Are we really ready to revisit 2020? Here goes...

• Tonight's Doctor Who ["Orphan 55"] makes a great argument for why we should listen to the scientists about climate change! As opposed to the screenwriters, directors, and set designers...
• Pro tip: There is already a scroll bar on the right side of the browser window. When you add a second scroll bar to the top of your page, gamers will wonder why their health is increasing.
• I enjoyed Netflix's "Lost in Space," but it's hard not to notice that literally all of the colonizers' problems stem from unapologetically stealing stuff they had no right to in the first place. Will makes a lot of good points, but he stops short of asking, "Why don't we just give back what we stole and then ask for help?"
  Also, the thing about gas giant planets is that they are by definition bigger than Earth, not smaller, and also generally not hanging out conveniently close to another planet. Why didn't they call the rocky planet a moon if it's going to be a stone's throw from a gas planet? That whole side plot had me hitting my head against the wall. But otherwise it was pretty consistent for a TV show...
• Gee, CenturyLink, thanks for sending me an email at 11:37 yesterday (which I just now saw) notifying me that our internet service would be disconnected 30 days from the failed payment on 1/24. As it happens, you actually disconnected it around 9am yesterday, and I had new payment in place before you sent the email, so literally everything about that email is wrong. I might have to frame it.
• TFW the gas pump says "receipt printing," so you hold out your hand for the receipt but the printer just goes PBBBBBBBBBBBTHT right into your hand. I assume the reason for the noise was that there was no paper. But if I made a noise like that I would really want there to be paper.
• Blu-ray players: I can't play this DVD, it's region 2 and I'm a region 1 player.
  Mac & Windows: If you wanted to play region 2 discs, you should have told me you lived in the UK, but since you said you don't, I won't play this disc for you even though I can.
  Ubuntu: This disc appears to be encrypted. Have you tried installing this decryption software? Let me walk you through it.
• Calling this (02/02/2020) "palindrome day" is too imprecise. At 16:27:31 UTC, the Unix timestamp was 1580660851.
• Did you hear about the guy who won a karate competition?
  He went home empty handed.
• Austin could still be nice if it weren't for all the damn cars.
• The other day I finished reading J. Michael Straczinsky's autobiography, Becoming Superman, and it is amazing. Most of us are not self-made. Most of us are the products of our upbringing and our privileges and all the people who helped us along the way, and there's no shame in admitting or even celebrating that. But there are in this world a few people who had every disadvantage and succeeded anyway by sheer force of determination. If you don't believe it, read the book.
• Gotta love when speakers claim that native plants will outperform invasive ones... Then how come they're invasive? Disturbance is why. Spell it out...
• Given the news about how we're all bioaccumulating PFOA, cremation is looking like a less appealing option since it sends those pollutants into the air. Microbes at least have the potential to break down "forever" chemicals like PFOA, though it may take more like 3 million years (since they haven't evolved yet) than 3 months. [link to BBC article about cadaver composting]
• [link to obituary for Larry Tesler] So this is the guy to blame for the fact that the Paste command doesn't cite its source. Rest in plagiarism, Mr. Tesler.
• How come maps that show the US in silhouette always leave out the Great Lakes? As if when you go from Wisconsin to Michigan to the UP you are in international waters...
• Lying here with the flu and thinking about Hidden Figures, for some reason...
  In the film, Katherine Johnson's breakthrough moment, when she finally gets the respect of her peers, is when she shows them they should be using elliptical and not parabolic trajectories for sub-orbital as well as orbital flights. The path of a projectile only appears parabolic if your coordinate system assumes the ground is flat and gravity is perpendicular to the flat ground.
  So her breakthrough moment... was when she reminded a room full of NASA engineers... that the Earth is not flat. I don't think that was emphasized enough.
• Yo' momma so bossy, she gives you your chores on Jira.
  ... and a 1099 for your allowance.
• Just once, I'd like to hear a pilot in an action movie follow up "Let's see what this baby can do!" with, "... not that. Or that. Guess she can't do that either. Probably shouldn't have tried doing that..."
• Montessori ain't just a mountain in Canada
• There's a video circulating where a scientist explains that the color magenta doesn't exist because there is no magenta wavelength on the spectrum. No, you just have a simplistic notion of what a color is. Go back to art class. 
  While you're at it, notice that the colors of your skin and hair are also not on the spectrum, and consider why you imagined your tools were more real than the world you live in. If you need help, ask a philosopher.
  #whyweneedliberalarts
• Pet peeve: payment forms that don't tell you they don't accept Discover until after you've already submitted your card info.
