ClearTheRail

Quality Programming

With the round-the-clock World Series Of Poker coverage moving from ESPN2 to ESPN what might be filling the void? Timbersports! And you thought huntin' shows were redneck.

Quote Of The Day

This one comes from Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's blog:

having a somewhat normal day or what may seem as a normal day is something i don't want to take for granite anymore.

OK Fred, take it for limestone. Its granted idiot. Pisses me off that this guy makes millions and his whole entire blog is peppered with such phrases as "i have been taken back by them" (aback). I guess making cookie cutter rap/rock garbage doesn't take much mastery of the English language.

Woo Ha!

As this goofy foreign guy I played with in Atlantic City would say, today was the most happiest day of my life. No, I didn't get married. I didn't get lucky with some hot cocktail waitress. I didn't even play today so I didn't win a single cent. So why am I so happy? I discovered an extension for Firefox that makes those annoying new window links pop up in a new tab instead. Fucking brilliant. I imagine that this will save me somewhere between 1,100,000 and 1,230,300 mouse clicks per week.
Just a note to my readers, if you aren’t hip to Firefox, let me set you wise. It is by far the best web browser available. It is made by the Mozilla crew, and is a stripped down (none of the non-browsing features found in Netscape or Mozilla, but more browsing related ones), high speed, lean, mean browsing machine. It features tab-based browsing, which is the greatest web browser innovation since the back button. I greatly expect that the next windows will have many of its features built into IE, but until then it is the stone cold nuts in web browsing.

Want To Hear A Funny One

Go to Google and type in "miserable failure" and hit I'm Feeling Lucky. What comes up is without a doubt the definition of a miserable failure.

Personality

Lately I have been getting the funniest spam messages once a week. They are from some low budget dating service that somehow got the impression that I am 41 years old and looking for a woman from my area. Apparently they also think I am not very choosy also, as the pictures in the email I am getting are nothing but two dollar skanks. I am not trying to judge people by appearances either, but when all I have is a couple pictures and a meaningless 2 line bio what choice do I have?
I was thinking about these hilarious emails that I receive weekly when I went to Yahoo! games today to play some chess. Sure enough what advertisement pops up on the main page? Yahoo! personals. So I click on it and decide to see what fine honeys in my area are available. I am so glad I did, because I haven’t stopped laughing since.
I can’t even fathom what would possess these people to write some of the things they write. First there is this gem:
“I hear that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince.. so pucker up fellas!”
Wow, I need to call her right away. Seriously, who could possibly find this witty/profound enough to write in their personals. Would anyone call this girl? If this wasn’t bad enough her page was entitles “Wookin Fo Wub In All Da Wong Pwaces”. I may just do the world a favor and respond to her ad, act like I am her dream guy, take her on a nice date to Lake Erie State Park and fit her with some cement shoes. Akron would be a much better place if this woman were sleeping with the fishes.
Also funny are the girls who describe their body type as “a few extra pounds”. Every time I go to a concert or a nightclub anymore I see hundreds of fat chicks wearing belly shirts. What is the point you ask? All women think they are skinnier than they are, unless they actually are skinny, in which case they think they are fat. And since neither gender is known for telling the truth in an attempt to attract a mate we can safely determine that:
1. Any girl who says she is slim is actually average.
2. Any girl who says she is average is probably either slim (not too likely) or overweight (highly likely). They may actually just be average too, but that is unlikely since they would have said slim.
3. Any girl who says she has “a few extra pounds” really means a few hundred extra pounds.
What makes it all so hilarious is when you read what they are looking for in a man. They can specify the income their potential man should have, and it is inversely proportional to their listed weight. The “few extra (hundred) pounds” girls really don’t care about your income. The “average” girls are willing to accept anything but the lowest category (below $35k), and the slim girls only want the guys raking in 6 figures. The slim girls are very picky about all of their potential suitors’ attributes, where as the biggie sized females seem to be willing to reel in any fish they can hook.
All in all it is very much like someone found a way to capture the essence of a nightclub on the web. All the girls pretend they are much better looking than they are, and the ones who appear to be better are much more selective about which men they will talk to. Now if Yahoo! could just add in some loud dance tunes and find a way to spill Budweiser on you people could just spend their Friday nights browsing the old Yahoo! personals.

My Bad

Sorry about my brief change of format, wanted to try something out. However I discovered after a while that I missed my chance to rant and rave at the world, so I will revert this back to its original form. The new stuff has been moved to my newest blog, which will now be at www.newsyoucantuse.com . This blog, that, and thepokerchronicles will make a perfect blogging trifecta for me. So I apologize to all of my long time readers (there are at least 3 of you) for the lack of me ranting, it will be back right away.

