Posts Tagged ‘utah’

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More Utah Mixed Nuts

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Looks like Dell “SuperDell” Schanze isn’t the only loose religious nutcase in Utah.  Paul Drockton also appears to have fallen off the deep end of righteous insanity.

Apparently, he’s been raving on about the Illuminati in Utah for some time.  He had been mentioned to me by an acquaintance once before, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon his recent two articles on his web site, that I learned how deep the delusion runs.

First he predicts, through a vision he personally received from God nonetheless, that there will be a massive spiritual calamity coupled with a giant earthquake in Utah.  Pedophiles running amok, rampant crime in the streets, dogs and cats living together – you know the drill.

Then he claims that Utah’s “Earthquake Awareness” week is a direct reaction to his predictions.  Certainly the fact that Utah is deep in American earthquake territory, with a major fault running through the Salt Lake valley (where 90% of Utah’s population resides) has absolutely nothing to do with it…

If you want a couple minutes of hysterical laughter, have a look.  I warn you, however, the crazy burns your mind just a little.

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Posted in Odd Bits, Religion | No Comments »

Ghost Town Trash Dumps

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Our dog, KiplingMy wife and I went out last weekend, roaming the north west of Utah in search of various ghost towns. This is the region in and around where the Golden Spike was driven, on the completion of the first intercontinental railway. The expedition was more for the plain fun of it, rather than anything serious, with the goal of having something to waste memory card space with by our digital cameras. A couple of Websites we visited talked of various buildings which could still be found, etc.

I was hoping to see a crumbling building or two, but our search for structures ended up being quite a disappointment. We only found one partially standing structure, in five towns searched – a collapsing fruit cellar.

It would appear that among the many hobbies of the resident Utards, destroying ghost towns is among them. I can’t blame outside tourists, because no one in their right mind from out of state would travel these dusty, barely maintained, mostly unmarked gravel roads, with only a handful of gunshot wounded road signs along the way. Some of the passages we took were pretty challenging, with most resorting to ATV’s to traverse them, rather than a 4×4 like we use.

A couple of piles of brick. One intact trestle. Some pottery shards. A few railroad ties. That’s all we found in roughly 400 miles of travel. Oh, I forgot to mention the piles of discarded modern beer cans, bottles and various trash, which amounted to more mass than the remnants of the towns themselves – their numbers would require scientific notation for manageable summation. Apparently the husks of dead alcohol containers are the only spirits of these once thriving little towns.

In spite of this, we did have a very good time just being out and about and our dog, Kipling, was excited most of the way. He’s a Yorkshire Terrier, but we refer to him as a “2x Yorkie”, as he’s no tea cup variety at 15 pounds and similar length in inches. (We knew he wasn’t a “show quality” dog when we got him, which was just fine by us.) He’s a smart little dog as well. Perhaps too smart at times, as he tries to circumvent the rules any chance he thinks he can get away with. The picture here is of his smiling mug, hanging off his car seat before we took to the trail again.

In any case, the trip itself was fun for the sense of exploration, with the highlight being the discovery of a coyote den under a trestle. Bones littered the surrounding ground, telling the menu of rodents, antelope and other unknown mammals.

Hopefully we’ll find more remote areas in our next search, which haven’t been ravaged by morons with sophomoric, destructive agendas.

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Posted in Asides, Personal | No Comments »

Save the Children: Utah Censorship

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Well, the Utards in the Utah House of Representatives are at it again. Michael Morley-R, has submitted a new bill, H.B. 407, which would create a self-imposed censorship system for ISP’s, quaintly known as a Community Conscious Internet Provider (CCIP). This would allow the attorney general to issue a seal for qualifying ISP’s, and impose fines against CCIP ISP’s who violate the snooping, Orwellian “anti-porn” content censorship that the bill demands.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a not-for-profit advocacy group in Washington, voiced skepticism about the proposed legislation.

“The bill demeans the concept of community by labeling those ISPs who block content access and spy on their customers as a CCIP,” Chester said. “They might as well use the acronym to mean ‘Communist-like Control over Information Privacy.’”

The bill requires that ISP’s basically spy on the network traffic of their clients and prevent any “unwanted” material from being transfered on the Net. If your ISP decides to become CCIP certified, you have no choice but to go to another ISP, because as a client you are forced to meet the CCIP standards that your ISP has vowed to. If there are no competing ISP’s in the area who are not CCIP, you’re stuck.

It’s not even remotely surprising that such a bill has hit the Utah house floor. The Mormon influence on the Republican Party in Utah is overwhelming. The Mormon philosophy has long been, that if you stick your head in the sand to avoid looking at something you don’t like, it will magically go away. This is part of the reason why they try to prevent their followers from having any exposure to things deemed inappropriate.

