Gabriel on Gilligan’s Island

On my walk home tonight/today/whatever you want to call pitch blackness at 7:00 PM I saw a pizza delivery boy. He got out of his beat down vehicle (I desperately need my license) and went to deliver the pizza to a welcoming home. I smelled the Papa Johns pizza (that I don’t care that much for) and it smelled pretty decent. Then I caught the smell of some pork product and it turned me off of the pizza. After that I wondered what would happen if I were trapped on an island and all I could eat was pork product pizza. I’d be like Lisa on that episode of the Simpsons when they found a boar and ate it, but she was vegetarian and had to lick slime off of a rock. That amused me for a little while and then my mind slowly drifted to the concept of being trapped on a desert island. That is when Gilligan’s Island popped into my head.

I love that show. It is amazing. But there are several things I find wrong with the show. No, not the distinct lack of Black people (lots of shows were good back then that had no Black people…much like the first two seasons of OTH…ASHLYN!), but just the questions in the show that no one (I) asked. So here goes, what is wrong with Gilligan’s Island.

Gilligan: Why did he survive until the end of the series? I mean besides the fact that his name was in the title of the show. He definitely should have been beaten and locked in a cage for how many times he screwed up their opportunities to get off of the island. The only logical thing that makes sense is that he screwed this up on purpose in hopes of losing his virginity while on the island because in the real world he was too much of a screw up to trick some unsuspecting female into dropping them drawz. Well…that and myspace hadn’t been invented yet.

The Skipper: Why was he still fat (I swear in one season he was actually fatter) if he was on an island where the only thing he ate was coconut products and fruit? That doesn’t make sense. He was on a desert island and it seemed like he was on a dessert island. I’m fat, if I went to an island with nothing to eat but organic all natural products I would stake my best friend’s first born son on my fat behind losing massive amounts of weight and having my beard become even more magnificent.

FIGURE 51.1: What I would look like if I was on a desert island.

Thurston Howell III and gold-digging wife: These people were just obnoxious douchebags. It was like if they came from an elitist society where he was born into money and she slept her way into money. Anyway, all they did was talk about how they were rich and count their money on the island. I find it funny that all those suitcases of money that they had were useless because they were on an island that hadn’t been turned into a luxury resort (during the original run of the series pre-the made for TV movies.) Their suitcases full of money were reminiscent of the value that the American dollar is in relation to other superpower currency. Also, I found it odd that a rich old White guy was on a three hour tour with a female that was his actual wife. In real life, that crap wouldn’t have gone down. Thurston would have been plowing through a plethora of snowbunnies (and a few coco puffs to cure that itch I know he had from the stories of his slave owning grand pappy.)

FIGURE 51.2: The person he would have been with in real life…had she been alive.

The Professor: This guy was like friggin’ MacGyver, except he wasn’t because my dude RDA would have figured out a way off that floating dirt mound…or he would have called Col. Carter to help him out a little bit. But aside from the Stargate references, what did the professor profess? Was he a professor of nuclear physics? Of chemistry? Of biology? Because he has displayed a mastery of all of the above. Maybe the professor was just some douchebag that had a lot of books at his disposal and really wasn’t a professor of anything. Seriously though, that guy was smart. Those douches on the trip were lucky to have a thinker of his caliber on that cursed boat. Imagine if some hippie that wanted to see the ocean had bought his ticket before the professor. Odds are that hippie guy probably would have been a graduate student in a social science like Sociology. Can you imagine if the professor tried to ‘help’ the others on the island with a BA in Sociology?

“Hey professor, why am I getting scurvy?”
“Oh, that’s easy Gilligan, it has to do with the strain that society has placed upon your shoulders.”
“Wow, professor, that sounds like a crock of crap,”
“No, it isn’t. Durkheim feels than anomie affects everyone in a society where the division of labor isn’t as it should be.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you should do my chores this week”
“Hey professor…”
“What Gilligan”
“Lick my balls”.

