Joshua's weblog

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182916549431

Do you ever wonder what happens to Japanese mascots when the product they are born into is discontinued? They were made to endorse a plane, a religion, a city government, and now those things are gone, like tears in rain. Only the mascot remains, an artificial personality given life by corporate necromancy.

You might think that they are simply discontinued, with their costumes thrown into a shredder and the official documentation all erased. This hasn’t happened since the 1960s, with the passage of the Foam Citizen Redemption Act. Most orphaned mascots are lucky enough to be rescued by the Japanese government’s Lost Mascot Division, where they are given a hearty meal, a place to sleep, and a chance to interview for new jobs.

On paper, it makes a lot of sense: why spend all that money on the cocaine habit of character animators to create new life, when you could instead adopt a slightly-distressed narwhal or depressed camel for pennies? In reality, corporate hubris prevents most of these down-on-their-luck mascots from ever being picked up. Only the new and shiny will do, say the big bosses, thinking that the stench of failure can never truly wash out of their lightweight foam bodies.

Some mascots in this position make something of themselves. For instance, Renraku Computer Systems is today run by an eight-foot-tall duck who ends every sentence with a pun about bread. He clawed himself out of the gutters, but few are this lucky. For every Quacky-chan, there are hundreds who are stuck working short-term jobs. Washing dishes, movie extras, gimmick prostitution: this is where most of them end up, even with the greatest efforts of the Lost Mascot Division.

So the next time you see a cancelled product, don’t just pump your fists in joy that the corporate motherfuckers are finally getting what’s coming to them: think first of the out-of-work mascots, and maybe give them a few bucks the next time you see one sleeping on the subway.

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182916549431

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182870348200

Have you ever seen one of those internet videos of a beached whale exploding? Then you can probably empathize with my “tuner,” Pirate Pete, who had a pretty similar situation on his hands when the last of my rusty-bored Pontiac 400s let go onto the floor of his dyno cell.

I put “tuner” in scare quotes because Pirate Pete isn’t so much a guy who is good with putting numbers into air-fuel tables as he is a guy who found an old dyno at a going-out-of-business-sale and had a storage shed to put it in. Accordingly, I’m at his place quite often, scattering rods and oil from hither to yon. If you look closely, despite us taking a pressure-washer to the walls last summer, you can still see the high water mark of where I found out that a stock 5SFE can’t take a little baby 150-shot of nitrous once it’s already on the rev limiter.

For a little while, we tried to pay off the dyno cleaning fees by charging the local auto manufacturers to do “destructive testing.” The theory is, they give us a brand new car, and then we beat the shit out of it until it fails and write up a really solid report. I thought we did a great job, but they weren’t pleased. They said it was “unscientific.” Despite now being unauthorized, we tried to keep it going for awhile after that, but eventually the guy at the rental desk caught on.

Things didn’t get any better, until Pirate Pete hit upon a brilliant idea. Nowadays when a Poncho grenades itself into the concrete, he just calls the oil-slick response team from the nearby pipeline company. They’re grateful for the training, and more than that, they want to keep it out of the papers. It’s that kind of commitment to community service that makes me feel good about angle-grinding chunks out of the pipeline to make new quarter panels out of.

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182870348200

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182826774169

I think there’s a real desire for unification in American politics today. Even though the electorate is split by divisive issues, the right candidate can focus on what brings the people together. We all breathe the same air, we all drink the same watered-down dog-piss beer, and we all love monster trucks. That’s why, when I was tapped to serve on the campaign of a promising new candidate, I jumped on it.

Here’s a little factoid for you: did you know that during the heyday of the Soviet Union, they had absolutely no monster trucks? Now they’re gone. There’s something about monster trucks that goes well with democracy. Call it the peanut butter that goes on the chocolate. Don’t believe me? Watch five minutes of a truck with military-surplus axles and farm tractor tires crushing some doomed automobiles and then tell me that you no longer believe there is an American Dream.

I was so excited to work on the Bigfoot campaign. A lot of people don’t know this, but there is a whole dynasty of Bigfoots, just like the Kennedys. We had our pick of the litter when it came time to figuring out which family member would be the one to lead us. There was a little bit of trouble getting the paperwork done - to be President, you have to be at least thirty-five, and that means Bigfoot 2 with his weird looking fender flares would have to be the candidate.

A lot of political experts will tell you that the debates are the hardest part of the whole thing. You gotta prep. For us, “prep” consisted of dragging a bunch of Cavaliers out into the parking lot and letting the candidate jump them in front of the news cameras. Bigfoot 2 is an immensely skilled orator. Once he laid out his dream for America, in the format of a midair C16-fuelled thousand-horsepower high-cam bellow, there was no stopping him.

