My friend Russell and I had talked about this before, and we had come up with a name for a school that we will found in the future that is guaranteed to be successful. Neither of us could remember it off the top of our heads last night though, so I promised the others that I’d post it up here when I got back to my computer. So here it is:

University of California The Russell Coniff Renaissance College of James the Laslavic Center New for Design of Superior Institute of Unlimited School: Quantum Academy

Just terrific, right? All we need now is a marching band.

Oh, and you’re welcome. :P

My dorm’s check-in is on August 27th, but we’re heading up a day early. So that’s actually just ten days away.

I’m going to miss my family, friends, and my amazing dog Sparky, but I’ve been waiting to go to college for my whole life and already had to delay it a year because of my health.

It’s almost time. I can hardly wait.

The Department of Homeland Security has expressed great interest in making everyone that wants to get on an airplane wear a special bracelet that can be used to shock you so badly that you won’t be able to move for several minutes per shocking. It also features a built in GPS, so they can monitor you and shock you from anywhere. It will have all your personal information stored in it, and can be used for “interrogation purposes” as well.

Expressing interest isn’t the same as seeking implementation, but with stuff like this combined with President Bush pardoning himself against potential war crimes, I’d almost bet that you thought about George Orwell before I even mentioned him in this sentence.

We need January. Immediately.

Alright, before you die from wondering what the heck I’m talking about, here is how I totally should have asked her. Enjoy!

Wasn’t that just wonderful?

Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, I’m going to try to get myself Comic-Con tickets for Saturday and Sunday. I’ve been getting emails from people wanting press passes lately. Sorry folks, but media pre-registration closed quite a while ago.

There’s still on-site media registration, but since I don’t have the energy to jump through the hoops again this year, you’re on your own. If you have a blog with an RSS feed (they pretty much all come with a feed anymore), I can add easily incorporate it into Bagelwood Central and syndicate your stuff, but that’s as much as I’ll do this year.

To make a long story short, the store refused to let a five-year-old girl who was having a bathroom emergency use their restroom. Needless to say, the little girl defecated all over herself and her parent, at which point they finally ran to a movie theater that let them clean themselves up.

If the store manager hadn’t mocked the humiliated family afterward, there might not have been a story. But the manager did decide that it would be a wonderful idea to further agitate them, and so now it’s been picked up by The Consumerist, which has additionally pointed out that as a matter of fact, there’s a rule in California called the Uniform Plumbing Code that requires a “toilet facility for customers, patrons, and visitors of all mercantile and business establishments.”

And with this embarrassingly heartless breach of both California regulations and just the simple Golden Rule itself making it onto the front page of Digg as well… Rut-roh for the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory!

Score one for the karma police.

Update: I can’t stand people that counter legal citations with, “Well, you’re not a lawyer, so you should just shut up!” Well, I found somebody that did that, and then went on to insinuate that anybody sympathizing with the little girl is just an anti-business radical. Here is what they said.

Is any one hear a lawyer in California who specializes in these type of cases? Does anyone know exactly what this establishment was zoned as, or what it technically is operating as? I think the the answer is no. Quit trying to act smart by pulling laws and facts out of our ass when you are neither fully briefed nor fully trained to handle the situation. Get off your soap box and stop wasting our time.

As for the whole “human compassion” argument, what if that girl shit herself in the food prep area, in it contaminated the food? What then? Or what if she had some sort of virus that got on the food and made people sick? Is that mother going to cover the store for their losses? No, she isn’t. This is a complex situation which can’t be simplified because you think big bad corporate America is wrong.

Brilliant in countless ways, no? Anyway, I couldn’t help but respond. Admittedly I was a little bit snarky, but that’s just my sense of humor for you. And it’s a Digg comment anyway, not a grand treatise. Just enjoy it.

