At first glance, this service appears to be something that could be very useful to various driver groups and classes.

-The forgetful driver – who is constantly locking their keys in the vehicle.
-The mechanically challenged driver – who is constantly forgetting how to start their vehicle.
-The hand-eye coordinationally challenged driver – who is constantly running their car off the road and crashing into things.
-The unaware of their surroundings driver – who is constantly having their car stolen.

But how much privacy and freedom are we willing to give up in order to compensate for these issues?

Apart from the fact that Onstar always knows your vehicle’s location, they also have control over your vehicle’s normal functions. Onstar is currently running a commercial showing how they remotely controlled a stolen SUV and forced it to pull over by activating the brakes and cutting the engine. So what happens if the system malfunctions or someone on the remote end pushes the wrong button? 

I’m sitting in my brand new Onstar enabled SUV cruising down an empty street. Suddenly my car cuts off and its brake bring me to a dead stop without my pushing the brake pedal. The speaker in my dashboard crackles to life as a voice says “Stewart C. Adams, you have been selected as an accidental death candidate.  Rest in peace.” The speaker shuts off and suddenly I feel the whole car move – as the realization hits me that I am positioned on a draw bridge over a deep river.  I reach over to open the door but it is locked and the control button is unresponsive, as is the window control.  I beat on the window as hard as I can but it is too strong.  I now feel the lightness in my stomach like riding a rollercoaster as the SUV plummets into the icy water.  No one can hear my screams for help and the horn and headlights aren’t working as I try to get a signal out. I am now dead.  All the vehicle’s functions have been re-enabled and the investigation finds no evidence of my carefully executed murder.

Sure, it sounds like something out of a Harrison Ford film…until you consider that Onstar would actually have such capabilities if they so chose to use them for that purpose.  But then you might say “But they’re a private company, they aren’t going to kill off their customers.” A logical idea…until you remember that Onstar is a subsidiary company of General Motors who’s majority share holding is now owned by the United States Government.

OnStar is watching you…

This past weekend I experienced something truly goodly…nay, I might even go so far as to say I experienced something spectacular. To begin with, I was served with a plate full of meat and bread by my very own meat and bread serving wench… and even though she was moderately fair to behold I could not convince the blonde fellow seated at my right to ask for her hand. He kept stating that he already had found his true love whom was seated at his right side. Regardless, I finished off my half a chicken and spare rib with two full pints of Pepsi and beheld the tournament of champions as they competed in hand to hand combat, awesomeness contests and the joust. I of course was seated in the Blue Knight’s section and therefore quoted the scene from The Cable Guy constantly throughout the evening…and what do you know, the Red Knight went down, down down down. During the show I got to see a real live Poopsmith in his natural habitat doing what it is Poopsmiths do…It was about this time that another wench tried to sell me an light-up rose, again I looked to my right suggesting that my dinner companion make the purchase as a token of his true undying love – not surprisingly, he said ‘No’ which only supports my theory that his love is a shallow loveless feeling not actually containing any love. Anyway, back to the tourney…(Spoiler Alert) the yellow knight kills the green knight and saves the prince who had only managed to get himself captured and really served no real purpose as a character in the story. Upon completion of the tourney, I was escorted to the throne room and knighted by the king himself. Harold the Herald, rang out a joyous proclamation on his trumpet and all the peasants rejoiced.

First up, we have a quality news report from the Onion News Network.

Next, we have two music videos from famed viral video band ‘OkGo’ with their newest song, “This too shall pass.”

And lastly, something for the video game nerds out there. The Halo Reach Multiplayer trailer.

Originally posted on February 25, 2009.

Hi, it’s me, your calculator. Yes, I know it’s kind of weird for you to be busily working and then suddenly be interpersonally communicated to by an inanimate object, not to mention an engineer-type inanimate object. But let’s face it, we have to talk…you see, I don’t think I’m being treated fairly through this arrangement. Sure it has it perks, I get free rides in your backpack, I get to make you laugh when you make pictures using math symbols, and I have the pleasure of knowing that I am infinitely smarter than you as evident in practically all your math exams.