So in conclusion, Senator, I don’t regret what I did on that campaign. We had no way of knowing that President Bigfoot would immediately order North Carolina burned to the ground after a falling-out with Vice President Grave Digger.

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182826774169

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182805764992

Quiet! If we sit here in this parking lot long enough, you can hear it: the telltale rustling of the European Tinworm eating its way through the fenders of this Intrepid.

Once thought only native to Italy, the European Tinworm has migrated to North America, carried there by early Fiats destined for the New World. Its primary habitat is pretty much goddamn everywhere, except for California and Colorado. The European Tinworm primarily consumes steel, especially when paired with road salt and moisture. These worms do not particularly care for soap and water, but let’s be honest with ourselves, you are not washing every nook and cranny of that winter beater every evening.

Its only natural competition is the Asian Tinworm, a species once unique to Japan. In groups, these ferocious eaters can skeletonize a Mazda Protege in five minutes.

There is no known method of mitigating the European Tinworm. In the 1990s, General Motors attempted to make car replicas with plastic bodies. The idea was that these “Saturns” would be able to confuse the Tinworm into not penetrating any further. However, this unnatural selection backfired, and today you can find many Tinworm habitats hidden deep inside the quarter panels of SL1s the world over.

If you see European Tinworm on your family car, do not approach. Take the vehicle to your closest body shop and let their experienced professionals remove it. Under no circumstances should you attempt repair yourself, lest you attract the deadly menace of Driving Around With Unfinished Primer On Your Fenders For Five Years.

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182805764992

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182760763732

We all laughed at my neighbour when she said she didn’t want to put up solar panels because they would suck extra power out of the sun and make it go cold. Well, who’s laughing now?

Truth be told, all of us bought into the physics explanation. Like 1950s doctors telling us a pack of smokes were a fantastic way to relieve stress, those fat cats over at Big Solar Cell played us like a damn fiddle. Back then, we believed it was like the sun was throwing out free candy bars, and all we had to do was hold out a big bucket and fill it up with gratis Oh Henrys.

It turns out that the way things really work is that the sun is like a huge battery. You see, it’s very cold in space, and so just like starting a car in the winter, every time you pull a solar farm worth of goo to watch ESPN, you’re cooling it down an imperceptible amount. We didn’t find it out until after we had all switched away from burning dead dinosaurs, and by then everyone was too tired to go back.

On the plus side, the greenhouse effect was pretty much gone by now. Humanity had reversed the whole of climate change just by running a few particularly aggressive bitcoin miners, but now we needed a way to heat the sun back up again, to get it into its ideal operating range before one of its cells burned out and we needed to take it back to Canadian Tire for a pro-rated warranty replacement.

We all laughed at Professor Jones when he proposed building a fifty-storey-tall electric-powered space heater and pointing it at the sun. Well, who’s laughing now?

https://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182760763732

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182710268511

Let’s face it: pretty much everyone needs to start riding a lot more trains if we want to have any hope of saving the planet. In North America, however, there is a long-ingrained hatred of the humble train. Be it because of inaccurate schedules, iced-over tracks, or getting the side eye from the lady at the Amtrak snack counter, everyone has a complaint.

For me, I felt that it was intolerable to share a train car with other people. If I wanted to interact with other people, I’d live in an apartment building, and also not menacingly wave a Soviet assault carbine out the window of my single-family home whenever the mailman came too close to the front door for comfort. This is why I launched a new initiative to Americanize trains.

Chances are you already own a car. That car is your refuge from a world gone mad. You can roll up the windows, sing along to the radio, and send pornographic snapchats. You can’t do any of these things on a train: someone is going to ask you to stop, or if you’re in Canada, stare disapprovingly at you whenever you aren’t looking directly at them. This is why the core component of our trains is the car. When you want to get on the train, you just drive onto the back of it and hang out until your destination, then drive right off.

Initial testing hasn’t been good. You see, without hard-won driving experience from the demands of city parking, the average North American neither knows how to parallel park nor how to drive in an enclosed space. Combine their inability to stay in a single highway-width lane with the inevitable texting while loading up the ramp, and we had a few accidents so far. My investors are now prototyping to have European valets get into the car and park it for the riders, but in testing, all that has happened is that a guy from France got shot after turning off the radio without consent.

I think that despite these small setbacks, pretty soon Americans of all walks of life will soon be riding the rails. Just don’t build your house anywhere near any sharp turns, because nobody knows how to set their parking brakes in this country.

