By Ben |
- There's a classic filk song called "The Ballad of Transport 18" about a cargo ship stranded in deep space that gets rescued by Mr. Spock at the expense of its cargo of beer. My brain is trying to parody it about COVID-19, but there are just too many possibilities.
- [January 6] So, we always hear that peaceful protests are more effective. Is that why the police are so much rougher on peaceful protestors than violent ones? 🤔
- [January 6] Even George Orwell stopped short of saying "treason is patriotism." Who would have believed that?
- Due to heavy automated traffic from Russian bots, I've had to shut off user registrations on all our blogs. Web 2.0 is dead. Очень спасибо.
- Since the Force doesn't seem to care about mass, maybe like gravity it's not really a force at all but a property of spacetime. That would make midiclorians some type of boson. I could live with that.
- WW84's social commentary has only become more relevant in the weeks since it came out. Imagine if it had been released on time, last year. They would have had to credit Cassandra as a writer.
- [January 13] I feel bad for the people who, deprived of a civics education and under the influence of false information, were pawns of a nebulous plan to storm the Capitol. I even feel bad for the handful of competent people whose years of training for an armed rebellion were squandered by being surrounded 100 to 1 by ignorant buffoons with no plan or discipline. They must feel really foolish right now to be thrown under the bus by the conniving wretches who planned the thing and spent years laying the groundwork for it. We must not let our thirst for justice be satisfied by punishing the foolish people just because they're easiest to catch and easiest to look down upon. They are the least to blame. What I mean to say is, those who had power and abused it deserve punishment more than those who were just part of the mob. Being part of a mob is bad, but it's not the same as abusing power.
- I'm about 90% through reading "The Last Man" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and I have to assume that, having sold the manuscript by the pound, she deemed it too cumbersome to edit.
- The novel has three volumes. Volume 1 gives an introduction that so far has no payoff whatsoever, setting the story in the far distant future even though they have no technologies or politics more advanced than the time the story was written. The main characters are introduced and pair off.
- In volume 2, the narrator's brother in law, who was barely introduced in the first volume, becomes supremely important and has an affair, causing the narrator's sister to be torn between blind obedience to him and blind obedience to him. She never wavers for a moment, and yet there are chapters upon chapters of her agonizing over never wavering for a moment. Her husband eventually finds a lost cause and sacrifices himself to it, and everyone is very very sad.
- In volume 3 there's a pandemic that kills at least 99% of the world's population, except the narrator miraculously survives it, and nobody is at all curious about why he, of all people, recovered from the plague when everyone else who gets so much as a sniffle is doomed to an early grave. The last surviving remnants of England decide to spend their last days somewhere more pleasant, so they are on their way out of England, certain they are the only people left alive, when they receive a letter (!!!) from a new character who has not previously been mentioned even once, but whom the narrator and his wife have apparently known since childhood, but it's far too late now to go back and add a mention of her in volume 1. The two of them (plus servants, of course) go back to get her, but the wife falls sick and dies. While burying her in the family tomb, the narrator encounters his mother in law, the former queen, whom nobody had thought to bring with them on their flight from England!! When I stopped reading just now, the narrator had found his old friend, and it was clear she's going to be his second wife, because who else is there? Servants? Mail carriers? Foreigners?
- [Headline: Bus dramatically plunges off bridge; driver, passengers hurt] If movies have taught me anything, someone has kidnapped Spider-Man!
- Cardinal males are red; ordinals are black and yellow or orange.
- You know a programmer is accustomed to talking to other programmers when he introduces a list of things and then attempts to permute the array by instantiating a class. (Watching a video from DrupalCon Europe last month) At least he realizes it. "I can't define things without using technical jargon." Direct quote. "... I come back 5 minutes later and remove any jargon. And then I keep iterating that process until I have something that relates to humans."
- How come there's not a Groundhog Day video game? Free play, unlimited lives, but if you want to win you have to be *nice* to all the NPCs.
- The hand specialist at Nebraska Medicine says I'm the first case in the history of his department to recover from the particular fracture I had without surgery. Most people who break that bone are elderly, and they break the end of the bone off, whereas I cracked it lengthwise. It feels good to be a medical marvel. 😉
- The thought that kept me awake half the night: Bob Ross asserted that "anyone can paint," which means Pixar's Ratatouille may be about painting, not cooking. Gusteau is Bob Ross, the chefs are animators, the soux chefs are storyboard artists, which makes Remy the rat... The author. With a bad case of impostor syndrome.