Even these fluffy benefits however, are considerably outweighed but the horrible treatment I must go through on a day to day basis. For one thing, the endless poking has to stop. It’s embarrassing when someone walks past and there I am being poked by that terrible index finger over and over as if I were a baby. Sometimes when you’re nervous you actually inflict pain on my rubberized function button. I fear that soon the labels on my buttons will rub off and I will become useless in the purpose for which I was created. Part of this problem could be fixed if you would just store your programs and formulas in my onboard memory instead of using up all that space with your silly text pictures…the long in the short of it is that they are killing me, slowly. Also, please keep in mind that it is not my fault when you can’t remember the Pythagorean Theorem and throwing me across the room and into the wall does not help the situation.

Another thing you need to know is that girls don’t think it’s funny when you tell them your calculator can give them a TAN, chop LOGs, and forgive SIN…you’re essentially stating that you have no idea what those functions do and are confirming that you are officially un-datable if not certifiably insane.

So please, do your poor calculator a favor and help me help you. Always remember: pi is not 3.14, nine is really just a confused six, and above all, never drink and derive.

Figure skating is exactly like Nascar.  Cloaked under the guises of “Art Form” and “Athletic Sport,” figure skating is comprised of about 123 seconds of fluff and amateur level moves and about 7 seconds of masterful intense action – which is really all the audience came to see anyway.  Watching a dude in spandex tights skate around the ice in sweeping arcs with arm movements in sync with the music is about as boring as watching stock cars drive around an oval 500 times.  Like Nascar, many viewers of ice skating really only care about seeing amazing feats of skill as well as the occasional crash.  In reality, figure skating routines should take a fraction of the time if they were simply a long chain of awesome toe-loop-jump-double-salchow-flip-triple-lutz-tripple-axel-toe walley-half loops. Which brings me to my next point, if this were the case, it would be much more clear cut who was the  winner and who was the loser.  Since most people wouldn’t even be able to finish their routines, the judging would become much less subjective – i.e. prejudiced in favor of their own country. When the difference between Gold and Silver is a tenth of a point because one judge doesn’t like euro-pop music, the system is broken.

And so my friends, I propose a new sport to serve as a replacement to the traditional flavor of figure skating.  Routines last 10 seconds and start at the top of an ice ramp.  The skater gains speed and does as many tricks as possible within the time limit.  If he or she completes a certain level of difficulty and doesn’t die, they are awarded a gold medal. We can call it Stewart Skating…but fear not people who still wish to see the hum drum boring non-sport version of figure skating, you can still see it at the Ice Capades and Disney on Ice where it belongs.

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It was another rainy night in Roswell. It’d been a long day and everything around me seemed to be in a dank and dismal state, with colors turning into grayscale before my very eyes. I sat at my desk, the sound of the ceiling fan whirring above me and the plinking of precipitation hitting the roof above that. As I slouch in my chair I tilt my fedora back on my head and contemplate what my next action should be. I ultimately decide that a drink would be appropriate for such an occasion and am then forced to think about whether whiskey or coffee would be more suited to pulling me out of my lackluster. As my mind wonders onto tangents regarding the consequences and benefits of mixing stimulants and relaxants, there is a soft knock at my office door. I pull out my pocket watch; ‘10:23 pm,’ long past visiting hours by anyone’s calculations yet I remain here in my chair none the less. I should go home and sleep…yet that would require me to walk through the rain, I hate it when my socks get wet… My mental wonderings are again interrupted by a knock at the door, this time a little quicker, just a slight bit louder and with more desperation behind it. Curiosity fills my imagination and begins to overpower my tightly grasped desire to be left alone. Realizing that I had left a light on and the blinds on my window open, I decide that my visage was easily visible from the street below and I would not be able to hide in pretending I was not in. “Enter” I say with a slight rasp clothing the edges of the lonesome syllables. With a slow and arduous creak my office door swings open…I need to lubricate those hinges to prevent further auditory torture in the future, but I know as long as it’s on my time it will never be done.

