New Skill Unlocked

I really have to hand it to my idiot Facebook friend for posting this incredibly dumb thing.

There’s so much stupidity here, I don’t even know what to do with myself. Clearly, this adult is under the impression that simply posting something will cause money to come his way and that "Chinese Feng Shui" has something to do with it. And then there’s the easy to point out stuff.

There’s the fact that there aren’t five Mondays in October this year. That isn’t all that difficult to confirm. If you’re on Facebook, you’re using a device with an easily accessible calendar. Seriously, look at a calendar. 

If looking at a calendar is too tough for this guy, it would probably be way too much to expect him to know that calendars basically work in a pattern, so Octobers with five Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are actually pretty common. It happened last year and will happen again in 2018, 2029, 2035, 2040, 2046. Interestingly enough, it won’t happen in 2836, which is 823 years from now.

Not only is does this guy’s stupidity such levels that I feel I need to complain about it here, three of his friends liked it too. I’d point out the very obvious, but I don’t want to be "that guy."

Instead I’m "this guy."

But, there’s a silver lining to the madness this has caused me.

For years, I’ve heard about people who, if you tell them any date for any year, they can tell you what day of the week it fell on. I’ve wondered how people can do that. While looking into this just how stupid the above screen grab is, I found something called the Doomsday algorithm. It’s got a pretty stupid name, and it sounds complicated at first, but I think I’ve got it down.

So, this idiot accidentally caused me to learn a completely useless skill I’ve always wanted to learn. Maybe I won’t hide his dumb ass posts from my News Feed.

Then again, he also posted this:

 

Okay clearly, this joke isn’t racist. No one said anything about black people. It just so happens that the joke could be boiled down to "There are three very powerful black people on a plane. The pilot jokes about throwing them out of the plane. Wouldn’t that make hundreds of millions of people happy?" But this joke isn’t racist, so let’s move on.

Why 256 million?
Because (U.S. population) MINUS (Number of votes Obama received in the 2012 election) ALMOST EQUALS 256 million

I’m unsure where it’s written that all feel the same way about the Obamas than they do about Oprah. We’ve already established that this joke isn’t racist, so it can’t be that.

The bigger point — other than the fact that the punchline has one person murdering three people in cold blood — is that this joke posits that there are two kind of people in the U.S.: People who voted for Obama in 2012 and people who would like to see him, his wife and, inexplicably Oprah thrown out of an airplane, several miles above ground.

So according to this joke, no one has ever said the following things:

• "I’m voting for Romney, but I don’t believe that people, in general, should be thrown from planes,"
• "I think both these candidates are two sides of the same coin. I’m voting for a third party candidate … also killing is wrong."

However, the joke is also hinged on the idea that there must have been people who said:

• "I strongly support Obama, but I’m too young to vote. Even though I think he has done remarkable things in his first term and I look forward to seeing what he’ll do for Americans in his second term, I believe he, his wife and some random celebrity should be killed in some horrific way."
• "My 10-month-old has no idea who Obama is, but I’m guessing she’d be cool with that whole plane thing."

Ugh, I very clearly expend way too much thought and energy into the dumbest things.

But on the plus side, I’m now able to figure out that America’s quincentennial will be on a Tuesday, so that’s something.