Heaven forbid regular people be able to use the internet to look up laws and make sure that corporations are not ignoring them! How pretentious! Who do these people think they are, living in a democratic nation with a “by the people, for the people” attitude toward government? Stupid empowered citizens and their anti-American penchant for citing things like laws!

But seriously, if lawyers were the only ones meant to be able to understand the rules we all have to live by, then we’d be in a pretty bad situation, don’t you think? “You have to have a restroom for people to use” is a particularly easy to grasp regulation in my opinion.

If they want to do business in California, they have to play by California’s rules, and they clearly did not comply with the Uniform Plumbing Act, which quite plainly states that they need to provide restrooms to customers, patrons, and visitors. The opus is on them to make sure that they are complying with all applicable business regulations. Oops.

Now, of course I agree that it would be a bad idea to just let people wander around where the food is prepared, but that’s why you don’t put the restroom that you are obligated to provide for people in the middle of the kitchen.

This is not a complex issue at all. This is a case where an entire store did not go by the golden rule of treating others as they’d wish to be treated, resulting in some pretty gross humiliation of a little girl, which in turn is resulting in the company being exposed for not being in compliance with the law.

Sorry, but I seem to still somehow find myself feeling much more sympathetic toward the little girl that was pointlessly humiliated than I do toward the heartless, law-breaking corporate entity that humiliated her.

The fact of the matter though is that everybody wants to beat the system. You can’t do better than everybody else unless you do things different from everybody else, and this means facing your inhibitions and grabbing each opportunity by the horns without worrying what the rest of the herd thinks. It takes brains to see the better path, but it takes guts to walk it.

Blah, blah, blah.

With that being said, if you were one of the people that came to me and declared that this was just a merry little prank, then… you already know that you were absolutely right about this being an exercise in bullshit, heh. Thanks for not spoiling it for everybody else, and hopefully you enjoyed being in on it after we talked! I’m just sad that we weren’t able have the fake “marriage party” at Speckles Park today, because that would been the perfect way to top it off and let the bag out of the cat, as the great Sir Bill Lemei would say.

The rest of you can feel free start leaving comments and stuff about how you, like, totally knew all along and, like, that’s why at the beginning of the conversation you, like, typed lulz or something once or twice. Happy April Fools Day, everybody!

I love to travel pretty much more than anything. I want to see the world, and one of the best ways to see lots of places is to go on cruises since food, activities, and so forth are included. If you do the math, it ends up being quite a bit cheaper than if you actually stay at hotels (even less expensive ones) and eat at restaurants, which you’d probably want to do. Yeah, hostels are fine, but if you actually put time into finding deals on cruises then you can still get to more places for cheaper. And obviously there’s something different and nice about cruises too, right?

The trouble is that pretty much all the cruise lines require you to have somebody who is at least 21 with you. For a long time, this has put a pretty big damper on my travel fantasies. However, I’ve recently found a loophole for a cruise that I’d very much like to go on near the end of the year. Take a look for yourself at Royal Caribbeans’ exception for married couples:

No child under 21 years of age is allowed in a stateroom unless accompanied by an adult aged 21 years or older. This age restriction will be waived only for underage married couples (proof of marriage is required) or for minor children sailing with their parents or guardians in adjacent staterooms.

Bingo.

So now you see the plan, and hopefully you aren’t freaking out. If you can stay calm long enough to think about it, this is actually very practical. I’ve talked about this with Kendra Owens, who already has enjoyed several cruises with her family. We talked about it quite a bit, actually, and obviously we laughed our asses off (and we’re still laughing), but yeah. It’s happening. Oh God, it’s happening (did I mention the laughing?).

We’re going to get one of those drive-through marriages in the beginning of April so that the paperwork can be done, and then as soon as we get back from the 14 Night Canary Islands & Portugal cruise, we’re going to get legally divorced (can you hear the laughing yet?). We’re totally just taking advantage of a loophole, but hey, I’m just enough of a lawyer dick to be okay with it.

And let’s face it. Marriages these days are hardly serious anyway.

