Heheh....yeah....

Check out this noise...


Does my heart good to see a child stalking case turn out with the girl's father and uncle beating the crap out of the guy before he was able to pull her into the car. Did they use excessive force? Sure. But once I saw pillows, duct tape and a knife inside that car, I'dve kicked him a few too many times myself. Well done!

I'd love to say this surprises me. (P-13)

Okay, we all knew this was coming...I watch Dateline, I get angry about stuff. So I apologize ahead of time for the predictability of this entry (I hate it every time I read it, but don't have time to redo it just yet), but even if it's predictable, the subject I'm talking about still bothers me.

So without further ado...it's Buss's Rant About the Tsunami Disaster. :-)


Wow. An example of human nature at its finest.

One of the most horrific natural disasters anyone could imagine, and while many people have pulled together and donated (might I suggest Amazon.com's donation option for an easy way to help out?) or went over to help Tsunami victims...there will always be people out there ready to think with the wrong head and take advantage of the poverty and devastation the tsunami caused to satisfy perverse pleasures.

Yeah yeah, I know this has always been a problem. Buying and selling girls as young as 6 for sex slaves or prostitution has been a problem in that part of the world for a long time now. We just dont' think about it normally. But pair it with a disaster of this magnitude and once again it hits Dateline and every other major news media service out there.

The problem is that there are so many children who have lost their entire families just walking around, that people can just grab them, stuff them in a building and nobody ever hears from them agian, because nobody bothers looking for them. This really isn't the authorities' fault. There are thousands of these orphans just walking around.

I think we can't deal with the tsunami on a lot of levels. We can't even look at it how it really is. One person dies, that's easy to assimilate and be horrified and outraged...but when the death toll grows to tens or hundreds of thousands...we just can't deal with the magnitude of that (credit goes to Eddie Izzard for that philosophical idea). It makes us almost numb to it all. But I'm sure it is only too poignant for the survivors....

The thing that really makes me sick is the thoguht that for a child to have survived all that, to have lost everything they own and everyone they love only to be snatched into a life as a prostitute or, even worse, sold into that life by the reminants of their own family...people they should be able to trust.

Okay, how the hell does one look their own son or daughter in the eyes as they are pulled away, knowing that they are going to be someone else's work or sex slave?

But this isn't a simple condemnation of people in that area of the world...ohhhh no. They have the flimsy but present excuse of being desperate. Take a look at a lot of the accounts. You think it's the same impoverished people who buy these children?? Sorry...no. Unfortunately all too often it's us. Obviously not just Americans, but foreigners in general. People from Better Places that don't have to worry about their next meal that are taking advantage of the poverty and what some people there are willing to do to get out of that poverty in order to satisfy desires that would normally not be easy to satisfy. It'd be sick and wrong to take an American child and molest them, so they take a plane ride, some of them under the guise of relief workers.

I believe with all my heart that child molestation is the single biggest sign of decline in our society, and their children are no less innocent or deserving of safety than ours. When you can feel lucky that you've made it to 18 without being whored out or outright sold into slavery....that's just....sad.

I really have no good way to end this. I understand that feeling like this now of all times shows more than a little hypocrisy. I understand that if I feel this strongly about it, I should be on a plane headed for Indonesia right now to help. Honestly? If I could scrape together the money for a plane ticket and wouldn't lose my wife and job by going, I'd consider it. But the demand for these kids has been created by the rest of the world. That guy busted on Dateline who left his cushy job and life in America twice a year to "Vacation" in that area of the world (and sleep with a few teenage prostitutes while there)? His life is probably ruined now, and all I could think was "GOOD!!". Screw him and everyone like him that thinks of themselves as morally above anyone else because they have a better lifestyle. Screw his rationalization that because the youngest girl he'd ever slept with was fourteen that he was better than most people who do this sort of thing.

Sorry if this is not one of my better entries. Not even one of my better rants. I don't have words to put this all in to. I don't even think I'm the one who should be complaining about this, given my butt is on my comfortable chair in front of my expensive computer in a temperature controlled building with Old Navy jeans on it and not helping these people I profess to care so much about.

Ah well. That's why I have the advantage of being able to write whatever I want in here and not have to worry about how it sounds and even (like in this case) if it has a lick of cohesion or makes any sense whatsoever.

But if you read all this drek and agree, cool. Please consider donating somewhere in the very least. It helps. If you don't agree and think I'm an ass for saying all this....well you're probably right. Please still consider donating. These people need your help, and it's also in human nature to help one another.

Thank you.

End of an era...

Just caught this bit of news this morning on the radio. Dave Barry is (for now) leaving the Miami Herald.

