Munchie machines and poverty

Hello my Good Ol' Three Faithful Readers.

One day I decided I needed some munchies to fuel my thinking furnace. Promptly, I made my way to the munchie machine located outside the office building and, for an agreeable amount of money, paid for a bag of chips on the top row of items. As my now paid munchies were making their way down, they got stuck. Bummer.

Forgotten traumas of old arcade-pinball in days of yore must have made me afraid of tilting the machine and losing my quarters; thus I shook the munchie machine gently. Alas, no go. My munchies were still stuck in there. So I shook the machine a little bit harder; they didn't bulge. It seemed as if by some unknown force the munchie machine was taking a zealous hold on my food in a kind of perverted man vs. machine tug o' war.

Like most of us civilized humans do when we become frustrated, I began shaking the munchie machine like a raving, maniac wild monkey on a mission. I would not be surprised if foam actually came out of my mouth. Finally, after the epic struggle, the munchies fell as I stood triumphant before that inert monolith. Following act I went to my office and ate them; I'm not sure why, but they were sweeter. The taste of victory.

But then I thought if I had ever wanted to behave like a wild monkey in the first place, I would not be living on a Northern Hemisphere country/state and would be living in a Southern country/state were people are blessed enough to have actual, real fruit trees on their backyards to which they can go and shake wildly at their leisure and food just falls at their feet. But no, I live in a civilized society up here north where what we do have are munchie machines to which you conveniently put hard-earned money in exchange for food.

Now, I sat to think about this ridiculous thought and figured that oddly, there is some truth to it. I have never quite put my finger on it but it somehow seems countries in the Northern Hemisphere are more "civilized" and "advanced" - if there is such a thing - than out Southern Hemisphere counterparts. I cannot speak for the whole world, but at least in my country it so happens that people from northern states are known for being more greedy than people from the south. Going on a hunch, I think it has to do with the fact that the north is more barren and arid; thus the first settlers had to bust their butts and fight with nail, tooth, blood and sweat for food and whatever wealth they could manage while people on the south had it easy just shaking trees when they felt like it.

Call me crazy, but actually the Southern Hemisphere is known for having more mild climates, forests and tropical paradises; and I do not claim to know much on economy, but they also seem to be poverty stricken countries; there's actually this concept called the North-South Divide to the point were these "uncivilized", southern countries become exotic and touristic attractions that must be exploited.

Now, I am not saying all people from the south are lazy bums expecting food to fall from above and that all people from the north are greedy sons-of-a-gun; surely there are greedy Southerners and lazy northerners. Actually I think there should be a way to end this "divide" and, thank The Powers that Be, there are some like The South Project. I hope the come to fruition so that eventually either we all can have fruit trees on our backyard or you can find munchie machines all over the world.

As for me, well, I am off to get some more munchies to feed my belly.

Fools + crimes + technology = digital natural selection?

Mellow greetings Good Ol' Three Faithful Readers, I hope you are having a day full of joy-joy.

A few days ago I saw Demolition Man on some DirecTV channel. I must say that now, 16 years after it was originally released, the movie looks very anachronic and far-fetched to the point of laughter - though oddly prophetic in some instances. Taco Bell is not the supreme franchise, Dahmer is dead, Schwarzenegger has not become President of the US, no phaser guns, profanity is now more accepted, we still have sex the old fashioned way, some "bad-for-you" stuff is still considered legal and we still use toilet paper - thank God for small favors!

One of the things that stood out to me as particularly funny was the concept of a pacifist police force. When Simon Phoenix -Wesley Snipe's character - goes on his first "non-sanctioned life termination" spree, one of the cops - I believe it was a young Rob Schneider in an uncredited role, way before he turned gigolo - says: "We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!" I laughed. Just before that, Phoenix repeatedly says "bad words", to which a Morale Statute Machine replies: "Your repeated violation of the Verbal Morality Statute has caused me to notify the San Angeles Police Department. Please remain where you are for a reprimand."

Well, how very BDS&M of you! Of course I'll stay right here to be reprimanded... not! San Angeles had been turned into a boring, Japanese fashioned Utopia thanks to some self-help book ideas taken to the extreme by Dr. Raymond Cocteau as well as a spice of Big Brother thrown in just in case. I must say I laughed, hard; the idea that somehow people would be either responsible enough to stay in place and be accountable for their actions or that this whole big RFID system to locate people whatever they are and reprimand them was too much for me not to laugh at.

Then, today, I find a particular piece of news about some kids putting pictures of themselves vandalizing a public pool. What the hell?! And it is not the only case, there have been many others of people posting the crimes they have or are about to commit in Facebook or MySpace profiles; and damn it, I would not be surprised if some idiot even Twittered it just as he does the crime! Someone there in the back corner actually wrote a very detailed blog about his Grand Theft Auto project. Bummer. We might not need police in the future, people will just turn in.

So maybe, just maybe, we don't need no stinking Dr. Cocteau to come and mind wipe us, we are doing it ourselves. I am really surprised to the point that I do not know if I should laugh or cry about it; will face-palm about it for sure! I understand we all want to share the cool stuff we do on our life through this magnificent technology called The Internet, be if we do something illegal I guess it is best if we leave it for ourselves. Maybe I should blame in on the Joker. People want to emulate this "better kind of criminal" the world needs and publish their evil schemes in order to inject some chaos into this world. Yeah. Right.

Here's some food for thought on how not to use Facebook status.