My attention is then focused on my guest, a slender figure hidden beneath an overcoat dripping with rainwater. Turning back toward me after closing the door, the visitor confirmed my suspicions as her face shone in the light of my desk lamp, yes, she is a woman. My stomach churned inside me as she removed her hat and made plain the fact that she was indeed a girl of unquestionable beauty…the very thing I had been dreading. While most would consider this good fortune or at the very least a bonus to brighten my previous state of being, not I, for I know the implications of the situation. I had already played it over in my head…she would take a seat and begin telling me all about how the mob was after her and that she’s pretty sure they murdered her husband though she has no evidence. She’ll say she has no money and will eventually shed a few tears all with the hope that I will pity her and become her pro bono private investigator. Despite the fact that I know all this will happen I also know that there is no way I will be able to resist her. I will end up nearly getting myself killed, might lose my license and will then have the mob after me, all this just to be a hero for a beautiful girl. When it’s all over I’ll get a kiss on the cheek and she’ll say “you’re a great fella,” she’ll turn around and I’ll never see her again.

So there I sit, staring into her sparkling, frightened eyes, I can see the path that’s before me and I know it is the road I will take despite the less than favorable outcome. Playing along with what I already know she’s going to say, I offer her a chair. But then something happens that shakes up my entire decision making paradigm. Rather than taking a seat and telling me about all of her misfortunes and how she’s at the end of her rope, she walks around my desk, puts her hand on my shoulder and whispers in a low, mellow tone: “All your base are belong to us.” At that moment I hear the bang of the gun firing but do not feel the resulting pain until several seconds later. The last thing I remember was me lying on the floor looking under my desk toward the door. I watched as the woman walked through the door and the skin of her ankles changed to a scaly green color, then everything faded to blackness. –July 7, 1947

iPad: “Hi, I’m an iPad.”

Netbook: “And I’m a Netbook.”

iPad: “I can only run one program at a time, if you want to view pictures, or type out a grocery list…you have to stop listening to music or surfing the web.”

Netbook: “I don’t have that feature…”

iPad: “I can watch movies as long as they are downloaded wirelessly or synced through a computer and will fit on my 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash memory (btw, we charge you $100 more for each memory upgrade).”

Netbook: “I can use an external DVD drive to watch DVD movies and have unlimited storage space by way of external hard disk drives. The high end Netbooks have as much as 320 GB internal storage with the average being over 100 GB.”

iPad: “I can stream YouTube videos by way of the YouTube app…but don’t have support for flash on web pages.”

Netbook: “Whoa…really? So no Hulu, no flash games like Kitten Canon or Farmville? No blip.tv embeds? No flash based web animation? You do realize that 97% of what’s cool on the internet requires flash right?”

iPad: “Ahem, moving on…I have an on screen keyboard that has no tactile  feedback and takes up half of the screen.”

Netbook: “I come with a real keyboard built in.”

iPad: “I have access to the Apple App Store…which can already be obtained with the iPhone.”

Netbook: “I can install and run real programs with full feature sets that aren’t limited to the fact that I’m an iPad.”

iPad: “I have no external connection ports except for a 30-pin proprietary USB connection used for syncing and charging.  So I can’t attach any peripherals unless they are specifically designed for me.”

Netbook: “I can use practically any USB peripheral, and often have VGA ports and memory card readers.”

iPad: “I have up to 10 hours of battery life.”

Netbook: “Depending on the model, I can get up to 15 hours of battery life.”

iPad: “My cheapest model costs $499.”

Netbook: “I average around $300.”

iPad: “I have the apple logo on my back.”

Netbook: “I definitely don’t have that…”

iPad: “I have a 9.7” backlit display so when you’re reading it’s like staring at a computer monitor.”