I grew up reading Dave Barry. His style of writing was, to me, a big inspiration. He was someone I very much looked up to as a writer. Role model? Probably not...but definitely one of the people I'd love to emulate better in my writing. Well at least the rants and humorous writing... :-)

Wow will I miss reading his articles. It's not often I am caught trying not to laugh so hard that I snort my morning soda when reading the newspaper (I try and stay away from the editorials), but every single article Dave has written has made me laugh out loud. His humor was always something I could count on to be creative and silly, and I always was caught off guard by some aside or comment he made. He taught me that Stupid Titles Were Always Funnier In All Caps, he perfected the use of the parenthesis to insert that little smartass comment into an otherwise normal sentence, and, most of all, it was just fun to read his weekly thoughts.

I hope he comes back someday, but until then, I've got about four of his books to buy and read.

This goodbye letter was posted in the Herald to his fans:


The last laugh (for now)

There comes a time in the life of every writer when he asks himself - as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Hemingway all surely asked themselves - if he has any booger jokes left in him.

For me, that time has come. I've been trying to entertain newspaper readers since the '60s, when I wrote "humor" columns for the Haverford College News. I put "humor" in quotation marks because when I go back and read those columns today, I don't get any of the jokes. But at the time they were a big hit with my readership, which consisted pretty much of my roommates.

After college, I got a job as a reporter at the West Chester, Pa., Daily Local News, where I was also allowed to write humor columns. I thought they were pretty good, but after my third one, an editor took me aside and told me - this is an absolutely true quote - "you used to be funnier." That was more than 30 years ago, and since then hardly a week has gone by during which somebody has not told me that I used to be funnier.

I sometimes got discouraged, but I kept at it, year after year, the past 22 of them at the Miami Herald. Why didn't I give up? I'll tell you why: I have no useful skills.

Also, this job has been a LOT of fun. Here are just a few of the things that, as a professional humor columnist, I have actually been paid to do:

I picked up my son, Rob, at his junior high school in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. (Rob, now 24, claims he has forgiven me, although, to be safe, I'm still in the federal witness protection program.)

After I wrote a column suggesting that opera might be fatal to humans, I was invited to Eugene, Ore., to participate in the Eugene Opera's performance of the Puccini opera "Gianni Schicchi." I played the part of a corpse.

An Air Force pilot took me for an F-16 fighter jet ride, during which - while hurtling through the brilliant-blue sky high above the Straits of Florida faster than the speed of sound - I threw up.

After I made fun of North Dakota, the city of Grand Forks invited me up there in January, and, in a deeply moving (also deeply cold) ceremony attended by a crowd of dozens, the mayor of Grand Forks, Mike Brown, dedicated a new sewage-lifting station in my honor. (Mayor Brown's official proclamation very eloquently compared my work to the production of human excrement.)

I went on the David Letterman show and demonstrated to a nationwide television audience that it is possible to set fire to a pair of hairspray-soaked men's underpants using a Rollerblade Barbie doll. (To my knowledge, Rollerblade Barbie is the only Barbie ever recalled as a fire hazard, although I am not taking credit.)

These were all fun things to write about. But many of my favorite columns were suggested by you readers, an amazingly alert group. If an important news event occurs - a toilet exploding, for example, or a boat being sunk by a falling cow or a cow exploding - I can count on my readers to let me know about it. On the other hand, if I write something that turns out - despite my relentless fact-checking - to be inaccurate, such as that Thomas Jefferson invented the atomic bomb, I will receive dozens of letters, often very irate, correcting me. I cherish those letters most of all.

So this is a great job. And yet I'm quitting it, at least for now. I want to stop before I join the horde of people who think I used to be funnier. And I want to work on some other stuff. So for the next year, I won't be writing regular columns, though I hope to weigh in from time to time if something really important happens, such as a cow exploding in a boat toilet.

At some point in the next year I hope to figure out whether I want to resume the column. Right now, I truly don't know.

So in case I don't get to say this later: Thanks to all you editors for printing my column, and thanks especially to all you readers for reading it. You've given me the most wonderful career an English major could hope to have. I am very grateful. And I'm not making that up.

Originally published on January 2, 2005

An apology

I know it's been over a month since I posted and I left things on a very depressing note, but I promise it wasn't depression that kept me from writing...it was how busy things were at work and home (and World of Warcraft. Stupid game....) and the holidays that kept me from even surfing, let alone writing.

One hole I want to avoid falling into is writing when I have nothing to write about. I suppose if I ever wanted to get a job as a journalist it'd be good for me to learn to find things to write about, but I would hate to read a blog post about what happened in my boring day, so I just don't post unless something bugs me or intrigues me enough to write about.

I should probably watch the news more. That or pay more attention to what I might be able to write about. Either way I'll attempt to post more often if I can.

I have another blog for the more geeky shiznit in my life over at http://geekboi.blogspot.com if anyone is interested. I mainly keep my gaming and geek stuff out of this blog in order to avoid scaring friends and family, but that also means I may have more opinions and such going on over there. This has better writing, that is written to slightly more often. You make the call.