Anyway, since we don’t actually care, we’d like to simultaneously invite you to our marriage and divorce party. We’ll probably just have some sodas in Spreckles or something like that, and basically, we’ll just be celebrating our own douchbaggery. For wedding presents, bring us cookies or something and we’ll love you forever, or at least until our divorce party on December 22 this year (at which time we shall expect more cookies).

I don’t know how many people do this, but we can’t possibly be the first, and it seems like this is what drive-through chapels are designed for. If anybody would like to join Kendra and I as we laugh our way through Spain, the Canary Islands, Portugal, and even Morocco, just grab a “partner” and come and get “married” with us. The round trip plane tickets will be $900 per person, and the cruise itself will be $1,100 for two people, so it’s actually $550 per person. $1,450 (you can add your own shopping money) is a very good deal for seeing all these places, and that’s the point. So if you get a job fairly soon then you still might be able to come with us. And no, I don’t think your “special other” will be terribly offended if you ask for a pre-nup.

This is going to work perfectly. I am a genius. I think I’ll have to get “married” next year too. Aren’t I romantic? Now, how to explain to the parents so that they don’t freak out and get the wrong idea…

If you’ve gotten this far, then see how things turned out in part 2!

“I’m good,” I responded.

“You mean ‘Well.” Unless you’re a superhero or something, your grammar is incorrect.”

“HA! ACTUALLY, YOUR CORRECTION IS INCORRECT! IN THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF DARTH VADER, I HAVE YOU NOW! BEW BEW, KABOOM! HA HA!”

Cough, ahem.

Anyway, I was right, and I always said that I’d find some third-party source whenever people corrected me, but never really did because there’s quite a few more interesting things to do. But one floated across my screen, so I’m posting about it now, and I shall forever link to this blog post when people try to get me. Har har!

I mean, obviously this is more playful than anything because the number of people that actually care is quite small, but finally, at long last, my amusing vindication is here! And I didn’t have to go out of my way to look anything up! Huzzah!

3. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.” Wrong! Am is a linking verb and linking verbs should be modified by adjectives such as good. Because well can also act as an adjective, it’s also fine to answer “I’m well,” but some grammarians believe “I’m well” should be used to talk about your health and not your general disposition. (See episode 51 for more details.)

This is from the Grammar Girl, by the way.

That’s probably part of why I’m so interested in a video that made it onto Digg recently that shows a rather unpleasant altercation on a school bus involving a teenage student and the driver. Cases where an authority is allowed to take away a right that a person normally has (such as the right to get off a bus) are very interesting to me since I have the overall view that basically says, “The law is meant to make it so that ‘your rights stop where my rights start’, to give certain legal advantages to the people when dealing with the government, and to keep the government accountable and severely in check.”

And I’m probably more interested even than I’d normally be in this video because I can definitely see self-defense claims being made, which is pretty much a sure way to get my attention since I practice karate (which makes self-defense matters interesting and relevant by default) and have actually gotten in trouble at school once for successfully protecting myself, but that’s a different fun story.

So with that little background given, here’s the video before I go further. It’s about ten minutes long, but I’ve already watched it a couple times and have played back snippits of it endlessly. It pretty much shows the whole thing from the start to the end, with the “biggest tussle” being about eight minutes in or so. I found the whole thing fascinating, like I said.

Just for flavor and to add some entertainment value, I’m going to show you what I think about this in a dialog format between “Real James” and “Judge James.” Imagine the regular James you know sitting in a chair next to another James, who is wearing the traditional black robes of a judge on some show like Hardball or Meet The Press.

Ready, set, action!

Real James: First off, I think we all agree that the student girl was outrageous. Maybe she’s a more attractive person normally, but what I saw wasn’t exactly hot stuff.

Judge James: I can’t let personal opinions like that effect my rulings, but yes, her immaturity is self-evident. I think she’s living evidence of why you’re a minor until you’re at least eighteen.

