R.I.B. - Ramblings In Brief - Seventh Seal

Far too many annoyances out there - far too many - and waaaaaaay too much crap all over the place so that one could promptly attend to, really... And why bother dealing with any of it "in depth" either? Thus, we chose to adopt the expeditive and most efficient method, permanently: blast it all to pieces piece by piece, take no prisoners, spare no one! But doing so in a less painful way, with little doses at a time! And not so visceral as it could be either; for this is not lambasting either, now is it? Now don't get us wrong here: in doing so, we do not hope that it will be less painful for everyone involved - at all! Au contraire, we hope it will sting, stab, bite and burn even more furiously since none of these topics (with one glaring exception now and then, really - but, to be honest, there are so few of those it makes one want to cry, really...! But that is another story.) hence, none of these stories deserved or was dignified with a full post to call it its own, anywhere else on the TLB Prime Network - at blogging time, that is!

So here we go again...
MORE R.I.B. - RAMBLINGS IN BRIEF!

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Flex is dead - what, already?
Well these virtual things are truly living up to their, ah, virtuosity, eh?
No reference to the movie of the same, really - for it was but another waste of celluloid as far as we are concerned! But that is another story - for our movie blog! Duh...

Flex is dead, therefore - and it was supposed to be the computer language of the future, not so long ago at all!!!

In its place, stands a new language with a familiar name: HTML.
HTML...?!?
Number Five, though: that's right - HTML5 is the only way to go now - at least for as long as this latest nerdy fad lasts!

As an outsider looking in, peering inside his laptop's circuitry - or trying to (like the time I cracked the old desktop open, for various reasons that motivated the violent gesture: let's not get into that right now, though...) I have to personally ask - why in blue blazes...?!?

If it is not for economical reasons (using HTML5 will be easier and more productive, and increasing productivity should boost the cash flow too - rrrright? Even computer geeks know that what matters really here: and it is the all-mighty dollar, n'est-ce pas?

Maybe it's practical reasons

Could it be safety reasons

Please tell me it's not for pure "joy of obfuscating" reasons now...! (Every six months, or so, perhaps in fear of their geeky rivals -the hackers- the I.T. crowd collectively decides to change everything: all the rules, the language, the preferred coding, the way to get things done in a constantly (purported to be) "evolving" industry intent of making money any which way it can...! The poor saps (derogatorily - oh so derogatorily) called "users" have no choice but to follow suit - once everything is obfuscated, they have to buy all the new software (if not new hardware too) just to keep everything that they've grown so used to simply in working order still...!

The obfuscation doesn't stop there though: of course, there are many more languages to use and choose from. One suspects, even, that these geeks are keen on trying to come up with as many new computer languages as there are actual languages (foreign tongues, langues, linguas - lingo, dammit!!!) in the whole blamed world! Good luck with that project, geeks! And the more chaotically confusing it gets to be, the better it is for them too: for they secure their very own raison d'être as the demand for their services is ever increasing exponentially, in truth!

Me, I think it is all incredibly CRUDe - and I will forever prefer ROM over REM even if it means having to dispense pearls to swine and even a RUBY every once in a while along with that...!
;-)


Next!

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Now for those of you that truly want scary signs that the end is indeed near:
beyond the fact that illogical chaos continues to ensue everywhere at the same time, in every field and in every level of society, inexorably leading us all to a pervasive and all-encompassing state of entropy and inertia...

Just a few minutes spent ogling the news ticker this past week-end would have supplied enough evidence to any and all who doubt that the end is very near indeed: why, how can you doubt when you see all the convergence of events that are happening simultaneously as we, er, blog...?

In Syria, "Army dissidents" have taken to arms and taken control of strategic areas, which led directly to clashes with legit Syrian troops and about sixty deaths - so far. Syria is one of those "hot spots" that could very well trigger a chain of events that leads to far greater numbers of casualties, there and abroad - mostly abroad.

Speaking of "hot spots" - Iran. On a parallel to ongoing concerns in re their nuclear ambitions, the country is considering retaliatory measures against the European Union in response to that embargo thing...! Iran is therefore raising the prices for their oh-so-precious Crude Oil (gotta capitalize - it's better than gold) and as if that wasn't enough motivation for WAR, they are considering banning sales altogether to the aforementioned E.U. too, for a mere jacking up of the prices is not satisfying enough in terms of retaliation...! On a parallel to all this, hence, Iran is playing the good misunderstood guy part (as its Foreign Minister plays that part so very well) having U.N. observers coming over and visiting their nuclear facilities in order to ease everyone's mind about Iran being in the process of readying itself to become a nuclear power in the full sense of the word.

