Demon Clown Baby

In the old days of 1996, before Google’s search engine existed, the Internet was a different place.

There were many search engines, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, and they were all worthless.

Let me tell you how search engines worked in those days. They returned searches based on any of your search terms, not all of them.

For example, you could search for Poison Oak and get hits about rat poison, because the word “poison” matched, but “oak” didn’t.

Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard of? Every search resulted in millions of hits.

The search engine I used back then was Lycos, because it at least told you if it wasn’t matching all your search terms. It was say “3 out of 4 search terms matched” or some such. So you would start at the 4 out of 4s, and when you got to anything else you knew you could stop looking through their results.

I cannot tell you how happy I was when Google came along and had a hard AND in their searches. If a page doesn’t contain ALL your search words, it doesn’t count as a hit. To me, that was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.

Thank you, Google. I may not like everything you do these days, but thanks for being the only ones smart enough to implement a real search engine.

Courtesy saves lives.

The problem with rudeness in society is that people who are rude don’t think of it as a weakness, but as a strength. They can do what they like without being bound by the rules, so that makes them special.

Consider: if you are moving a 3000 pound vehicle down the highway at 65 miles per hour, that is approximately 195000 thingies* of force. That’s enough to kill a whole lot of folks. And sure enough, over 40,000 people die every year on US roads.

As a safety feature, we built signals into our killing machines, so other people would know where we were going, and they’d hopefully kill less often. And we’re all taught in driver’s ed to signal before turning and before changing lanes. 5 seconds before changing lanes, 100 feet before turning.

But the problem is, when you signal to change lanes, the person in the lane next to you realizes that you are going to be ahead of them. They can’t have that! So naturally, they speed up and cut you off. You can get in behind them, if someone else doesn’t do the same thing, and if you haven’t already missed your exit.

After experiencing this for a while, new drivers, safely signaling since getting a license, figure out it does not good. Why signal? It just tips your hand! So people start signaling less and less in advance, until they only signal about 1.2 microseconds before moving, or else they give up completely and just change lanes without signaling at all.

Rude people have trained all of us not to signal.

The result? People die.

* I learned physics in metric, so I don’t know what the US force measurement is. Foot-pounds, probably, but is anyone really paying attention to these numbers anyway?

Some cities have renamed their Easter Egg Hunt to the Spring Egg Hunt, presumably to avoid the whole religion vs. government issue.

I don’t see the point in that, since Easter is already a secular holiday.

Easter is about eggs, and chocolate, and rabbits, and spring. Mainly it’s about chocolate and Jelly Bird Eggs from See’s Candies.

As far as the resurrection of Jesus goes, that isn’t supposed to be celebrated on Easter. It’s supposed to be celebrated on Sunday.

Look it up in the Bible if you want. The christians in the 1st century (you know, the ones that actually knew Jesus personally) met every first day of the week (Sunday to you and me) and remembered his death and his resurrection.

They didn’t hunt for eggs and eat candy. That stuff comes from pagan spring and fertility celebrations.

The idea that Jesus’ resurrection is to be celebrated only once a year is not in the Bible; that was added much later.

So if you want to be religious, great, remember his resurrection every Sunday. If you want to colour eggs and give Easter baskets to your kids, great.

There is no conflict between the two; they have nothing whatever to do with one another. Easter is secular. Jesus resurrection is religious, and to be observed every week, not every year.