From: nenslo <nenslo@yahoox.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 3, 2004
It looks to me like the people who design basketball
shoes are now
branching out into toothbrushes. There are all sorts
of ridiculous
looking toothbrushes, with two types of bristles and
rubber prongs, and
bristles that point in different directions and brush
heads that are
pointed and round and bend in the middle and handles
that look like god
only knows what, some kind of purple puke wave blob
with green and white
translucent glittery streaks and stripes like those
shoes I saw a couple
of years ago that looked like they had a transparent
CAMEL SNOT WEB on
them, and they, the toothbrushes, cost like six dollars.
So what is a
six dollar toothbrush going to do that the 99 cent ones
tucked away in
the corner won't do other than suck five bucks out of
your wallet. I
can understand having to trick some dumb kid into thinking
that brushing
teeth is some kind of media event by shelling out for
a barbie or scooby
doo or spiderman or hulk or slammin sammy sosa toothbrush
but beyond
just being some kind of ninny what exactly is the average
adult's need
for a six dollar toothbrush that looks like a prop from
an Italian
Science Fiction movie? Eh? Sure, I can understand
how DIFFICULT it is
to clean out one's electric shaver and how an automated
self-cleaning
system is truly necessary, but this toothbrush thing
has me baffled.
And I am not even talking about the twenty different
varieties of
electrical ones, just the totally manual ones here.
And there must be
forty different brands of toothpaste. I read this novel
called MAILMAN
by a guy named something Lennon and this guy tries to
join the peace
corps and spends one week in Kazakhstan and it's a bleak
nightmare of
poverty and wretchedness and when he gets back he goes
shopping at the
supermarket and gets mentally stuck in the cereal aisle
and has a total
breakdown when he spots a cereal made just for women,
when a week before
he was standing in line for an hour to buy one bug eaten
tomato.
Sometimes I know how that feels, when I see how many
different types of
chewy granola bars there are and how some of them have
anti-oxidants and
some have calcium and omega three something or other
or ginkgo biloba or
leutine and chondroitin, and some just have chocolate
chips, and you can
hardly find any crunchy granola bars, there are only
about five kinds of
them. Or all those different kinds of shampoo that are
made to smell
like fruit - why do people want to have the impression
they are putting
gloppy fruit on their hair, and why kiwi fruit specifically,
when it's
really only stuff from a chemical factory anyway. Fruit
does not get
your hair cleaner, believe me, not real fruit, you'd
do much better
washing your hair with vegetables, like celery or some
of those asian
vegetables that you can't even tell really what they
are, like those
warty cucumber things or those things that just look
like sticks.
Please explain this to me. And when I buy shoes all
I want is the very
plainest type of walking shoes, plain black ones which
are invariably
the cheapest, and yet they still even though they are
all black, have to
have these little strap shapes and cutouts and mesh
inserts and
embossing and stuff on them when for god's sake they
just look black
from five feet away and all I'm going to do is walk
on the damn things,
not go showing people the interesting shapes and the
special blue thing
inset in the middle of the sole. And the kind with
the air pocket in
the sole, watch out for them, I bought one pair once
and after about a
year they got a hole in them so every step I took made
a really
irritating wheezing sound especially in the rain. I
need to get more
than a year out of a pair of shoes and I usually do.
If I didn't I'd
have to work for a living like most of you losers, except
for you REAL
losers who are like wheelchair guys or on disability
for being too huge
or weird or retarded to be employable which I guess
would explain how
you find the time to read all this crap. And I wonder
about those dish
washing detergents from Mexico they have at the Food
4 Less. I saw on
the local Fox news they were faking up this story about
the DANGERS in
your local 99 cent store, and it was all about this
toothpaste that was
made for the African market with approval from the dental
board of like
Gambia and Zaire, and they showed the instructions for
use on the side
of the box are all in Afrikaans, like OH MY GOD how
am I going to know
how to use some god damn toothpaste if the instructions
are in another
language. I wish they would just stick to the stories
about the dog
that's raising orphaned ducklings or the cat that lives
with a squirrel.
Bet you didn't know I would get back onto toothpaste
for a minute there
did you? But Fox news is for IDIOTS, it's even too
stupid for even me.
It's like five minutes of local murders and then all
this crap about
somebody driving their truck into a store in Alabama,
and some state
trooper videotaping a cow on the highway, who gives
a hoot what those
hick morons do, let them all kill each other. Though
I wonder about
those Baltimore decapitators. I think I'll look that
up. Toothbrushes
man, what the hell is it with that.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "iDRMRSR" <idrmrsr@subgenius.com>
HINT TO NENSLO:
You don't just use these things on your TEETH anymore.
[*]
-----
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: kdetal@aol.com (KD et al)
Well, for the corporations it's all about trying to
make more money (yeah, I
know, Duh) in the newly most idiotic ways possible.
Did you know they have air
freshener plug ins now that have little fans on them?
They started out with air
thingies you just stuck somewhere. Then they got the
bright idea for plug ins.
Then they diversified and made OIL plug ins. Now they
have little fans on them
to supposedly spray the scent around the room. And of
course with each new
fangled idea, the price goes up. It's the corporate
version of Yahtzee. Each
different product is a new roll of the dice. "
The dumb shits are BUYING the
new fan plug ins: 5 Sixes- YEAH! Beat that!"
On the consumer side, we buy all those things and care
about what our tennis
shoes say and the slant of the bristle on our toothbrushes
and debate forty
minutes over fifty kinds of toothpaste because ITS A
DISTRACTION FROM DEATH.
Thats right. We're all gonna fuckin' die. But if I can
revolve my world around
ten thousand completely meaningless
americanidolsurvivorginkobilobastarbuckslatteacrylicnailsvideocellphone
distractions- well hell- THAT must be what life is all
about and it sure takes
up my minute to start with brain space leaving no room
to think about the fact
that I am in atrophy and degenerating at a cellular
level every fucking minute
and will one day be nothing but a pile of mush with
wrinkles and bad bones and
teeth that fall out in constant pain, before I finally
CEASE TO EXIST
COMPLETELY.
There now. Which kind of toothbrush did you want again?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Cosby <http://joecosby.com/code/mail.pl>
I think that's almost exactly it.
The thing is it goes around back to my favorite rant, growth economy.
A company can't survive by making as much money this
year as it did
last year. Where this growth money is supposed to come
from is a
mystery.
To some extent that's why inflation has come to be considered
a normal
part of the economy. Since we have an economy where
we have to keep
making MORE AND MORE MONEY, we have to make money worth
LESS so we can
earn MORE when there isn't anything else MORE to get.
It isn't just that it's DUMB. Dumb would be OK. If
everybody
accepted that inflation is a math trick we do so we
have BIGGER AND
BIGGER STACKS OF CASH (which is all it really is) then
it would be OK.
Raise prices 5 %, raise wages 5 %, and everybody is
happy and your
little stack of happy green pieces of paper gets bigger.
The problem is, the financial world BELIEVES IT. And
that digresses
from DUMB to CRAZY. The financial world believes that
it's possible
for a more or less constant number of people working
a more or less
constant number of hours (on top of a dwindling set
of natural
resources, as far as manufacturing goes) can produce
MORE AND MORE
VALUE, FOREVER.
IMO that is the ultimate reason why conservative/moneyed
interests and
religion have always gone hand in hand; religion teaches
the ability
to believe something which is impossible because those
in authority
tell you to believe it, and our economy requires that
ability.
They BELIEVE. And so, in the CORPORATE world, they
have to BELIEVE
also, in order to hold onto their jobs.
I have never really been in the corporate world, but
I've been close
enough to it to see how it works. The Necktie Persons
are expected to
produce more and more value, forever. It is their death
sentence and
every last one of them has been sentenced.
So when that Necktie Person at Gilette is sitting at
his desk, that's
what he's thinking. That's his MISSION. What am I
going to do to
cause Gilette to make MORE AND MORE money this year?
It isn't just that they're greedy. It isn't just that
they're cynical
and contemptuous of their public. To SURVIVE, they
have to come up
with some way, whatever way, to drive more money into
the company. If
they DON'T, they DIE.
So they already sell electric razors. The Necktie Person
can't just
sit there and hope more people will buy electric razors.
That might
keep Gilette at exactly an equal level of annual profit,
but that
isn't MORE AND MORE, and so the Necktie Person would
be PUT TO DEATH.
