The Schlicken Empire

The Elson Gallery

As I was browsing the internet this afternoon, I came across a Monty Python sketch about arguing. It peaked my interest because I, myself, enjoy arguing. Check out the video below.

I’m sure you laughed as much as I did, or at least thought of someone who enjoys arguing enough that you could see them paying to do so. I often times have the same problem the actor in the sketch had. People don’t want to argue with me. They will avoid it entirely. Maybe it’s because they know they will lose, or maybe because they know I won’t shut up even if I lose. Either way I often hear the sarcastic words, “You’re right.” Then the argument ends with neither one of us convinced and me irritated.

I do, however, see how my arguments can be annoying. I tend to argue over topics multiple times, knowing full well I will never convert my listener. Below is one of my favorite arguments.

Putting the toilet seat down.
If you’re a woman, you’re probably asking yourself, what’s there to argue, it goes down. I tend to disagree and not so much on weather it should go up or down but why it should. Most woman use the classic argument that if the seat’s left up they will fall into it when they go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. To me, this is ridiculous. I mean I’ve often times used the bathroom at night and I’ve never fallen in. My wife hates it when I say that.

I would be very interested in hearing some of your favorite arguments. Leave a comment if you think it’s a good one.

The real reason I posted this, besides the great video, was to promote a new website called convinceme.net. It’s a site for arguers. They have many topics and several different formats. The site’s been up for less than a year and I know all new members would be welcome.

The journey began as I was sitting in my kitchen watching a static filled show on CBS. I just moved to the town I’m in and I haven’t had the time or the money to get cable, so I’m stuck with the bunny ears. Also, lucky for me, my apartment is cinder block so my TV antenna hardly works at all. I get one channel that’s worth watching and as I watched Dr. Phil explain to me about his new 2007 format and how it was going to be more intense, I thought to myself, “what am I going to do tonight.”

I’m a football man. I love it, breathe it, drink it. I need it to survive. I was able to watch a little, Sunday, on my TV and Saturday I spent the day at local stores watching College Football. I shuffled between BestBuy, sportsbars, and restaurants, the later being difficult to do without actually spending money. I got many looks as I sipped my tap water and ate the free peanuts.

So, Monday afternoon, I decided to see if there was a way to watch cable TV at my apartment. I do have an internet connection and although it’s only DSL it works fine enough for my needs. With that internet connection I planned on watching Monday Night Football later that evening. I was pretty sure that I would find it somewhere. I’m a firm believer that anything can be found on the internet. If you haven’t found it yet, it’s most likely because you haven’t looked hard enough. That said, I started to look for ESPN. It ended up being a very long tedious journey filled with lots of B.S. sites, spam sites, scam sites, and more.

First, I knew ESPN 360 was out because it’s not offered in my area. ESPN, smartly, claims it’s the providers fault, therefore they get no complaints. I think that’s B.S.

Second, I went to Google (the internet search god) and searched p2p tv streaming. P2P streaming is the way the majority of TV is provided over the internet. The hosts rely on individuals to upload content so as to sidestep any legal issues. I searched all sites that advertised no downloads. I didn’t want to download software if I didn’t have to.
This option looked promising as I found several sites claiming to offer ESPN like wwitv, channel king, & world tv pc. Most, however, had broken links and the rest had ESPN from other countries, primarily China.

Third, I continued on the p2p streaming theme but I looked at ones with a program to download. TVU (pictured right) & Sopcast were the two most highly recommended sites. I downloaded and tried both and although they both had several good shows including: Comedy Central, CBS, Spike TV, and Nickelodeon; neither had ESPN from the U.S. From everything I was able to figure out, TVU use to have ESPN and other channels but the networks recently started making them take the content off.

By this time the game had already started and I had wasted my afternoon searching for a lost cause. My only option now was to prepare for the future so I looked into TV place shifters. They are devices you buy that send a personal TV stream over the internet. The only negative to this is you actually have to buy the product and have a cable subscription somewhere. I immediately thought of my parents. The two shifters that I found were HAVA and Sling Media (pictured left). The latter can even be bought in your local Bestbuy and other stores.

So armed with this new information and a little down from my inability to bypass corporate America I decided to get on TVU again and watch some of the channels it had. The first one I went to was CBS. Even though I have CBS here I wanted to see if they played the same content. When it popped up I was surprised to see football. At first I groaned thinking they must be playing Sunday’s football game but at a closer look I realized it was the Monday night football game on ESPN. I was dumb founded. Could it really be true?

Well, it was true. I was able to watch the last 3 quarters of Monday Night Football last night on TVU. It was on the CBS channel. I’m not sure if this will be available next week, but goodness knows I’ll be at my computer to find out.

It’s been a few days since the clear and utter embarrassment of Miss Teen South Carolina. We here at Schlicken have up until now resisted the urge to comment up to this point. But in the interest of our future children and since the main contributer currently has two, we had no other choice but to make sure everyone is fully aware of how ridiculous the teen beauty queen sounded. Before we go on, watch the video.

Every time we watch this display we find ourselves a small, tinsy bit dumber. Miss Teen South Carolina made a huge blunder by not fully preparing herself for possible questions. We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say maybe she doesn’t do well off the cuff but that’s still no excuse for not having put the time and effort into studying possible questions. She was all over the place with her answer and with incoherent thought at that. Below is a graphic that tracks her thoughts.

One good thing did come out of this horrible incident and that is that kids, in the U.S., should be forced to study and get good grades and anytime they start to argue, all we have to do is pull out this video.
You don’t want to study you say. You want to go to your friends house and have fun. Well watch this.
No dady not the video.
Yes the video.
I’m sorry I’ll study.
Enough Said.

America might still have a chance.

A couple of day ago I ranted on the duplicate post issue within stumbleupon. The issue sparked a lively debate between the different facets of stumbleupon users. Many agreed with my post and my call for a system to control it. There were also some who didn’t see it as an issue at all and even others who criticized me for posting a duplicate post myself.

After reading the comments and suggestions from many readers I decided I would contact Stumbleupon myself and see if this recent eBay purchase had any plans.

They responded to my request quickly and said the following:

Thanks for contacting us.
The engineers have been working on a solution for this problem, and we have something in test right now!
Hopefully, we will be ready to release it for wider use very soon.

Regards,
Barry Conway
barry-feedback@stumbleupon.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com

So there you have it. Stumbleupon does recognize the problem and they are actively pursing a solution. That’s why stumbleupon is the best way to surf the internet. To them, it’s about the people.