- I don't know what I was expecting from a Menards email promising "Gifts For Your Valentine," but it wasn't a toilet.
- Here's a hot money-saving tip: If you have a Frigidaire appliance, don't stress about extending the warranty before it runs out. They will continue to pursue you with offers to extend the warranty for *years* after it runs out, after you no longer own the appliance, after you have moved to another state and left them no forwarding address, after you have repeatedly written to them and begged them to stop sending you mail. Guess how I know this.
- Good Humor Man is like the least appreciated superhero.
People: Aaaaa! We're on fire! Help us!
Good Humor Man: Ha ha! Sounds like someone's screaming for ice cream! - When your cat hollers at you because the bottom of the dish is visible
That's the supper bowl halftime show - TFW a questionnaire asks you "Did you know X?" where X is something that cannot literally be true, so you answer "No, I did not."
"Did you know that the fossil fuel industry has unlimited amounts of money to spend on lobbying?" Why no, I did not know that industry was in charge of any country's money supply, or for that matter the length of the real number line. - If "Nationwide is on your side" and "Trust the Gorton's fisherman" came from the same ad agency, somebody deserves a refund.
- Random thoughts of a foggy brain:
1. Is "cream of the crop" a mixed metaphor? I mean, dairy is not a crop.
2. There should be an oat milk called Cream of the Crop.
3. There should not be a bird food called Cream of the Crop. - Who is the greater fool, the lawyer who can't turn off the cat filter, or the judge who released the video to the media with the admonishment that it "not be used to mock the legal profession?"
- somebody should make biodegradable dinnerware out of wheat and call them Glutensils
- Every now and then I forget that Didi hates whistling. I start whistling a happy tune, and pretty soon there's an angry cat biting my ankles. 😾
- [article about the Perseverence rover] If I were a European, I think I would be a little offended by this plan. The nuclear powered NASA rover takes soil and rock samples, but then leaves them scattered on the surface. A solar powered ESA rover then picks them up, loads them into a rocket, and launches them into orbit, where another ESA robot intercepts the payload, repackages it, and sends it back to Earth, only to have it land in North America for analysis. Who negotiated this deal for the EU?
For that matter, who negotiated it for the US? ESA doesn't exactly have a great record for successful interplanetary missions. What makes us think they can pull off every step of this plan without a hitch? If even one of those robots doesn't work exactly right, the payload is lost. - As an upperclassman at Grinnell, I took a semester of piano lessons just to see what college level piano lessons would be like. Having studied piano for 10 years already, I brought sheet music for two ragtime pieces I wanted to learn to play, Bolcom's "Graceful Ghost" and Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." The teacher insisted that I must play the music as written and not improvise or swing the beat. I argued that it was meant to be performed swinging, but she challenged me to prove it, and having no YouTube at my disposal I complied and performed "Maple Leaf" as written in the recital. But I wish I had learned to play it like Joplin did!
- Every time I hear a commercial that mentions "A1C," I can't help thinking that's 16 more than Alexandria 0casio Cortez.
- How appropriate is it that the only people who remember Mike Myers's "Middle Aged Man" sketch are now middle aged or older?
Asking because I had to explain to a committee of adults how to buy checks for the organization's checking account. None of them had bought checks before.
For I am Middle Aged Man! (ahhh!) With knowledge and wisdom far beyond those of younger men. - Q: why does our car make a bleep bleep noise when it's in reverse?
A: because there's a back-up censor
This joke isn't mine... it was posted in all seriousness on a Facebook group for Nissan Leaf owners. The guy said he had mounted a bike rack on the back of the car and it wouldn't stop bleeping because of the censor. - [Feb 20] With apologies to Gil Scott-Heron and respect to all my friends in Texas:
"My power was off half the week
(With Teddy in Cancún)
My water pipes have sprung a leak
(And Teddy's in Cancún)
I'm melting snow to wash and flush
(But Teddy's in Cancún)
That doesn't help me drink or brush
(And Teddy's in Cancún)
The city doesn't plow or salt
(But Teddy's in Cancún)
The mayor said it's my own fault
(I should go to Cancún)
Cruz said there's nothing he can do
(Why not go to Cancún?)
