By Ben |
  • [headline: Browns gearing up for one last shot at dropping Big Ben] I just assumed this headline was about UPS.
  • Goodreads: we know you said you're interested in science fiction, so we thought you might like "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" Because, you know, it predicts the future. Oh, you've read that, and you liked it? Then have ALL THE DR. SEUSS. And also Winnie the Pooh
  • How much warmer was December 2021? Our house had 25% less demand for heating than in December 2019, and 36% less than 2020.
  • [headline: Apple becomes first firm to hit $3tn market value] Back in the early 2000s I had a friend who was then turning 60 already retired, and his investments were 100% in Apple stock. At the time it seemed like a very risky strategy. If he's alive today, he probably pays more tax than Apple.
  • Loki and Gaius Baltar and Dr. Bashir are not played by the same actor, but they are clearly some sort of Sci-Fi trope, with their very similar British accents and their scrawny physiques and soulful dark eyes. Like how Brita and Jess and Kimmy and Zoey are a sitcom trope with their perky attitudes and bangs and oversized eyes.
  • Yes, cryptocurrencies are pyramid schemes that are destroying the planet. So is EVERYTHING ELSE in our economy. So by all means, criticize "tech bros" and other crypto evangelists, but don't stop there.
  • I just learned that the Spanish equivalent of "word of mouth" is literally "mouth to mouth" (boca a boca) which means that you can resuscitate a person by gossip, but only en español
  • [link to a Doonesbury comic] Boopsie's eyes have gotten progressively more creepy over the years. Soon she'll look like Gollum. And talk like him, Precious.
  • A friend sent me a midnight text asking why the power button on her computer is labeled ⏼, and speculating that it's on & off. I told her it means her computer has already acquired two of the three Deathly Hallows and should under no circumstances be given the Cloak of Invisibility. It's important to be the friend your friend deserves.
  • A cowboy walks into a bank in a wild west town and says, "I'd like to -- what's the word -- to get some money from my account."
    The teller says, "Withdrawal?"
    "Sorry," says the cowboy. "Ahhh'd lahhhk ta giyit..."
    [A friend suggested an alternate version: the cowboy asks, "how do you say it?" And the teller replies, "withdrawal"]
  • Would you rather be right all the time and have no one believe you, like Cassandra, or the opposite, like a meteorologist?
  • A commenter in a group used the word "approximity," which is not in the dictionary but clearly means "horseshoes and hand grenades."
  • For the love of god, we know that we can save by bundling home and auto insurance. It's not a selling point. Literally every insurance company does that. Find something else to say.
  • Had an exchange with a developer this morning who essentially said there's no point fixing the Year 2038 bug because people need to get used to not planning for a future. Sixteen years folks... History as we know it ends with the Unix epoch. 🙄
  • This morning I got curious about an old margarine jingle Fran Stallings used to sing, "The new ubiquitous comestible." I can't turn up the ad itself or the lyrics, but I learned it was written by Stan Freberg for Nucoa, and I can find other Nucoa ads and, more interestingly, more ads Freberg wrote for other products. And strangest of all, searching YouTube for that exact phrase turns up other margarine ads that do not contain the phrase. So somehow that phrase has become associated with margarine ads in general and not with that ad specifically.
  • [regarding her televised claim that Jews are not a race and so can't claim racial discrimination] Whoopi Goldberg isn't anti-semitic, she's a Jew-Exclusionary Radical Antiracist.
  • I am disappointed that none of the competing specifications for ZML appear to be orthogonal to XML and YML.
  • What I don't get about the song "Brown Eyed Girl" is... What good is a transistor radio in an old mine? It's not going to get any reception in there. 🤔
  • I was a little disappointed when I met a Dr. Van de Graaff yesterday that his hair wasn't standing on end.
  • last night Jessie was talking about the medal in skeleton, and for a moment I thought she meant Wolverine. #winterolympics #toomuchpopculture
  • Carfax: if you want to see the service history of that car, it's gonna cost you $40. That information is precious because we carefully curate it for accuracy.
