I get the feeling that pet owners just don’t get enough of human stupidity. They crave more. So what better than to own an animal that’s dumber than any human that ever lived.

Personally I feel humans are stupid enough. Don’t get me wrong, we have the capacity to act intelligently, but all too often we have bad judgment or we just decide to be stupid. Granted, that’s a little sad. But I find that human stupidity, my own included, is already filling my need for unintelligent behavior. I don’t need an animal to supply me with a constant source of dumbness.

Pet owners seem to have a different view on this. In fact, they seem altogether thrilled with any kind of accomplishment an animal can aspire to, however simple. Omg I threw the stick and you brought it back to me. And we only rehearsed this 47 times. I mean how long would it take you to train your kid to do this? Try it once and your job is done. And what’s so amazing about fetching thrown objects? Is this some kind of useful skill that society is in desperate need of? Or the whole dog training program. Teach it to sit up, to roll around, to fetch, to behave. Wooow, your dog is soo smart. What kind of low threshold for achievement do you have to be impressed by these things? Parents send their kids to school to be engineers, accountants, lawyers, advertisers, realtors etc. But when the dog claws on the door when you get home it’s omg my dog is sooo clever, it missed me. Of course it did, you *feed* it. Oh my cat it so smart, all it does is sit there all day.

And what’s so great about being around pets anyway? They’re dirty, smelly, noisy, unruly, unpredictable (in spite of those top shelf training videos) and just plain ugly too, much of the time. And not a shred of intelligence. You know a park is a place where you want to take your kids and just let them play, it’s one of the few safe places for them to be if you live in a city, a place with no traffic. A park is a place where you’re supposed to be able to run around, play football with dad, roll around in the grass and do whatever you want to do, with impunity. But then dog owners think it’s a great idea to take the dog for a walk in the park, and suddenly it’s transformed into a minefield. Now you have to watch your every step. Great way to ruin it for everyone. In Holland they even make it explicit, with signs that mark this area is a dog toilet.

I think pet owners actually wish they lived on a farm, but since they don’t they want pets. It’s like a bad compromise, a pet in the city instead of animals on a farm.

Animals are nice as mascots, as characters in children’s shows, as teddy bears, as illustrations in books. Cuddly, cute, compassionate, thoughtful, clean, and loving. We all like good fiction.

If you want a living thing to love, to talk to, to take care of, get a plant. Or take that plunge and get a human. I hear kids are great.

The patient sustained multiple severe stab wounds to the upper chest and abdomen. The consumer didn’t stop until he was able to retrieve the product.

They basically use this packaging for anything they can get away with. In some stores half the products are packaged this way, in what has to be the most consumer hostile packaging known to man. There are three big problems with it:

1. It’s a huge pain to open, unless you have a mechanical lab on hand.
2. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to open without damaging the product.
3. There is no semblance of putting it back together the way it was, you open it you bought it

I would take the cheapest, ugliest brown carton box with the technical specifications printed on the side over this plastic. And it would be cheaper. No pictures either, just open the box and see what it looks like. And if you don’t want the customer to open the box for some reason, just seal it with duck tape. And leave one box open so they can check out the merchandise.

Recall the last time you were impressed by a Yahoo! website, product, or service. Okay, that was fast. Why is it that these guys are so hooked on being mediocre? Not bad, mind you, or evil, just sub standard. So that almost everytime you use one of their services it pains you that there are glaring bugs they could have fixed.

I already reviewed once how they are destroying Yahoo! Mail, which is actually one of their very best services, in favor of a new version of the service that’s much worse. But that’s just the top of the iceberg.

Today I was watching an interesting talk about javascript on Yahoo! Video, and I soon realized that Yahoo!’s flash video player is the worst one I’ve ever seen. When I watch it, the play button gets stuck so I can’t pause and none of the maximize/minimize controls seem to work either. And if you think it’s Adobe’s linux flash plugin that’s buggy, I’m happy to say that I can watch flash movies without a hitch on any number of other sites.

And that made me think back on various times I’ve used Yahoo! services in the past. Many years ago, I was trying pretty hard to promote Juventuz, my football fansite. Back then, the surest way of getting good traffic was to be in Yahoo!’s directory. Their directory was very exclusive and very hard to get into. As one of the leading fansites in my particular category, I think I waited about 2 years for my site to be added. Meanwhile, the category listed a couple of sites that were either almost dead or completely 404. After Juventuz finally got added it didn’t make a big difference anymore, by that time I had built up good traffic through other means.