But Dems have raised a mil or two
(While he was in Cancún)
Can't help me pay the bills or rent
(While he's off in Cancún)
But watch him run for president
(When he's back from Cancún)" - My biggest pet peeve about Omaha is when white people assume that we must live in West O because we're white. No, I would NOT prefer to see the doctor at @#%$ Village Pointe when we live less than 3 miles from the "downtown" (Blackstone) location.
- [Feb 20, during the Conservative Political Action Conference] CPAC is for people with sleep acnea
- [Feb 28 re criticism of the Inflation Reduction Act] "Most of the handouts in the bill are only for those who elected the president..." You mean the majority? Imagine that!
- I've started studying Guaraní on Duolingo. It sounds like if Japanese and Swahili started a family together in Brazil.
- TFW you make the claim that members of a Facebook group share some common ground and that it's possible to say some things there without getting pushback, and then someone unironically and without joking disagrees with you.
- There should be an epic novel about email scammers trying to land the one big fish that will give meaning to their lives.
It should start with the sentence, "Call me phishmail." - Since memes were named by analogy to genes, I think we should start calling their pervasive spelling errors mutations.
- A COVID innovation that I don't want to give up is professional conferences where all the sessions are recorded so you can skip them and watch them later at high speed. Like, I do want to hear what you have to say, but not right now, and much faster.
- [March 13] Re-watching "Mars Attacks!" tonight would have been even sweeter if we could say COVID is vanquished. Or if Slim Whitman music were effective against it.
- TFW a medical researcher asks you about possible environmental causes of your cancer, and you say, "you mean like going inside an experimental nuclear fusion reactor when I was 16?" and his eyes light up. #totallyworthit #superkids1993
- I wonder how many times a day people misspell Petsmart as Pestmart.
- A few days ago the lock screen of my phone spontaneously changed from flat black to dark purple billowing shadows. There was no software update, no change of settings. It makes me feel a bit like the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper." Minus the misogyny part of course.
- I gotta say, my stereotype of English speakers as the most provincial and petty language learners has been thoroughly shaken by studying Guaraní via Spanish on Duolingo. Native Spanish speakers are, at least in the discussion forums, WAY more provincial and petty. Open the discussion on pretty much any Guaraní sentence and they are bickering about regional differences and whose version of Spanish is right. I'm sure it's very important.
- When people write about the accomplishments of people who are not famous, do they think they are doing them some sort of favor by ending with, "sadly, most people don't know who she is"? Seriously...
- Somebody told me that you should phrase your ideas like somebody told you them and you're impressed, and now I can't stop thinking about it
- [headline about Alan Turing being featured on a UK bank note] I mean, it's not *actually* Alan Turing's face, but it can pass for it in a carefully designed test.
- Every once in a while I get this mashup stuck in my head, to the tune of "Feeling Good" by Nina Simone:
Butterfly in the sky, you know how I feel
I can fly just as high, you know how I feel
Take a look! It's in a book, how I feel
It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,
It's a reeeeeeaading rainbow! - [clickbait headline: "Why Is Saving Historic Places is Important?"] Why is proofreading is important? Am friend! It clicks the button. Please?
- [March 28, regarding the ship stuck in the Suez canal, which had EVERGREEN painted on its side] All I'm saying is if they'd chosen a deciduous boat instead of an evergreen it would be floating a lot lighter this time of year
- It cracks me up when folks try to write "ISO" to mean "in search of" and it gets autocorrected to iOS. iOS coffeemaker. iOS cinder blocks! iOS flowering plants!
- I could be wrong, but if you can offer a $2100 discount on your online class, it may have been overpriced to begin with. 🙄
- UseNet should be rebranded as BlogChain.
- Facebook is very concerned that the article I shared last week about a hypothetical plan to re-green the Sinai desert was "missing context," but it's not clear what I'm supposed to do about it. They already paired it with another article to give it "balance," although the other article is also missing context, along with LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE that gets shared here.
- While I was driving home tonight, "The Atomic Hour" on NPR was playing the songs that were called "oldies" when I was a kid. Everly Brothers, that kind of thing. Then I switched over to a rock station, and they were playing today's oldies. You know, "Get Down with the Sickness," "Enter Sandman," "Come Out and Play" ... top 10 popular hit records from 30 years ago. If those aren't oldies, what are?
