Thank You Whistlestop

Ready for some good news from the Whistlestop Wheels bus people? They know who I am, they know my power and they will from here on out stop putting all of my boss' rides on standby.

Well actually, it's not quite that dramatic, but it made me feel better. They said that they were grouping his house with another location farther away from where he lives and therefore decided to put his rides on standby. I told them that i was getting all of their conversations on videotape (which I was) and they decided to work on it and get back to us. They did get back and they will no longer give us trouble about that. Thank God, let's hope it stays that way.

And no, the woman I e-mailed the other day hasn't responded. If she does, though, I'll let you know.

"Acute Stickitodemanias"

I believe that was the term coined by Jack Black in "School of Rock." Anyway, the reason for the title is because a woman in the Marin IJ just recently wrote a column about how good Whistlestop Wheels was as a service for transporting the handicapped. Looking back on a long year of trouble with that company, I can definitely say that the system isn't all that perfect, so I decided to write here a little letter and hope that my voice is heard in her upcoming edition. The following is the letter I wrote to her. Get ready, folks. This is gonna be a looooong blog.

Dear Beth Ashley,

My name is “Jaimetud” and I am a frequent rider of Whistlestop Wheels. Every Saturday, I work with a man with cerebral palsy and we use the Whistlestop Wheels system all the time to go places and do stuff. I read your article in the IJ today about how Whistlestop Wheels is a good service for the handicapped and I’m glad to hear that the folks over at Whistlestop are treating you properly. However, I think there are a few things you need to know about Whistlestop.
First off, allow me to explain to you what my situation is. I am a caretaker for a handicapped man in a wheelchair. The severity of his situation is extreme. He goes around in an electric wheelchair because his motor skills are too poor for walking and he has trouble talking to people. I’ve been working for him for over one and a half years now and I still have trouble understanding some of the things that he says. And just this last week, he had a test in Basic Math at College of Marin. I helped him study for it the day before. He’s been studying First Grade math since he was in middle school and he still can’t do basic addition and subtraction problems like 5 minus 2.
We’ve been using the Whistlestop Wheels service for over a year now. When we started, we both realized that they were a good company to be with, but overtime they seem to have grown to be less and less responsible towards his needs. They’ve rescheduled his appointments countless times or even cancelled them altogether with or without our consent. They told us that it was because his house was outside of their usual service route by over 3/4ths of a mile and that according to this, they must put all of his rides on standby, which means that he’s not a priority on their list like everyone else and they have the option of canceling his appointments with them if they so please. Because of this, our usual Saturday appointments have been cancelled and his rides to work on Wednesday have been cancelled. Because of Whistlestop, he has missed work about five weeks in a row now.
Other than that, if they can’t make the rides happen, they’ve rescheduled them to times that are way too inconvenient for us without us knowing. A year ago, we had a trip to go to in the city on a Tuesday during Spring Break. We were going to Stars Agency to apply him for getting a job as a male model for handicaps and they only have open auditions on Tuesdays. Whistlestop decided to come to his house an hour early when I was still at home and was unable to come with him. Knowing that we wouldn’t have another opportunity to do this until summer came due to scheduling conflicts, we instead spent the day taking Golden Gate Transit to Northgate. Another time, we spent the day in San Rafael. I called several days ahead of time to schedule our appointments for the day and I even called up several times in the meantime to make sure that they hadn’t changed it. I even called that morning to make sure. It wasn’t until we had to go home that day that I called them up on my cell phone to find out that they had changed the time for our return ride to an hour earlier than what we had previously scheduled the day before…even though I just called them up that morning to make sure that the schedule we set up was still legit! On top of that, I had to get home so I could get ready for a babysitting job. Fortunately, they were able to get an emergency bus over there to take us home. These are only two of the instances in which such a case has happened to us.
Last week, we decided to pull out the guns. We decided to make sure that his house was really outside 3/4ths of a mile outside the usual service area. The usual service area that they take is around the usual bus routes that Golden Gate Transit takes. There’s a bus stop down the hill from his house that takes one of the usual bus routes. We measured the distance from there to his house and found out that it was only a half a mile away from the bus route. And so we called them up and told them this. They said that they had his location on their computers grouped with another street that’s approximately another mile up the hill from where he lives. They said they’d look into it and get back to us. Two days later, they called back and said that he was indeed within the usual service area, that they had made a mistake and they would stop putting all of his rides on standby and charging him $2.50 instead of $2.00. But the next Saturday, they still put us on standby and charged us $2.50 again. I explained to the bus driver the situation that we had just had and she told us that it usually took a week for such changed to go through.
In short, I know you’ve only been with Whistlestop for a very short time and I think it’s great that their treating you fairly, but I think you’d have a very different opinion with Whistlestop if you’d been with them as long as I have. I’m not saying that you should write an apology in your column for telling people that Whistlestop was a good company, but I would appreciate it if you could shed some other light on the subject by telling them a story that shows the truth behind their company. Do remember, that even though you’re only going to be with Whistlestop for a short period of time, my friend and I have to rely on them and other companies like them permanently for transportation. That is why I feel that our story must be heard.
If you want to tell our story in the Marin IJ, you can. If not, you don’t have to. But if you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me back at Jaimetud@gmail.com or call me on my cell phone at (###) ###-####. Together, we can bring a serious issue to light. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
“Jaimetud”
E-mail: Jaimetud@gmail.com
Cell Phone: (###) ###-####

Ward Churchswill

It doesn’t surprise me that one of the leaders of political radicalism at colleges happens to be a dirty, smell hippy like Ward Churchill. According to MSNBC.com and their Scarborough country video entitled “Radicals on Campus,” Churchill is a college professor who believes that America deserved 9/11.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/

How is it that bungholes like this guy wind up traveling from university to university telling students how bad America is without losing his own job for damaging the reputation of his own college? If I was the Administrator at the college, I’d fire his ass at the first opportunity I got. I understand that this guy has his rights as a citizen, but I also would have my rights to fire him if I didn’t want him to represent my college.

In response to this radicalism, David Horowitz, a man who’s an online news editor, is running a battle against it with his own set of rules called the “Academic Bill of Rights.” Sounds like the guy’s in the right place right? Well, almost. According to this Bill of Rights, “professors must not use their classrooms for political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” In other words, any exercise of free speech period goes out the window. I guess if this guy had his way, there would be no classes on religion, anthropology, history or even political sciences, because from my experience, that’s most of what I got coming from those classes. Basically, this is fighting radicalism with radicalism and I’m not so sure it’s gonna work.

Now don’t get me wrong, if I were a college administrator, I would love to have Liberal teachers at my school. After all, as this video definitely proves, there’s a tremendous left-wing bias in our educational systems and it’s not going away any time soon. The trouble is, the moment some jerk who works for me starts going place to place telling everyone about how much he hates his country, I would consider that too radical for anything and I wouldn’t want that guy representing my college. Enough said.

Bloscar

Yep, I'm watching the Oscars tonight. I believe Chris Rock is hosting tonight's ceremony, which should prove interesting because he's a comedian whose humor often contends as being too laud for television. That, and he's the biggest, blackest thing ever to happen to the Oscars since Whoopi Goldberg. Makes me wonder if he'll have much of a career ten years down the road. Should be a good night though...I hope.

Also, I do this because I simply love the Oscars. I think it would be great, in about ten to twenty years time, to actually be there one day. I wonder if recieving an Oscar could ever match my sweet imagination. What joy it would bring to me just to be there. To get up on that stage. To have a special acceptance speech. To thank my parents for their support like most everyone else does...even though there was a time when they weren't quite sure.

Ah, one can only dream.

Shocking Revelation

Anyone here ever been to JKCinema.com? I have. Plenty of times. I find their “Urban Legends” series to be quite entertaining. As for the rest of the site, it’s got plenty of Anti-Bush humor on it. Some of it’s good for a laugh, some of it’s so nasty it’ll scare a gay man straight.

But seriously, back to the “Urban Legends” bit. This fabulous little series tells of hauntings and spooky stories that date back generations. It also does give me a fine chill every now and then. It makes me wonder though: if the shorts there are so cleverly crafted in these “documentaries,” is it possible that the man who makes them actually believes in ghosts caught on film or any of the other crazy things he talks about? After all, he did call for his viewers to try and make ITC or EVP recordings a while back. The message is still up there if you want to see

http://www.jkcinema.com/

“OK, ghost hunters! I want you to send us your best ITC work for a future urban Legends project. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Urban Legends: Ghosts and Urban Legends: Evidence. Let's scare the world! More information on this project as it progresses.”

Sound like a person who might be a little bit devoid of reality? If you take the time, you’ll also notice that the guy has set up a political blog on the left side. He’s boycotting Wal-mart. Alright with me. Links to Democrat sites. That’s cool. The “Don’t support companies with conservative ideology” part. Treading the line. Then I saw this website on the blog just today, and it almost knocked my socks clean off.

www.michaelmoore.com

Yup yup. This guy is lost. He’s as left as they come, folks. He’s crossed that line on either side of the political spectrum where they’ve gone insane. Ghosts, hatred for conservatism and a Michael Moore advocate. This guy needs an asylum trip really badly.

Two heads aren't better than one

This is pretty damn cool

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050220003409990005

“CAIRO, Egypt (Feb. 20) - Egyptian doctors on Saturday removed an undeveloped head that was linked to the skull of a 10-month-old girl, an official from the health ministry said.

Ahmed Barakat said surgeons at a hospital in the Nile Delta town of Benha, some 25 miles north of Cairo, treated the baby for craniopagus parasiticus, a rare birth defect where a child's skull is linked to the head of an undeveloped twin. The rudimentary head is usually thought to be parasitic.

He said the operation on Saturday lasted about 13 hours and that the girl, Manar, is now in intensive care.

"She is fine and doctors are trying to prevent any complications," he said.
Barakat said a skull reconstruction surgery was also performed. A separate twin sister, Noora, is healthy after initial complications.

Such rare defects occur when an embryo begins to split into identical twins but fails to complete the process, leaving an undeveloped conjoined twin in the womb.

The twin sisters were born on March 30 last year.”

If you want to take a look at the attached babies, copy the above URL and paste it into your browser. 20 bucks says this makes it into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

Who Can I Sue?

It never fails. You make a movie that’s worth tons of money and someone else wants to cash in

http://forum.bcdb.com/gforum.cgi?post=39943

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Scuba-diving dentist Dennis G. Sternberg has filed a lawsuit against Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, charging that they stole his idea for the 2003 animated blockbuster Finding Nemo. Sternberg, 56, of Allenhurst, New Jersey filed the suit this week in U.S. District Court in Newark. He claimed that he used his experiences as a certified diver to create "Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish," an underwater adventure story for children, in 1991. The amphibious dentist stated that he sent an illustrated manuscript to Disney and talked on the phone at great length with a writer from Pixar about his story. Pixar has a distribution partnership with the Mouse House. Sternberg was told by a Disney vice-president in 1996 that the story had "great potential," but that it didn't fit into the studio's "development slate" at the time, the suit said. He smelled something fishy seven years later when he was in a movie house and saw a preview for an upcoming attraction: Finding Nemo. "I thought, 'Hey, I'm the scuba-diving dentist. Those are my characters, that's my story.' It made me sick to my stomach,'' he told The Star-Ledger for Wednesday's editions. Reached by the newspaper Tuesday, neither Disney nor Pixar would comment.
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OK, so let’s pretend like this story is legitimate. If it’s true, this Sternberg fella will have to face off against Disney and Pixar at a time when Disney ain’t lookin’ so good. And for the record, I watched the trailers for “Finding Nemo” a million times when they came out. Not once did they mention anything about Nemo being kidnapped by a dentist, specifically.

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Finding Nemo recounts how young clownfish Nemo is caught by a scuba diver and arrives in a fish tank in a dentist's office. After Nemo's father searches the ocean for him, Nemo escapes from the dentist's tank and, in time, is reunited with his father. The New Jersey dentist's story even had a character named "Nimo." Sternberg's suit alleges a violation of federal copyright laws, as well as fraud and misrepresentation, breach of contract, unjust enrichment and breach of the duty of good faith and fair dealing. The companies "have intentionally, knowingly, illicitly and slavishly copied plaintiff's protected works in whole or in substantial part," the suit contends.
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Sternberg is also going to have to prove that Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of “Finding Nemo” who goes to my church, didn’t come up with the story himself. From the story that I got, Stanton pitched the story to Pixar years later, after a story like this would most likely be forgotten. Andrew’s story was that he was Marlin, the over-concerned father, and his son Ben was Nemo, the boy fish who looks like he’s going to get in trouble. Stanton thought this story up one day when he was walking with his son and he noticed that he was getting worried every time Ben looked like he was going to walk into the least bit of trouble. Then he thought it would make a great story and fleshed it out into a plot with imaginary characters…years after 1996.

Now I’m not saying that Sternberg doesn’t have a case. I am saying though that Stanton is not the kind of person who would, to my knowledge, rip someone else’s story off. Indeed, there are similarities, but there’s not enough for me to say that it’s a rip-off. I saw the comparison between “The Lion King” and “Kimba, the White Lion.” That’s an obvious rip-off right there. This looks like just a case of a lot of the same story elements that many stories have.

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The lawsuit also asks the court to void a two-page waiver that Disney compelled Sternberg to sign before submitting his manuscript. The waiver said that he would be entitled to just $500 if he claimed that Disney used his material without permission or authorization. "Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish" tells of "two worlds coming together -- above and below the sea, with unusual sea creatures such as hatchet fish, creatures with large eyes, and other exaggerated features, undersea turtles and their travels on the undersea Gulf Stream currents," the lawsuit says. For a long time, the lawsuit states, Sternberg was personally acquainted with a woman who was an executive secretary at ABC Capitol Cities, a Disney company. The suit adds that he sent a copy of his manuscript to the secretary, who encouraged him to send Disney another copy. That second copy, the suit alleges, reached Barry Blumberg, an executive vice-president of TV animation at Disney. Stern says that Blumberg called him at his home in November 1996 to discuss the story. During that phone call, Blumberg told him, "We all love 'Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish' and the entire concept," the lawsuit said. Blumberg's office, the suit said, connected Sternberg in touch with Pixar employee Andrew Stanton. Sternberg told Stanton that he envisioned "Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish" surfacing during the story and finding his way by using the Statue of Liberty.
The title character of Finding Nemo, by comparison, surfaces and gets his bearings upon seeing the Sydney Opera House.
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This is where things get real interesting. However, did Sternberg come up with that kind of plot point himself for an animated movie? Does the quote “past the rock that looks like a longneck” sound familiar to anyone?

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That's just one way, according to the lawsuit, in which "Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish" is "substantially similar to the expression, premise and storyline of Finding Nemo."
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And I’m sure Sternberg forgot to mention that the rest of the similarities were various other movie clichés.

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Stanton was the director and story writer of Finding Nemo, as well as one of the film's three screenwriters who were nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay. "The thing that makes this so different from other similar situations is the amount of contact between Dr. Sternberg and the studios,'' said William T. Hill, Sternberg's lawyer. "There was a vice-president from Disney on the phone with this guy. Vice-presidents from Disney don't contact just any old Joe Schmoe off the street.''

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You know, I wish Andrew would show up at church more often. He’d probably be able to rip this one to shreds if I passed it to him. On the other hand, it’s crap like that that make people like Andrew not want to go out in public.

Deep Sore Throat

What happens when a sore throat sneaks up on you while you're napping? You go on a date afterward with it and stay up the whole night with it. That's what happened to me. Actually, the date went quite well. I hope though that I didn't get her sick or anything. And yeah, funny enough I napped today as well. got more rest this time, but this is the second day in a row I've taken a nap and my boss has called me up. Haha funny, that is. Yesterday, I think I came across as being rather grouchy, but I explained that to him today. He thought for some reason that I just didn't like him anymore. Not true.

Man, I hate being sick.

2 Asses in the Hole

OK, I’ve been screwed over twice in a row today and I’m really pissed right now so I gotta tell anyone out there who’s willing to read this all about it. But to help the mood a little bit, I’ll start off this post with a little joke

What is the similarity between virginity and trash?
Dumb kids like to throw them both out the window.

Funny isn’t it? I made it up myself. Pretty friggin’ hysterical, considering that while it may be funny to you, it’s a pain in the ass for me. As a biker, I frequently encounter trash in the road that people throw out their car windows. Today, I encountered a a paperback book on how to draw hot manga girls. Not only was it ripped up, but the pages were thrown out the window at constant intervals of time so that a set of beautiful plants along the road were littered with somewhat trampy looking cartoon pictures. I just picked up the cover and left the rest because I didn’t have time to pick it all up.

What’s the use of having a county that’s mostly populated by peace-lovers and folks who want money to be put towards all the important things like city care if they can’t even keep the town clean? And why are we spending so damn much on teaching our kids why not to litter if it doesn’t work? I’m sure it does, but it could definitely work better than this. Do keep in mind that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. More and more trash is showing up everywhere every day. It’s disgusting.

And now on to the reason for being in such a hurry home. I had a few phone calls to make. I had to schedule an appointment with Whistlestop Wheels to take me and my boss to MacCentral in San Rafael this Saturday. Turns out we already had something planned for this week. This week, my boss was scheduled to go to the mall on Wednesday and then to his own work on Saturday. Sounds nice except for the fact that WE HAD THAT SCHEDULE FOR LAST WEEK…BACKWARDS! Last week, it was work on Wednesday and the mall on Saturday.

What’s wrong with this picture? Whistlestop Wheels is a bus service made to take the handicapped citizens of Marin County wherever they want to go whenever they want. The problem is that the place is run by a bunch of obvious incompetents who have screwed up our schedules dozens of times. They have changed our schedules without letting us know, cancelled our trips altogether without our consent, all of which they’ve done dozens of times…and now they’ve stooped to an all new low! This time they’ve given us our schedule from last week backwards this week and we didn’t even have to call them up! To top it off, they’re doing this shit more and more often. Now it happens every other time we schedule something with them.

Is this the way to treat the handicapped? Should a system that is created to treat the handicapped like human beings do the exact opposite? No. No way in hell. I hope we can afford to take legal action against them because this is downright irresponsible.

Theory of Modern Darwinism

Since I haven’t gotten incredibly philosophical in a long time and I’m overdue for a Plato moment at any time now, I think I’ll settle on this one. I’ve always been enthused with the concept of social Darwinism. Sure, it’s a dead dog of an ideology to follow, but there are certain truths in every ideology that’s based in reality. It started as an answer to why things were, reached it’s climax when everyone became so incredibly racist that they almost killed each other off and now exists as a shadow of it’s former influence as “The Darwin Awards,” a website that gives “awards” to people who died from doing something incredibly stupid.

In recent times, a certain factor in actual Darwinism, aka the kind of Darwinism that Darwin himself approved of, has come under fire. That factor is that the weak die out. The reason why this has come under fire is because with progress made in medical sciences, we manage to extent the lives of the elderly and help people with otherwise fatal conditions so that they don’t die out. And somehow, people think that because of this, we are proving Darwin wrong, despite the fact that not everyone who needs this treatment gets it and in every country in the world, people are dying due to this along with the animals. Case in point, when you can cure all the dying people in the world from their fatal natural conditions, then Darwin will be wrong, but until then, it’s Darwin: 1, Others: 0.

And now for something completely related.

I was forced to ponder the idea of Social Darwinism when I read about the case of Leroy Wells on Right-thinking.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Leroy Wells is one of those guys who auditioned for “American Idol” and it was just so gawd awful that it made everyone who watched the show topple over with laughter at how they actually thought they had any skill period. I never watch “American Idol,” I just watch all the rejects whose auditions eventually wind up on the Internet. Among this crowd of talentless hacks are William Hung, “Kieth Da Virgin” and the guy who works in the chicken factory who came on singing “Barbie Girl.” No wait, that last one was on “The X Factor.” Never mind.

Anyways, Leroy Wells came on to sing some stupid R&B song that was probably the only set of words that anyone understood coming out of his mouth. When he talked, it was hard to understand anything he said. He couldn’t immediately find the stage, he had to be directed to it. Lastly, he didn’t really sing very well (you probably saw that coming) and he tried to make up for it by bobbing his head and stomping around the stage like a Neanderthal.

If you want to watch his audition, click this link:
http://www.leroy-wells.com/

What did all this get him? Nothing. But if his words could be properly understood, he said that he was planning to have such an awesome “krunk” performance so that he could get all the judges krunked that they’d put his performance on TV and make him famous. For y’all who ain’t up wit’ today’s slang, krunk is defined on urbandict.com as being a song or dance that will get you pumped or a new swear word. This performance was neither and caused Simon Cowell to spit out a few new quips about his performance. Hmm, a terrible singer who was chewed out by Simon and went on to become famous for having no skill and actually getting paid for it. That sounds familiar. Oh yeah, that’s the Story of William Hung, the singer who redid Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs,” got a record contract and is currently making the tsunami victims even more miserable with a duet with Jackie Chan. Or at least that’s what I heard.

Undoubtedly, Leroy Wells thought that he could repeat this success by doing the same kind of crap, only worse. Well sadly, he was wrong. And as I found out, it’s not the first time he’s made a grave error in judgment. The night that his performance was aired on TV, he was in jail for failing to appear in court. Apparently, he had been arrested earlier on that month for shooting somebody’s car with a handgun. Apparently, he didn’t like the way the cars were arranged and decided to shoot some guy’s car, thus penetrating car door and wounding someone in the hip. Now he’s in jail. Good.

How does this relate to social Darwinism, you ask? Social Darwinism attempts to explain why people are where they are in this world. Simply put, they are where they are because they belong there. Leroy Wells is a stupid crook who not only killed audiences with a terrible performance, but shot someone’s car AND their hip and wound up in jail for it. He has been put in his place simply because he put himself there. In conclusion, I guess there’s even some truth in the old ways of thinking as well. We live in a society where people are put where they belong by themselves most of the time. Despite the exceptions to the rule, this is the modern world of Social Darwinism. Welcome to my world, baby. Can you dig it?