    Also Carfax: Oh, you say you OWN that car? Here's the full service history for free. Would you like to edit it? Go right ahead!
  • Me: [minding my own business]
    elementary gym class: 🎼 Touchdown (two!) every morning (four!) / Not just (two!) now and then (four!) / GIVE that chicken fat BACK to the chicken / and DON'T be chicken again! 🎵
  • [Feb 24] y'all are reacting to the prospect of being at war like we didn't just spend TWENTY YEARS ignoring that we were at war.
  • I just misread "Le sirop de MONIN®" as "Top o' de MO'NIN'"
  • I find it amusing that if you start a list counting from 0 (as programmers and other pedants are fond of doing, because ordinal numbers ≠ cardinal numbers), but your stylesheet has set the list-style-type to Roman numerals or letters where there is no 0th option, you still get 0 as the first ordinal. 0, I, II, III makes sense; 0, a, b, c not so much. 🤷
  • Having seen part of Star Blazers at Russell Dysinger's house as a kid made me have a weird reaction to learning about the Argo in Greek mythology and about the gamelan musical ensemble in my 20s. Now I'm having a similar reaction to learning that Iskandar is a variant of the name Alexander. They really should have chosen some more creative names!
  • Didi and Dahli got a good 6 weeks of unrestrained play in while the house was dog-free. Now they're adjusting to a new dog, Kooper. They are intimidated by his style of play, running around madly. But he is TERRIFIED of theirs: they like to ambush him in the darkness. He'll venture downstairs, and the next thing we hear is YIPE! YIPE! SQUEEEAL! as he runs back upstairs. 😹
  • [March 10, re sanctions against Russia] All I know is, if it turns out that we can bring an aggressive nation to its knees just by refusing to do business with them anymore, we should really reconsider our military spending.
  • Is there a name for the style of singing in the '60s where the background singers sing just as high as humanly possible? Notable examples include "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" and "A Marshmallow World".
  • I like it when an institution gives the option of closing my account by just sending them a letter in the mail rather than waiting on hold for an unknown amount of time before someone tries to talk me out of it.
  • [March 13] Pretty sure if you'd told me 5 years ago that the top name in the news this month would be a white male comedian who didn't harass anybody, I would have said "thank God" and failed to ask any follow up questions.
  • Knowledge is knowing that you should generally clap on 2 and 4, and that the counting numbers start with 0. Wisdom is knowing that these rules do not apply to the same situation.
  • [March 14] Pi Day in Unix timestamps is frustrating: 314159265 was 42 years ago, and 3141592653 is still 47 years away (after the Epochalypse).
    In case folks are wondering why I keep referencing Unix timestamps on days when other folks are seeing patterns on the calendar, it's to point out, in my smartass way, how arbitrary and imaginary those patterns are. March 14 has nothing to do with pi, except that the Earth has approximately completed an orbit since the last time we celebrated March 14, and some of the formulas for an orbit contain a pi. Everything else is arbitrary: representing an irrational number as a base 10 decimal is an arbitrary choice, as is choosing where to round it. The choice of calendar is arbitrary, as is choosing to leave out the year in order to see a resemblance to the digits of pi. And of course the resemblance to the word for a dessert is a meaningless coincidence. Image removed.
  • I remember when Word first introduced toolbar buttons for copy and paste, I thought, that is a bad idea. Now, almost 30 years later, there are adults who have been using computers for decades who still don't know that you can copy and paste from the keyboard using the same keys in every single program, because they think they need toolbar buttons to do it. Image removed.