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182710268511

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182659315496

Have you heard of MTV’s charming little reality television program, Cribs? In it, they send a camera crew to take a look at the interior of a famous person’s house. I liked the idea a lot, but I thought it was a little elitist. A little prescriptive. Doesn’t the average person’s home deserve its time in the spotlight? That is, after all, what our democracy is all about: the working Joe.

And what about so-called “reality” TV? There’s nothing real about it. If we wanted to set up a traditional reality TV program, the houses would be cleaned, gone over by a professional set designer, repainted to get just the right white balance on the cameras. I didn’t want any of that, which is why I rejected Hollywood and went my own way when it came time to start my new program.

Ideally, when you’re on Seat Safety Switch’s Lifestyles, you won’t even know about it. We’ve got a really good locksmith on staff who can get in and out with any of a variety of commonly accessible Chinese pick guns (don’t worry, we don’t show the specific model numbers on camera). Alarms? We have the police on our side, thanks to our tactical hiring of a “home safety consultant.” You’ll return home at the end of the day and have no idea we were ever there, filming your duvet covers and ranking the level of carpet filth against everyone else on your block.

Viewers will see homes in a new and exciting way. Don’t miss a week, because you never know when your place might be next!

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182659315496

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182607949944

Contrary to popular opinion, self-driving car technology actually dates back several decades. In 1939, IBM invented the very first autonomous car. Of course, they had help from the Nazis, as they did for the next fifteen years afterward.

The Hollerith-IBM “very long word full of syllables”-kar celebrated the finest advances of the period. With the chassis starting out as a basic Mercedes of the period, adding the fastest available microprocessors allowed it to take up only two lanes and the same curb weight as a city bus. A driver would simply feed thousands of punch cards into the dashboard in order to program their eventual destination, and you’d be off in science-fiction glory.

There were a lot of problems with the early prototype, as you would expect by the fact that modern German cars are basically incapable of driving themselves in the rain without shitting half a litre of Pentosin into the sewage system out of fear. On the very first test drive, the engineers soon found out that it was incapable of turning in any direction other than right.

Despite this setback, they continued. Surely it could just make three rights and that would be the same as left, they explained during the mandatory-attendance project-status update meetings. However, like future artificial intelligence scientists would soon find out, they hadn’t factored in a few of the environmental issues.

During one particularly fateful test-drive, the car turned into a parking lot, where it encountered a small platoon of soldiers who had been deployed to defend it from saboteurs. Without the room to turn its considerable bulk around, and since IBM engineers had not yet programmed the critical “backing up” process into the computer, it had no other option than to honk at the soldiers in the hope that they would scatter.

Rather than suffer a political blow to the perceived integrity of the project, IBM management made a snap judgment call. Assuming the soldiers to be traitors, they were ordered executed on the spot. For the car’s bravery and incredible insight into the true motivations of human beings, it was promoted to Hitler’s personal motorcar.

The car’s time with the Fuhrer was short-lived, when, testing the next version of the software in the Eagle’s Nest garage, it backed over an oil painting that he was working on in his spare time.

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182607949944

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182555321181

A friend of mine works for the local rural power company. He’s what they call a “troubleshooter,” which means his job is to find trouble and then literally shoot it. Hayseeds stealing copper from substations, raccoons making a nest inside a transformer box, elementary school kids sticking up the linesmen for their lunch money: everything gets the two barrels of customer service.

Being in the “real America,” of course, means that he has to deal with more than a few DUIs. Every so often, a Pontiac Grand Am will slide off the road, clip a power pole and knock out the juice to an entire village. A few hours later, once a human being capable of using telephones has driven past and seen the blacked-out municipality, they get a little trouble call. My buddy goes out there, finds the driver, and puts them down.

It might seem cruel, but think of it from the power company’s perspective: every drunk that serves as a human circuit breaker is probably going to do it again and again and again. That hurts profits. Thirty cents of buckshot is a really small cost to the budget - not even justifying a whole line item - and the cops in the neighbourhood, if they ever even investigate, know that the power company could just as easily arrange for a vehicle strike outside the station during the live airing of The Voice. They know whose frostbitten feet not to step on.

In fact, I can only think of one time in the last couple years that my buddy actually got in trouble. Back in the summer, there was a teen couple who decided to climb the transmission tower out behind the high school for a romantic rendezvous. What you might not know is that these babies are equipped with the finest vibration and sway sensors available, and that a pair of kids rutting on the tower looks a whole lot like the return of Buzbar, the God of Electricity, to punish us for the hubris in which we abused the gift he left us so many centuries ago.

http://seatsafetyswitch.com/post/182555321181