I Eat Rainbows

We were excavating. That probably doesn’t help you, since we’re always excavating. We’re excavators, it’s what we do.

In this particular case, we were excavating the ruins of some unknown little Egyptian tomb, way out in the middle of nowhere. Well, Egypt, I suppose, but it sure as hell felt like the middle of nowhere. And we kept calling our client back, every week or so, saying we’d found nothing, nothing at all, and he’d say, in his gruff Russian accent, “Ze tomb o Shinkozenhenmen is zere, I know it! Keep zigging.”

Whatever we tried, sonar, line drilling, even density calculations from this one earthquake that we excavated through, it all gave exactly the same result — that there was nothing there, and ze Russian baztard waz crazy. But hey, he paid a lot, and by the hour, so we kept on it.

So that was our first mistake. We never thought to ask how he knew. We just figured was that this was roughly our equivalent of the quiet life.

Have you heard the rumours that the Egyptians were actually incredibly advanced, but most of their technology was lost? It’s true. It’s fucking true.

That’s what we found. A block of earth that was exactly the same density as its surroundings, responded to sound in exactly the same way, and was conveniently in the one place that none of our drill-scans checked, that managed to contain this massive hall.

And I mean massive. Maybe your average skyscraper would have fit in it, if you broke it in half and laid the two halves next to each other.

So, well, we’re not idiots, we’re excavators, so we don’t go in. We call up our client and he gets incredibly excited and says he’ll meet us here in a couple of days and we shouldn’t touch anything.

So, of course, halfway through the bloody first day, Derek, our resident geek, gets all excited (something about null fields), and heads in with a boatload of our equipment. Idiot slipped through my arms like a snake. He managed to say, and I quote, “This stuff is awesome! Is that a – it looks like a fusion device! This is brilliant, it’s like a tribute to Mad Science! I’m going to -”

Here his voice gets all screamy, and the line dies. And the earth drops away from under our feet, dropping us into the hall. There’s the geek’s body, and one of his stupid friends try to run towards him, and gets mowed down by this flying… thing.

So I duck and roll to the side, and I watch. I watch my entire team, one by one, get brave and decide they’re going to make a run for it, and get killed. In a new way each time.

Whoever designed those deaths wanted to see blood. Lots of it.

Finally, the bastard Russian gets here. I shout out a warning to him, and he just grins and waltzes right in, as if he owned the bloody place. And he doesn’t fucking die. He stops when he sees the bodies, and shouts at me, asking if Anyzone elze iz alive. I say no, and cautiously stand.

Then, if you bloody believe it, the bastard laughs maniacally, twirls his moustache, and fucking shoots me in the head.

I am angry today.

I am angry because today I have seen the culmination of something I have been dogged with ever since I learned to think rationally. I am also angry because I could have seen this before, but chose to placate myself instead, thinking “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

I am angry because of an idea.

I have seen this idea in many different guises and forms in my life, from be courteous, have manners to if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything. It’s disguises and cloaks also include being wrong is bad, don’t speak until you are certain, and don’t question authority. A common masquerade is I am older than you, and thus I know more than you, and another common one is respect other people’s beliefs. I am angry that this idea has found its way into our vernacular, and currently goes by the name of politically correct speech.

What this idea boils down to, in all its forms, is don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t speak your mind, you may offend. Don’t try to change anything. Stick to the status quo.

I am angry because this is a horribly wrong, destructive and retarding idea. I am angry at the number of people that I respect who have succumbed to this idea, and I am angry that they are trying to force it upon those who disagree.

I am angry that people feel that change is bad purely because it causes a difference. I am angry that we, a species that prides itself on being intelligent, still have issues with avoiding stagnation.
I am angry that, as a culture, we still haven’t gone beyond the archaic trappings and imaginary friends of religion.

I am angry that a concept such as “social proof” even exists. I am also angry that I have caught myself succumbing to it.

I am going to attempt to combat this, as much as I can. I am going to adopt the motto Being wrong is not a bad thing, but feeling something is wrong and not speaking up terribly, horribly bad.

And no, I will not close that rant tag. I will only be closing it once I feel that this issue has been addressed.

It could be a while.

There ya go. Steve, over at b.lesseverything.com, has given to the public the secret to unlocking the awesome power of jQuery within the also awesome power of Ruby on Rails.
He has an excellent quote which I would like to reproduce in all its excellence here:

[P]rototype now makes me feel like I feel when I am writing c# code, I’ll leave it to your imagination what that feels like.

Go. Read the post. And then chuckle to yourself as you imagine all the new, cool stuff you can do.
Ha… world domination, here I come!

[Edit] Part three of this saga is at jQuery on Rails, pt 3