That which confuses me.

It used to be child abuse, but now we are in a full-on social media Mass Hysteria over sexual harassment. Just look what happened to Matt Damon when he commented on this issue.....

That being said, and realizing as a man I am stepping into a minefield here, I want to address the issue of "Why Now?"

Why Now? Why is this an exploding issue now?

It was over 15 years ago that I had my first company training on sexual harassment. It was mandatory and we were told it was company-wide and everyone had to participate. It went on your training records and if you put it off, your supervisor would see you hadn't done it and not complete your annual evaluation until you had.

Yes, it was that mandatory. AND additional training happened over the succeeding years as laws changed. AND that training was just as mandatory and unavoidable. The Corporate America I worked for comprehensively addressed sexual harassment as early as the year 2000.

And in that training we all learned about "Hostile Workplace" sexual harassment, which is basically "if someone feels uncomfortable, then that is harassment."

We learned that hostile workplace harassment is in the eye of the beholder. You as the guy ( and it usually is a guy ), have no recourse if someone goes to HR about you. So we were told "Don't even have a picture of your wife or girlfriend on your desk, just to be on the safe side. Especially not that cute one you took on vacation."

So my company over 15 years ago, knew this was an area ripe for accusations and they trained us all to not do ANYTHING at ANY TIME in ANY WAY that might be construed by ANYONE as contributing to a hostile workplace.

I guess HR wanted a quiet life.

So the point I am coming to is "Why Now?" And I am forced to draw one conclusion, And it is this....

Ordinary working stiffs have had sexual harassment training forever, and we knew that there could be serious repercussions over many perceived sleights by the harassed. So we took our training and we did what our companies asked. And we avoided, avoided, avoided anything that could make us open to accusations.

But what about all these people who are now so publicly accused? Why did they continue? Surely they all worked for someones company at some time? Gosh, even as contractors they got the training somewhere? Even running their own companies, the lawyers must have told them about the law and the consequences of accusations....

Why didn't they stop until 2017 when allegations became avalanches?

Could it be that it was because they were Big Shots and they thought the law did not apply to them?

"Don't you know who I am?" to the power of a google? The bullying "I can ruin you in this town" mentality?

I think it was that. They all deserve everything that's coming to them.

Grifters on the Instagram.

In the last few weeks I have been contacted by two people through social media who wanted me to be their "friend" based on my Instagram posts.

One came at me via Facebook Messenger and claimed to be the Page 3 Girl Lucy Pinder, but from her broken English, I know it really wasn't her.

In both cases I got lines about "Needing a normal friend" and "You seem a genuine person". You know, generalized sucking up.

Lucy kind of backed away after I didn't respond enthusiastically enough to her. But I have reached out to see if she still thinks I'm hooked.

Annabelle contacted me two days ago via Instagram. She quickly sent me her phone number ( 612 470-xxxx ) and we texted away; me telling her how lovely she was and her massaging my ego saying stuff like "You have a genuine heart" and nonsense like that.

Then of course, out came the "I am flat broke, my phone service is about to be cut off" ( so we would not be able to continue to text ) and "I need a $75 i-Phone gift card and no-one else will help me."

She was good, but I'm a 60 year old man and I know that a 34 year old woman is not randomly reaching out for friends on social media.

So then "Poof!", I blocked her phone number, deleted her texts and blocked her on Instagram.

On IG she trolls by the name of "sassyannabelle". So, Buyer Beware. Especially Olde Buyers.

Fuck Microsoft

Microsoft: YOUR DELISTING SERVICE IS BROKEN! Fix This!

Access denied, banned sending IP [AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD]. To request removal from this list please visit https://sender.office.com/ and follow the directions. For more information please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=......

You are breaking Customers' E-faxing!

When I delist, the IP is not being removed. This has been happening ALL DAY. 7/24/17

I used to have to Delist once a month when I sent out invoices, now you've fucked up my IP permanently.

You need to fix this. And you need to fix it YESTERDAY.

Southern Baptist Convention: As Unchristian as they wanna be.

Yesterday, the Southern Baptist Convention hurriedly passed a resolution condemning white supremacy and the alt-right after a major backlash against the organization occurred when their leadership scuttled an initial and more strongly worded resolution against those ideologies.

At a news conference, Barrett Duke, a Southern Baptist leader who had led a committee that decided which resolutions should be considered for a vote, said the resolution as originally written contained inflammatory and broad language “potentially implicating” conservatives who do not support the “alt-right” movement.

Well Barrett, that's the point isn't it? Conservatives are not really Christians. To paraphrase George Carlin, they are just a group of people who meet up on Sundays to compare clothes and cars.

