I'm all for PETA: People for Eating Tasty Animals

I likes me some meat. I won't deny it, and I won't apologize for it. I don't necessarily feel animals should be flogged just for fun; they do have a place in my heart, but also in my belly.

Some strict vegetarians make it sound like theirs is more than a dietary choice, but rather a transcendental way of life. They won't eat "anything with a face," yet have no trouble eating a head of lettuce! ;-)

There's also the concern of eating animals that some people consider pets (like pigs, rabbits, horses, dogs, etc.) Why should I stop enjoying a little gerbil fricasé just because some idiotic 5-year-old seems to like to keep gerbils as pets? It's not like I'm eating my pet, anyway (not that I'd be necessarily adverse to the notion; Fido is looking rather scrumptious lately, and that cough of his doesn't seem to be going away...)

But I digress! I propose that the only way it somehow seems "better" to eat plants instead of animals is because we can't hear them scream. Really! People would be less gung-ho about eating salad if we discovered that whenever you crunch on a leaf of lettuce it's actually yelling: "FOR THE LOVE OF IVY, STOP CRUSHING MY BODY WITH YOUR TEETH!!!" [Note: "Ivy" is the God of the plants, revered because no one seems to like to eat it; it is also noteworthy that lettuce is surprisingly fluent in English].

Let's face it: we humans are meat-eaters. And it works out like that for a reason: we're nasty motherfuckers and Mother Nature wants us out of the planet pronto! Think about it: some plants can live for decades, nourishing themselves with the soil and crapping into the air (it's crapping if you think about it, really); they harm no one. Then come the herbivores, who are animals that last a long time because all they do is eat plants which taste like ass, but which do not raise their cholesterol level or clog their arteries; they can last a long time since they only eat plants, which can re-grow in just a few weeks.

And then there's us, evil, resource-depleting, nuclear-bomb-building, murdering, environment-destroying humans, devouring animals that took decades of nutritional resources to grow... obviously we can't stay around too fucking long, or we'll eat Mother Nature out of house and home! So, we have a penchant for fatty meats, our cholesterol rises, our arteries get clogged, and we die at 40 while having a torrid extra-marital affair with a Vietnamese hooker named Bambi Nguyen who charges $5 for suckee suckee.

So, it all works out: we humans eat meat, die soon, and don't detonate that WMD some maniac may or may not have stored somewhere, and the planet lives to see another day.

Do your part, fellow hoo-man: EAT MEAT! :-)

Drop your kids on their heads; make 'em dumb; save thousands!

With the rising costs of higher education, parents nowadays seem to have a genuine concern regarding their ability to get their kids through college. Well, fret not, trusted reader, for I come to you with a solution (which should be evident from this post's title, but in case you are marginally retarded, I shall now state it as though it were a big revelation): drop your kids on their head when they're babies!

If you are lucky, brain damage will ensue and your kid will not be smart enough to even get into college (if you do it right, not even DeVry, regardless of how serious they are about success). However, a tender balance must be struck, for you do not want your kid to be so brain-damaged you have to feed him or put him in special education (thus completely missing the whole point).

It's all about surfaces; if you drop them on cement, that's probaby too much brain damage; on a bed, too little. Now, a berber carpet (as per my repeated experiments with as many children as I've been able to obtain from around the neighborhood) seems to yield the best results (let's just say that not all my experimentation proved successful, and that some of my neighbors' kids will be wearing padded helmets and riding the short yellow bus: my bad!).

The other trick is doing this during early infancy so that your kids won't remember it when they grow up: no one wants to have their son remember in a therapy session how Daddy pushed him off a stool onto the floor! So, in summary: surface and timing are the most important things to remember.

Good luck!!!

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Disclaimer: Rafa is kidding; he has not dropped any kids on their heads in the course of a makeshift, Mengelian experiment, or at least not after his court injunction. Dropping your kids on their heads is a bad idea, which you'd know unless you yourself had been dropped as a baby, in which case you should have been chemically castrated during early childhood, or at least you should have been raised as an engineer so that no one would have sex with you and you wouldn't reproduce.

Farewell to Clippy!

Before diving into my current rant, let me just say that I know I've been a lazy-ass lately and have neglected my blog. To my surprise, two of my friends (César and Omar) had apparently checked it a few times and have egged me on to write some more, so thanks for the support, guys. :-)

Now, on to the rant!

If you have ever used Word 97, you have met Clippy. Here, in all his glory, is Clippy:

Clippy is a creepy, anthropomorphic animated paperclip (get it? paperCLIP -> Clippy? Oh! These geniuses at Microsoft, hollowed be their name!). Clippy's job is to annoy the fuck out of you when you type, and pop up every once in a while and make inane remarks and suggestions about what you're typing (à la "I see you are writing a letter to your baby's mama! Do you want me to help you find nice ways of saying: Try and prove the baby's mine, bitch!?").

Even more unsettling was his lecherous leer and his suggestive wink, as though he were suavely saying in a thick, Banderas-like accent: "Oh, I can fix that for you. I can fix that for you gooood." I'm sorry, but I prefer less innuendo from my office assistants.

Anyway, an article I read states that Clippy will not be on by default starting in Office XP. There were even some animations (voiced by Gilbert Gottfreid) depicting Clippy's post-Word life, and a poll as to what he should do next. Personally, I think Clippy should be unbent and used for lock-picking, or at the very least, used to burst pus-filled boils; I'd be happy either way!

What do you think should happen to Clippy?