Real James: We don’t actually know for sure if she’s eighteen.

Judge James: She doesn’t look or act that old to me. I’m going to assume she’s not eighteen.

Real James: Always the safer assumption.

Judge James: Stephanie would call you a “creepster” for that joke, you know. And since when do you make jokes like that anyway?

Real James: Enough about the younger girl, Judge. Didn’t you feel terrible for the bus driver? I mean, not just for having to put up with a brat like that, but at the very end when it looks like she’s fallen down and is just pitifully asking the radio where her help was, didn’t you just want to jump into the video and hug her?

Judge James: Sure, but that’s personal opinion as well, and as a Judge, I need to be as objective as possible. Now, what are the likely accusations against the bus driver here?

Real James: The brat effectively accuses the bus driver of assault and battery, and though she does not actually accuse her of theft when she takes away her cell phone, somehow I get the feeling that she’s the kind of person that would say that.

Judge James: Right. Now, as you know, “assault” refers to threats and attempts to strike, while “battery” refers to actually having struck. This is important because you need to have somebody “assault” you before you can do anything in “self-defense” against them. Even though the video does seem to show the bus driver touching the student first, it also seems to me that the student physically made the first move, moving toward her somewhat aggressively as if to bull rush (or “bull fast-walk” in this case) right through her.

Real James: Also, looking at the video, it’s hard to tell, but it looks a little bit like the girl suddenly throws her hands up really suddenly a moment before the bus driver puts her hands on the girl to push her back, while saying something like “You better not touch me!”

Judge James: Correct. So basically, the self-defense argument hinges on the assumption that the aggressive approach of the girl was a reasonably conceived “assault” in the legal sense.

Real James: So now, how does self-defense work when students are involved?

Judge James: Obviously people like teachers and bus drivers are strictly not allowed to do anything to their wards. It’s a risk for them to ever touch the students. However, I’m pretty sure that this does not mean they have to just let themselves get beat up by an angry student. If the student is acting in such a way that physical contact is unavoidable, such as when the student is trying to hit or “bull fast-walk” into the teacher, the teacher is at least allowed to try to stop the student and shield themselves, but the use of force should definitely be absolutely minimal here.

Real James: Judge, just look at that bus driver. She’s tiny and old, and the student is young and apparently healthy and even somewhat muscular. Well, I wouldn’t really call her muscular, but compared to the bus driver she certainly was. Later on, the girl seems to smother her even! Anyway, when she’s pushing her away in the beginning, how is that not minimal force? The girl didn’t even whimper or anything, and the other kids clearly didn’t think it was enough to warrant stepping in.

Judge James: Agreed. So when the girl first makes the accusation of assault and battery by declaring that she would sue the bus driver for touching her, I feel that she has a pretty weak case.

Real James: How about later, when the bus driver’s daughter comes and starts to fight the girl, pulling her hair and apparently punching her to get her off her mother? If the bus driver is in the clear, what about her daughter? If that brat (sloppily) tackled my mother like that, I’d get up and pummel her for as long as it took to get her off too! And she was clearly stating both why she was getting involved and the condition for her stopping by saying, “Get off my mother!” over and over. I just don’t blame her at all!

Judge James: Don’t worry. Fortunately, “self-defense” in the legal sense not only covers protecting yourself, but also works for protecting your family. Maybe the girl did not use the absolute minimum amount of force, but there actually isn’t any official, objective scale for determining that anyway. In theory, the girl could have used a baseball bat to get the girl off of her mother, as long as she did not continue to beat her or chase her down after she got her off.

Real James: Good. She should’ve. Well, not really. But I’m relieved that it works like that.

Judge James: Indeed.

