There are legions of individuals working throughout the world to improve the lives of their fellow human beings and striving to prevent conflict through mediation and education.  Many of those folks have whole months of their lives to this cause.  Many have devoted years.  To accomplish this, a great number live in the same conditions as those whom they are trying to help.  They put themselves at risk of infection by foreign parasites, viruses seldom seen in advanced countries, and physical harm by local thugs and military juntas threatened by their presence.

Amateurs.

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama, sitting President of the United States for nine months, single-term U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois,  three-term state Senator, lawyer, 3-year community organizer and political science major.  He was nominated for the Prize prior to the 1 February 2009 deadline, at a time where he had served as President for less than two weeks.

The five-member Nobel Committee examined the 205 nominations for this year’s award and chose President Obama over other nominees such as Afghani human rights activist Sima Samar, Chinese political prisoner Hu Jia and Zimbabwe’s pro-democracy Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The Committee’s citation reads:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

Other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates include Martin Luther King, Jr., UNICEF, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Theresa, Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel and the Dalai Lama.

<Happy Voice, “Pomp and Circumstance” plays in the background>
Graduation is right around the corner, and many seniors are looking forward to the excitement of having their name called and walking down the aisle to receive their diploma.

<Music ends, idiot switches to his Mr. Bad News Voice>
But an increasing number of students won’t get to graduate …

And that’s when my head exploded.  “Get to graduate?”

Get?

Maybe I’m just showing my age, but when I graduated high school (back in 1988, shortly after the Renaissance) students had to earn a diploma.  You know, by taking tests and reading and writing and stuff.  I didn’t even apply myself in school, yet still managed to graduate in the middle of my class.

When the hell did a high school diploma become a right?

Those of you who had to drop out to support your ailing mother and 85 younger siblings, pipe down.  You guys are a statistical blip, outnumbered by the legion of mouth-breathers who can’t apparently squeak through public education with a D-minus.  The same goes for everybody who had a serious medical condition in 12th grade and needed a quintuple organ transplant: you guys get a pass.  I’m baffled by the huge number of future service industry employees incapable of following along in class, let alone trying to make change.

Am I out of touch here?

If I may be of service, let me supply the answer: until it blows up in your face, you shiftless dregs of humanity.

Just a my way of showing my appreciation for having to show ID every time I want to buy cold medicine for my children.

Do not try this at home: hypothetical AquaDots ingestion!

Tonight the Jacobson family hit the jackpot in the latest round of the Chinese Slipshod Toy Quality Lottery. AquaDots have apparently has been recalled. The problem?

If swallowed, the seemingly harmless pellets metabolize into a date-rape drug known as Liquid Ecstacy.

The toy itself is pretty clever: take a bunch of colored beads, place them into entertaining shapes on a special tray, spray them with water and voila! They stick together as sort of a 21st-century doily. My kids made a couple of stick figures and a darling yellow and black kitty, as seen to the right.

A yellow and black kitty ready to take the young’ns on a wild ride of self-discovery and trippitude, that is!

After hearing about the recall on the radio tonight on the drive home, I burst into my house and snatched the evil thing away from my helpless offspring. Well, not quite: they were busy playing with Play-Doh and didn’t notice. Still, crisis narrowly averted, I say!

Fear not, parental units…according to this New York Times article, the bead manufacturer has promised to “add a safe but foul-tasting ingredient to future beads to discourage children from eating them.” Yeah, that’ll work…since the kids who were affected by the drug ate them not because of their bright, candy-like colors but obviously from their sublime flavor.

And does anybody want to take bets as to how long it will be before we hear of some paint-huffing asshats buying two dozen of these kits from Wal-Mart? I mean, the meth-heads have already made the purchase of over-the-counter medicines a pain in the butt (in my area, at least), so is this scenario that outrageous:

Cashier: I’m sorry sir, you’ve got too many toy items.

Parent: Excuse me?

Cashier: You have three Chinese-manufactured toy items in your cart; by law I’m only allowed to sell you two at a time.

Parent: Uh…ok. I guess I won’t take the G.I. Joe action figure.

