One of Today’s featured excite links:

Super-Cute Kitten Photos

If that isn’t confirmation that the average person has all the intelligence of a potted plant, I really don’t know what would be. Super-Cute Kitten Photos? Who the hell are these people who spend their time looking at pictures of other people’s pets on the Internet? There isn’t even anything particularly insulting to say to these people as any insult of appropriate venom would simply be above their intellectual understanding. Kittens, for God’s sake!

And while I’m venting . . . if the bastard who lives above us continues banging on the floor/ceiling like he’s digging for gold, I will be forced to throw him in front of a train, even if it means dragging him all the way to the mainland.

P.S. Go to ExplodingDog.com. It is probably the best thing on the Internet that isn’t Anna Kournikova. Some personal favorites are “that boy ain’t right,” “he was angry,” and “is this love? that i’m feeling?”

Formerly of IslandEdition.com, currently pursuing fortunes in the big city, Kirby Ferguson lives and he’s setup a radio station at Live365.

If you can stand being swamped with ads (I recommend hiding the window behind other windows), you can listen to Kirby’s fine music picks including:

“Steve Earle, Radiohead, Wilco, Vic Chesnutt, Moby, Richard Buckner, Dandy Warhols, Aimee Mann, Lucinda Williams, and Elliott Smith”

The quote of the week comes from Signal vs. Noise. Commenting on the alleged impending downfall of eToys and the subsequent collapse of online retailing, they wonder:

Ah if only they had spent all of their money on a weather control device instead of advertising…

Re: no big loss. I never did like Shake ‘n Bake much.

Fudge replies:

Miracle Whip, Shake n’ Bake, Jell-O, Maxwell House, Kraft Dinner, Kool-Aid,
Raisin Brand, Miller Beer…Why are people buying tobacco from a food
company?

All are really popular products, most are actually not that bad (try adding
hot-dogs to the kraft, breaks up the taste). Why boycott these products?
Tobacco revenues are falling yearly and the lawsuits are mounting. Fairly
soon most of these companies will likely give up on the tobacco side of
their business and focus more on other things. Maybe if people spent some of
their tobacco cash on jell-o it would be a good thing no matter who makes
it. Let them make all the cigarettes they want, if no one is smoking them it
won’t last very long anyway! Some places are currently asking for
legislation that limits where people can smoke outside! If the price of
pants goes up to $300 and when I buy them I’m told that I can’t wear them in
restaurants or downtown, and when I do wear them people stare at me and
shake their heads, and they make my breath smell, and they have this picture
on the side of some guy who wore pants all his life and his legs are all
white and pasty…pretty soon I say “Fuck pants!”, gimme some of them shorts!

Who the hell reads Harper’s anyways?

As to your pants parable, in theory you may be correct. Unfortunately, in reality most people are not as wise as you are – many do continue to smoke, likely due to the fact that, unlike wearing pants, smoking is rather addictive whereas pant-wearing is merely a matter of style and comfort.

Cigarette companies advertise, they do not simply produce a product. They advertise to “young people,” a demographic which has not abandoned smoking as readily as others. I would prefer if the money I spent on groceries did not end up financing an ad campaign for a product which kills approximately 1200 people a day in the US alone.

If I might make an analogy of my own, let me cast tobacco companies as a criminal, a mass-murderer. If said murderer becomes more inept and bumbling with age, unable to knock off people in the record numbers it has previously (7.2 million in the last 20 years), I still don’t think I’m going to buy Popsicle-stick sculptures from the guy because his profits (431 billion in the last 20 years) are diminishing somewhat, no matter how attractive his art might be.

IDEO is the über-cool corporation, complete with corporate identity hand made by the logo master Paul Rand (you might know some of his logos: IBM, ABC, Westinghouse), that designed such ass-kicking consumer electronic as the Palm V and the Handspring Visor.

They have a bunch of smart asses working around the clock coming up with cool stuff (just what we need more of, don’t you think).

I particularly recommend checking out the Identity Card Project (see link on the front page) and the space vacuum.

I was somewhat surprised to learn that all the brands pictured below are owned by Philip Morris. To read about Adbusters Harper’s Campaign go here. And stop eating Kraft Dinner, it tastes god-awful anyway.

Go see The Legend of Drunken Master starring Jackie Chan. In this re-release of the ’94 Drunken Master, Jackie Chan plays a master of the Drunken Boxing style of combat who needs to actually be drunk to reach the peak of his abilities.

There’s this one scene where a dude with an axe comes at Jackie, and then Jackie’s like: “pow, pow, whap-pow, kapow, smack-wap”, and axe-guy is like “oof,” and then Jackie does this flip-somersault thing and then: “whap, whap, whap, YIIAHH! wap-wap-WHAP,” and the axe guy falls off the roof.

Probably the best Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen. I don’t think he’s human.