He has to come up with something NEW. Or DIE.
So they invent insane crap that nobody needs.
I bought a phone the other day.
I didn't need much. Just a PHONE. I wanted a cordless
phone, so I
don't have a cord all over the living room.
But they don't sell just a phones anymore. The prices
varied from 40
bucks to 200 bucks for phones that remember your birthday,
download to
your computer, browse the web, play video games, ring
with your choice
of 900 exciting tinny music bites, and so on and so
on before you
start getting to technical features that NOBODY KNOWS
or WANTS TO KNOW
what the fuck they are about. (I have no idea what
the broadcast
frequency of my cordless phone is and I don't WANT TO
KNOW OR CARE).
So I thought FUCK THIS SHIT. And I bought a 40 dollar one.
The people at the store gave me a weirdly blank look.
It was a big
deal, they had to send somebody to the SPECIAL ROOM
where the cheap
phones are.
So now this phone I have has a terrible hiss. When
the battery gets
low, it emits a tone which is audible to the person
on the other end
and then goes dead for one-second intervals to warn
you that the
battery is low, which is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING.
The point, anyway, is that they have added so many FEATURES
that you
can't get JUST A PHONE which isn't ten times WORSE than
the phones you
could get ten years ago.
Because of some Necktie Person. Sweating at his desk.
Thinking "what
if this phone could BROWSE THE WEB?".
And, needless to say, not thinking "a phone that
goes dead at
one-second intervals while you're talking on it is REALLY
FUCKING
WRONG".
>On the consumer side, we buy all those things and
care about what our tennis
>shoes say and the slant of the bristle on our toothbrushes
and debate forty
>minutes over fifty kinds of toothpaste because ITS
A DISTRACTION FROM DEATH.
>
>Thats right. We're all gonna fuckin' die. But if
I can revolve my world around
>ten thousand completely meaningless
>americanidolsurvivorginkobilobastarbuckslatteacrylicnailsvideocellphone
>distractions- well hell- THAT must be what life
is all about and it sure takes
>up my minute to start with brain space leaving no
room to think about the fact
>that I am in atrophy and degenerating at a cellular
level every fucking minute
>and will one day be nothing but a pile of mush with
wrinkles and bad bones and
>teeth that fall out in constant pain, before I finally
CEASE TO EXIST
>COMPLETELY.
>
I think that's what it all always comes down to.
But people's fear of death is deeply buried. They don't
even go NEAR
it.
IMO people in general have a pathological fear of ANY
kind of
introspection. ANY kind of self-examination.
So they blast the TV for the six hours a day they aren't
working or
commuting and completely absorb themselves in TRIVIA.
Trivia is what I find most annoying in most people.
That ability to
be fascinated by completely meaningless crap.
>There now. Which kind of toothbrush did you want again?
Personally I think they invent toothbrushes like that
solely to give
Andy Roony and nenslo something to bitch about.
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.com/
"If God is male, and God is everywhere, does that
mean His Penis is everywhere?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: hellpopehuey@subgenius.com (HellPopeHuey)
If you were really so goddamned smart, you'd realize
that its part of
the plot to drive people with an IQ above 90 bugshit-crazy
with gloss,
greed, pettiness and logic-occluding crap. And look,
its working! The
REAL horror of it is, this plot was devised and is promulgated
by
marketers with IQs of 112 and really nice suits they
can afford
because people with IQs of 70 think a Hulk toothbrush
will get their
teeth CLEANER than a simple blue one with no marketing
geegaw on the
handle.
In addition, we get carried along with the herd by force
and denied
proper time to sit and read or socialize enough to know
what the fuck
to do about relationships that go askew because the
societal tone is
set by people with IQs of 70 who think Bush is a good
man, that the
last episode of "Friends" meant jack shit
to someone drying up by
inches on the Serengeti, that Elvis is cooking burgers
at a roadside
cafe in Nevada, that a film showing Jesus being tortured
Clive-Barker-style has anything to do with the idea
of real
self-sacrifice or true morality that involves principle
rather than
genitalia and that a green Hulk toothbrush naturally
cries out for a
red Spider-Man version to sit next to it on the shelf
so it won't get
lonely at night.