Netbook: “You know the Kindle has the same size display but it is specially designed to look like paper and be gentle on the eyes without glare.”

iPad: “…I’m like an iPhone, but bigger so that you can’t carry me around in your pocket and without the Phone part.”

Netbook: “So basically you’re telling me that you’re not useful as a cell phone, a laptop or a reading device?”

iPad: “No, I couldn’t possibly be saying all three of those things, that would be multitasking and I can’t do that.”

In the spirit of vain repetition and pure laziness on my part, I am re-posting last year’s Valentines blog post for your nostalgic enjoyment.

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When it comes to singleness, there are two polar extremes that dwell on the teetering edges of the bell curve. On one end, you have hermits, consistent feminists, and Bill Gothard – people who are to remain single for their whole life. Some are content to be here with little desire to even go on a date that could cause them to become romantically involved with another person. While others are angry…so very angry…and hate everyone and everything so much that no one wants to be near them and/or they can’t find a person they hate little enough to be interested in. In many cases, these people are already married to something else that A) takes up all their time, B) has made them rabidly bitter toward even the idea of finding true love, or C) both. This ‘something else’ could be almost anything…a career, a celebrity obsession, a hobby, playing Halo for days at a time, etc.

At the other end of the bell curve we have those people who are absolutely terrified of the concept of being single and do everything in their power to get as far from single status as possible. Here dwell the traditional Mormons, wealthy Sheiks, the Smurfs, and King Solomon who, consider love to be more a symbol of success than a delicate emotion. To most of these people, a relationship is just another achievement (bleep bloop) on their resume of social and interpersonal prosperity.

But since most of us hang out somewhere between these two extremes, this is all I’ve got to say:

For the single Ladies: Don’t worry about a thing, the man of your dreams is going to find you soon…sweep you off your feet and carry you away to his castle whilst singing “Kiss de girl” and riding upon his magical unicorn. He will marry you and love you forever with an undying passion the likes of which this world has never seen. But, in the meantime…embrace your singleness and have a very joyous Singles Awareness Day.

For the single Gentlemen: I have put your message in binary code:

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10000001001001001000000110010001101111011011100111010000

1000000111001001100101011000010110110001101100011110010

0100000011010000110000101110110011001010010000001100001

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1010010110000100000010010010010000001101010011101010111

0011011101000010000001110111011000010110111001110100011

0010101100100001000000111010001101111001000000111001101

1001010110010100100000011101110110100001101111001000000

1100001011000110111010001110101011000010110110001101100

0111100100100000011101110110010101101110011101000010000

0011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000

0001110100011100100110111101110101011000100110110001100

1010010000001101111011001100010000001100100011001010110

0011011011110110010001101001011011100110011100100000011

1010001101000011010010111001100101100001000000110110101

1011110111001001100101001000000110100101101101011100000

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0111100100101100001000000111011101101000011010010110001