• [March 1] I have seen every season of Doctor Who. The season that ended tonight is, hands down, the best written one in the history of the show. Last season was the first to not have any really bad episodes, but it also didn't have any really good ones. This season was uniformly good for the first time ever. Being consistent about anything at all is an exciting new development, but I'm particularly glad it's being consistent about writing. Even if it all goes to crap again at Christmas, we'll have this season. ♥ ♥
• Me: I wish guys would stop singing falsetto so much.
  Also me: Why is this guy singing the same five notes over and over?
• Pro tip: Putting the text of your event announcement email in an image means that people with vision impairments can't read it. Embedding the registration link in that image as well means that the link is not clickable. Maybe you should just print your announcement and mail it.
• Klyde and I saw the movie "Fantastic Fungi" yesterday. There's a lot of good information about soil fungi in it, but also a lot of hype. There's a ton of excellent time-lapse imagery with squelchy sound effects added. The CGI visualizations are top notch, but at first I wondered where they were getting their inspiration for how they represented some of the concepts. Then the film embarked on a 30-minute endorsement for psilocybin, and my question was answered!
• [March 8] Question: Are anti-vaxxers organizing COVID-19 parties now, or are they waiting until there's a vaccine available?
• In the commentary for Captain Marvel, the directors say they tried *not* to use "I'm Just a Girl" in the soundtrack because they felt it was too obvious. I've got another for them: "Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to dis a Kree?"
• What I'm wondering this morning: is Suzianna the same person as Sally, or does the singer have two different girlfriends in the South? And are Polly Wolly Doodle and Fanny Fae also girls he's involved with? Is that folksong a predecessor to Mambo #5?
• The other thing I'm thinking about this morning: microbes, including viruses, produce chemicals called autoinducers that can change the behavior of other organisms by altering their gene expression. So a microbe doesn't have to actually infect a cell or an organism to change its behavior, it can do that with autoinducers. If that happened right now with COVID-19, how would it look any different from what's currently happening? We say memes "go viral," but it's possible that the opposite has happened, and viruses have gone memetic.
• [March 13] The local Catholic archdiocese was quoted as saying that cancelling mass would be "the nuclear option." Just think of the energy that would be released!
• What kind of a song is "Doo dah, doo dah?" I feel like the Camptown ladies could try harder.
• Yesterday was the first St. Patrick's Day I can remember where nobody said, "May you live in interesting times." Maybe this is the year we retire that blessing for good!
• Sorry, Bernie campaign, I will not complete any survey where there's a yes-or-no question but all the answers are variations of "yes." I think a little less of you every time you send it to me. And there's no way to submit feedback to you about it, so I'm being passive-aggressive as well as snobbish.
• People who have always been good at spelling and grammar: There is no excuse for posting comments riddled with typos.
  Autocorrect: gold me beef
• Here's what I don't get about shows like The Office and Modern Family: the characters look at and talk to the cameras, so clearly they know they're on TV, but as far as I've seen, nobody ever objects to being filmed. No one says, "No, I won't work at Dunder Mifflin, you have cameramen IN THE BATHROOMS" or "No, I won't date you, people recorded you with your last boyfriend and put it on network TV." Also, you know people send fanmail to the characters, but they never read it onscreen.
• It's heartening to do an image search and see how many chemists have made tassels for the caps of their graduated cylinders.
• [March 27] How come all the late night hosts are dressing down when they record shows from home? Are they trying to show solidarity, or have they just lost the ability to dress and shave themselves after years of being groomed by others?
• "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" from Sweeny Todd is the song in my head this morning. I've always wondered about the lyrics: "My cage has many rooms, damask and dark / nothing there sings, not even my lark / Larks never will, you know, when they're captive / Teach me to be more adaptive." I know this isn't meant to be true literally, and Johanna is not the most sensible character, but A) she and the birds in her cage are singing in those rooms even as she is saying that nothing there sings, and B) if everyone knows captive larks never sing, why would it be notable that "not even" hers sings? 🤔
• Facebook just showed me an ad for a dog food named Canidae, and now I want to see a video of dogs and foxes and such set to "I Want Candy," but with the extra syllable in the word. You know: "Canidae on the beach, there's nothing better / but I like Canidae wrapped in a sweater."
• I filed our 2019 taxes a month ago through H&R Block, and we were eagerly anticipating our refund this month. This morning I got a letter from the IRS saying that we need to verify our information because we moved last year. The process took over 15 minutes and required a working cell phone, email account, and credit card as well as SSN and information from our 1040. I checked and double checked that the site was legitimate and belonged to the IRS, because an identity thief would have loved to have all that information.