- You know, I have worked on Web sites for a living for more than 15 years, and I do not care to be notified when businesses or organizations debut a new Web site. I get why they're excited, but why should I care? And even less do I care to be notified *before* they have debuted the new site, just because it's "coming soon." That is the opposite of news and goes straight in the trash. Lookin' at you, US Bank. </gripe>
- Do not despair when the bar for acceptable behavior is raised. It's the main evidence of progress.
- I just want to see electric cars get commonplace enough that their owners no longer feel the need to get vanity plates.
- If I ask people who aren't toilet trained to wear diapers before coming inside, that is not "discrimination." It doesn't matter that poop on the furniture or the rug is "survivable." It doesn't matter that you have a good reason for not being toilet trained. It doesn't matter that you probably don't have to poop right now anyway. I just don't want poop on my stuff, and I'm asking you to do the same thing as everyone else, which is to take precautions to not poop on my stuff. So if you can't get toilet trained, whatever the reason, I expect you to wear a diaper before you come inside. That is all.
Also, the fact that you pooped on furniture before and "it wasn't a big deal" doesn't sound as impressive as you think. - Refrain in a song on the radio was, "Nobody's in the basement." Or maybe it was "No bodies in the basement." Either way, it's suspicious and someone should probably investigate. I'll stay here and creak the hinges slowly on a squeaky door.
- [headline: Genetically modified salmon head to US dinner plates] "The company argued that escape is unlikely, saying the fish are monitored 24 hours a day and contained in tanks with screens, grates, netting, pumps and chemical disinfection to prevent escape. The company’s salmon are also female and sterile, preventing them from mating." Where have I heard that before? 🤔
- [headline: Crowe expected to start for the Pirates against Royals] I didn't know there was going to be another Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but replacing Johnny Depp with Russel Crowe sounds like a great idea to me!
- [headline: Most Americans think they can spot fake news. They can't, study finds.] The more certain you are that this article is correct, the more likely you are to be mistaken.
- There's a company advertising on here that they can turn a SketchUp model into a 3D printing. I'm pretty sure anything I've ever modeled in SketchUp would tear a hole in the fabric of reality if you tried to print it in less than 4 dimensions. I'm just that bad at it. [friend commented: "I genuinely hope this is how the world ends."]
- Apparently the wind last night was just strong enough to knock the storm window pane out of our screen door and onto the concrete three steps below, but not strong enough to break the glass.
- TFW you spend over 5 hours trying to get the software to work the way that makes sense to you, and then less than 30 minutes getting it to work the way that makes sense to the software. 🤦
- It's scary how much more I buy at the farmers' market when I haven't eaten breakfast yet.
- I swear, if I asked on NextDoor for recommendations for a crematorium, half a dozen people would chime in that I could do the job myself.
- I notice that when somebody's gender reveal IED causes injury, death, or destruction, the news reports don't disclose what gender was supposed to have been revealed by the thing.
My money's on TROGDOR!!!!!!! - Geeky joke for geeks:
1. The open-source fork of Google Chrome is called Chromium. So far, so good.
2. The open-source fork of Microsoft VSCode, by analogy, is called VSCodium.
3. Among other things, VSCodium helps developers navigate the branching variants of code under version control.
4. Codium is the name of a genus of seaweed that also has a branching structure.
5. So the icon for VSCodium is a silhouette of seaweed. - My AP news feed had more confusingly ambiguous headlines than usual this morning:
"Jamie Lynn Spears sent death threats over sister Britney Spears' conservatorship"
"Residents evacuated from another big Florida condo building deemed unsafe" - I would ask where the time goes, but I'm afraid to find out.
- Thanks to Jessie for knowing how to get decomposing foam rubber insole goo off of socks! It's a product called Kiss Off stain remover, and it works like magic.
In related news, I wore my roller skates last night for the first time in three years. - I don't know how a nurse gets all the way through school without knowing that cocoa mix makes coffee taste better, but I've just rectified that.
- [article about unfilled seats at a Trump rally] At least Bezos's space penis didn't have 60,000 empty seats.
- There is a theory which states that if a viral meme is ever free of typos and grammatical errors, it will immediately disappear and be replaced by one that has mutated. The [sic] is another which states that this has already happened.
