Lately I've noticed a number of girls wearing largely backless tops
but wearing standard bras nevertheless. What's up with that?
fox23news.com: The grizzly aftermath of an apparent murder-suicide
went unnoticed for hours. So, the victims were eaten by bears?
I was in Grand Junction, Colorado, the first time I encountered one
of these:
It turns out that I didn't need to go that far — there's
another one right near my house, at the corner of San Pablo and Solano.
Which is the corner where I have to cross in order to go to the Albany
farmers' market on Wednesdays, which is therefore where I was standing
when this 13-year-old boy with a diaphanous mustache decided to push
the button over and over: "Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!" I'm not the
sort of person who tends to talk to people in public, but in this case
I felt compelled to put on my fake-helpful voice and point out to him
that it doesn't actually say anything else. (Because, you know, maybe
he thought it would eventually say, "Okay, I give up, go ahead and go
if you're so hepped up about it.")
Elizabeth goes to Starbucks a lot and happened across this on its
website — it's a post about caramel Frappuccinos by someone
billed as Lindsay S.:
Some people who have tried it are saying it's "the best Frappuccino®
blended beverage we've ever had at Starbucks."
Who is she quoting? If that really is a quote and someone actually said
"Frappuccino blended beverage" — even without the
® — isn't that a pretty good sign that it's time to
send in a team of deprogrammers?
The implied backstory behind the addendum here is kind of
depressing:
A pop-up in my Dark Age article
called Astro City's endless references to non-existent stories
"just so much static." Which raises the question, do young people today
even know what static is? If so, when do they encounter it?
Learn the alphabet the Puritan way! Here's a sample!
Now I want to see an episode of Sesame Street that ends, "This
episode has been brought to you by the letter T, the letter X, and the
rapid approach of irrevocable, eternal death."
I may have mentioned that... yeesh, almost 20 years ago now... I had
to go to traffic school, and the teacher made a point that I think sums
up a lot of human experience. He asked people what their traffic-related
pet peeves were, and then he listed two of his own: "One, I hate it when
pedestrians dawdle in the crosswalk. And two, I hate it when drivers rush
me while I'm trying to cross the street!"
The reason I mention this is that, when I'm busy, I sometimes let my email
pile up for days on end and hate getting pestering "did you get my email?"
followups... but, man, I hate it when I send an email and don't get
a reply within, like, half an hour.
Similarly, I hate it when people miss the intent of a post or comment
that is clearly satirical... but I really hate it when someone says, "But
my post was clearly satirical!" when in fact it was not clear at all.
This month's sign that I am old: I've been re-ripping my CDs at
320 kpbs, now that disk space is no longer at a premium, and I
noticed that one of them said "MADE IN WEST GERMANY."
I wondered what ever came of that lawsuit against the Lower Merion
School District, which issued laptops to students and then took and
archived thousands of photos of those students in their bedrooms using
the laptop webcams. It turned out that the case ended with a $610,000
settlement: $185,000 for the students who were spied on, $425,000 for
their lawyer.
In Reno this month a plane crashed into the crowd at an air show;
the death toll was in the double digits. Youtube was classy enough to
precede the Associated Press report on this with a commercial featuring
that "Mayhem" guy.
Joseph Brannigan Lynch in a Yahoo article describes Frances Cobain
as "eerily evoking both of her famous parents simultaneously."
Child looks like parents. Eerie! Fuckin' magnets, how do they work.
msnbc.com cautions readers to avoid satellite wreckage because
"sharp edges could be dangerous." This is good advice! I know
that when giant pieces of space hardware are plummeting toward me,
I sure hope they aren't pointy.
Apparently there have been complaints about what one headline called
"DC Comics' sexed-up reboot of Starfire." But... I read Teen
Titans for a while back in the '80s. Starfire was always
openly sexual and drawn by George Perez as hubba-hubba eye candy. This
new Starfire doesn't seem any more "sexed-up" than the original. The
Starfire in the cartoon was sexed-down.
I read on TPM that some teabaggers were trying to kill the dollar bill
in order to force people to use the highly unpopular dollar coin. This
prompted a split reaction in the comments, with half saying, "Yet another
stupid teabagger idea" and the other half saying, "Actually, even a
stopped clock is right twice a day..." Then came the usual proposals to
kill the penny and round prices to the nearest five cents. But... if
you're going to do that, why not just drop a decimal place altogether?
Instead of things being, e.g., $24.99 or $24.95, they would be $24.9 or,
dare I dream, $25. Why do we need more than a dime's worth of precision?
The one exception I can think of is gasoline, which is generally sold in
larger quantities than those in which it is priced, but note that gas is
currently sold at three decimal places, e.g., $3.799/gallon, so
knocking off a digit still gives gas stations a cent's worth of flexibility.
Of 45 ESPN baseball analysts, the number who predicted that a team
other than the Red Sox would win the AL East:
zero. Doesn't it seem like a lot of the problems in the world today
can be explained by the notion that, whether we're talking about corporate
media empires like ESPN or any other element of the power
structure — financial institutions, governments —
of the people permitted to have a voice, not one out of 45 will
depart from the incorrect conventional wisdom? That a mere 97.8% thinking
inside the same box is actually not enough groupthink for these
entities?
Happened across a comment (not directed at me) that jumped out at me
as the perfect distillation of the so-called "bottom half of the Internet":
that movie is a piece of shit but your reason for disliking it is
retarded just like everything you think
Thanks to all those who suggested books for
my reading list! I think I now have enough to last me through the end of
the '10s.