  I get that there are a lot of scammers out there who would file a fake tax return to get the refund. I get that. I feel for the tax collectors; their job sucks and everyone hates them. What I don't get is, the refund was not going to be mailed to our new address. It was to be direct deposited into the SAME BANK ACCOUNT WE USED LAST YEAR, so what does our change of address have to do with anything?
  Also, after we moved, I filed a form 8822 to notify the IRS of our new home address. I've never done that before, but I was changing the address of our business and figured what the heck, I'll do the personal form while I'm at it. What was the point of filing that form, if almost a year later they are still unclear as to our address? 🤬
• [April 11] Sign of the times: our beloved shih tzu Loca got attacked by a German shepherd dog this morning (she seems to be OK but is at the vet with Jessie now), and I wasn't upset with the owner for letting her dog get under the fence, I was upset with her for BREATHING ON ME as we talked out what to do.
• Thought experiment in light of yesterday's press conference: if Eric Cartman from South Park were president of the US... would that be any different than the current administration?
• That awkward moment when you're listening to a live stream and there's an echo and the person stops talking and the echo keeps going and says things you don't remember the person having said yet, and you flash back to the Midnight episode of Doctor Who. 😱
• If there's always been a rainbow hanging over your head, you might have a humidity problem. Just saying.
• What cats are really thinking when they hesitate in a doorway: "Dude, do you realize you just collapsed the wave function? Until you opened the door, it was simultaneously raining *and* not raining outside. Now, bam, just one reality. Mind. Blown."
• TFW you tell the body shop to replace the part of the car that's falling off, and instead they replace a nearby part that was also loose, and when you ask why they didn't replace the one held on with duck tape, they say that because it was held on with duck tape, it was not falling off and so they figured it was not the part you meant.
• One of the things I appreciate about programming in jQuery is that if something can't be done, it just doesn't do it. It doesn't complain about it. PHP used to be like that, back when I started. Say, for each paragraph, move the image from the left to the right. In PHP you now have to say, *if there is an image* in that paragraph move it to the right. jQuery just figures, hey, some paragraphs don't have an image, that's the way it goes.
• Since y'all are geniuses at emojibra, I made you one:
  • ln(🥦) = 🐧
  • ln(-🐧) = ♫*🌞
  • ♫^2 = -🐧
  • 🥦^(♫*🌞) = -🐧
  • 🌞 = ?
• I just realized coronavirus is an anagram for carnivorous. COINCIDENCE??
• Jessie and I just watched a show with an Irish song in the soundtrack, and the subtitles said "He once sat as a Chucky for his pay." I got curious about what that meant, and it turns out the word is spelled "tiocfaidh." 🤦
• This morning my computer did a major OS upgrade, quietly in the background, without breaking anything and without uninstalling any software I need for my work. I don't miss the Mac. 🐧
• When I visited Rhiju Das ten years ago, he tried to explain to me the importance of a protein folding video game he had developed with his grad students at Stanford. Tonight I watched him on Nova explaining that what they learned from that video game may be crucial to bringing a COVID-19 vaccine to market.
• According to Google Translate, "Hakuna matata" is Kenyan Swahili for "we have no problems," but in the Sundanese language of Java, it means "open source."
• I would like to curse all designers who recommend light grey on white text, dark grey on black, or any grey on grey. May they be hunted by timberwolves through a thick fog, forever.
• It doesn't inspire my confidence in a distributed computing project when they tell me less than a day after I've signed on that I've already contributed 99.77 hours of processing time and completed 630 jobs. #timedilation #reallybigscience #numbersarehard
• Pro tip: If you are trying to conceal the fact that you are a Russian bot, don't select a Russian time zone when creating your account.
• I thought it was odd when companies I hadn't done business with in years felt the need to email me about their COVID-19 policies. It's positively surreal that they're now emailing me about where they stand on police brutality. Um... thanks? I feel like it would send the wrong message to unsubscribe right after you told me you support peaceful protest, but the next time I'm gone... unless the next time is in response to the next national crisis... 🙀
• TFW the person who hijacked a scheduled 15 minute meeting into an hour long meeting says, "I don't want to spend too much time on this."
• yo mamma so irrational she waltzes in π/4 time
• I'm curious to know how long the manufacturers of public toilets without lids have known about the dangers of aerosol poop and just kept on making toilets without lids anyhow. Because I'm pretty sure I remember hearing about it as a kid in the early '80s.
• it's a moving red dot! 🙀
  I cannot catch the dot. 😿
  the human controls the dot. 😾
  it's a moving red dot! 😻
• Leaving behind the problematic word "colonize" in the headline, this case [in an article from Scientific American] for exploring Titan is surprisingly compelling. I do think that any sort of outpost at that distance is going to need to be populated by sending a few enthusiastic parents and dozens of frozen embryos rather than a full crew of adults. There may be plenty of fuel to be had on Titan, but sending people there could bankrupt the Earth's economy.