The message of bills like this is clear: The moral values of their religion are simply not strong enough to guide their followers to perform the prescribed behavior, so they must force their standards on them (and everyone else) to obtain obedience by force of law. They use the well over-worn mantra of “Save the Children!” as their rallying cry and go for the forced execution of behavior control, Bill of Rights be damned. What more can you expect from a religious group that believes in Magic Underwear?

In any case, I can’t think of a single rational ISP who is going to go along with this crap if it passes. This means they’ll make CCIP certification mandatory for all Utah ISP’s once this law is in place. Fascism sneaks up on you like that.

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Police State, Utah

Friday, February 15th, 2008

“A new bill proposed at the Utah legislature would allow for police to withhold misconduct reports from the public.”

So begins KUTV’s article on Senator Chris Buttars’, utterly deplorable attempt to make police misconduct unaccountable to public scrutiny.

Senator Buttars, you’re way, way out of line! Even suggesting this notion is despicable!

Your reasoning is utterly repulsive, utterly stupid and unbelievably arrogant. I personally hope that you’re dropped from office come next election, just for this bill – even if it doesn’t pass.

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Rock Slide

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

It finally happened. I have finally witnessed the most unbelievable display of ass-hat driving that I could have possibly imagined. Oh, I can certainly ponder a slew of slapstick automotive events which could grace the filler of a Jackie Chan film, but what I’m referring to here was real. Very real. Yet, unbelievable.

In short: as I was riding up the mountain on my way home the other night (quietly snickering at the fact that my GoldWing still had acceleration going up a mountain side, nearly as much as on the flats) when I rounded a corner and spotted an SUV, facing the wrong way on the opposite lane of the road. Note, I said “facing” the wrong way, not traveling the wrong way. The vehicle was traveling in the correct direction for the side of the street it was on, it was just facing the wrong direction at the time.

Though not at great risk of being hit, I swerved far to the right as I went past and took a peek inside the vehicle. A dark haired woman was in the driver seat. She was talking on her cellphone while gesticulating with the other hand. As she was talking she was looking at herself in the center mirror from a distance of a foot or so, either inspecting her makeup or counting pores. In any case, her attention was on anything but driving. Dumb as a rock, that one.

I rode past and tallied up the score: this woman was rolling down a mountainside in an SUV, backwards, no brake lights on and accelerating, paying attention to her phone and her face, but oblivious to the road. Easily 100 points out of 100 for stupidity, with 20 extra credit points for being totally ignorant of the situation. I crap smarter than this.

I rounded the next corner and lost sight of her. I was tempted to turn around, but I was actually worried that I might get hurt in her spasms of attempted correction. Better to hear about it on the radio than to be part of it.

I saw no signs of an accident at the bottom of that run when I went into work this morning. I would hazard a guess that she became aware of the fact that she was rolling backwards down the mountain at some point during her phone conversation and took steps to correct the situation. I have to wonder which side of the road she was on when this happened.

I’ve talked about it a few times in this blog and I’m sure many readers are sick of it: but I feel it is my civic duty to warn outsiders about the dangerous conditions in Utah. Seriously, I’d rather take my chances in the desert without water for a week, or the flash flooding through the slot canyons during the rainy season, than to challenge the overwhelming stupidity of the average Utah driver.

If you’re visiting Utah, consider yourself warned.

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Posted in Asides | 2 Comments »

They shoot morons, don’t they?

Monday, June 25th, 2007

If I have said it once, I’ll say it again: Utards can’t drive.

This week in point… On just a five day commute from home to work and back again, a total of twelve miles one way, or 120 miles total a week – here is the score:

  • Merging into my lane without looking: 8 counts.
  • Merging into my lane without signaling: at least 25 counts.
  • Merging into my lane without either looking or signaling (this is not an inclusive score): 13 counts.
  • Performing a U-Turn through an intersection on a red light: 1 count
  • Performing a U-Turn through an intersection on a red light, from the right hand lane (this is not inclusive of the above): 1 count. This is the third time this has happened to me since I moved to this idiot haven!
  • Performing a left hand turn from the lane right of the left turn lane, through a red light: 1 count.
  • Weaving in and out of a lane of traffic, due to cellphone use: too many to count, but I hit 35 before I gave up keeping track.
  • Weaving in and out of a lane of traffic, due to no apparent cause: 3 counts.
  • Turning left – almost reaching the cross road crosswalk, but suddenly deciding to go straight, along half a block, in the lane of opposing traffic (AKA, the wrong side of the road): 1 count.
  • Crossing over a double yellow line in order to pass a bus, swearing at the people who were properly in their lane of travel for being in his way, screeching to a halt and honking at him: 1 count.

How the hell do these people survive? How is it that Darwin does not take these asshole’s miserable lives out of the picture at rates exceeding WWII combat? Why are we not allowed to shoot these morons on sight?

I guess if I can see any kind of silver lining to this otherwise dark cloud of vehicular mayhem, it’s that I now can qualify for police level defense driving without having to take an actual course on it.

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