On the other hand, I believe in the notions of a self-regulating society, pretty much in the same vein as Wikipedia or some mature - if rare - forums out there regulate their own users towards the common good and betterment of the community. This comes to prove that some people out there are willing to let authorities know when they find an illegal activity going on; and though the idea that all these camera-phones are out there eying on us might seems scary, at least the regulation is actually done by us, the people, not some tyrant government's idea of right or wrong. With that said, I do hope the Twitters can find Mr. Armstrong's bike.

As for me, well, I am off to commit serious crimes against the post-apocalyptic Washington D.C.'s Wasteland's population armed with my Pip-Boy and a teddy bear loaded Rock-It Launcher.

One thing I enjoy, one thing that sucks

Hello my Good Ol' Three Faithful Readers.

Today I bring you something I really enjoy in life. It happens whenever I'm eating something like Spicy Nacho Doritos, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Honey BBQ Frito's or some other kind of munchies that leaves my fingers smeared with all the delicious munchy flavor so I can then suck it off my fingers. Heck, sometimes I will even scrape the bottom of the bag to collect more of the stuff.

Sometimes life conspires against us and finds ways and stuff to get in the way of whatever it is that we enjoy. At the beginning its things labeled by our parents as "good" or "bad" as we are growing up. Surely this has happened to most of us - unless you didn't have parents or they simply did not care for you. Later on life finds trickier, oh so subtle ways

Just like slurping the last drops of Coke with a straw, sex, eating sweet candy, sex, jumping on the bed, sex, reading at the toilet for hours, sex, videogames, sex, horror movies and mostly sex, enjoying those remnants of flavor on my fingers was labeled as "bad".

One grows up and leaves their parents rule behind, free to - responsibly - decide.

So now that I could enjoy sucking the Archers Farm Buffalo Wing chips off my fingers freely, life finds something to put in the way of my enjoyment: my car's manual transmission. Because every time I have to change gears some off that delicious flavor gets wiped off my fingers. And that sucks.

Lesson to learn: there will be many annoyances in life. We can go on getting mad and making a fuss each and everytime; that way we will only become a walking avalanche belching cuss-words at every crack in the paviment.

We should stop and suck the flavor of life off our fingers.

A Martian Wish

Here I am, sitting in front of an old school CRT monitor bombarding my eyes with electron beams that cross an organic material known as phosphor at around 85-MHz; at the same time millions and millions of electric pulses are going out of my computer while hundreds, probably tens of thousands of radio waves on such high frequencies that my measly human body cannot comprehend are going right through me, carrying countless telephone conversations, TV newscasts, podcasts, cooking food and furry animals concoct plots against us in high pitched languages we cannot comprehend.

I also happen to be sitting on a building on top of a rocky structure we call Earth, that is to happens right now its being pummeled with winds gusting at 45 mile per hour and water in falling from the heavens. In the center of this Earth there's a core of molten iron with a radius of about 3,400 Km. formed sometime around 4.5 billion years ago in some form of a phenomenon called the iron catastrophe and it is rotating at 0.04 degrees relative to the Earth's surface rotation, which is a mean of 7.2921150 ×10⁻⁵ radians per second on the equator. The convection of the outer core and the Coriolis effect cause create something called the Earth's magnetic field extending several tens of thousands of kilometer to outer space.

Between that core and the rocky surface in which the building I'm sitting on is resting, there is lava flowing on its own underground ocean at 1,200C more or less; there's also tectonic plates constantly moving and shifting and twisting and grumbling. All this is moving at the speed of 100,000 Km. an hour around an unbelievable hot mass of burning gas at temperatures of 15.5 million degrees Celsius shooting light at 300,000 Km. per second. All this is happening on an ever expanding soup of gas, matter and anti-matter that seems to be expanding and chasing after its own tail since the fateful day of a Big Bang.

Sometimes we also board moving machines that transport us at around 100 Km. an hour amongst tens of thousands of theses machines hectically running around. At a time we may rest, sleep and dream of strawberry fields and places never seen; other times we run or board flying machines that move us 9 Km. above the surface of the Earth.

And I'm not alone. There another 6'800,000'000,000 human beings just like me made of a bunch of atoms and energy that is never created nor destroyed, only transformed; fully cognizant that we will eventually die and become nothing more but compost in this never ending circle of life.

... wow... all that schitt is going on and yet we worry about emails, sometimes unsent emails, phone calls in the middle of the night, text-messages in the drafts folder, pictures never taken, Facebook statuses, MySpace and forum comments by anonymous whoever he or she might be, about the shoes we wear to work, the fragrance on a shirt's neck, oil and blood stains that detergent can't get out, the frequencies range our headphones can't reproduce, the cost of living and the cost of dying, expiring coupons, TV channels not on our package, the clothing of digital avatars, stats of a bunch of adventurous online pixels, the color of our hair, the length of our beards, the smell of our pants, the food we can't have, the extra pounds we shouldn't have, unrequited love and reciprocal hate, fantasies that exist only in our minds on dark and still nights, the drinkability of our beers, untold words, spoken words, kisses given, kisses stolen, kisses not given, tears not shed, the water cooler conversations, meetings stuck in, missing football games, matching accessories and paper cuts...

We forget at times, that just by standing here, we are already beating cosmic odds of existing. We should enjoy it, as it is, as it comes.

Why waste it, my Good Ol' Three Faithful Readers?

* Inspired by a Martian Child, who we all happen to be at some point. Also by sugar puffs.