1011010000010000001100111011010010111001001101100011100

1100100000011101110110010101101110011101000010000001110

1000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000111

0100011100100110111101110101011000100110110001100101001

0000001101111011001100010000001100100011001010110001101

1011110110010001101001011011100110011100100000011101000

1101000011010010111001100101110001000000100001001110101

0111010000100000011010100111010101110011011101000010000

0011001100110111101110010001000000111010001101000011001

0100100000011100100110010101100011011011110111001001100

1000010110000100000011101110110100001100101011011100010

0000011110010110111101110101001000000110010001101111001

0000001100111011001010111010000100000011000010010000001

1001110110100101110010011011000010110000100000011100110

1100001011110010110100101101110011001110010000001111001

0110111101110101001000000110010001101111011011100111010

0001000000111011101100001011011100111010000100000011101

0001101111001000000111001101110101011100000111000001101

1110111001001110100001000000111010001101000011001010010

0000011000110110111101101101011011010110010101110010011

0001101101001011000010110110001101001011110100110000101

1101000110100101101111011011100010000001101111011001100

0100000011010000110111101101100011010010110010001100001

0111100101110011001000000110001001111001001000000110111

0011011110111010000100000011000110110010101101100011001

0101100010011100100110000101110100011010010110111001100

1110010000001010110011000010110110001100101011011100111

0100011010010110111001100101011100110010000001000100011

0000101111001001000000110100101110011001000000110111001

1011110111010000100000011000010110111000100000011011110

11100000111010001101001011011110110111000101110

06. Jasmine – Here we have a young girl who is constantly disobedient to her father (who is also sultan btw), who runs away from home on a regular basis, wears hammer pants, and rather than pursuing a relationship with an upstanding member of society (who just so happens to be rich, handsome and royalty), she decides to go for the ruffian punk kid who steals for a living and is commonly known as a “street rat.” By today’s standards, this degenerate would be accurately known as “drug dealer.” Since when is it okay to tell little girls they should aspire to marry a street rat when they grow up?

07. Pocahontas – The only of the Disney Princesses that is actually based on a historical character, Pocahontas is everything the real Pocahontas was not. The real Pocahontas was about 10 years old when she saved John Smith’s life, she did not know him prior to the encounter and never had any kind of ongoing relationship with him.  She also did not worship talking trees and was baptized as a born again Christian after marrying John Rolfe in 1614.  But I guess its okay to completely deface a historical figure and add fiction to his/her story if it means box office sales. 

08. Mulan – Ah, the Chinese woman who looks like a man.  So much like a man that her gender was never questioned throughout months in a military training encampment.  The ultimate example of feminist role reversal, Mulan gives the audience the impression that all men are idiots and women are the best at fighting giant hulking Huns.  If only the Huns had sent their women to invade China, then they would have won.

09. Tiana – Also not a real princess until she marries a frog, Tiana is an American living in New Orleans in 1912.  Wearing a princess costume for a masquerade ball, Tiana is mistaken as a real princess by a frog who just happens to be a prince from a country that still has a monarchy. Since I have yet to see “The Princess and The Frog,”  I will not comment further regarding the negative aspects of the film or its “princess.”  If you have seen the movie, feel free to add input in the comments section.

But has anyone ever really taken a critical and admittedly cynical  look into the lives of these Princesses?  Little girls love them because they wear Drancy Fesses, women love them because they are “strong,”  and guys love them because they are “hot” and “rich” (everything a man wants his woman to be).  But what really lies under the skin deep beauty and initial appeal of these characters? Let’s analyze them, shall we?

01. Cinderella – Not really a princess at all except by marriage, this little girl is everything she is because of other people.  She was a slave because of her step mother and sisters, she was made into a fake princess by her fairy god mother, she was rescued by her animal friends and she was made into a real princess by the prince.  Basically Cinderella doesn’t even really exist except as a shell entity that is swayed and moved by whichever way the proverbial wind is blowing.

02. Snow White – Allegedly the fairest maiden in the land, Snow White obviously lived in a land where standards for feminine beauty were extremely low.  With her pale white skin and plain features, Snow looks like one who has some kind of unshakable disease.  Based on her general attitude and the fact that she eats poisoned fruit received from an obviously shady old woman, it is clear that Snow is not the brightest bulb on the strand.

03. Aurora – Also known as Sleeping Beauty, this princess was given an unfair advantage at birth.  Bestowed with super human beauty and singing skills by the fairies Flora and Fauna, has no one realized how superficial these gifts are?  What good would beauty and singing do the kingdom if Aurora had turned out to be pure evil?  How about something like ‘the gift of wisdom’ or ‘the gift of purity’?  I guess the scale of what makes a good princess is measured only by how she looks and sounds.

04. Belle – Belle is a clearly disturbed small town girl who falls in love with a creature of another species. Enough said.

05. Ariel – Filled with teen angst, this half fish girl strives to be something she’s not…a woman.  This is displayed by Ariel’s constant rebellion to her authorities, her whiny sel-fish (ha!) attitude and the fact that she’s half fish.

To be continued…