Short Takes 4 (The Piss Everyone Off Edition)

Another set of Short Takes…

    … because I have had a bad week and I don’t have a real article in me this week.

-I was just playing some of Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels (the real Super Mario Brothers II) and fuck me sideways, but games really were harder when I was a kid. This shit is BRUTAL.  Being a gamer from back in the day (I refuse to use the term Retro-Gamer because retro means going back to something and I never stopped playing these games) I have noticed that the games I grew up on are FAR more difficult then the games of today.   I get that the culture has changed and games changed with it.  Back in the 80’s, home gaming was still very much an offshoot of the arcade gaming model… make the game so hard that you die every 3 minutes (that was the average play time of an arcade game per “guy” in the 80’s) and have to insert more quarters.   Home gaming started to have longer games, but kept the difficulty up on that level.  Today I can breeze though Super Mario Brothers 3 or The Legend Of Zelda in a single sitting without dying once… but when these games were new.. we died every few minutes.  I would love to see these little shits that are aces at Halo or Call Of Duty have to play through Ghosts & Goblins or Deja Vu without any cheat codes or walkthroughs. Then we will see who the real gamers are.   

-Our priorities are kind of fucked up in this country.   Why does education of our youth (aka the future of country for good or ill) take a back seat to just about everything else?  Why is it that we pay city garbage men 5 times what we pay teachers in the US?   Come to think of it, garbage men have a better union too, and a stronger set of incentives, better insurance, better retirement benefits as well… Maybe if we paid teachers more then the down syndrome kid that hands out breadsticks at Fazoli’s we might actually have a future in this country, but alas we care more about our own selfish needs and desires so there is no chance of this happening. Idiocracy was a WARNING goddammit, not something to aspire to.   Hauling garbage is a shit job, I get that, but so is teaching, the difference being that teaching will make the country a better place live in the long run, while not teaching the children (childrens ain’t not lernin) will just make more future garbage men and late night convenience store employees.

Hell, look at the US prison system.   A prisoner has more rights and better conditions than a student does.  Rapists, murderers, drug dealers and even pedophiles get better food than the US school lunch program, they get better facilities, they have access to more literature and they have to pay for none of it.   I know the prison industrial complex is a real problem in the US but good goofy, shouldn’t law abiding students have more rights than the person that wants to fuck those self same children in the ass?   We are making it so there are only two real options for a future, drug dealer or join the military.  Now I am depressed damn it…

With the shooting in Newtown still in the headlines and fresh in our minds and the insanity that is the “news” there is something we need to talk about, something that is going to piss off and divide most of the people reading this (and I don’t give a fuck, it has to be said).

Gun control.  I bet that most of you reading this just did one of two things… you either started to get enraged at me for “wanting to take away your guns” or you started to smile as you saw I was going to go after gun nuts.   Well, you are both wrong.   I do hate gun nuts, I do hate the romance our society gives to guns, I do think that even current gun laws are lax, BUT I don’t think gun CONTROL is a bad thing in any way and lets face it, if you are just a gun nut (and yes that is the term I going to keep using as it is apt in 90% of cases) you think CONTROL means BAN. I can’t count the times just this weekend that I have read or heard some gun nut proclaim “if they think they are taking away my gun, they will have pry it from my cold dead hands”.   Hey, here is a reality check (again), CONTROL IS NOT A BAN.  I have not heard a single person ACTUALLY propose a gun ban, yet I keep hearing about how CONTROL will lead to that. HOW FUCKING SO? And don’t give me that “this is just the first step” bullshit, if you believe that you need to crunch some new tin foil on your antennae there buddy, you are getting fuzzy signals.  CONTROL means allowing you legal gun nuts to continue to possess and purchase these metal phallic substitutes for the ailing libido you no longer have, just so you can feel like a man.   CONTROL simply means making it harder for those with ill intents to get a gun.   Keeping them out of the hands of criminals, psychos, the mentally ill and anyone with an agenda that can be perpetuated by those guns (a militant group looking to overthrow the government for example) this is not a bad thing. You will still be able to purchase your semi-auto poison tipped cop killer bullet firing AK-47… you know… for duck hunting… but that crazy man that is amassing an arsenal with the intent of putting the spider aliens from planet 10 to sleep… he will find it harder to get these and therefore perhaps make him easier to spot and stop.

There is also the issue of the NRA and the gun lobbying groups.   These people like to whip up a fervor in an attempt to do one of two things, further a political agenda or further fundraising goals… nothing more.  When Mayor Bloomberg of New York make a speech asking for tighter gun CONTROL he was accused of proposing a large scale gun BAN.   Um, crazy people, those things are not even close to the same thing.   You just heard what you wanted to hear and facts had no way of penetrating that teeny tiny cerebellum did they?  This last year, the republicans trotted out, time and again, this notion that “Obama wants to take away your guns”.. well guess what?  That was not only untrue, it was the OPPOSITE of what Obama had done.   While Bachman and Palin and all the other right wing porno queens were claiming this… Obama was loosening gun laws and removing restrictions from gun purchases.   But you guys believed it… why?  Because you WANTED to.   Simple as that.   

Gun violence in this country is at an all time high, and yet gun restrictions are not… funny how that works out huh?  Proposing and enacting gun CONTROL is a good thing, it keeps guns in the hands of you law abiding people so you can make up for what you don’t have in the pants, but it also makes it harder for those with ill intents to get them.  Sure, guns will always be among us, there will always be a black market for them, there will always be an above ground and legal market for them… but CONTROL is not the same as Banning so grow the fuck up and actually be a man about this… stop being a whining pussy.  Why is it that we can get a gun at a corner store, but not the health care to repair the damage done from that gun? 

-The “news” coverage of the Newtown shooting is not only everywhere but it is starting to look like Natural Born Killers meets Idiocracy is our future.  I have heard more crazy shit in the last 2 days on the “news” then in the weeks prior to the election and yet.. somehow I feel that this is just the start.   I get sickened by all of this and I get people telling me “just turn it off”…  Not an option for me, I run a current events show, I need to stay abreast of current events.   I hate to say it, but watching all this bullshit is now part of my job.   I have to collate and assess things for my show.  Back to the circus it is I guess…

Tell me to shut the fuck up a 1201beyond@gmail.com or contact Alex Jowski to fire me at alexjowski@gmail.com