“Never underestimate the power . . .
. . . of human stupidity.”
For last week’s eclipse, proper eye protection was a must. Well, it was a must if you wanted to see normally afterwards. Staring directly at the sun without eye protection for just a few seconds can cause retinal damage, even during a partial solar eclipse.
Still: despite the public warnings not to look at the eclipse without proper eye protection – or due to counterfeit merchandise – some “fine individuals” just didn’t acquire proper eye protection beforehand. So a few such enterprising people without proper eyewear found a novel way to “protect” their eyes during the eclipse.
They used sunscreen. On their eyeballs.
Reports have come from healthcare professionals in two different states of this abysmal idiocy. And yeah – one of the states was indeed the Granola State, California. (The other state where this was reported by a healthcare professional to have happened was Virginia.)
(sigh) God must love fools; he made so many of them.
(In case you’re wondering: yes, this article’s split title/intro was shamelessly stolen from a great writer – the late Robert A. Heinlein. It’s one of his more famous quotes.)
Category: "Teh Stoopid", Dumbass Bullshit, WTF?, YGBSM!!
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/08/24/joey-bada-cancels-concerts-after-bragging-about-gazing-at-eclipse-without-glasses.html
“This ain’t the first solar eclipse and I’m pretty sure our ancestors ain’t have no fancy eyewear. Also pretty sure they ain’t all go blind.” ~Bada$$
I saw that, too. I hear he’s going to change his stage name to “Joey Dumba$$” now.
I just SMH that he actually used his critical thinking skillz before making a conscious decision to stare at the eclipse.
See the split title/intro of this article for an explanation. (smile)
‘They ain’t all go blind’?????
Real eddicated feller, ain’t he?
He and Jethro Bodine are in a close race.
I think Jethro has him beat hands down.
I tend to use “ain’t” quite a bit in my speech. I’ve also been known to write it here and there. I disagree about it being a “sign of ignorance.” It’s a word used in some accents and dialects of the English language. However, this ignorant tool’s grammar just sucks.
Heck, even the CINC and his wife both looked at the eclipse after removing their glasses. It’s contagious.
Key question is how long. A brief glance (second or two) apparently doesn’t produce lasting damage, while prolonged staring (20+ seconds) does. From the article IDC SARC linked:
My guess is that the POTUS took a 1-2 second glance, but was snapped during same by a MSM photographer with an agenda who was waiting for such an opportunity.
That’s correct, Hondo.
There were cloudy skies most of the morning in my area, making it easier to locate the sun before the eclipse by simply glancing skyward briefly. But the clouds thickened toward the eclipse hour, so I gave up. At the end, still hoping, I made one last try and saw a cloudy hole in the clouds, and managed to get a couple of nice shots of the moon leaving the sun.
Heinlein is right, too. There’s an entire generation of people with abundant levels of Da Stoopid. I doubt they’ll survive an Appoxyclipse.
I was watching the news when he came out and looked up. I heard even a couple people yell out “don’t look at it!” from the crowd. He looked for maybe 2 seconds at most. It turned into a bunch of memes.
I think my favorite was the “so who said not to look up? CNN, Mr President. Fake news!”
As a child I watched a solar eclipse without eye protection and didn’t suffer any damage that I know of. It was a morning in July, 1945, according to Google. Remembered because it was summer and I was out of school. Partial clouds were probably my friend.
I was working outside, and glanced at it…no staring though. 🙂
Obviously Trump’s fault!!
At the “DAILY TIMEWASTER” web site, there’s an interesting photograph of the solar eclipse being viewed from the International Space Station.
http://dailytimewaster.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-eclipse-seen-from-iss.html
Sunscreen on the eyeballs!? Dammit, ouch. All for science though, right?
Someone who would do that would probably also bleach their hair by sticking their head into a bucket of Clorox.
Waiting to read about all the lawsuits of I. M. Anidoit vs The Big Bright Thing in the Sky. Which will also result is some kind of timewasting legislation. JEEZ I have worked for the state too long!
The little Dino’s received the lecture about being dumbasses and NOT to stare at the eclipse. We went online and learned how to make pinhole cameras (and did so). My youngest son, who happens to talk WAY TOO MUCH like his father, said Damn it Dad, we have this, don’t look at the sun or our eyes are gonna fry DUH! 🙂
Hope you all had a great weekend!
The reports are coming out of Virginia and California but I am sure every state had idiots. They just have not made public reports about it.
I can say with 100% certainty that nobody in the SF bay area during the eclipse had any damage to their eyes from staring at it.
False.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Doctors-Treating-People-Who-Viewed-Eclipse-With-Naked-Eye-441357893.html
Stay classy.
Not false. Those were people who had traveled outside the bay area to view it and sought assistance from local doctors after they returned.
They did not view it while in the bay area. It was impossible to view the eclipse in the bay area.
It was far too overcast. Due to the thick overcast sky and the refraction of light through the cloud cover you could not even see where the sun was in the sky. It was the most disappointing celestial event of my lifetime.
Because there was only a 75%-80% eclipse in the area and the thick cloud cover that refracted light evenly throughout the sky the difference in daylight during the eclipse was barely perceivable at all.
My friend put it best when he said;
“Yeah. I was listening to what the birds thought about the eclipse. They said ‘meh’.”
(sneerrrkkkk!) Thank you, Roh-Dog!!
Nope. My statement stands.
