Cheesy Quintessence

It has recently been weighing on my mind how annoying companies’ use of humanoid things is becoming. Everything imaginable has been given a human face or shape. If it’s an animal, one can rest assured that it’s been put on its hind legs (even if it has none) and given a smile. Every time I go for the box of cookies, I have to look at this dorky looking cookie sitting on its side, staring back at me with the cheesiest grin that makes me feel sick for eating it. Many will argue I simply resent the fun since I never had a childhood, but I don’t see how it can’t get annoying after a while.

I thought I’d get into the game and make something humanoid. The first thing that came to my mind was a toilet; how tempting it would be to give it some eyes and turn the bowl into a big gaping smile. But then I realized that had been done already. I had difficulty coming up with anything that had not been done before, so I ended up making a humanoid human face.

Am I the only one who finds analog clocks to be idiotic? Analog clocks came into being centuries ago, long before it was possible to display the time in digits. In a sense, the many analog methods of displaying clocks are hacks; the use of hands pointing at various positions of a circle was a feasible mechanical workaround to the inability to display digits in a stationary position.

Now the year is 2006, and everything is digital. The possibilities of digital media far surpass those of analog counterparts; it can be copied instantly and losslessly; it can be more easily manipulated; the quality is ultimately better. Yet, despite all these technological advances that continue to change the way we live, the analog way of telling time is still with us… and we’re using digital devices to display it!

Look at how inefficient the analog clock face is. The clock face everyone knows can only display 12 hours, so one is left in the dark as to whether it’s AM or PM. There’s no way to quickly tell what the minute is when it’s not right on a mark; one must carefully measure the distance between two marks and determine what the minute is from that, and even if there were 60 marks around the clock face, one must take the time to count what mark the hand is actually pointing at. The clock doesn’t shrink well, either; where a digital clock would be readable in a 6-pixel font, an analog clock can abrely be made out in a 45×45 pixel square. In the time it takes me to decipher my best guess for what the time is from an analog clock, I could have glanced at a digital clock 20 times and known exactly what time it was.

So why do people tolerate this crap? Why do people still buy analog wristwatches? Are they classy? If one is going to try to be classy by carrying around obsoleted time-telling technology, why not just carry around a little sundial instead? That would be so much fancier. Heck, it could even have built in LEDs that shine light on the hand based upon the atomic internal clock, thereby allowing it to work in the dark! That would only be one step beyond the inefficiencies introduced in using digital devices to reproduce analog clocks.

I just read an amusing article about a male student wearing skirts in protest of his school’s ban of shorts this time of year. He is merely trying to point out the unfairness of the school’s ban of shorts while girls are still allowed to wear short skirts. The school tried to stop him from wearing skirts because of it being “disruptive,” but he ultimately won and will be wearing skirts until April rolls around and shorts are allowed again.

This brings up an interesting point about male and female rights. Although there is no enforcement outside of this specific class, my American Government II instructor, a middle-aged woman, is a real “Nazi” about hats being worn indoors; she will not allow men to wear a hat in the class because it is “disrespectful” according to “well-established” rules of etiquette. However, if a girl wants to wear a hat, it’s just fine. Is that ridiculously unfair or what? Thus, while girls are allowed to wear ridiculously short skirts, men can’t even wear a hat to keep their heads warm in the 63°F classroom because doing so is “rude.”

It’s the “most wonderful” time of year again: the Holidays. It’s that time of year that lasts for four months as companies try to suck as much money as possible out of people for stupid decorations and gifts. Indeed, they’re all so eager to eat up the profits that before the Halloween hay is even out the door, the Christmas crap is in the door. Christmas is the most overly-commercialized holiday of the year, and I fail to see why people don’t get tired of its redundancy.

Every year, it’s the same thing; repetition of the same annoying music and infestation of colorful lights and posters invades everyone’s senses no matter where he or she goes. It’s a time to be jolly, to be giving, to spend money! That’s what Christmas is all about. Or so they say. That’s what the secular “celebration” of Christmas is about. I really don’t see why anybody who’s not a Christian celebrates Christmas. How anybody came up with the nonsense–Santa, elves, et cetera–used to celebrate it is something that needs a lot of explanation.

I’m sick of what Christmas has become. The secular holiday needs a new name for itself, since it obviously has nothing at all to do with Christ. That name, whatever it may be, would go on my list of bullcrap commercial holidays to not observe: Valentine’s Day, secular “Easter,” Halloween, and Thanksgiving.

Alas, ’tis indeed the time to be merry; there are only five more weeks of this bullcrap until it’s over for another eight months.

Today, I was in a Chicken Express store, waiting at the front counter to get my refill. I’d been waiting for less than a minute when a person of colored skin came along beside me and was waited on immediately by the black person working there. I was still standing there, bewildered that he got waited on before me when I was clearly there first. I continued to stand there, and another black employee came along and started looking at the person being waited on, acting as though I was completely invisible. Eventually, she did offer to get my refill, but this was obviously a discrimination against me due to the color of my skin.