Cashier: All righty. Can I see some I.D., please? (In walkie-talkie): Can I get manager approval on lane 8?

At least the stuff China is producing right now is only toxic. Wait until they start shipping toys that somehow, inexplicably, explode when they get too hot. Or too cold. Or on Tuesday. Gosh, the American public might even demand somebody to be accountable for that sort of thing. Maybe even decide to stop buying products from a Communist country with an abysmal human-rights record, few environmental controls whatsoever, and more oversight as to what their citizens see on the Internet than the products they sell to the rest of the world.

Yeah, crazy talk. I must be getting a contact high from the yellow and black kitty.

Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming [courant.com's] reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.

[...]

… even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.

I mention this because for some unknown reason I bothered to read the related thread on Fark.com and was moved by the tremendous amount of stupidity I found…and I don’t just mean the typical trolls that post something insensitive. No, I’m also talking about the emotional hand-wringers who are calling Kim a “hero” for leaving his car and dying alone in the woods.

Mind you, I’m not saying that James Kim deserved to die.…but I can’t help but wonder why the hell they were on that road during the winter in the first damn place.

One Farker posted a picture that allegedly showed one of the warning signs along that road. Call me crazy, but I don’t doubt him one bit; I’ve seen plenty of roads with similar signage in Colorado and Washington state. If the Kim family drove past one of those large, brightly-colored signs and ignored the cautionary text, then they were stupid.

Maybe I’m going to hell for suggesting such a thing. Some of Fark’s more sensitive posters suggested that the sign, which supposedly said “road may be blocked by snowdrifts,” wasn’t a strong enough warning.

Poppycock. That mentality is why we have warning labels on hammers instructing people to wear goggles during use. There is a very good reason why you must pass a couple of tests to earn the privilege of operating a motor vehicle: it’s easy to kill yourself or others with a car if you don’t pay attention to details.

I am very happy to hear that Kim’s wife and two young children survived. I’m sure that James’ decision to leave his car and family to search for help was a difficult one. But doing so does not, as so many Farkers emotionally penned, make Kim a hero. He may have been a victim – of somebody else’s incompetence or his own — but to call his actions heroic merely illustrate how abused and meaningless the word “hero” has become.

The Kim family, once they found themselves stuck, did do some smart things. They stayed in the car, as is suggested by survivalists and law enforcement officials. They ran the engine sparingly — just enough to warm the car — and were able to make the most out of their remaining gas. They set their tires on fire: something that had not occured to me but would have provided additional heat as well as a plume of thick black smoke for rescuers to see. Mrs. Kim and her children were spotted thanks to an umbrella covered with reflective tape, another good idea.

What happened to the Kims is a tragedy. But calling James Kim a hero is nonsense, perpetuated by people who want some sort of happy ending or uplifting note for this story.

Today’s post at the IE blog, however, sent me over the edge.

There will be two versions of IE 7 — something in itself that isn’t too surprising, since there were multiple flavors of IE 5.x (Mac, Win9x, WinXP/2000). Unfortunately, some market-mindful monkey has decided that they will be called different things: IE7 for Win2000/XP/2003 and IE7+ for Vista.

What’s the difference between the two, other than the operating systems? Obviously if it’s IE7+ then it has to be better, right? Wrong. Apparently features as “Protected Mode, Parental Controls and improved Network Diagnostics” qualify as the “plus”. You know, critical things that most folks like you and I will likely never use.

The big problem with this inane naming convention — and the crux of my problem with it — is that it merely sows confusion. Ever run into anybody who was baffled by the differences between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional or Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional? How about the dozen or so different flavors of Office?

Even more frustrating is the monkey wrench this throws into the usual convention web developers use to describe browser support. For instance, if my website works under Firefox versions 1.5 and later, I merely say that Firefox 1.5+ is supported. Same with IE5.5.

Now what? “This website supports Internet Explorer 7++”?

The IE7 dev team claims:

These [aforementioned] features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (“The version of IE7 in Vista” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily…)

Right. So instead of you guys dealing with a perceived naming issue internally, you’re going to force the rest of us on the planet to adopt a name that will help tout the superiority of your next OS product. Thanks.