Ginger vs. Mary Ann: Mary Ann wins. Ginger was a red headed slut with barely any body shape and a very pale face. She was high maintanence and had a diva like attitude. It would be like dating Beyonce except without having a rich, famous, and attractive girlfriend. I mean staying on the island would be enough to force you to want to give it to Ginger, but that’s pretty much it. Mary Ann on the other hand was down to earth, nicer, could cook, was tanned AND thick, and wore better clothes. I’d let Mary Ann bare some of my mullato children. Every man on that island was dumb as crap for not trying to get with her. Plus from one of the episodes I remember she was single BEFORE the island. Dudes are dumb.

And thus concludes my three hour ramble.

Gabriel on Degrees

Anyone of any color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation can benefit from college if they choose to do so. But they should save their (or their parents) time and money if they end up graduating with a degree that is useless. Contrary to popular romanticized belief college is about earning a sheet of paper that says ‘hire me because I have <fill in the blank> skills/abilities’ in the goal that every American secretly desires (whether they know it or not) which is to make money. Earning degrees in things that won’t make you money, or piggyback you into a graduate/professional school that will make you money are useless. People might know these degrees when they hear them because as soon as the degree is pictured one has a difficult time trying to place an occupation/career to said degree. Well my friends (borrowed from the maverick), Gabriel is here to school you on which degrees you should be wary of before choosing them. This won’t be an exhaustive list, but just things that I have the most experience in seeing in my friends, acquaintances, enemies, etc.

ENGLISH: Why on earth would anyone want a degree in this? Think about it, would you be impressed if someone got a degree in Spanish if they were from Mexico? Odds are, you’d just look at them and question why they didn’t spend their time getting a degree that mattered. It is the same way with English degrees. I might have a personal gripe against English because every English class I have taken in college I earned a C. English is stupid, if you were born in America you should know it. The only people I am impressed with that have degrees in English are people that are from other countries. Only in America.

COMMUNICATIONS (excluding telecom which is respectable in my book): The school I attend has one of the best communications departments in the country (or so I was told.) Given this, I give them respect in the level of difficulty of communications. That is until I hear about or see one of the many athletes on television (or from my personal experiences) that major in communications. The problem isn’t that they major in communications. The problem is that communications is one of the go to majors for athletes. Most athletes are placed (or choose, however it works) into majors that require little or no work so that they can focus on their athletics while still keeping the graduation rate high enough to recruit more athletes. The cycle perpetuates itself and eventually a school can have a top notch program that gets taken over by people only in school because they can run fast or throw a ball. These degrees will be put to good use when said athletes end up working at a car dealership because they are an alumnus of said school.

SOCIOLOGY (Yay me!): This falls under the same umbrella as communications as a go to major/course load for athletes. For non athletes the typical sociology major is someone who was in a more challenging major and either didn’t feel like rising to the challenge, or someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life so they chose something they liked. This is quite possibly the biggest mistake one can make. While sociology is interesting, it isn’t enough to warrant as a major. People that major in sociology are douchebag frat boys, white people with dreadlocks, douchebag athletes, douchebag feminists, or douchebag pseudo black nationalists that claim that pennies are a form of symbolic racism because they are useless and brown. People majoring in sociology end up graduating and working for a crappy non profit for the rest of their lives or living in a van down by the river (because Karl Marx said that money was evil and they believed him.)

FIGURE 46.1: Sociology Major

ETHNIC/MINORITY STUDIES: So many crappy and useless things fall under the umbrella of these majors. African American Studies (and other fancy terms for Black people in society), Gender and Womyn Studies, Islamic Studies, blah blah blah. They all suck. At least with sociology and other social science degrees one can end up working for their choice of non-profits. AAS degrees end up working for taco bell or the NAACP. GWS degrees end up working for the violence and suicide prevention hotlines that make 6.75 an hour plus commission. Islamic Studies degrees get put on a list by the government making travel to other countries very difficult.

FIGURE 46.2: Makes less than I do with her college degree.

ECONOMICS: This major is like the sociology of the business world. All these theories and social principles that apply to money are learned, but really if the people who truly cared about money went to the right degree they would be in accounting or business or marketing…econ pisses me off because the people that major in economics actually feel that they are better than sociology majors. You aren’t you douches… you’re just in a different college.

There are several other majors I didn’t touch upon like Anthropology, Political Science, Environmental Studies (which would need its own separate post for me to rant about the sheer idocracy of tax payer dollars going to waste by offering this in public institutions…) and Geography to name a few, but I’m too tired and I have to do Spanish.