I don't know about the U.N. observers, anyone else in the United Nations or anybody in general - but no one, absolutely no one should be "optimistic" here (as Iran's Foreign Minister was reputed to be feeling like, at the end of these tours by U.N. observers...! If you believe the news tickers, that is...)

Besides, if the left one doesn't get you, the right one will - North Korea does have nuclear weapons: you didn't a reminder of that now, did you?!?

Meanwhile, "the world's foremost gathering of business and political leaders" was taking place, for five days to boot, in Davos, Switzerland. It ended Sunday on what was qualified as "a sombre note". It must have started, therefore, on January 25th. Wow - and I wasn't notified?!? They got what they had coming - the sombre note was for not having invited Luminous! There!

The 5-day "summit" (since it gathered what the French call "des sommités dans le domaine" - ha!) which one can alternatively refer to as the W.E.F (what - the whiff? What are these morons SMOKING? The question must be asked - indeed! Okay - W.E.F stands for World Economic Forum - happy?) ended on such a sour note because all these geniuses, for all their business acumen and know-how, they have narrow a clue how to properly deal with Europe's "crippling Debt Crisis" (once again, it has to be capitalized because it is considerably lesser than gold: the lack of gold is the problem, yes! No matter how far we strain away from it, it always comes back to GOLD! But never mind that right now...)

We have, on one hand, a USA government that has devalued the world economy, brought about the collapse of world banking and even the devaluation of its precious paper currency - and it is it that is leading the world straight to the gutter as it is going - and yet the European Debt Crisis gets the nod as the world's worst problem right now, in the eyes of all of this elite of business and political "leaders"...

With leaders like these, it is not any surprise that the world is going down the tubes!

"Paper money" is all that is holding the world together as it stands right now indeed - and soon enough it will have as much weight as Monopoly (TM) money.

All these leaders and big money braintrust should have taken advice from Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas and simply not show up at this so-called summit/waste of time...!

Tim Thomas was a no-show earlier in the same week at the White House when his team got the "honor and privilege" to be hosted by the U.S. President Barack Obama who finally acknowledged the Bruins' Stanley Cup Championship in 2011 (something the Google Zeitgeist failed pathetically at - but that is another story...) - well, Thomas felt he could pass on that and he was RIGHT.

What honor, what privilege, to be hosted by evil incarnate at worst; a mere puppet of evil forces working behind the scenes at best? B.A. is all B.S. and will, ultimately, see no other recourse than trigger another senseless, baseless WAR just to trigger another "economy boost" (a stimulant that somehow was not mentioned by any of those political leaders in Davos? Strange. It wasn't even suggested by a single one of those business leaders there - not even those in the most concerned industries? Stranger! Oh well - it is all done behind the scenes anyhow...)

I may be repeating myself - but that is the honor and privilege of he who blogs and has many blogs, forums, mouthpieces, vehicles and soapboxes with and upon which to express himself!
;-)

Now - where were we and where we heading with it?
:-!

Ah, yes - the end!
With all these crazy things going on at once -all of these and more that do not even make it onto this blog, news tickers or anywhere else- you can rest assured that you will be resting in pieces (and, if you are lucky, in peace) sometime soon - indeed.

The often-perceived as "leading idiot amongst the idiots" (his fellow countrymen comedians portray him as such, anyhow) Canada's P.M. (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper said something at that W.E.F. summit thing that was disturbing to all, especially back home, as he qualified of "economically unsustainable" any form of supplements given to an ageing population. Hence, Old Age Security cheques, that old-timers have grown accustomed to and that personally I was looking forward to, at some point in time (if the world doesn't go kablooey in the meantime, that is) could be something to put a cross upon, perhaps...?

It has been called "the prime minister's pension bombshell" - a bomb that was carefully dropped at the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland (as it is customary for Canadians to do: making a splash, but in a careful, dare I say conservative way!) and all the so-called experts and political observers fully expect that to set to spark a "war of words" (better that than a War of the Worlds, eh - the old Parliament House in Ottawa wouldn't fare well against Alien blasts) when those pesky "lawmakers return to Parliament on Monday" - ha.

As reported here: "the rhetoric has been ramping up since Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a speech at the World Economic Forum Thursday, that an overhaul may be necessary as a growing population ages making supplements like Old Age Security economically unsustainable."

And to think that all it was was a mere comment; one made by the aforementioned "leading idiot amongst the idiots"! Still, it is one that has to be taken seriously and it is one that has "set off a firestorm of reaction on all political fronts" back home, in Ottawa.

