Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 4/19/06

Opinion Double Feature!!

By, Puns McKenna

Have you ever seen those “Catch the bouncing ball” or “Stake Dracula” ads along the sidebar when browsing the web? Of course you have. We all have.

I was wandering through the World Wide Web the other day looking for something or other, and ran across a “Stake Dracula and win an iPod” ad. It had this little amateur animation Dracula bouncing around over a “scary house” scene. Now, I’m not a sucker for these let us sell your name to eight billion advertisers, so we can fill your email box with Spam, guys, but this was funny.

I sat there for twenty minutes chasing Dracula around the screen just to see if I could stick him. Has that ever happened to you? Come on admit it, there’ve been times when you’ve been tempted by one of those goofy sidebar games. It happens to us all, really… no really it does…*Looks around all innocent-like* …Naw it only happens to you!

Ok so seriously now, no joking around. You all know what I’m talking about. So let me ask you, do you find them as annoying as I do? Well if you do, here’s a tip. You know that little bottle of white out you have sitting next to your typewriter? You know you have one, we know you have one, just admit to geekiness and let it go.

Anyway, take that little bottle of white out to your screen where the ad bars show up and block em out. There! Problem solved, right? What? You mean you can’t see other stuff that you want to see? Oh well…. Better get out the putty knife and scrape that white out off your screen then. What to do about those ads? Well there’s always mental white out….
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Do We Need Eyeglasses?

By, Puns McKenna

Oh My God! I was reading an Article on one of the sites I regularly frequent, purely by accident, and nearly fell out of my chair. At first I was shocked, then I laughed, and then I just stared in shock.

Ok so this article was about a man who escaped from a Louisiana prison. He’d been sentenced to life for killing a man in Minnesota in 1987. Now the Cops were hunting for this guy, ostensibly so they could send him back to prison.

Anyway, this escapee was jogging down the road and gets stopped by a cop. Cop asks him what he’s doing jogging. Now from the article I gathered this guy was jogging in gator country, which is stupid enough on it’s own, but I digress.

So this cop stops him, and the escapee says, “I’m doing roofing work in the area and had a relative drop me off so I could get some daily exercise.” Now at this point I’m wondering why the hell a guy would want to jog to work when he’s got a perfectly good ride. My suspicious sensors are goin off at this point. But the Cop apparently buys this story.

The article doesn’t say whether the cop actually looked at the picture he was given of this escaped guy, but one would think he would look, right? I would have. Hell I would’ve whipped the picture out right there and said, “Hey can you stand this way so I can compare you with this picture I got?” But then I’m just weird that way.

So get this, the cop apparently accepts the story and lets the guy go. When he was asked later, the cop said, “I let him go, because it didn’t really look like the guy in the picture.”

Now at this I do a double take. Huh? What?! Ok wait a minute! This guy doesn’t look exactly like the guy in the picture, so you’re not even going to detain him based on resemblance, just to be sure? Ex-squeeze me? Ok folks do we need glasses to see just how TOTALLY messed up this was? Are we letting Escapees go, because they don’t look EXACTLY like their pictures?

Kinda makes me glad I live in a place where the law of the land is still the Gun. God Bless the West, no?