DISCLAIMER: People obtaining degrees to become teachers or going into law school, medical school, graduate school (to obtain PhDs) or anything else similar to these are exempt. The world needs more truly educated people…and a PhD is hard no matter what you get it in. Except gym…I don’t know what the difference between that and a BA in gym would be. Yes the gym degrees do exist. I know someone with a gym degree.

Gabriel on Statistics

Just because people can quote three numbers and try to relate that to life itself doesn’t mean that they are educated, or scholarly, or even good at math. In fact it is quite the opposite. Statistics used in everyday commonplace should be taken with a grain of salt. For those who are unlearned or uneducated about the truths of this world statistics are a way to further keep people in the dark about things that really matter. Statistics are used and quoted by people who know nothing about mathematical or scientific procedure.

People that you usually see quoting statistics about random things are…you guessed it! White people! Well, not all White people, but the dumb/ignorant ones. I have never seen a white person in ANY of my math classes quote statistics or skewed facts and figures like I have seen in my sociology and other social science classes. The reason is that in math and mathematical science classes ALL people know better than to foolishly blast numbers around because odds are that other people can logically prove the fallacies in their crap. However, in social science classes most people are there because they have a deep rooted fear (read inability to do math for various reasons) or distain for math. Thus they tend to take facts and figures and accept them as true without doing any research on the matter. For example.

Chaz: Yeah, like I was reading that like 51% of all Black men are in jail.
Bethany: Really?
Chaz: Yeah, I was on the internet and saw that Black men were 40% more likely to get arrested. About one in every ten White guys are locked up, so I did some math. Fangled up some statistics with that SOC 303 class I took.
Bethany: Wow, Chaz! You’re (in her mind she spells it ‘your’) so smart!
Chaz: Cheah…that’s how I roll.

FIGURE 42.1: Chaz…

In case you didn’t understand the example, I’ll enlighten. All of the stats in that example were made up by me on the spot. The fifty-one percent statistic was plain wrong. If 10% of all white men were in jail (which they aren’t) then 40% more than that would not be 51% (yes I added this incorrectly to show the ignorance of Chaz when it comes to simple algebraic methods such as addition), percentages don’t work that way. Secondly, the arrested rate doesn’t equate to the number of people that actually get incarcerated. So, one can see how Chaz and Bethany are incorrect douchebags who live off their parents.

But my purpose of this blog isn’t to blast everyone who is horrid at mathematics. It is because the AP did some research (most likely faulty) on the attitudes of Black people about White people and vice versa. Apparently most of the world was shocked to realize that even some (about a third) liberal voting democrats have a tendency to think of Black people as “lazy”, “violent” and responsible for their own troubles. Well…I wasn’t surprised. And quite frankly, I don’t care about their stupid “research”. Odds are the research was done by someone without a degree in any branch of hard science. Probably not even a social science major. It was most likely done by some guy with a 6 year bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Idaho that smoked with Sarah Palin. I’m all for hating on the “palefaces” (as one of my roommates Cappy so eloquently phrases them), but at least have a moderate cause. Slavery, sure. Jim Crow, sure. Viacom, most definitely. Taking our women, in the past yeah, now…who cares. Skewed, incorrectly done research that most socially aware people knew anyway, nah.

 

FIGURE 42.2: What Black people (and folks in general) should be really pissed about.

 

My thinking is that if Black people are in a fuss about this research it does three things:

1. Shows that Black people (outside of those brothers and sisters dating snowbunnies and huskies) still care waaaaaaay too much about what White people think about them. If Black people had conducted the survey on themselves yielding the same results the researchers would have been called “Bill Cosby a** n*****” and Black folk would have gone on about their day.
   
2. It gives White people credibility to believe that everything done by faulty research has strength and validity. “That one survey they did was accepted, so it must be right…thus all other surveys done have to be correct too.”
   
3. It hurts the hundreds of years of racial harmony (or as close as we are to that) that is currently in place making it more difficult for people like my other roommate to get his moolatè making swirl on.
   

In conclusion, I will leave you all with a wise piece of advice that the wall of greatness bestowed upon my friends and I during our trip to China. “76 % of all statistics are made up on the spot.”