Patrick’s Rants

The latest commercial from Burger King has to make you wonder. Are the ad agencies popping ’shrooms or what? The creepy king is dancing a jig in his tights in front of the fake background images photographers use. We cut back and forth to people eating some kind of texas burger while the announcer says, “feed that mustache son”. Everyone eating the burgers gets an instance over sized mustache, including women and a dog (who only licked the wrapper).

I think the message they’re trying to send is the burger makes you feel like a cowboy, but I’m not sure if we aren’t subliminally getting, our cows have “lots of testosterone”, or even “we give our animals huge amounts of hormones that will make even a dog grow a cowboy sized mustache.”

For the safety of the public, and to satisfy a late lunch urge, I had one of these burgers and nothing happened to my mustache.

Jack in the Box’s sirloin burger ad shows us the corporate boardroom at Jack in the Box, where Jack is talking about their new burgers and how they cook the seasonings right into the meat. He then pulls down a diagram saying,

“For those of you not from Texas, here’s where the sirloin comes from.”

One of the other guys, then speaks up,

“Some of our competitors sell Angus burgers. Can you point to the Angus area.”

Jack looks at the diagram for a moment, then back at the guy and says,

“I’d rather not.”

Now Jack in the Box has been sued by CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises) which owns Car’s Jr. and Hardee’s over the “confusion” between angus and anus, but the judge just wasn’t buying the injunction request.

It’s a good thing too. I mean BK has their Dr. Angus who promotes eating the angus burgers and they didn’t sue. Saturday Night Live has Colonel Angus and they didn’t sue. I mean, if you’re going to promote your Angus expect someone to poke fun at it from time to time.

I (hopefully still) have a regular reader whose story mimics part of the preface,

“Chapter 9 quotes the comedian Julia Sweeney’s tragi-comic story of her parents’ discovery, through reading a newspaper, that she had become an atheist. Not believing in God they could just about take, but an atheist!”

He goes on to describe why we don’t hear so much about atheist groups,

“organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority”.

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If there were nothing else to tell you that Cheney had nothing to do with outing Valerie Plame, the commutation of Lewis Libby’s sentence before having to spend a day in jail would tell all. The sentence was too harsh? How about the death sentences of Valerie Plame’s associates? There has been some chatter about Richard Armitage being the first to disclose Plame’s name. The chatter goes something like this, if he isn’t being prosecuted for outing Plame, then Libby shouldn’t have prosecuted for lying about his role. Or at least he shouldn’t serve any time because the original crime isn’t “important enough” to warrant prosecution.

Well, I say it’s time we line up Cheney (who was ultimately behind the outing) and Armitage (who did the initial outing) and let these two Dicks have it.

Scooter Libby’s sentence commuted, Obama raising a tremendous amount of money for his campaign, the White House still ignoring subpoenas. What a wild Fourth! I went camping and swimming, got sunburned despite the slathering of sun screen and finished reading Richard Dawkin’s, The God Delusion.

I’ll post about at least a few of these shortly.

Time for the annual server upgrade at the office.

I’d been holding off because the K12LTSP install disks refused to recognize the hard drives. I kept getting prompts to format the drives. That certainly wasn’t going to work, there’s too much data on that machine. I had also been holding off on upgrading the kernel on it because lilo doesn’t work without rebooting into something like Knoppix to run it.

I walked into the office Saturday afternoon, a stack of CDs in hand. I inserted the first install CD and rebooted the machine, the familiar screens of the install come up. And that’s where it stops being easy… (more…)