• TFW you get a voicemail from "Elijah with Thrasher," but the voice-to-text thinks it was "allies with Russia."
• Menards: 11% rebate on everything! In the form of store credit.
  Also Menards: 10% processing fee for online orders!
  Also Menards: Rebates cannot be spent on online orders!
  ...so... what you're telling me is, I can get get the online processing fee refunded, but only if I come into the store to spend it. Gee, thanks.
• Not all stereotypes of Oklahomans are true. However, I remember I knew a whole family back in the '80s who insisted that Dalek was spelled "Darlek" because of how the Brits pronounced it, in spite of the fact that it's spelled Dalek on screen at the beginning of every single episode where they appear.
• Nothing say "Our company not Russian front" like Boris and Natasha grammar in advertisement. Look, is moose and squirrel!
• If anybody were going to do a civil war, tonight [July 4] would have been the night. Gunshots would blend right in with the nonstop mayhem outside. If we make it through tonight without some sort of armed insurrection, it ain't happening.
• Since tomatoes are a kind of berry, that means tomato sauce is jam, and ketchup is jelly. Enjoy some today on your hot dog sandwich.
• I've seen a lot of people pointing out historical inaccuracies in Hamilton, so in that bloodyminded spirit I'd like to contribute that "The greatest city in the world" in 1775 was probably Beijing, but definitely in southeast Asia. Also, being a new man has always been a privilege reserved for a minority of New Yorkers.
• Pro tip: the more detailed you make your instructions, the more likely they are to contain errors.
• If you're in a vehicle approaching a T intersection, the voices telling you to turn left or right are not "extremists," and continuing straight ahead is not a "moderate" opinion because there is no more road ahead.
• The USPS "informed delivery" service where they email us pictures of our incoming mail is a nice touch. Now we just need the option to send the junk mail straight to recycling, so they don't have to bother delivering it.
• I know I've said this before, but ... if your site does not accept a major credit card, the time to let folks know that is *before* they have sent you their card number, expiration date, and CVV. If you only tell them after, they may think you are scamming them. Or at any rate, I will. 😠
• Terrible fashion idea I had in a dream this morning: blue jeans, but each pocket is made to look like another pair of jeans, so you're putting your hand in the waistline. And the pant legs are cut so they look like the legs of the pocket-size pants.
  Now I really wanna see this on the runway, just to laugh.
• Well, that's a first. I just got asked to take a survey about my experience taking a survey.
• English speakers think it's confusing that "the" and "a" are pronounced two different ways depending on what sound follows them. I've lost count of how many ways there are to pronounce "al-" in Arabic depending on what comes after. At *least* six. And at least three different ways to write it, as well.
• Facebook automatically translated a friend's photo caption from "empanadas!" to "pies!" Why stop there? "Feet!"
• And now, Deep Thoughts:
  People disagree about whether it's ok to wear socks with sandals, but everyone agrees the socks go on first.
• Adults in 2000: Wish we could find an incentive that would get kids to read and learn to type.
  Adults in 2010: Kids are spending too much of their time texting and not socializing in person.
  Adults in 2020: Wish kids could do all their socializing online so they wouldn't have to meet in person.
• I decided to re-read the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books during pandemic. I've read the first two so many times I skimmed over whole sections because I knew them by heart. The third is still my favorite, with its coherent plot and Arthur's (and Trillian's) character development. The fourth is a nice exploration of, "if you finally got everything you wanted, what then?" and the fifth begins as a nice exploration of, "if you then lost everything, what then?"
  But the ending, man. I read the fifth & last book ("Mostly Harmless") as a teenager and fan of the series, and I was crushed by the ending so badly I didn't read it again for 30 years. It's brutal even the second time, even when you know what's coming, because the foreshadowing is too thin, the characters don't have time to react, and most importantly it eliminates any possibility of a sequel or a reboot or even fanfiction with an alternate storyline. It definitively ends all the characters for all time, and there's nothing they or we or anyone can do about it.
  I get that Douglas Adams struggled with writer's block. I get that he felt pressured by his agent and his editors and his fans to produce one more book about his beloved characters. Poor thing, must be tough. I get that he was probably struggling with depression, alone with tens of millions of other people. But usually when people destroy their own legacy, they have the sense to do it in another milieu so that we can hold their work separate from their poor personal choices. There's no way to do that with Adams other than to just pretend "Mostly Harmless" was never written.
• Me: I wonder why my digestion is so messed up.
  My body: It's the tomatoes.
  Me: Maybe I should see a dietician.
  My body: STOP GORGING YOURSELF ON TOMATOES.
