- Telling me not to eat at Chick-fil-a because the owners fund groups
fighting against gay rights is like telling me not to club baby seals
because the club manufacturers won't let their workers unionize.
- I was gobsmacked to discover that Berkeley Bowl hiked the price of
those Calabrian peppers I like from $3.49 to <blink>$8.49!</blink>
We live in dystopian times.
- I know this has been a summer of record-breaking heat for most here in
North America. If you'd expect an exception, it'd be up in the Puget Sound
area, which is traditionally the one green spot on a blazing red summer
temperature map… but Victoria BC is just across the way, and
Elizabeth reports that it has been sweltering. Meanwhile, down here in the
Bay Area I've spent much of August wearing a fleece jacket. It is weird to
look at a map of the west coast and see it covered in 96es except for a big
61 over my house.
- My current computer didn't come with a word processor, so after poking
around for a bit I decided to get Open Office. But I didn't start using
it heavily until fairly recently, and I soon found myself very irked by
the fact that (a) it doesn't scroll properly and (b) people have
been complaining about this since at least 2004 and the maintainers refuse
to fix it. I tried to find another free word processor that seemed remotely
usable, but failed. I even installed Microsoft Word 2002 because I
had the CD lying around my apartment, but that hasn't proven to be much
of a solution: not only does it not shade non-breaking characters, but it
overrides my tab settings whenever it thinks making them a different size
would be prettier. Infuriating.
- Wait, was the person who designed Open Office's scrolling the same
person who thought it was a good idea to create web pages that load
new content when you scroll down, inevitably making the page jump
unpredictably and causing you to lose your place? Or if those were by
two different people, can we make them fight to the death or something?
- I was grievously disheartened as the election returns came in and it
became clear that Romney and Ryan were rolling to a big victory…
and relieved beyond words to wake up and realize that it had been a dream,
because my brain had provided none of the usual subconscious signals that
this wasn't really happening. I guess I was set off by that PPP poll
showing Elizabeth Warren losing by five points to Scott Brown, because in
the dream Romney had actually won Massachusetts — commentators
were astonished that the GOP wave had extended so far, and then others
chimed in that, hey, Romney had won the governorship there back in
'02…
…and it occurs to me that while the idea of Mitt Romney as president is seriously traumatic, I lived in Massachusetts for three years while he was governor and I was barely aware of his existence. What a difference an 85.5% Democratic legislature makes, I guess.
- You Kids, Get Off My Lawn department: I totally don't understand the
whole subculture of people who post Youtube videos consisting of a montage
from a TV show with some random pop song on top. I was watching a show,
recognized an actress, went looking for a clip of her on her previous
show, and the search results were just page after page after page of fake
music videos.
- Having well over a thousand files in my Calendar directory was causing
problems, so I sorted them into subdirectories and whipped up a custom 404
page that would automatically reroute people to the Calendar pages' new
addresses. It worked fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, so I figured I
was all set. But I recently discovered that Internet Explorer
won't load custom 404 pages unless they're long enough for its
liking. I had to add a giant comment to the 404 page that does nothing
but pad it out so that IE will acknowledge it. That program can't die
fast enough.
- How did I manage to own Please Please Me for 23 years without
realizing that it's actually pretty good?
- One wrinkle to the Todd Akin story you may have missed: he put up a
web petition and urged visitors to "Tell McCaskill That Your Standing
With Todd Akin!" Someone pointed out that "Your" is incorrect in that
context. So the message was revised to read: "Tell McCaskill That
Your're Standing With Todd Akin!"
- I was reading an article on Wikipedia about German humor. Here is
one of the items under the heading of "Traditional joke themes and forms":
Fritzchen (Little Fritz): A boy of 8-10, who traps adults (usually teachers, parents or policemen) in witty plays of question and answer, exposing their silly or bashful adult ways. Example: Fritzchen and his grandma walk along the pavement. Fritzchen finds a 10 Pfennig coin, but his grandma intervenes: "No, don't pick up anything lying on the ground!" Soon afterwards Fritzchen finds a 10 Mark note, but again his grandma says "No, don't pick up anything lying on the ground!" Soon there is a banana lying on the pavement, grandma steps on it and slips over. "Help me, Fritzchen!", she cries, but Fritzchen says: "No, don't pick up anything lying on the ground!" (Note that because of their being hard to come by, bananas were a highly-craved commodity in East Germany)
Is it just me, or is the parenthetical at the end the funny part?
- So last year I talked about how my car
seemed to be near the end of its lifespan, but then the battery went dead,
and putting in a new battery resolved a bunch of different problems?
Well, it turned out that it resolved the problems for nine months. The
car started acting up again and I took it back down to the shop. The
mechanic said:
- "Time to get a new car"
- "That'll be $529.33"
It sure would have been nice if those statements had been linked by an OR instead of an AND.
- "Time to get a new car"
- I was at a lecture in which the professor was explaining that Andrew
Jackson's policy of Indian removal was reviled in New England due to the
influence of evangelical Christianity there. A hand shot up and the
professor called on its owner. The question: couldn't it be because the
population shift would lead to an unfavorable reapportionment at the next
census?
The aspies are bringing the heat early this semester!