Pension reform suddenly became the hot topic of discussion - as everyone forgot everything else that implies an upcoming doomsday or some darn thing like that...! The battle lines were clearly drawn on CTV's Question Period Sunday when panelists from the three major parties faced off with host and chief political correspondent Craig Oliver over pension reform - wow! What wondrous reporting you can find on that CTV.com site: all self-promoting and all, as it is informative too! Astounding.

His defenders made the case that their precious Stephen Harper only "wants to look at long-term longevity because he wants to ensure income security for seniors for many, many generations," said one Shelly Glover, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance and therefore cronie of a cronie of Harper's. As that was just the opening salvo of the debate, you can guess that everyone else rallied against her, stating that thou shall not touch the pensions or something...!

All of it embodies pretty well the Canadian culture, I think: their heads in the snow (as the sand is not available for most of the year, global warming or not. Blame it on the Revenge of Kyoto or something! Take that, Harper!) they see not the dangers right now, they think of the problems in the far future...
Sheesh.
You have to get through the present troubles in order to get to the future ones, numb-skulls!!!

But enough about all this - this which has turned into both a preview of our bonafide apocalyptic blog here, Things To Come as also one of the bonafide political blog, Canadian Dreams - wow! All that was missing was some parallels drawn to a certain Pumpkin penned in Cyrillic and we had it all right here!

But we've done enough as it is...!

Next!

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How best to wrap up something so revelatory as this - hmm?

Well, we can ramble on and on about the myriad theories about an hypothetical end of the world to be found in all cultures, throughout all time, in every corner of the globe...

Maybe we should focus on the signs, which can be anything and everything. For there are numerous signs that the end is near, assuredly...

Here's one: on that same ticker, there was something about a Kelly. Not Grace Kelly, not Chris Kelly, not Kelly Clarkson or Kelly Osbourne, no - not any of the previously famous Kellys, not at all. This one is COOL. This one is Kelly Oxford and she's "hit the jackpot" simply because she's in sync with the times which are sorely lacking in laughs and overindulging in voyeurism at the exact same time, quite paradoxically enough... But that's another story.

K.O. (she hit the jackpot in initials too) is deemed to be some sort of "internet pioneer" since she started wasting vast amounts of time on the web as early as 1997. It was a natural progression for her, from her youthful obsession with CB radios, she says. Okay...

GeoCities (argh, not that accursed name again) was her playground - but not her exclusive playground, not at all. At 18, she was quite the party animal and had already tallied up "years of partying" and enjoying a fake ID to go everywhere deemed trendy... So much for the image conjured up by what an internet pioneer should be, eh? But never mind that now: girrrls will be girrrls and all that jazz...

She evolved on the net, as in real life. She matured, got her act together (or cleaned it up, as she says; in Calgary, of all places...) offline just as she went from miserable GeoCities to cooler-than-cool Twitter and Tumblr and, just like that, she garnered a steady following that has grown exponentially ever since! Because the masses love to peep into others' lives: and they love to laugh, too!

And so, a social butterfly of the web suddenly is rewarded for sharing jokes on tweets less than 140 characters-per-shot: rewarded with celebrity fans/followers, a script deal "with a major U.S. network" (CBS) and a book deal too (which will be, like, extended tweets in the form of "narrative essays" about the exact same subject matter) not to mention celebrity, fame and glory all her own. Not only that - on her Twitter page, she defines herself as "designed to make you feel like everything is going well." And then she states that she is our Perestroika! Very telling; very revealing indeed...

This is not a case of "only in America" folks - this is one of the signs!

She is Canadian, anyhow, not American (born an Edmonton wild girl, reformed early enough in rival town Calgary -Flames fans will be happy- where she got married, gave birth three times and became what she is now) so this is definitely not an example of that hackneyed "American Dream" everyone keeps hoping to come into effect in their own lives and change everything for the very best at some point in time...!

There must be something in The Good Book about this sort of thing: when everyone will be so prone to share everything, losing every last shred of that sense of privacy and what would be sacred as opposed to what is not. And this generation of bare-all-souls is passing this on to their offspring already - even if they didn't inculcate, it's in the genes now.

Revealing all - that is what this Facebook society has gotten to. And for some of those exhibitionists of the web, the wittiest ones, it will pay off immensely. There is something awfully odd about that and it can only mean one thing: society, at least as we know it, has reached a breaking point. A point where nothing is private anymore. And that cannot be right, surely...?

Unless the script and book deals make it right, hmm?
It remains odd though that the only thing that will be deemed too indecent to reveal anywhere, through any electronic means whatsoever, will be the pay off here...

Not that she'll be literally rolling in gold, at all, folks - she'll be getting Monopoly (TM) money, like everyone else...

But enough rambling already!