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The world is going to hell.

Friday, March 7th, 2008 @ 1:40 pm | Uncategorized

More accommodations for ineptitude:

According to a recent report, human beings are becoming so incredibly stupid that they require cushioned lamppost bases so that when they run into them they don’t mess up their idiotic faces. Apparently, a study in the UK found that one in ten people actually managed to hurt themselves by walking into a post while peering down at their mobile phone screen.

Call me old fashioned, but how about letting them run into the posts until they friggin’ learn to look up?

-jb

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11 Responses to “The world is going to hell.”

  1. scott Says:
    March 8th, 2008 at 4:50 am

    A solution that advocates personal responsibility, Sweet.

  2. jeromy Says:
    March 8th, 2008 at 11:40 am

    Well, I didn’t act like a rightwinger and suggest the lampposts have spikes with electric current attached to them…

  3. Dana Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 6:32 am

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    Call me old fashioned, but how about letting them run into the posts until they friggin’ learn to look up?

    Congratulations, Mr Brown: you are on your way to becoming a conservative! :)

    Of course, our good friend Jesurgislac is from across the pond; perhaps she’ll weigh in with a story about how necessary it is, for public safety are reduced health care costs, to cushion those poles!

  4. Jesurgislac Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 7:13 am

    Heh.

    Being an advocate of personal responsibility – unlike Dana! :-D – I did the personally responsible thing.

    I checked out the website of the charity Living Streets (you can too: it’s http://www.livingstreets.org.uk) to find out if this story was actually true, rather than irresponsibly – and gullibly – just assuming that because I “read it on the Internet” it must be true. And yep: no reference to this anywhere on the Living Streets website.

    I see the website links to an ITN video on YouTube, which looks to me very like the kind of short clip British news often put at the end of a news broadcast for light relief: it’s labelled “Comedy”. On Google News, “padded lampposts” gets six hits, not one of them a local London news source.

    Call me old fashioned, but how about a little less gullibility and a little more research? If I could find out this is a joke, not a real Living Streets project, in something under ten minutes of easy research requiring no significant google-fu: so can you!

  5. Jesurgislac Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 7:13 am

    Damn, I’m glad I saved that: my comment went to the spam queue.

  6. “It must be true! I read it on the Internet!” « Jesurgislac’s Journal Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 7:19 am

    [...] on Iowa Liberal, the original Iowa Liberal wrote, in a post entitled The World Is Going To Hell: “Call me old fashioned, but how about letting them run into the posts until they friggin’ [...]

  7. Dana Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Well, how ’bout that! Our good friend Jesurgislac has moved awat from his “GreatestJournal” site, which was hard to read and annoying on which to comment, for a new wordpress.com site.

  8. jeromy Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    Jes claims this is a hoax, but it’s a little more complicated than that:

    http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/content/towerhamlets/advertiser/news/story.aspx?brand=ELAOnline&category=news&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newsela&itemid=WeED05%20Mar%202008%2017%3A10%3A46%3A543

    BTW, Dana, I could have set my watch by when you’d come waltzing in talking about how this makes me a rightwinger now. You guys love sitting in your bubbles telling each other how you’re conservative because you put the lid back on the peanut butter.

    Seriously, I listened to a rightwinger talk show the other morning, and it was shit like, “I got caught cheating in the 4th grade, realized it was wrong, and that’s when I became a conservative!” Oh, really? So that’s why liberals have all those fancy PhDs, because they cheat on their tests! Maybe if rightwingers were smarter they wouldn’t be tempted to cheat? And why is it so hard to get one to debate honestly, fess up to mistakes, use facts that approximate reality, etc.? Catch a rightwinger lying and they just slink away. I guess I’m a conservative!

    I admit, this isn’t as silly as golden oldie Brian Pickrell classics like, “Conservatives wear suits and liberals wear Birkenstocks!”

  9. Dana Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    Nahhh, I just said that you were on your way to becoming a conservative; we’ll give you a membership card when you start to vote sensibly, for Republicans. :)

  10. Thomas Tallis Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    but Dana the Republican party hasn’t been conservative for over a decade

  11. Jesurgislac Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Jes claims this is a hoax, but it’s a little more complicated than that:

    Thanks for the followup. It’s certainly not a news story.