  Me [eating tomatoes]: I guess I'll never know
• I could write a memoir about my efforts to keep Twin Cities Free-Net afloat during the first dot-com bubble of the late '90s.
  I could call it "Benjamin, Net, and Yahoo!"
• Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any weirder... I got personally invited to join the Golf Course Builders Association of America. I'd like to see someone try to play golf in any of the landscapes I've designed.
• People who ask a question and then keep talking so they can't hear your answer over the half-duplex cell phone.
  "What was your name? I'll try to call you back, but maybe you could call me back in about ten minutes. What was it? I didn't catch it. What? Please say it again. Did you say Don? Ted? Dan? Speak up, you keep cutting out."
• This election is like heads you and your family and friends go to prison, tails you go to an extermination camp, and the third party voters are like, "Maybe it'll land on edge." 🤔
• You could make a form button that can only be clicked on a touchscreen, by giving it borders that a pointer can't go through. A mouse pointer is an inhabitant of Flatland, but a fingertip is a visitor from the third dimension.
• In hindsight, I'm surprised that Amazon didn't respond to Uber's employee issue by hiring all those drivers as Amazon delivery drivers and selling their service back to Uber to deliver people.
• [regarding DeJoy's appointment as Postmaster] I think that, assuming the Internet keeps working, we could crowdsource a functioning and affordable postal service in under a month. But I really hope we don't have to.
• The position of Spın̈al Tap drummer was cursed when Lord Voldemort was turned down for the job. Prove me wrong. 😉
• Pro tip: If your survey software cannot handle someone clicking the browser's back button, maybe provide a back button that does work up in the top-left corner, or some BIG BOLD TEXT up there saying, "Our form is broken and we don't know how to fix it, so please don't click the back button or you'll lose all your data. Thanks!"
• TFW you receive a recall notice for the car you recently totaled, regarding a defective latch that had been making an irritating rattle for years, but that the dealership said was not covered by the previous recall.
• [re an article about an AI-generated blog] Porr says his experiment also shows a more mundane but still troubling alternative: people could use the tool to generate a lot of clickbait content. “It's possible that there's gonna just be a flood of mediocre blog content because now the barrier to entry is so easy,” he says. “I think the value of online content is going to be reduced a lot.”
  ...as compared to... the golden age of online content? 😃
• Customer service for a student loan refinancing firm: Please see our new privacy policy!
  Me: I don't have an account with you. Please stop sending me mail.
  CS: You must have an account with us. That's why you got our mail.
  Me: I've never refinanced a student loan, and if I did I wouldn't use my work email to do it. Please stop.
  CS: We are unable to find an account under your email. Please log in to change your contact preferences.
• If well intentioned liberals won't let white women celebrate the 100th anniversary of suffrage because it didn't include people of color, why do we let white men (or anyone) celebrate the 4th of July?
  ...it's because of the guns, isn't it?
• A mortgage offer addressed to Simon just arrived at our Omaha address. Simon has been dead for four years and never even visited Omaha. Also, he was a cat.
• things that make me die a little inside
  • horizontal rules made of dashes or underscores
  • fixed width columns in email newsletters
  • rows of dashes or underscores that are a few too long for the fixed width column and so wrap to the next line
• Happy labor day! Support your local unions! Except maybe the police union. Collective bargaining is for people who don't already hold all the power, IMO.
• I've had "He's a Pirate" (the Pirates of the Caribbean theme) in my head on and off for a couple of weeks, and just now it occurred to me that you can mash it up with the Doctor Who theme. Naturally someone else had already noticed this and made a video with footage from "The Black Spot":
• I'm glad to see so much new music from TMBG. I just wish it wasn't all so depressing. More depressing music is not what I need right now. Update: I found one that's not depressing! ....and it's a cover. ["Walking my Cat Named Dog"]
• In Trump's America your suburbs aren't safe from baby sex explosions burning down all the trees and houses.
• SiriusXM: $30/month was too steep for you, huh? How about $5/month for your first 5 months?
  New York Times: We see you've been enjoying our free newsletter but haven't subscribed yet. How about a trial period of 5 months for $5?
  Redbox: Wait, you used that coupon for $1 off a rental? How about $1.50 off your next? You used that one too? $2 off your next! We can do this all day! 🤔
• In case you ever wonder why I turned out the way I did, I grew up with this song ["Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles] in the house. He sho' is hip, ain't he? Like, whass happening? Hi-yo dinosowah. He's too much. Ride, daddy, ride.
• I might have been interested in being a poll worker, until I saw there's only one shift, 13 hours long, and you have to arrive an hour early. That's crazy. All those elderly poll workers have more stamina than I do.