Of course, the reason Yahoo!’s directory was important was that they were a force in web search, long before the Google revolution. But if you look at their search right now, it’s hard to be impressed by it. It’s only a single input box, there’s no advanced options to filter on language or whatever. Compare that to Google’s advanced search that has lots of options.

So what else does Yahoo! do? Flickr. It wasn’t built by Yahoo!, but they own it now. And it’s a successful site, probably the most popular photo sharing site, and might be Yahoo!’s more successful venture right now. But the navigation is horrible. Once you zoom in on a picture, there’s no way to navigate, you have to go back. And the way albums are presented, it’s awful. The best photo site I think is Zoomr (unfortuantely they are in the middle of a redesign right now), although there seems to be little competition in this space.

Yahoo! is a veteran internet company, and one of the major players. But is there anything they are leading at? Their search is far inferior and always has been to Google. Their messenger service is basically irrelevant. Their map service I think was launced after Google’s, and I don’t know anyone who uses it. Yahoo! Groups is decent and pretty popular, but if you actually need to set up a group it’s quite a pain to use and very limited. And, of course, their video is fairly irrelevant to Youtube. For an internet company, they don’t seem to have much of a talent for internet products.

As a kid, I was used to silent transactions. You would go into a store, pick up some items, proceed to the checkout line, and when it was your turn, the cashier would say “that’ll be 2.50” (kids don’t have a lot of money). You would hand over the money, and if you wanted to be super polite you would say “here you go” as you did that. Transaction end. Silent or near silent.

Then came those holidays in Poland, which introduced a new set of problems. The elders would instruct you that upon entry you are obliged to say “good morning” (you can’t just say “hi“, that’s rude). This goes not only to the person working there, but also all the other customers (if they are around). Then if you wanted to ask about something, you couldn’t just say “do you have?“, you’d have to say “dear miss, does the miss have…?” Then as money is changing hands, the “here you go” is not optional. And finally on exit, you’re obliged to say goodbye to both the cashier and the other customers. The etiquette varies a bit, it doesn’t apply so much in supermarkets (which didn’t really exist at the time), but it applies in every small store, barber shop etc.

I always hated these rules, because they seemed so completely pointless. I get irked by anything that is overly complicated for its purpose. And it’s not that people in Poland are nicer to each other, they just talk more. If you were mad at someone, you would still have to utter those pleasantries, although you would say them in a completely different tone of voice. So it’s just pointless blather that doesn’t add anything to the scene. Instead of saying good morning to actually wish someone a good morning, you’re obliged to say this robotically to every person you interact with. If you’re a really cheery person who wants to wish everyone a good morning, go ahead. But otherwise, why would you have to say that all the time?

I could not bring myself to pronounce those terms myself, out of how plain stupid they sound. I would always try to formulate myself in a way to get around the “dear miss” and “does the miss have“. You can say “excuse me, is…. present?” and that way you avoid addressing the person at all, and it’s still polite enough.

The language of these phrases is just totally out of context. Popular language in Poland is often very vulgar, more so than say Norwegian. If you’re 13-16, you’re not cool unless you use fuck in every sentence. In fact, to be on the safe side, use it several times. Fuck, I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do fuck. (To be technical about it, the word used for fuck actually means whore.) This is the way people actually talk, and it’s not just kids either, when grown men are in the company of their peers they do talk like this. And if you want a truly enriching experience, let your parents send you to summer camp; when kids get away from their parents, you’ll hear little else that fuck, whore, bitch etc. (It’s actually at camp that I felt completely estranged, didn’t feel like I fit in at all with these weirdos.) So, when a group of teenagers is walking down the street and one of them stops to buy a magazine in a booth, he will switch from the fuck language to “does the miss have“. The contrast is frankly shocking. When people need to be formal they are, otherwise they see no reason why they shouldn’t be as vulgar as they possibly can.

To me, these are two worlds I don’t fit into. The formal language is contrived and aristocratic like, and no one talks like that outside formal situations. And the popular language in many circles is completely foreign to me as well. Of course, I’m not foreign to curses, we all use them sometimes. But I don’t mangle them into my sentences like that. So who’s the barbarian here? The person who doesn’t utter polite phrases, who only has one mode of expression, or the person who cycles between formality and vulgarity all the time?