Real James: I’m a little bit worried though. See, I feel like the bus driver did everything right, really. I mean, the manner in which she confiscated the cell phone was a bit questionable, but technically the girl offered her the phone anyway to talk to her mother, so actually, I think I’ll be a smartass and defend that too since I really don’t feel like the bus driver deserves to get in trouble at all in this case. But others might not feel like I do, and you can clearly hear one of the other students on the bus near the end talking on his own cell phone saying, “Oh my god, the bus driver freaked out and punched a girl!” Since the worst of it was just a little bit off the screen since the girl bowled into the bus driver and pusher her in the corner, will the rely on people like that kid to say what happened?

Judge James: I think any competent lawyer could prove that not only are those witnesses not terribly credible, but also that none of them had line of sight. Regardless, it’s true that we never really see a punching motion, but we do see the girl shove and smother the bus driver, so if the bus driver made a punching motion to the girl’s stomach to get her off (if her arms were caught in front of her) or if the bus driver banged on her back with her fists (if her arms ended up wrapped around her, like in a messy grapple), then that would be a pretty easy case for “self-defense.”

Real James: What about the people who are saying that the bus driver is at fault for not just ending the situation before it even started by letting the girl out when she asked to get off?

Judge James: School bus drivers can’t legally do that, actually. The girl and her parents would have had to sign a document that explained how students can only be let out at the designated bus stops (except in emergencies), and that the bus drivers are legally responsible for them until then. Parents can actually sue school bus drivers if this isn’t adhered to, and you can search the internet for countless legal cases when something happened to a student who was prematurely released by a bus driver. In fact, the bus driver can go to jail potentially. They really just aren’t allowed to let the students go. In an issue like this where there’s no emergency, the bus driver did the right think by just blocking the students way and guarding the “space behind the line on the floor” (which actually exist in school buses for this reason) so that the girl couldn’t press the button to open the door.

Real James: I heard some guy say that it was kidnapping and illegal imprisonment. He seemed a little bit silly.

Judge James: That’s because he was silly. Probably misinformed, too. Not everybody knows or understands how school bus drivers just aren’t allowed to let the kids off anywhere.

Real James: I totally agree with all this, but couldn’t somebody argue that it became an emergency for the other students when the bus driver was attacked?

Judge James: Well, temper tantrums and disciplinary issues like that aren’t really the intention of the word “emergency” in my opinion, but I could see a legitimate argument formed around that. But the other students eventually did just that, and it doesn’t really help the girl that caused it all. To be honest, I feel like all of the students should have remained on the bus until the help that was summoned arrived, but I suppose I would advise the school against actually punishing them.

Real James: I think that if I had been there, I would have been one of the kids who stayed behind to see if the bus driver was okay. I mean, really, I just feel bad for her like I said.

Judge James: Apparently, you’re one of few who would do that.

Real James: The ones who did it seemed more interested in playing teacher’s pet than actually helping the bus driver though, so I’d almost rather get them out of the way.

Judge James: You aren’t a paramedic or anything yourself.

Real James: That’s not the point. Anyway, they probably should have all stayed on the bus, but I can at least understand how it all led up to them deciding to crack open an emergency exit.

Judge James: They should at least be firmly told to not leave the bus like that though, and given brief lecture as to why.

Real James: Sounds fine to me.

Judge James: In conclusion, I think there’s plenty of justifications for how the bus driver responded to the situation, and if the woman decided to press charges against the girl, I would not dismiss them from my court.

Real James: I just wish that any one of the laughing boys with dumb grins would’ve intervened instead of watching and giving each other high-fives. Or better yet, I wish the girl wasn’t such a brat in the first place.

Judge James: She should be ashamed, and her parents should not be proud of what we all saw.

What’s funny is that this was clearly made by actual big business graphic designers, marketing consultants, advertising specialists, video producers, and professional actors. Anyway, if you have any other unintentionally creepy web sites, post them in the comments.

Without further adieu, here is my submission for the world’s most unintentionally creepy site. Prepare to get a visual kick in the butt, and do watch the whole intro through because the creepiness doesn’t even begin until like ten or fifteen seconds.