This week’s Customer comes from Getting a Word in Edgewise.

Lehman Brother CEO Dick Fuld was punched in the face by another Lehman Bros. employee, who apparently knocked him out cold while he was running on the treadmill at the company gym. I only wish I had been there to do it myself.

It amazes me. After completely gutting their companies, these guys still actually think they deserve huge payouts and bonuses. And they’re getting them! None of them will be eating cat food and ketchup soup in their retirement. If there was any justice in the world, they most certainly would be.

First we got bail-out fever for bad debt created from bad mortgages. Now we’re going to start buying the short-term Commercial Paper so that “qualified” companies can have operating capital. And don’t expect McCain or Obama to do anything but keep things the same or worse once they’re in office. Go ahead and dream of a day when “hope”, “change,” and all the other words they bandy about have meaning, but don’t believe that day will come anytime soon.

I wonder if these free-market, I’ll-die-before-letting-anyone-but-me-take-a-government-handout guys will ever stop bribing our political leaders into letting them belly up to the money trough. My guess is: Not until we make them. And unfortunately, we’re going to be too busy ourselves for a long, long time, paying off this @$#%#$! debt that their buddies so cheerfully saddled us and our children with.

And with that, back to the salt mine…

This week’s Customer comes from The Inadvertent Thief.

According to Wikipedia:

Chindōgu (珍道具, Chindōgu^?) is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindōgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindōgu are sometimes described as ‘unuseless’ – that is, they cannot be regarded as ‘useless’ in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called ‘useful’.

This is the same spirit that inspires me to create my Friday comics, Products that Never Made It. While mine are entirely fictional, however, there are inventors out there taking their unuseless ideas and making fully “functional” prototypes. Just check out these creations of Chindōgu master Kenji Kawakami.

Those shoe umbrellas are awesome!

This week’s Customer comes from Will Somebody Please Think Of The Pr0n.

I’m going to preempt Products that Never Made It so I can rant about Proposition 8.

DON’T VOTE FOR IT!

Okay, that was simple, but let’s unpack some of the reasons why you shouldn’t vote for it, especially if you are a Christian.

• You can’t legislate morality. It doesn’t work. Moreover, it leads down a dangerous path that the world’s already gotten plenty of experience walking. For instance, during the debate about slavery, many of the best theological minds of the day “found” that the practice of slavery was not only NOT condemned, but actually encouraged, by the Bible. Frankly, you can read a lot into the Bible — something that wasn’t lost on the Nazis — and this is why not only the Bible is holy to Christians, but also our constantly evolving understanding of it. Another reason that you can’t legislate morality is that it means different things to different people. How would Protestants feel if the Catholics started writing their beliefs into the law? To paraphrase a friend of mine, “Do you really want the Mormons deciding what is or isn’t moral for you? The people who brought you plural marriage and magic underwear? Really?” There is nothing wrong with being either Catholic or Mormon; but there is something wrong with forcing others to believe as you do.
• The separation of church and state is not to be messed with. If I need to go further into this to convince you, then email me, but the fact is that despite our constitution being influenced and written by Christians, the founding fathers definitely did not want the church any where near the state. You can point to our money and pledge all you like, but the history of how those came about only supports my point and I would strongly encourage you to look it up.
• Speaking of the law, it does mandate that we should treat each other equally. An affront to one of us is an affront to all of us. We are a corporate body in secular life in this country, just as we are in a corporate body with our brothers and sisters at church. This goes along with reason #2. However, equal treatment under the law does mean exactly that. In WWII we interned thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans, to our great shame. Those who were around to see that should’ve asked themselves a very simple question, “When they come for me what will I do?” By guarding equal protection for others, we guard it for ourselves.
• Is this really even an issue or is it being used to manipulate you by challenging your faith? I have yet to meet one person or a group who could explain in no uncertain terms how same sex marriage damages the institution of marriage as a whole. Not one that holds any water. I’m sure there are lots of studies by Pat Robertson’s university or the American Family Association that massage the data until they get the results that they’re after, but as for actual scientific results — there are none that do not, in fact, support the opposite — that it’s beneficial to society and marriage to have same sex marriage be legal. Much like the abortion debate, same sex marriage has been co-opted for use as a political tool to manipulate you into making a disastrous choice for the very beliefs that you feel so strongly about. For instance, under Clinton, safe, legal and rare policy abortion went down. But under Bush II, whose policies focus on stopping the practice of something they can’t change overtly, abortion rates have gone way up. This is not a coincidence. Ideology does harm when applied inappropriately to civic life.
• Beware of those who would use distortions and doomsday scenarios to convince you. In a California where same-sex marriage is legal, churches will not be required to perform unions they find objectionable. On that point, the California constitution and Supreme Court are certain, and so should you be. No Church will lose or endanger its tax exempt status by refusing to perform a marriage they do not believe in. In a California where same-sex marriage is legal, schools will not and cannot be forced to teach about same-sex marriage unless the community and school board makes that happen, and even then the state has very strong protections for parents who wish their children to not attend those classes. These lies are scare tactics being used in television, radio and print ads as well as viral email and internet campaigns to scare you into voting for Proposition 8. If you have to lie to win your argument, you are clearly in the wrong. They ARE lying and they ARE wrong.
• Christ wasn’t a hater. If you don’t think any of my other arguments hold any water I have saved the best for last. Christ had a very distinct answer to sin, and regardless of if you think that homosexuality is a choice or if you’re born a homosexual, Christ’s answer is the same. It is His purview to evaluate and punish sinful behavior — and it is our purview to love one another and do our best to live together in a way that honors what He has done for us. If you are a Christian and reading this, then please remember the woman who was to be stoned. Christ advised others to not pick up stones and then didn’t even pick one up Himself, but chose instead to forgive. That is a powerful message for all of us.

I hope that this little bit of browbeating clarifies the situation for anyone who has been swayed by the lies of the current pro-Prop 8 campaign, and gives encouragement to the rest of you out there.

This week’s Customer comes from Sometimes, Even Yoda Isn’t Enough.

This week’s Customer comes from He Uses the Google.