• I'm looking forward to colder weather mainly because thicker clothing will mean we get scratched less when Dahli climbs us.
• TFW you forget to take off your debugging glasses at the end of the day and accidentally point out to a stranger that they assembled their bicycle wrong
• As the Senate rushes to confirm a new Supreme Court justice [September 23], just remember all the other things they could have done this year. Only this is a rush.
• Bernie's was the only political campaign mailing list I've been on in years that didn't regularly insult my intelligence. These fundraising "deadlines" are bogus. The dollar goals are made up. The "matching funds" are often fictitious. And the incessant repetitive emails pleading for ever increasing amounts after I've already given are a real turn-off. I wish I could believe that it'll all be over with the election, but realistically the only way to make it stop is to unsubscribe or send it all to junk mail. We need a new system; this one is broken.
• [Headline: Disney sued over Toy Story 4 Evel Knievel knockoff] Someone doesn't understand parody. Disney should reply that the Mr. Potato Head character was the one based on Knievel.
• Lawful good: valid HTML with stylesheets
  Neutral good: Markdown
  Chaotic good: HTML tables
  Lawful neutral: white space with &nbsp; and <br>
  True neutral: no white space
  Chaotic neutral: white space with tabs
  Lawful evil: XML with XSLT
  Neutral evil: formatting with empty <p> tags
  Chaotic evil: formatting with empty <div> tags
• People who say they're "spiritual but not religious" deserve as much respect as those who say "I practice the scientific method, but I'm not a scientist."
• Kara Eastman's campaign keeps saying that Don Jr. "parachuted into" our district. Pics or it didn't happen.
• <grumpyoldman>In MY day, PHP didn't have any newfangled DateTime objects! If you wanted to convert a date to some format, you'd just pass any old string of text to the strtotime() function, and then pass that timestamp to the date() function, and it worked! That's the way it was, and we LIKED it! We liked it FINE! Now we're supposed to use these <scarequotes>DateTime objects</scarequotes>, and we're expected to know IN ADVANCE what format the string of text is in! And if it's a little bit different, like say instead of a space there's a line break, or September is abbreviated Sept instead of Sep, then the whole thing FAILS! How is that an improvement?</grumpyoldman> #getoffmylanguage
• I want to make a new markup language called ZML, and define it as perpendicular to XML and YML, and watch people try to figure out what that means.
• To those who despair at other people's English, I say, try reading other people's HTML. And yet it works in the browser. What is important?
• Facebook required me to fill out a form asserting that I'm abiding by their privacy practices...
  ...but I couldn't submit the form without allowing a 3rd party tracking cookie.
• "lunch hour" webinars that last more than an hour 🙄
• At least once a day, Didi ambushes Dahli, and there is a great caterwauling and crashing of objects, and Didi has to spend a few minutes in her penalty box, and then she's fine for a few hours.
• I stopped reading my email midway through the day yesterday because there were so many pleas for "last minute" campaign donations before the end of month "deadline." Here is the most astonishing one:
  "...defeating him in 34 days hinges on raising $8,384 before my final End of Quarter deadline in 6 hours. ... I can hit this goal if just 1 more supporter from Omaha chips in. ... Can I count on you to be the one donation I need?"
• a new low: just got a campaign email written by James Carville, insulting me for not donating to the campaign I just gave to a few days ago.
• Pro tip: you can and should restrict the numeric range on a field in a survey or any other Web form. Lookin' at you, Carnegie Mellon COVID researchers. If you're reading this, we don't actually have -17,384 children in our household. I just clicked the down button by mistake and then watched in disbelief as it kept going more and more negative.
• [meme: in my opinion, yamaha is probably the best grand piano/motorcycle company out there] It's worth mentioning that Nissan Motors is not related to Nissan Chemical, Nissan Computer, Nissan Diesel, Nissan Marine, or Thermos Nissan.
• Am I the only one who finds the acronym ACAB confusingly similar to AFAB & AMAB? I don't know which is worse, "All Females are Bastards" or "Assigned Cop at Birth"
• I keep seeing Disney+ ads for The Right Stuff, and I can't help wondering how many parents are getting the unexpected pleasure of explaining why the men are singing the Air Force and Marine hymns while wanking in their adjoining bathroom stalls.
• I'm tempted to change my Zoom profile pic to the words "This could have been an email" so it shows whenever I turn off my camera.
• I think "Cabin in the Woods" may be the best allegory for the US electoral system.
• Adventures in trying to close a credit card account we are no longer using:
  1. I try to log in for the first time in six months. The site tells me I have too many failed login attempts and I'm locked out for 30 minutes.
  2. 30 minutes later I try again with the same username and password and am let in, but first I have to log in a second time because the first was just to unlock the account.
