Tips on Pedestrian Merging

By admin

Walking around in public places should be a fairly simple process, don’t you think? It would seem like people walking to and fro could all blend into a harmonious flow like some kind of synchronized swimming exhibition. At least that’s my fantasy. Unfortunately, it is far from reality. The problem seems to come from select individuals who apparently have the idea that they are royalty and everyone else should be getting out of their way.

I wish these select individuals were few, but the truth is they are everywhere out there. Just as too many cooks spoil the pot, too many self-appointed kings create major jams on the sidewalks of busy city streets. As bad as they are, they are only part of the problem. Throw in the huge segment of society that are evidently living their lives in an oblivious fog and you really have some serious negotiating to do anytime there are people between you and your destination.

It blows my mind. Either I am in somebody’s way or they are in my way. I don’t know what the self-appointed kings do when they encounter an oblivious human obstacle, as they always seem ready to execute me - and I am courteously trying to yield to them! Most of the time, that is. Once in a while you run across someone who is so arrogant you just have to get in their way on purpose to try and bring them down to earth a little.

Mama Riah and I were on a cruise recently and took some excursions which involved bus tours. Now everyone in America knows how to properly exit a plane, right? You know the people in the row in front of you also need to exit so you wait your turn and exit after them. Apparently this common etiquette doesn’t extend to tour busses. The people in the rows behind us jammed the isles and forced us to sit there until they had all passed, as if the protocol is last row exits first or something. It was like driving in Boston.

With that in mind, here are some pedestrian merging tips:

• Walking in a crowd is like driving - you don’t just stop on a whim as people behind you will run into you.

• Remember that you are not the center of the universe.

• Traffic flows on the right in America. This goes for walking as well as driving.

• The sidewalk was not invented just for you, we all are supposed to get to use it.

• People in front of you might turn right or left at any moment.

• When everyone needs to go to the same place, going in the current order that you are arranged makes the most sense.

• You really are not more important than everybody else.

• To receive courtesy you might want to try extending it once in a while.

Papa Riah

Technorati Tags: idiots, pedestrians, traffic

How to Be a Good Liar

By admin

Ever wonder if people can tell when you are lying? If it’s obvious because it’s whenever your lips are moving, I probably can’t help you. But if you really want to know the secrets of being a good liar keep reading. This is something that a majority of the population does well, so why not you? Why should you be burdened with always telling the awful, ugly truth? Spruce up your conversation with a few good lies instead. People will think you are a lot cooler than you know you are deep down.

There are several reasons why people lie. The first is that their profession requires it. Did you ever see that episode of The Twilight Zone where the used car salesman had the haunted car that caused the owner to always tell the truth? He suddenly couldn’t make a living. The politician who was considering buying it (but found out about this particular glitch) couldn’t take it because his career would be finished as well. If you must lie in order to do your job effectively, you had better be good at it - or else find another profession.

A more popular reason is just by habit. At some point a person starts lying and then it just becomes routine. I once worked with a guy who prided himself on it. He wouldn’t tell the truth to a customer under any circumstances as that would have been beneath him. He liked to show off the elaborate lies he would tell to his coworkers. Many of them were very creative, and he used to love it a few days later when the angry customer called back - so he could lie even more. This guy was good.

Another friend of mine exaggerates habitually. When you are having a beer with him and he starts telling anecdotes from his life’s experiences, you know to automatically reduce whatever he says by about 40%. Even he realizes that this habit from his youth has caused everyone who knows him to take his stories with a grain of salt. But he can’t do anything about it. It’s too late. If he started reporting all his life’s experiences accurately now, everyone would still reduce them by 40%. So in order to tell the truth he actually must keep exaggerating.

What about white lies? Those are lies we tell to spare other people’s feelings. That is, until they find out about it. Then they are usually more upset at you over the lie then they would have been if you just told the truth originally.

Then are the really big lies that seem absolutely necessary - the ones that save your skin. If you don’t tell them you are in really big trouble. Some classic examples include President Richard Nixon and, more recently, Martha Stewart. They both had to lie facing some very embarrassing circumstances. Interestingly, they both later discovered that the trouble they got in to for the lie was significantly worse than the trouble they would have gotten into if they just fessed up in the first place. Who’da thunk?

The biggest problem with lying is the necessity of remembering your previous lies. This is a lot tougher then simply accessing your actual memories. Who knows what you said to somebody if you are in the habit of lying? Therefore it is best not to discuss any previous topic of conversation with the same person ever again, just to be safe. The exception would be if it’s one of your standard lies that you tell to everybody - then you are probably OK.

The reality is that the term good liar is an oxymoron. There is no good liar. You cannot become a good liar. You can only be good by not lying. No matter how tempting it is, you will become a much more respected person (by everyone you encounter) if you always are truthful in everything. It can be difficult at times, because this runs counter-intuitive to our human nature. But it’s true. You respect people who are truthful and want nothing to do with liars, right? Everyone else is the same way. Get into the truth habit. Soon it will become second nature to you and won’t require a conscious effort. Your life will be better as a result. That’s a promise.

Papa Riah

Technorati Tags: liar, martha stewart, society

Lesbians Making Out on House

By admin

Papa Riah doesn’t watch much prime-time television. I have tried and tried and tried, but there just isn’t much there that is even vaguely interesting to me. I’d rather watch the same old movie on AMC again that I’ve seen 74 times. However there is one show I like and that is House. Every Saturday night when Mama Riah and I get back from going out to dinner somewhere we plop ourselves down and watch our Tivo’d episode of House, rerun or not.

This week the show decided to push the envelope and opened with a steamy lesbian sex scene, involving one of the regular cast members (this season anyway). It was definitely the most risque such material that has ever been aired on network television, to date. And on my favorite program, nonetheless! They did it in such a way that it fit right in with the dark nature of the show - so unless you were really paying attention to what just happened, you probably wouldn’t notice or even think twice about it.

So they slipped one in on us, and as a result have effectively paved the way for all manner of homosexual sex scenes on prime-time television. That’s what just happened. You don’t see male homosexual sex scenes on TV yet because that is a much more graphic connotation. Men actually possess the tools to… um… violate each other, while female homosexual sex (for lack of a better word) seems like a harmless little vice by comparison. At least that’s how society sees it at the moment.

Twenty years ago no way would this have flown. Fifty years ago you’d have a hard time finding something this radical in a porno movie. Seriously! Today it’s on regular network prime-time television. Give it twenty more years and the way things are going you can expect hardcore male-homosexual sex scenes on Sesame Street. Sure, you laugh at that now. But the notion of this last episode of House airing anywhere outside of cable TV was unfathomable just twenty years ago. You cannot deny the direction in which things are headed, and unless something happens to stop it that’s where we are going.

And nothing will probably happen to stop it because the bottom line is nobody cares. Heck even I don’t really care that much about it, and that’s part of what is so interesting. Watching two women make out is uncomfortable to me, as it is to most of you normal people who haven’t yet been converted into total perverts. But we sit there and pretend it isn’t, because we are conforming to the progress (for lack of a better word) of our culture around us. So even Papa Riah is being gradually lulled into submission by the forces that are slowly but surely degrading our society.

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water he will immediately jump out. But if you put him in a pot of room-temperature water and turn the heat on underneath, he will stay in there and slowly boil to death. We are all frogs in a pot of water folks, and the heat has been turned up. Anybody notice?

Papa Riah

PS. If you don’t think society is degrading fast just take a look at the Google ads which are displaying on this page.  You know Google doesn’t allow ads for gambling-related products? So what gives with this stuff?

Technorati Tags: homosexual, house, society, television