- "Caravan of Despair" should be the British title of the Robin Williams movie, "RV."
- It's only been 8 years since I had a tire blowout just after dropping Jessie off at the airport, and facing a week of living alone with a still-undiagnosed gluten intolerance, I had the closest thing to a nervous breakdown in my life. Thanks to my mom for dropping everything to come up for the weekend and help put myself back together. Jessie was out of town last week as well, and it was tough. I don't remember how to live alone. Those of you who are living alone: you have my respect. But you also have my support, if you need it. Maybe don't call or text just to make small talk, because we're all busy. But tell me you're having a rough time, and you'll have my attention. Nobody has to do it alone, but you've got to ask for help when you need it.
- haha, I had forgotten that it was just days after my breakdown that Indiegogo decided to report me to Homeland Security and confiscate the funds I had raised for an educational trip to Cuba. That was not a fun week.
- I have been studying Spanish since elementary school, but I just now learned that the word for "adjustable wrench" is "llave inglesa" -- English key. Now I'm imagining English people opening their doors with wrenches while the Spaniards laugh...
...but of course it's the other way around. "llave" can mean key, spanner, faucet, lock, brace, piston, or valve, depending on the context. Meanwhile "key" can mean at least 8 different things in English! - TFW someone posts a meme with so many typos that when you try to comment with an equivalent number of typos, your phone actively fights you to correct it..!
- is there a better name for a dystopian cartoon hero than [professional skateboarder and surfer] Sky Brown? How is she not a character in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts?
- Dear PayPal:
1) I have stopped using my account whenever I can help it for one reason only: the Balance View no longer shows the account balance. There is no longer any way to see what the account balance was at a given time in the past. This is a stupid problem on your fault and should be easy to fix.
2) I am posting this to social media and not to your help forum because countless other people have already posted about it to your help forum and you have not responded. - In English, hungry is an adjective (I am hungry). In Spanish, it's a noun (I have hunger). In Russian, it's a verb (I want to eat). In Dutch, it's the absence of a noun (I have food need). In Navajo, it's a state of mind (I'm thinking of hunger).
- Since some of us evidently need a refresher, the group we know as the Pilgrims was not the same as the Puritans. One tried to cooperate peacefully with the native Americans; the other tried to convert and eliminate them, just for example. That's why it makes a huge difference whether the Thanksgiving we celebrate is the first (peaceful) or the second (following a massacre): They were different people with different agendas. [link to a history.com article] One group gave us the UCC and UU churches; the other gave us witch trials. One gave us Christmas as we know it; the other tried to ban Christmas. Not the same people.
- [headline: Baby born with twin inside stomach] "An extremely rare occurrence that only happens once every 500,000 births." So... there are 15,000 of these in the world right now?
- [headline: Wall of ice collapses at Titanic museum in Tennessee, 3 hurt] Remind me not to go to the Hindenberg museum...
- TFW a news story about Minnesota uses a photo of the Minneapolis skyline that still has the Metrodome in it. (demolished in 2014)
- [photo of a patch of pavement in our neighborhood that didn't get resurfaced because a car was parked there, right by a temporary No Parking sign] Some people's purpose in life is to serve as an example to others.
- Am I the only one who thinks Andrew Cuomo looks like Willem DaFoe? I can't find any side-by-side pictures. I mean, I can tell them apart, but on some level I'm expecting Cuomo to become the Green Goblin any day now.
- When the Drupal dev team sends out an email saying that a major security vulnerability will be disclosed later in the day along with the upgrade to fix it, it feels kind of like when Gandalf promises to help win the battle of Helms Deep -- five days later. On the one hand, thanks for letting me know when I can fix the problem so I can clear my schedule. On the other hand, now we know there's a problem, and so do the hackers, and they have a massive freaking army outside the gates. It's that one drain at the bottom of the wall, isn't it? I knew we should have put another gate on that.
- I've had the same peppy '80s Swedish pop song ["Fångad Av Rn Stormvind"] stuck in my head for days. My subconscious has composed the following English lyrics:
I'm like a telephone that rings
But in the end I won't give your money back
I like the confidence it brings
But in the end I might have a heart attack
I can't remember half the things I try to say
Don't worry, baby, I can take the news OK
[chorus:]
But if you see me in the streetlight, watch out!
'Cause I might have killed a guy
More than likely Jean-Paul Sartre
See me makin' moonshine? Watch out!