It was literally 100% impossible to view the eclipse while in the SF bay area.
I please to aim!
Still laughing!!
“nobody in the SF bay area DURING the eclipse”
Reading is fundamental.
Quit stalking me, you strolling troll.
Still laughing and will continue to laugh.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Clouds-expected-to-block-eclipse-for-much-of-Bay-11946978.php
“With only minutes left before the point of greatest coverage at 10:15 a.m., Michael Kafka, a 49-year-old visitor from Germany, looked out past the Golden Gate Bridge toward San Francisco and then up toward the sky.
“Where is the sun?” he asked anyone who was listening, a bad sign during an eclipse.
There was no sign whatsoever of the sun, let alone the eclipse on the famous span, which was nestled in a cozy white blanket.
The few folks who had come to photograph the celestial event were now looking at live-stream footage on their cell phones.
At 10:15 am, Kafka’s wife, Ursula, was describing to the other disappointed folks at the vista point her experience watching a total eclipse years back in Munich.
“It is really interesting because when the sun gets dark the animals and birds, they all go silent,” she said, as two nearby eclipse hopefuls began packing their gear. “I think they can feel it.”
None of the dozens of tourists who had by now arrived with their clicking cameras and smart phones could feel it nor, it appeared, did any of them care.
“We wouldn’t want to burn our eyes out anyway,” said Anna Auld, 42, of Vancouver, Canada, who was busy lining up a selfie with her husband, Mark, with the bridge in the background.
“I gave it the old college try,” Ruby said as he packed up his cardboard eclipse viewer. “It was fun to try, and I didn’t go blind.”
Though it does appear it was visible South of San Francisco.
And pictures of the eclipse from those areas is being reported by bay area news outlets.
But I regard areas like San Jose as being “Silicon Valley” and not “Bay Area”.
You keep spinning your wheels you’ll eventually get to where you are.
That’s only because they all hve the zombie stare anyway! 😉
It’s all Bushes fault. I do not stare at the sun or eclipses. What is so great about doing that. I caught an indirect flash from a welders rod when we were in the Philly yards dry dock for a refit which was enough for me.
My wife’s twin sister brought her kids and two of our other nieces over (so I spent the day with hot Asian twins–sucks to be me, eh? 🙂 ) to our place for the eclipse. We were too far south for it to go dark this time, but it was still cool to witness. We didn’t have the glasses, so my wife put together some of the pinhole-in-foil devices so we could see the eclipse projected on some paper with our backs to the sun. It was made very clear to the kids not to look at the sun, and my wife and sister-in-law both gave me a bilingual ass-chewing when I glanced upward once (not even at the sun).
Every TV news show was explaining different ways to safely view the eclipse. The radio stations were talking about it. You didn’t need to search the internet, helpful websites were popping up on the browser’s opening page. Anyone in a developed nation who fucked up their eyes has no excuse. Hell, even a lot of technologically-primitive cultures have had some crude-but-effective homemade eye-pro for centuries. They sure as hell know better than to stare at the sun!
I hate lazy reporters. Drill down to the ORIGINAL articles when you steal someone else’s work.
The VA TV station was quoting the SAME nurse that talked to their sister TV station in California.
“Trish Patterson, a nurse at Prestige Urgent Care in Redding, Calif.”
California owns this stupidity. Reporting on it doesn’t mean it happened there.
Everyone knows that people in Va just used half filled whiskey bottles to filter the sunlight.
Not you Hondo, BTW!
This is all anecdotal nonsense.
“California owns the stupidity”?!
California and Virginia were not the only people with idiots during the eclipse. The notion that they were is idiotic.
A quick Google search found anecdotal reports of eclipse related eye injuries in New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, Oregon…
Must’ve all been visitors from California….
Now the kommissar is an expert on ALL the states of the Union…do we bow down now, or wait for the coronation?
A quick Google search will reveal that pretty much every state in the path of the eclipse has anecdotal news reports of eye injuries.
Across the nation the number of injuries was less than expected (probably because the internet and social media allowed for much better social awareness of the risks).
However, Virginia and California were not the only places injuries are being reported.
Only California had morons put sunscreen in their eyes.
Own it…
Only because they were duped by the White,cis, male, homophobic, ruling banking class!
Hashtagresist
Hashtagnotmypresident
Redding unfortunately does have its share of idiot hippies, as demonstrated here.
If California didn’t have so many idiots, my job would be boring.
Two words, THAT GUY.
“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
“We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. ”
Heinlein was not a fan of stupid fucks…
But wouldn’t stupidity be a subjective standard? Or does that question make me part of the problem?
Or do I even really exist?
We’re all just shadows on the wall of the cave/dust in the wind, pick one, or both.
I need a drink.
Well, if ya need a drink . . . yer in good company.
. . . and Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
‘I drink, therefore I am!’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtgKkifJ0Pw
(smile)
Need proof that “Teh Stoopid” is headquartered in berzerkeley commiefonia…
I give you 8 posts from our own resident shining example on what is essentially a weather report from him with only a short description of the cloud formations over that area of Planet Earth needed…
I rest my case…
No, God does not love the stupid people, HE figures that the ‘stupid’ bit will sort them out of the brighter population by getting rid of them. I don’t really mind except we are paying for their medical care. Otherwise, lettem have at it.
Dear God! I once got sunscreen in my eyes by accident. That is an experience I hope I never repeat. I can’t imagine the stupidity of someone doing it on purpose.