  3. For my security, I must confirm all of my confidential information that is now displaying unprompted on my screen.
  4. Checkboxes used as radio buttons. 🙁 Without label tags. 😢
  5. I finally get into my account, and there is no option to close it. I open a chat session with support. It is an AI. It begins our conversation by saying, "Please try again later, this service is currently down."
  6. I ask my question anyway and get an immediate response saying that to close my account I should simply click a link. I click the link and get waitlisted for a chat with a live person.
  7. The live person asks for my card number. I don't have it because I haven't used the card in ages and don't know where it is.
  8. The agent asks for my phone number, and after I type it it is modestly censored with asterisks, even though it was just displayed in full a few minutes ago along with all my other personal info.
  9. The agent will send me a confirmation letter, but I don't need to respond to it. They're just sending it as a formality.
  10. Customer satisfaction survey! It is too wide for the chat window, and the window cannot be resized. There are more checkboxes without labels used as radio buttons. 😢
  11. Having submitted the survey, I log out. The AI pops back up in the chat window to tell me that my session has ended and ask if I would like to log in again.
• I feel like "The Fast and the Furious" is really missing out by not cross promoting with Snicker's "You're not yourself when you're hungry" slogan. I get pretty furious when I fast...
• Consensus from this morning's pre-meeting small-talk: the secret to being proficient in vi is to have learned it 30 years ago. (This consensus included two coworkers in their 20s.)
• [Headline: Dame Judy Dench gave the kiss of life to her goldfish] OK but what does that mean, exactly? Did she blow air into its mouth? Water into its gills? Life essence into its soul? What?
• It is pretty weird that we use the phrase "broken record" to mean both "something that happens over and over" and "something that almost never happens"
• How am I just now realizing that Nightmare Before Christmas is a warning tale about cultural appropriation?
• With apologies to Martin Niemöller:
  First they tried to ban the Muslims, and I spoke out even though I was not a Muslim, because we have separation of church and state.
  Then they came for the LGBTQ+, and I spoke out even though I was not LGBTQ+, because love is love.
  Then they continued assaulting and killing black people disproportionately, and I spoke out even though I was not black, because black lives matter.
  Then they separated refugee children from their parents and kept them in cages, and I spoke out even though I wasn't a refugee, because seeking asylum is a Constitutional right.
  Then they succeeded in banning the Muslims, and I said wait, is that still a thing? I thought we had moved on from that.
  Then they allowed hundreds of thousands to die of a preventable illness, and I spoke out even though I didn't have the illness because nobody should have to die of a preventable illness.
  Then they deported the parents of the kids in cages and lost track of many of them, and I said wait, they're still keeping kids in cages? Dammit, there is too much going on.
  Then they threatened to commit violence during the election, or to systematically disenfranchise voters, or to disregard the results, it wasn't really clear, but I volunteered to watch polls just in case because voting is the basis of our system of government.
  Then they came for me, and no one spoke for me because there was no evidence that my speaking out had accomplished a damned thing.
• TFW you're lying on the floor and you bat idly at a cat toy and suddenly you have a cat in your face and your chin is bleeding
• Last night we were watching the episode of Call the Midwife set at Christmas 1960, and we were surprised to see a hipster in full plumage. Black framed glasses, goatee, flannel over T-shirt and tight jeans -- he looked like one of the cameramen had wandered onto the set! I had to remind myself that that's when that style came from, and it was probably a painstakingly recreated period costume.
• Sometimes all the cat wants is for her bed to be moved into the sunbeam. #IHaveNoThumbsAndIMustScream
• I feel like Hollywood gives us unrealistic expectations of how much fun a ragtag band of misfits will be.
  TV comedies offer a more pessimistic view. In TV groups of misfits, there's always at least one character who is NOT enjoying it.
• Future art historians are going to be confused by the sudden glut of "Mandelorian and Child" portraits. Who was this rich patron, Disney, and why did he suddenly shift from commissioning portraits of motherless princesses finding their first love to depictions of adoptive fatherhood?
• And now, deep thoughts:
  If you have trouble telling the difference between the letters l and I, be grateful you are not a barcode reader.
• I'm not a fan of most of the Doctor Who Christmas Specials, but "The Time of the Doctor" is my least favorite. In case you need another reason to dislike that story, here's a terrible pun hidden in it you may not have noticed before:
  You know the Cyberman head was named Handles. You know essentially nothing else about the Cyberman head other than that it was named Handles, because the writers didn't see fit to give it any backstory.
  But that means that on this occasion when the Doctor saved the Universe on Christmas, he was...
  Handles' messiah.