'Cause I prob'ly killed a guy
And his name was Jean-Paul Sartre, yeah! - Microbes divide to multiply. Movies get more derivative the more pop culture they integrate. But is there anything that subtracts to add? Decibels and pH come to mind, but those are both logarithmic scales, so they don't count, at least not in a straightforward fashion. [friends suggested: battery sizes, wire gauges, insulation R values]
- The Turkish word for turkey is "hindi." 🤦
- Know what doesn't go well with a touchscreen device? Pine sap.
- What's the adjective meaning "like a coyote?"
I think it should be coyotic. - I've seen a lot of popular-press articles about the 40th anniversary of the IBM PC, a product that IBM discontinued in 2005. But did you know that August 25th was the 30th anniversary of Linux, which currently powers 30% of the Internet, 38% of embedded devices (such as car entertainment systems), 70% of phones and tablets, and 100% of supercomputers? I can't find any articles in the mainstream press about it. 🤷🐧♥
- I'm on chapter 19 of a sci-fi novel, and the narrator still hasn't realized she's a genetically engineered tapeworm, even though it's been obvious to the reader since chapter 1. Sigh. I can't wait to read about how shocked she is when the big reveal finally happens. Or at this rate, maybe that's being saved for one of the sequels..!
- 2021: we heard you like bicycling and gardens, so how about a garden tour by bicycle, starting in your neighborhood?
Me: sorry, I have too much fatigue today. Next time.
2021: how about a Doctor Who trivia night, also in your neighborhood, but on a day when you can't think straight enough to find words?
Me: 💔 - When life gets you down, make a pillow
- I predict that if the Tesla Cybertruck comes to market with those flat unpainted panels, people will quickly rediscover that the reason every other vehicle on the market has curved panels is so as not to blind other drivers when the sun reflects.
- Every time I see the name "Theranos," I imagine Willy Wonka saying, "Let's put Thanos in the ER! Wait, strike that. Reverse it."
- I still spell out "Thanks in advance" because "TIA" always looks like "Take it away" to me.
Also, "KFC" makes me think "Krishna F-ing Christ." YMMV. - Naming computers is an opportunity to reflect on what they mean to us at the time they come into our lives. I bought my last MacBook because I spilled coffee on my previous one and needed a replacement in a hurry, although I was already having second thoughts about Apple, so I called it "Last Best Hope" as a reference to Babylon 5 (and the ill-fated Babylons 1-4). Once I'd made up my mind to switch to Linux, I named my Dell XPS "Vorlon" after the seemingly alien technology. But it's been letting me down for a few months now, so I got a newer XPS to replace it... It just arrived today, and I've named it "Kosh." B5 fans understand.
- It's a shame that Uncle Ben's rice didn't take the opportunity of changing their name to say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Then again, I'm an Uncle Ben, and I haven't found many opportunities to work it into conversation either. Maybe because there's not much evidence that it's true.
- Piranhoia, n. The conviction that fish are conspiring to eat you.
- Some of my friends shared a meme by an alleged college professor whose response to land acknowledgments (e.g. "this event is taking place on unceded, unsurrendered land of the [x] people") was to take a student's water bottle and say he would apologize in the future, and, he says, "a fruitful discussion ensued." At least one of these friends have since taken the meme down from where they shared it, so rather than reply there, I'll do it here:
It seems to me that fixing everything is not the intention of land acknowledgements, and it's disingenuous to think that that ever was the intention. The intention was to inspire discussions exactly like the one this prof is taking credit for. So the fact that they had "a fruitful discussion" means that it worked. And if he takes credit for the someone else's work, well then, he's part of the problem and doesn't know it. 🤷 - I cannot see an ad for "Cry Macho" without thinking, "...and let slip the dogs of masculinity!"
- I always free associate from "Killing Me Softly" to "Phyllis Schlafly" and vice versa. "Filling us schlafly with her song, filling us schlafly... with her song..."
- [headline: Shakira attacked by pair of wild boars] Planet of the Boars is in production now, and Shakira is starring in it!
- [Oct 4] Wait, so the Pandora Papers say basically the same thing as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers? Shouldn't Pandora have been first, so she could unbox the others? And what's the next leak going to be called, Papyrus Papers?