Mind you, there are more oddities that come from strict etiquette. For instance, let’s say you go into a little shop that only has one person working there, and there are already a few people in there. You enter with a group of 3. Now, what are you supposed to do? Does each of the three people have to say good morning? Is it okay if just the first person says it? If the cashier is currently doing business with a customer, how many times does she have to be interrupted by a good morning when a group enters the store? And whom do you address it to, the cashier, the other customers, everyone? You address the room. You generally look to the cashier, and whoever wants to respond is free to do so. Generally the person working in the store is obliged to respond. Of course, when you enter with your parents, who always go in first (and make the greeting) and you don’t say it, they will come down on you. But how stupid is it for 4 or 6 or 9 people to come into a room, each saying good morning? What is this, a conveyor belt?

So maybe you think you’re just gonna try and fit in. You observe people, what they do, and try to copy it. This is not easy. People are not consistent. In spite of these strict rules, people are not [complete] robots, they break rules all the time. And it’s hard to determine what is definitely rude and what is acceptable.

Then, into my adolescence somewhere, a new trend started taking shape in Norway. People would be saying hi to you in stores for no reason, and sometimes say bye when you left. Continental influence probably. I found this odd at first, I hadn’t grown up with it. But it’s not a Napoleonic practice that stems from some kind of high aristocracy as in Poland, it’s a very common kind of thing. The expressions aren’t formal, they are common. It’s the same language you use with your friends daily, so you don’t have to wear that imaginary wig and pretend to be someone you’re not. I got used to the practice and now I don’t mind saying hi. When I say it I mean it, I’m not just saying it for show. If I don’t want to say it, I won’t say it, and no one will give me deathly stares over it. Kindness over politeness. Humans over robots.

Don’t get me wrong, the intentions behind politeness are good. People who shaped these rules I think really wanted us to be friendly to each other. And if you take them in that spirit then I think you’re doing a good thing. But people are not robots, just because you give them rules to follow does not mean they will a) follow them or b) follow them with the given intention. Politeness in Polish culture is such a strong norm that people follow it out of necessity, not kindness. In fact, think about that principle for a minute. Is there any way to enforce kindness? There isn’t. What you can enforce is politeness, a rigid, blind, meaningless code that we feel obliged to adhere to. There is no shortage of good theories that don’t work in practice.

I was on a flight a few months ago and I needed to bring my tennis racket. It’s a bit awkward to take if you only have a backpack, cause there’s no way to pack it. And no way to conceal it, unfortunately. As I’m going through security, this woman stops me. “That’s a strike weapon, you have to check that in.” What now? Oh, my racket? No no, it’s just a racket, it’s not a weapon. It’s for sports. She made me check it in and I was a little panicked cause I wasn’t prepared for this. Well it turns out I was still okay on time, so no big deal.

But the stupidity of it is annoying. A tennis racket is now a weapon? “What about that guy over there, he’s carrying a laptop! Have you seen those youtube videos, you can maul a guy with a laptop!” (No, neither have I, but youtube has everything so I bet you could find people beaten with laptops as well.) I mean a tennis racket, that thing is made to be really light, it would be a terrible weapon. A baseball bat I could understand.

Somehow when I get into these situations with the security people, there’s always someone else who comes out of it unscathed. On the very same flight there was a guy that had a racket on the plane. A badminton racket. Even worse for a weapon, would probably break that thing. But if mine is a strike weapon then his is too. What, you couldn’t hit someone with a badminton racket if you wanted to? They won’t take our laptops, cause that would really piss off the business travelers, but it’s actually a more potent weapon.

Another time I’m going through security at Schiphol, again with just a backpack. I had a pair of scissors in there, not that I even remembered, I had them in my pencil case since junior high. But sure enough the guy pulled me over and stole them. “You can’t take these on the plane.” Right next to me there’s another guy being examined and he’s carrying a first aid kit in his backpack. In there, yes you guessed it, a pair of scissors. The security guy takes them out, looks at them, puts them back in. I think his were actually bigger than mine (and probably sharper on account of a first aid kit having to be in good condition). So apparently I’m a terrorists, because I have scissors, but the guy next to me, pretending to be medical personnel, couldn’t possibly be faking, right?