Damn TV

My girlfriend forced me to watch the last episode of Friends. I suppose she didn’t hold a gun to my head but she really wasn’t far off. Her reasoning for wanting to watch it (she doesn’t watch Friends) is that everyone else will be and it was hard to argue with that logic, because everyone else definitely was. When I was in high school I tried smoking because I figured if millions of people do it then there must be something worthwhile about it. It took me a year to figure out that it wasn’t and that millions of people were actually just idiots. Apparently over the years my ability to distinguish when the masses are on to something (The Apprentice) and when they are just lemmings (Fear Factor) has been honed to a razor sharp edge because it only took about 3 minutes of Friends to figure out that it was utter garbage. And it only took that long because the first 2.5 minutes I saw were commercials.
Going into it I was thinking “if I wanted to write a cliché ending to this what would I do?” The answer was obvious. I would make it look as if Ross and Rachel weren’t going to get together until the very last minute and then have the surprise hook up at the end. Guess what happened?
Don’t get me wrong, other than the sappy, unbelievable (and often impossible) plot lines the show isn’t all that bad. True it is sitcom cliché through and through, but it is without a doubt the best sitcom cliché. The jokes are funnier than every other show, the actors better at their roles. It is no surprise that it was so popular for so long. But still despite all of its strengths the show, from the pilot to the finale, was stuff you have already seen before.
It makes you kind of sad that it is going off the air, not because you will miss it but because you know 10 clones of it will sprout in its place. How I long for the days when there were new episodes of Seinfeld to look forward to. As far as sitcoms go it is the pinnacle and will likely never be bested. There is Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I like very much, but it will never be as good as Seinfeld and it only produces a handful of episodes every year.
I watch at least 8 Seinfeld episodes every day and they truly never get old. I suppose someday somebody will probably come along and make another sitcom that good (or at least close) but I have a feeling it will be quite some time. I suppose if I were the kind of person who actually watched network TV on any regular basis this would be a perfect time to commit suicide, especially after the only show currently on the air (and for that matter the only spin-off ever) that is even moderately amusing (Frasier) has its finale in a week.
The only TV I actually do watch on a regular basis is the World Poker Tour (in the rare instances where it is not a rerun) and TechTV, and I am screwed on both of those too. WPT is having to reedit some of its shows to block out the references to the online cardrooms which sponsored the events due to legal pressure, which is causing them to run reruns now instead of new episodes. And TechTV was purchased by another channel (G4) and is firing all of their staff and will likely retool the whole station into something way too videogame oriented. So I guess I will have little reason not to simply pick up a book anymore. At least until the Seinfeld episodes all come out on DVD.

News You Can Use

All I have to say about this one is wow.

Reader Email

Today I got a hilarious email from someone who was upset about something I said on my site. Of all the offensive things I have said (and there are many of them) he chose to take issue with my article about how Dell commercials suck. Here is the email for your viewing pleasure:
You obviously have a problem with language - you use gutter talk and think you are qualified to do commentary on commercials. Spare us the sorrow! I am not saying that the Dell commercials are bad or good, just commenting on your lack of decency in your choice of words. HT
First of all pal before you criticize my diction take a look at your own. I won’t break it down for you here but since your email came from some Christian Academy perhaps you could ask the head nuns to mix in an English course or two for their students, as your grammar is rather poor. Also I am very qualified to commentate on commercials for a few reasons.
1. I watched them.
2. I have a website on which I comment about things.
3. I fucking feel like it.
It wasn’t some great essay on the state of man or the merits of a 1992 California Cabernet Sauvignon as opposed to a 1993 one. It doesn’t take an experienced ad agent to know if a commercial is stupid or not. It takes one guy with a website and an IQ higher than that of the average cantaloupe.
I don’t know what country you come from, but the fact that you would email something so asinine to someone with hundreds of readers daily sure suggests it is the good old USA, which means that you probably took those history courses where they talked about The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. In there it explicitly states that I can say whatever I wish and use whatever language I chose to do so. And luckily you can exercise the same freedom and not read it. So do me a favor and exercise your constitutional right to fuck off.
I mean what does this ass do, search on Google for 4 letter words then go to each website and send them an email asking to tone down the language? I realize my site is perhaps not something the average five year old should be reading but it sure isn’t a flaming beacon of indecency on the World Wide Web or anything. It is truly baffling to me that somebody would take the time out of their day to compose an email like this. But at least I got some good material out of it.

Fuck The RIAA

I have to say that the RIAA has finally won its battle with the Kazaa network, and it has nothing to do with its legal attacks. I imagine anyone who has tried to download a popular new song on there knows what I am talking about. Now every time you attempt to download a current hit you get a bunch of versions which play normally for a few seconds then turn into an obnoxious screeching noise. Finding a track that is actually a full song is near impossible.
I have to give credit to whoever invented this. If someone told me the idea to put a bunch of dummy files on the network I would laugh at them assuming that people would just be intelligent enough to delete them as soon as they heard what they were. But, people being as stupid as they are, it is not uncommon to see a dummy file on thousands of hard drives.
I tried to get that song Shut Up by Black Eyed Peas just because I’ve never heard it and they are one of the bands du jour. I tried numerous files, all of which had hundreds of users, and at many different bitrates and every single one of them was a dummy. How stupid are people? All you have to do is delete the damn tune and no more trouble. If everyone simply previewed each song after downloading it there would be no trouble at all.
Luckily I have a few tricks up my sleeve to find actual songs, but you can bet I won’t share them here. Then the RIAA will come fuck them up too, and people being as stupid as they are will just let them.