- TFW the cafe you're working remotely in has played the same song 8+ times, so you ask the staff to change the song, and they restart the same song from the beginning. And then they realize their mistake and put on something new.😅
- Pro tip: check the camping gear for cat pee before the day of the trip.
- I wish Home Depot would stop trying to sell me front doors after I already bought a front door from them. How many front doors do they think I need?
- There should be a water distillery in Stillwater. Maybe they could franchise in both Stillwaters.
- The text-to-speech on my phone pronounces COP26 as "26 Colombian Pesos," and I wonder if the Conference Of the Parties has been a running joke among Colombians for 26 years now, and I'm just finding out about it.
- All day I had a chord progression in my head without the tune and couldn't place it. What is that, an Adele song? No, it's the %@#$ Nebraska Medicine hold music.
For those who are not familiar, it sounds like somebody playing a Philip Glass LP at 78 RPM. - I don't understand why there are fans of Imperial stormtroopers. Near as I can tell, not only are they faceless minions of an evil empire, they're also incompetent at their jobs. Am I missing something? Is there a back corner of Star Wars canon in which stormtroopers are worthy of respect and admiration?
- When your vision is only clear around yourself, that's myopic. If your vision is limited to what's happening around somebody else, that's a biopic.
- Now that a new generation is learning that a "Maker" is a sandworm, I hope to see a sandworm at the next Maker Fair. It could be a knife rack, or a pepper shaker, or a mode of transport. Or all three!
- It occurs to me that vampires on Buffy turn to dust when staked, even if they were freshly deceased. Seems like somebody in Sunnydale should have offered that as an eco-friendly alternative to [hospice and] cremation.
- today's coffeeshop playlist is "indistinct breathy vocals with timid guitar"
- a pet peeve that increases with each year: when people (myself included) say "people" but mean something more like "native English speaking American neurotypical adults." People who are still learning our language and culture are also people. They will make mistakes, because they are learning, and that is how learning happens. Maybe if we had to precisely specify the learners we're excluding, we would think twice about excluding people who are learning.
- [Nov 14] I think it's funny how righteously outraged folks are about Facebook's parent company changing its name to a name that was already in use by an existing company (horrors!) when Google's parent company changed its name to Alphabet... and then there's Amazon. Seriously? "Meta" is the one you're upset about? 🤔
- I just realized many of us have been on Facebook longer than emoji.
- I've never been to Cape Fear, NC, nor have I seen either of the movies named "Cape Fear." But I'm working hard on software that will be deployed there this weekend, and every time I see the name, I think of The Incredibles. "No capes!"
- TFW you realize you're taking meeting minutes in valid YAML, and nothing could be more natural.
- When somebody sends an email that contains important information only as text in an attached JPEG, I feel like the last 25 years have been a complete loss and weep for humanity.
- Liberals can troll ourselves without even meaning to. Webinar tonight devolved quickly from "permaculture originated within colonizer culture" to "the word is offensive because permanence is not desirable" to "decolonize and uncolonize are two different things and if you use the wrong word you are wrong" to "the English language is a tool of the colonizers and any English word is wrong." Fortunately I had another commitment and had to leave at that point.
- I swear, the more filmmakers overuse slow motion, the more I watch at 1.5x or 2x. I don't need to see every dang thing in slow mo.
- [UU World article on "A Theology of Darkness"] This article was one of the first things I saw this morning, and it's been bugging me ever since. There is a distinction between the ABSENCE of light and the ABSORPTION of light. They may look similar to human eyes, but one is cold and the other is warm. They have never been the same thing and should long ago have had different poetic and theological implications. I feel like this article misses that point entirely.
- I keep thinking of how the blue jeans industry advised consumers to only wash their jeans every 10 wears. Man, if you're not getting dirty, what are you even wearing jeans for? If you're just gonna sit still, put on something that's actually comfortable to sit in.
- A barista evidently has a Grateful Dead channel on their music streaming service, and I have now heard more Grateful Dead songs in the past two hours than in my entire life combined.
- [Article from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about how "Do You Hear What I Hear" was actually about the Cuban missile crisis] Now I feel better about the poems I wrote in my 20s that nobody understood. I would have felt way worse if I'd written a best-selling Christmas song that nobody understood.
- Facebook wanted to know why I hid the "Birds Aren't Real" ad, so I selected "Knows too much."
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