  There are just so many things to hate about that episode. The Doctor shows up naked to Christmas dinner with Clara's family. We meet one of his ex-lovers, and it's awkward and gross, and by the way he's still naked. The town named Christmas has zombies in the snow for one scene that are never acknowledged again. He sends Clara away repeatedly in order to single-handedly save a town full of people he's just met, and by the way he's still naked. He mourns the death of Handles like it was his only friend, even though he has a town full of people that he's saving and we still don't know why he's so fond of this Cyberman head. A thousand years go by for no reason other than dramatic effect. And in the end he winds up being rewarded with a new regeneration cycle that we now know he didn't actually need because his/her regenerations weren't limited to begin with, so the whole story was meaningless and the Doctor killed a whole bunch of innocent people in order to save another bunch of innocent people, and god is dead. And for all we know, although the Doctor has regenerated twice and is now female, she is STILL NAKED.
• [headline: Australian scientists map millions of galaxies with new telescope] Three million galaxies sounds like a lot, but we've known there were far more many since before we could see them. Two decades before the Hubble Telescope took the ultra deep field photo, Rebecca Stallings and our classmates and I were singing a song in elementary school that contains the lines, "There are many billions of galaxies / Each with many billions of stars / Could it be that somewhere among all these / There's another planet like ours?" I'll link to it in the comments. It blows my mind that physicists have been able to get so many predictions right decades or centuries before anyone could observe them directly.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's EULA was written in Microsoft Word, and I for one am scandalized!
• Librivox is the audiobook equivalent of all those free streaming services. You might recognize some famous names, but it's not their best work, and it's probably not well presented.
  I've been reading The Last Man by Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley. It's ... long and flowery and so far pointless. I guess there's a reason I'd never heard of it before.
• TFW the insurance company whose slogan is that switching companies could save you 15% informs you as you are in the process of switching to another company that the lower rate the other company offered you might be a teaser for a limited time, as if their own lower rate had not also been limited in time. 🙄
• People act scandalized that Santa knew Rudolph was being bullied and did nothing about it until Christmas Eve... But isn't that his MO? Being omniscient but doing nothing with that information 364 days of the year? That's his whole thing.
• Huh. I've never taken a market research survey that included a lie scale before.
• [December 10] Personally, I'm glad that not everybody is ready to take the vaccine right away, because there's not enough for everyone right away anyhow. 🤷
• "You only need to spend another $229 to earn $5 in rebates!" --Menards
• It's amazing how much better stormtrooper armor works when the protagonist wears it.
• It's pretty remarkable that Dahli does so little damage when she sits on my keyboard. She likes to change the layout to Russian, turn on the caps lock, and turn off the Fn lock, and sometimes she types a little bit or opens an app I don't need. So far I don't think she's deleted anything, but I do need to be more careful about closing the lid before I walk away!
• AAAAAAA Google Tasks changed the icon for a not-yet-completed task to a circle with a checkmark already in it, and I am not OK with this. That is not how checkmarks work! AAAAAAAAA
• There was a headline this morning about a "deputy dog," and I wish I could stop saying "deppity dog dog a ding dang deppa deppa deppity dog dog a ding dang deppa deppa"
• TFW you try to read an article about a US cybersecurity agency warning about a "grave threat" from Russian hacking, only to find that the article has been classified. (403 means access denied.)
• TFW you see a UNIX timestamp with only nine digits and think, ah, those were simpler times... (999999999 was early September 9, 2001)
• [December 21] Q: when liberals praise Australia and New Zealand's leadership for beating COVID-19, how come conservatives don't say that's because it's summer there?
  A: because it would alienate the flat earthers.
  Happy solstice!
• [Headline: An executive [Trump] order says new federal buildings should be in the Greco-Roman classical style] HAHAHAHAHAHA TAKE THAT, AYN RAND! In its dying days, 2020 delivers a punchline that finally makes having sat through The Fountainhead worthwhile!
• You know how, when somebody gets knighted, he gets tapped on each shoulder with a sword?
  I just realized Obi Wan did that for Anakin
• WW84 is a timely and powerful argument against reelecting a man who should never have been allowed to gain power. It's a shame it wasn't released in time for the 1984 election. 🙃 [historical context: it was not released in time for the 2020 election, but the character of Max Lord could have been a caricature of Reagan as much as it was of Trump.]
• [December 26] What was that chipmunk ever going to do with a hula hoop if he got one? Even if it was appropriately sized, he had no waist. 🤔
• Why are there so many
  names for that three digit code on your credit card
  and why can't we just use one?
• If a nonprofit set an arbitrary end-of-year fundraising goal, and they are short of reaching that goal, why is that supposed to motivate me as a donor? I get why it motivates them as fundraisers, but what's my motivation?