Frankly, its all so foul, I'd enter into a mutual murder
pact with
you utilizing 9 mm pistols at a 2-foot range, but with
my luck, yours
would misfire and I'd end up in prison trying to sharpen
the end of a
prison-issue toothbrush so I could fight off the loving
advances of a
decerebrate cellmate who once got a stiffy from seeing
a shot of Starr
Jones on TV and you can bet your goddamned ass it wouldn't
be a HULK
toothbrush, either.
Okay, enough of that. Anyone want cake & coffee?
--
HellPope Huey,
First Church of the SubGenius, Deformed
I always feel like Curly,
trying to cram a parachute into a shoebox
before MOE comes back with that hammer.
"Do you reject Satan and all his evils?"
"Sure."
- "Ed Wood"
"Honey, have you tried just not being a mutant?"
- "X2: X-Men United"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Frere Jean Bleu <FrJBleu@ifrance.com>
nenslo <nenslo@yahoox.com> wrote:
> Sure, I can understand how DIFFICULT it is
>to clean out one's electric shaver and how an automated
self-cleaning
>system is truly necessary, but this toothbrush thing
has me baffled.
I have the same "issues" with razors. I started
off as a teenager with
a rather nice electric razor then found out that wet
shaving was much
better. Electric razors tend to yank out the bristles
as they get
blunt and they start getting blunt from day one.
The wow factor is also prevalent with razor blades.
I have this
ridiculous heavy triple bladed "Diamond" Schick
with a teflon "smooth
strip" and little wires running perpendicular to
the three tungsten
(or is that titanium?) blades to prevent nicks which
I got as a
present last Xmas.
It's heavy, chunky and awkward. Impressive engineering
but poorly
executed design. The blades get blunt after about three
shaves just
like any other razor and cost about $10 for a [pack
of 5 to
replace...... when you can find them. Disposable Bics
seem to have a
much nicer feel and do a better job for 10 cents a pop.
There was a comparison recently in a newpaper. The disposable
Bics
came in at number one ahead of all the Titanium tipped,
quadruple
bladed, smooth stripped, lateral and longitudal rotating
pieces of
junk..
One good development is shaving gel. You only need a
little spot and
the can lasts for ages.
Fr J B
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Cardinal Vertigo <vertigo@alexandria.cc>
I don't know which newspaper did the comparison, but
I received a
Gilette Mach 3 Turbo, a grip-handled triple-bladed techno-wonder,
as a
gift and it kicks the snot out of a Bic disposable any
day of the week.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "ghost" <ghost@ghost.net>
"Joe Cosby" <http://joecosby.com/code/mail.pl> wrote:
(snip)
> It isn't just that it's DUMB. Dumb would be OK.
If everybody
> accepted that inflation is a math trick we do so
we have BIGGER AND
> BIGGER STACKS OF CASH (which is all it really is)
then it would be OK.
> Raise prices 5 %, raise wages 5 %, and everybody
is happy and your
> little stack of happy green pieces of paper gets
bigger.
The problem with this Greenspan-style inflation is that
his formula is:
Raise prices 7.5%, raise wages 5%. Factor that out over
10 years. (in most
industries annual wage increases are probably 2.5%)
Or, more realistically, decrease real wages for the
majority of workers by a
number of means like major job losses in many sectors,
loss or dimunition of
benefits, etc and hyper-inflate real estate to suck
more money out of poorer
non-home-owners.
See where this is tilting?
So why are most people still smiling? Must be the subliminal
signals hidden
under "American Idol" broadcasts.
Most Americans will be serfs by 2040.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Cosby <http://joecosby.com/code/mail.pl>
"ghost" <ghost@ghost.net> wrote:
>So why are most people still smiling? Must be the
subliminal signals hidden
>under "American Idol" broadcasts.
Cause we're BEATING THAT BASTARD SADDAM!
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.com/
Instead of ERROR 404 you get ERROR CHAPTER 7 when you
go to their former
site...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Cosby <http://joecosby.com/code/mail.pl>
<cue John Williams victory theme>
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.com/
Original file name: What the hell about #1916EB.txt - converted on Saturday, 25 September 2004, 02:05
This page was created using TextToHTML. TextToHTML is a free software for Macintosh and is (c) 1995,1996 by Kris Coppieters