If a resolution so palpably right actually implicates your members, then surely you look at them with questions, not at the language of the statement that exposed them?

Hands up all those who were surprised by the SBC's initial stance.

My hand is down.

Dateline 05/17/17

Someone needs to tell Rush Limbaugh three things:-

1. Obama is no longer President.

2. Obama publicly commenting on an investigation which he thought to have no merit is way less serious than Trump trying to influence an ongoing investigation privately.

3. "Let it go" doesn't mean "investigate but don't prosecute", it means DROP THE INVESTIGATION. Plus, the fact that the investigation continues is a reflection of Comey's integrity and not of President Trump saying that the investigation should continue.

If we want to compare Obama's actions to Trump's, anyone with half a brain will see that what Trump is doing is far far worse.

Word

If someone says to you "Your voice is like smooth jazz", after your initial double take, it is perfectly acceptable to punch them in the nose and say "And your schnoz sounds like Nico McBrain's high hat".

Monica Crowley's book has been pulled

Monica Crowley, what went on in your head?
Oh, Ms. M.Crowley, did you talk to the dead?
Your life style to me seemed so tragic
With the thrill of it all
You fooled all the people with magic
Yeah, you waited on Murdoch's call

So Ms. M.Charming, did you think you were pure?
Shining PhD, in nocturnal rapport
Uncovering things that were sacred
Manifest on this Earth
Conceived in the eye of a secret
And they scattered the afterbirth

Ms. M.Crowley, won't you ride my white horse?
Ms. M.Crowley, it's symbolic, of course
Approaching a time that is classic
I hear that Fox Babes call
Approaching a time that is drastic
Standing with their backs to the wall

Was it polemically sent
l want to know what you meant
I want to know, I want to know what you meant, yeah

---||---
No really. What did you think you were doing?

Movies I saw in 2016 - it's a short list

The Forest

The Boy

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The Witch

Secrets In Their Eyes

Eye In The Sky

Green Room

Love and Friendship

Money Monster

The Nice Guys

The Lobster

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Tale of Tales ( Streamed )

The Purge: Election Year

Everly ( Streamed )

Our Kind of Traitor

Fight Club ( Special Movie Theater Screening )

Lights Out

Absolutely Fabulous

Captain Fantastic

The Infiltrator

Star Trek: Beyond

The Disappointments Room

Sausage Party

Don’t Breathe

Morgan

The Girl On The Train

Denial

The Handmaiden

Arrival

Nocturnal Animals

La La Land

Miss Sloane

2017 Movies to Avoid

Jeez, this looks longer than last year's list...

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

XXX: The Return of Xander Cage

Underworld: Blood Wars
National Treasure 3

Splinter Cell

The Beguiled

Clerks III

Death Race 4

Fifty Shades Darker

Rings

John Wick: Chapter 2

T2 Trainspotting

The Lego Batman Movie

The Great Wall

The Legend of Conan

Power Rangers

Kong: Skull Island

Logan

The Shack

Smurfs: The Lost Village

Fast and Furious 8

Baywatch

Pirate of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Annabelle 2

Terminator Genisys 2

Barbie

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul

Wonder Woman

Transformers: The Last Knight

The Mummy

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Despicable Me 3

World War Z 2

Cars 3

Spider-Man: Homecoming

War for the Planet of the Apes

Independence Day 3

The Fantastic Four 2

Alien: Covenant

Flatliners

ChiPs

The Equalizer 2

The Lego Ninjago Movie

Zorro Reborn

Blade Runner 2049

Friday the 13th

My Little Pony: The Movie

Justice League

Thor: Ragnarok

Murder on the Orient Express

Star Wars Episode VIII

Jumanji

Pitch Perfect 3

Death Wish

Chucky 7

---||---

Maybe I can do the Blade Runner.  But probably not. Nice to see Jumanji as a holdover from 2016's list though.

One of The Best Jokes Ever

A shortsighted man accidentally walks into the pet shop next door to an electrical appliance store where he was intending to make a purchase. On seeing a young man who seemingly worked there he asked:

"Excuse me young man, but do you have an infrared griller?"

To which the young man ( who was very keen to make a sale ) replied:

"No, I'm afraid not Sir, but we do have this lovely ultraviolet chimpanzee."

New FitBit daily record for me

My fitbit #Fitstats_en_US for 7/31/2016: 51,107 steps and 21.8 miles traveled. https://t.co/SwtavsFTcO

— The Chalcenteric Kid (@AlaninSoFlo) August 1, 2016

Enough Said

No words necessary

Social Media Day

Being Positive

#PoemYourLife - The Sequels

Doggerel and rhyme
Do I have time
To parse all I've been told
For that nugget of gold
That calls out my foes
As gardeners with hoes?

