Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Dear Puma: Please sign me to an endorsement deal. Thanks.
It sure would be nice to be a professional athlete. I mean, I remember when I was a kid and I played sports. Even when I hated going to practice, I still liked it a hell of a lot better than going to school. I would assume being a professional athlete is the same way. It sucks from time to time, but you get paid an obscene amount of money and you don't really do anything that can be classified as work. You're basically getting paid to stay in shape, be on television and, as I ascertain from most professional athletes (Sean Kemp for instance), father a bunch of illegitimate children with a bunch of random, slutty women. Now, say what you will about the pros and cons of screwing lots of random slutty women, it certainly beats sitting in a 10x10 windowless office for 40 hours a week staring at a computer screen. I'd screw some random skank just to get out of here early on one day.

... So why am I talking about this right now? Well, it's because I hate David Beckham and I'm being forced to find pictures of him for work right now. What a bastard. Adidas gives him all kinds of money and free stuff, he married a Spice Girl (ok ... So that's not the GREATEST thing he could have done, but it's not like he married one of the chicks from Wilson Phillips), and his job recently required him to move out of England to go live in Spain. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but where I come from, that's called "catching all the breaks." What a fucker. My job only gets me cheap software and affords me the opportunity to discuss how 520 should be rebuilt as a toll bridge with some random guy on the bus. (520 should be rebuild as a toll bridge by the way ... One with a bike lane like I-90 has dammit.) Now, I seriously need to figure out how to get Puma to sponsor a graphic designer who works at Microsoft. I have about three million articles of Puma clothing already, those bastards might as well put me on the payroll. I bet I'm way less of an insufferable prick than David Beckham too. What a fucker.

I should never have quit soccer when I was a little kid. I played for like a year, then I got drilled square in the face with the ball by some kid who was about 20 times bigger than me and standing about 8 feet away. That's when my "fuck this" alarm started blaring, alerting me that skateboarding and riding BMX was way cooler than some faggotty game where you can't use your hands.

Instant Runoff
So while I was talking to the aforementioned guy on the bus, he hipped me to something called "instant runoff." It's a genius idea for elections. Basically this is how it works: When you go in to vote, say for president, you're handed a ballot and you rank your choices of candidates. Say there are 3 candidates; Bush, Kerry and Nader. Say you're one of those people who wants to vote for Nader, but you fear you'll be wasting your vote because you think there's no chance he'll win. Well, with IRV you're able to actually express an opinion when you go to the ballot box. You can vote Nader as your first choice, Kerry as your second, etc etc. You don't HAVE to rank all the candidates, you can just pick the ones you wouldn't mind representing you and put them in order of your preference. That way if Nader does in fact lose the election, all the people that voted for him first automatically have their second choice counted since Nader is out of the running.

This seems like a great idea to me. I haven't researched it a whole lot to really test that theory, but whatever. I do know why this scenario will never get put into place: the arena of public discussion. If IRV was put in place, guys like Nader would inevitably get way more votes. Probably not enough to win, but certainly enough to get the percentage needed to get into the presidential debates. Were a guy like Nader to debate head to head with George Bush and John Kerry, the results would be devastating to the Democrat and Republican parties. Suddenly the fact that the military budget is now close to, if not way over, 500 billion dollars a year, along with a lot of other things mainstream politicians DO NOT want to talk about would be subjects for public debate. No mainstream politician wants to bring the country closer to a real democracy though because corporations, unions and special interest groups don't line politicians pockets so voters can get what they want. They do it so THEY get what they want, fuck the voter.

Of course, as we all know quite well from the 2000 presidential election (unless you're an idiot), American "democracy" is a farce. You get to pick from Coke or Pepsi and be happy with it because almost no one is aware or alerted of the fact that they have the option to vote for cranberry juice. Personally though, I'd run as beer. Everyone would vote for beer.

p.s.
I'm starting a really fast, dumb, punk rock, party band. Here's our logo: