Online Advertising.

This, unfortunately, is one post I cannot claim originality for. My dear friend Tyler Childs was the creative mind behind it. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently sociopathic for me to pass it on without feeling like a blog spammer.

Unless you browse with Lynx, you've dealt with banner ads and other sundry annoyances while trying to figure out what exactly is funny about failblog knockoffs. While some of these ads are legitimate and serve a real purpose, everyone knows that most of them are just pathetic excuses for spam. Next time you're on your favorite website and have about 10 minutes to spare, here is what to do*: click on any of that ads that promise you something ridiculously good in exchange for virtually nothing. This is how you know it's a scam. My personal favorites are the ones that involve filling out surveys, and you will see why momentarily.

In a new window, open up whois.net, or just do a Google search for whois. These websites are dedicated to telling you who runs a website. Put in the domain name for the website that the ad brought you to, which is everything between the www. and the .com, or .net, or what have you. This should get you a page with contact information for the company who owns the website. Now, here's the fun part. When you start the survey, fill out the form with the company's own information. Then have fun signing them up for special offers. If you get bored, you can stop without completing the survey, since the website saves all your information beginning at step 1. Personally, I just keep going until I've filled out all the free offers and all that's left are the ones that involve credit card.

Voila! You've just created a situation where everyone wins! Your favorite website gets advertising revenue, the spammers get to receive lots of spam (I can only assume they like getting it as much as they like sending it), and you've managed to entertain yourself for 10 minutes while procrastinating about something worthwhile.

*Disclaimer: don't actually do anything described in this post.**

**Disclaimer disclaimer: My disclaimer is obviously just so I don't get sued. Clearly I wouldn't be telling you what to do if I didn't think it was worthwhile.***

***Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: The above statement is possibly a lie, since it possibly voids my disclaimer.

Mission to Mars.

Ok, so I've seen a couple trailers for this movie, and it seemed intriguing enough. Hey, it even managed to collect about 4 stars on Netflix, so it can't be too horrible, right? Wrong. To use the old monkey with a typewriter analogy here would be insulting, both to the monkey and the typewriter.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I have a very bad case of flu, with a high fever and nausea. Just before the fever hits 104 degrees, I decide to watch Apollo 13 and War of the Worlds. In my feverish state, I decide that mixing these movies together would be an incredibly cool idea, so I get out my laptop and start writing. Also due to fever, I mistake moviecliches.com for reallygoodmovieideas.com, and find a whole bunch of interesting stereotyped foreign accents, relationship jokes, wittily heroic phrases from other movies, and of course copious amounts of hero music.

After typing up my script and printing it out, my fever goes up to 107 degrees. Now completely delirious, I imagine my script to be a pan of lasagna and consume the entire thing. Nausea results in me vomiting the entire back up about 15 minutes later. My fever goes down to 102 degrees just long enough to send this script to a desperate movie studio, and the rest is history. That, in a nutshell, is most likely how Mission to Mars was invented.

Seriously, words cannot describe how bad this movie was. In the predictable scene where the sacrificial hero dies, I actually got angry because the scene was extending the amount of time I had to be in front of the TV. Also, I learned that Martians apparently look like motherly goldfish, and that it is possible for grown men to make CGI animations that are worse than a drawing by Michael J. Fox. Moreover, if you happen to be on Mars and step inside any one of their giant hidden face statues, it will feel exactly like the Museum of Science in Boston.

I will not actually give away any more of the plot, because just reading it would cause you to feel like your intelligence was being molested. Suffice to say that I never hope to hear any real person say any variation of the phrase, "I was born to be a Martian."

Unfortunately Memorable Websites, vol. 1

During the course of my internet wanderings with StumbleUpon today -- and goodness knows we've all been there -- I happened to come across this website. Perhaps, dear reader, you can tell me what it's for. After staring at the screen for a good 30 minutes, I have come to the conclusion that somewhere out there is a web designer laughing his cheeks off at me.

Notevendoommusic.com is actually the opposite of what the title suggests. As the throbbing techno beats pounded into my skull, and images of cute cat heads danced across the psychedelic background, I knew that I was experiencing doom in its most concentrated form. I was staggered by the sheer amount of doom they were able to fit into 971 bytes of HTML.

This is truly the stuff nightmares are made of.

Octuplets? What planet are you from?

This post is a break from normal, generalized rants, to specifically focus wrath upon one individual. This is an extremely rare occasion, and so Nadya Suleman should feel highly honored. Who is Nadya, you ask? She's the one who had octuplets last week in California. Oh, and did I mention that she already has 6 kids? And that she's a single mom? Yeah... the story doesn't get any better, either.

I'm pretty sure there should be a law that if you want to have 8 kids at the same time, they should do a sanity check before just stuffing you full of fertilized eggs. This reminds me of that immortal episode of The Office, in which Michael informs the world that "I want to have 100 kids so I can make them be my friends." If this woman is so desperate for companionship, she should try cats or gerbils or Furbies or World of Warcraft. At least in WoW, your self esteem doesn't depend on collecting babies.

One of the news headlines about this story probably deserves the Irony Award of 2009, even though it's only February. "Nadya Suleman denies being selfish, says she holds each baby 45 minutes." What an unselfish woman. If she'd only been able to give her kids 35 or 40 minutes of time each day, I'd say she was being completely self-centered. But 45 minutes is acceptable. Though most people can't remember their days as infants, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that their parents paid attention to them for slightly more than 45 minutes each day.

Here is the part that makes me want to start punching fertility doctors in the face (not Nadya, I wouldn't want to deprive her kids of that precious 45 minutes.) The medical cost of just giving birth to these 8 kids will be anywhere from $1.5 to 3 million. Guess who's paying for that? Not the mom, certainly. She has freaking 14 kids to raise. No, that cost will come directly from our pockets, fellow taxpayers. Local aid, state aid, federal aid... at some point, everyone in America will have to pay for the fact that this woman is selfish and needy. No wonder she's having babies, because it's really no surprise she doesn't have friends or a husband.

As one psychiatrist said, "When you don't have connections in childhood, you go see a therapist. You don't have 14 babies."

I bet this woman will end up having more kids when the current ones get old enough to hate her.