---||---

Brit-born, forlorn on an island of scorn.
America-bound, with a life to be found
In sunshine and friends
Where Florida ends.

---||---

Reserved & distorted
Like a life that's contorted
By politeness and fears
That melt over years
Living and growing
Then knowing.

#PoemYourLife

Fly over the sea
For all you could be
Believe in yourself
A collector of Delft
Snakes in the yard
And a bowl of Swiss Chard.

My take on Bathroom Bills

I agree with Governor McCrory, it isn't a problem, it has never been a problem. Not in North Carolina, not anywhere.

Leave transgender people alone. Bigotry from the government should not be yet another affront they have to bear..

Prosecute people guilty of committing actual crimes in bathrooms. They won't be trans folks I guarantee you that.

Jim Garlow: Utter Buffoon.

"How many nations in the World have this many people of their highest level of leadership call on god the way we just heard?"
 

Well Jim, Iran for sure. Saudi Arabia too. Probably Syria.
 

You fucking moron.

And a "Clap Offering"? You've got to be kidding me.
 

https://youtu.be/lH0IMx4InIw

My thoughts on how not to run Yahoo!

So, the game is to get eyeballs on advertising. That is your #1 objective if you are Yahoo! And how do you do that?

By giving your users a great experience which encourages tham to come back to your site. Sounds simple right?

So what do you do to make that user experience seemingly as shitty as possible?

1. You fuck up your "redesigned" email. Possibly the biggest draw of users to your site. You make it slow, java-heavy and some days, unuseable.

2. You screw up your news feed, making it hugely irritating to try to find the stuff you want and you embed political content like Faux News that cannot be filtered out. And you make every fourth item some sort of "Sponsored" advertising. This raises all users' hackles.

3. You mess up your mobile email app so badly that people uninstall it and swear to never download it ever again.

4. You completely fuck up the user comments sections on news stories making it now impossible to follow reactions and replies to a user's comments, even though you tell them "You have 2 replies and 3 thumbs up" to those comments.

5. You take away a user's ability to create a simple profile for themselves with a pic and a short bio. This one you messed up years and years ago and with your utter contempt for your users, you have never ever addressed fixing it.

Microsoft blocks emails from QuickBooks

A friend's company has set up an email server and is using it to send monthly email invoices to his customers via QuickBooks.

This has been working for about a year and now Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to block some emails due to "spam-like activity".

The server is clean and not on any spam lists. It is used 100% to send invoices to customers.

Microsoft have taken, on their own "initiative", to decide that emails generated from one of the most common accounting packages used in business today are spam.

This is simply not acceptable.

And when you try to delist yourself a second time from the MS blacklist ( after you thought you had successfully done so the first time they fucked up) you get this response:

We see that the IP address in question has been submitted for delisting within the last 90 days. 

In order to process this new request please provide us with the following information:

1.       What caused the spam-like activity from the IP address?

2.       What steps have been taken to prevent the spam-like activity from occurring again?

Please respond to this email with your answers and any questions or concerns you may have.

---||---

Of course, they do not tell you what "spam-like activity" is in their myopic eyes.

I'm sure QuickBooks are not happy that is assholery is happening.

The Differences are what will make the Difference

Today on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, the political "experts" in the studio said that the three principle Democrats vying for their party's nomination essentially all agreed on the major issues of US politics.

Well, that's debatable of course, but if it is true, then the differences that the candidates do exhibit are what we must use to choose between them.

So Hillary voted for the Iraq War. Bernie Sanders did not. And of course neither did Governor O'Malley.

Hillary was Secretary of State, and a poor one. That cannot be laid at Senator Sanders' or Governor O'Malley's doors.

Hillary and Bernie can definitely be tagged with the the label "Washington insiders". I don't think that can be put on Governor O'Malley.

Bernie Sanders is proud to call himself a Socialist. As an ex-Brit who lived under the Socialism of the British Labour Party, this will forever disqualify him from getting my vote. I did not become a US citizen to have Socialism follow me to the United States.

I am a liberal. But I believe is American Exceptionalism, I believe this is a country where the success of its citizens is lauded and still possible.

I do not wish to live in the Nanny States of America.

This is why I so fervently hope Governor O'Malley stays in the race. He is the only Democrat I will vote for.

If Hillary goes get the nomination, I will write in my choice for President.

#NoBushes #NoClintons #NoSenators #NoBuffoons