  • I've been using Duolingo for 10 years this week! This year I'd rank the Arabic and Spanish courses a bit higher now that they have more lessons, and I'd add Yiddish and Turkish to the list with **** each. Here are my total XP in each course as of this morning:
    Spanish: 31,475
    Arabic: 12,234
    Russian: 6,546
    Yiddish: 4,580
    Swahili: 3,551
    Hindi: 3,528
    Dutch: 3,434
    French: 3,012
    Turkish: 2,556
    Japanese: 2,475
    Navajo: 1,775
    Guaraní (from Spanish) 1,369
    Hebrew: 871
    Russian (from Spanish) 455
    Chinese: 121
    Greek: 80
    Spanish (from Russian): 35
  • Omaha World Herald: may I ask why you want to cancel your online subscription?
    Me: because you raised the monthly price to more than Netflix and the New York Times combined, and it's not worth that much to me.
    OWH: it looks like I can offer you a limited time rate of $4.99/mo. Is there anything else I can do to keep you as a subscriber?
    Me: it would be great if I didn't have to keep calling every few months to get a reasonable rate.
    OWH: I just work here.
  • I really wonder about [the movie] "Barry." Especially since Michelle Obama's own account of how they met, in her autobiography, is so much better than the movie version. Did nobody think to ask her?
  • deep thought of the morning: charging money for guns is unconstitutional, because not everyone has money, and the right to bear arms "shall not be infringed." 🤔
  • Kooper makes our previous dogs seem like they had design flaws. He doesn't smell bad or need brushing or wiping. Loca was very sweet, and I will always love her, but Kooper makes her look like a dirty mop in comparison. And poor Marcel had indigestion almost daily, which I can identify with, but I'd rather not pick up after.
  • Andrew Stanton did more to redeem the characters of John Carter and friends in 132 minutes than Burroughs did in 11 books.
  • Nextdoor makes me feel good about my time at Twin Cities Free-Net. We had our interpersonal problems, but TCFN was never the garbage fire that Nextdoor is on a daily basis.
  • I was enjoying the British reader of "The Dawn of Everything" audiobook, but I was unprepared for his pronunciation of "Ur." He sounds like he's being punched in the gut.
  • Following up on my post a few days ago about how some people still don't know there are key combos for copy and paste... I remember when I first learned Unix in 1993, somebody explained that the center mouse button would copy any selected text and paste it to where you clicked, and I thought "that's weird, when will I ever use that?" Now I use it about 100x a day.
  • [photo of an "Easter Advent Calendar"] A quick search reveals that Easter Advent is indeed a thing, culturally if not theologically. 🤦 I don't mean to imply that Christian theology is usually coherent, but it's usually more coherent than, say, Doctor Who.
  • Developers: Introducing the World Wide Web, where everything is text and accessible to people with vision impairments and mobile devices!
    Designers: with images in the text!
    Developers: OK, you can embed images, but try to keep them small to save bandwidth, and you have to supply alt text so screen readers can --
    Designers: and fonts! Centered text! blinky scrolling colors!
    Developers: Introducing stylesheets, so you can put all that non-semantic formatting in a separate file from the semantic text.
    Designers: needs more interaction. Like a programming language for bells and whistles.
    Developers: Introducing ECMAscript, for all your bells and whistles. Please just keep them separate from the semantic text so people with disabilities can --
    Designers: Videos! We need to share videos!
    Developers: OK, here's a standard for videos, but be sure to include captions, and please keep in mind that not everyone has a ton of bandwidth to --
    Designers: SLLOOOWWWW MOOOTIOON
    I realize that designers are not intentionally trying to undermine web accessibility, but sometimes I wonder what would be different if they were.
  • I really enjoyed watching The Lost City! If you remember enjoying Romancing the Stone but suspect it hasn't aged well, I recommend this updated version.
  • [link to tax.iowa.gov] antipattern, n. The validation rule on this form that requires a SSN in the format 999-99-9999 but only allows 10 characters to be typed. It is possible to complete the form by typing one character at a time without dashes, but it will scold you for 8 of them.
    Also: the IA1040 form is totally fillable in my browser in Linux, but when I try to print it, it has an overlay saying that it has to be opened in Adobe Reader, which is not supported for Linux. Guess I'll have to print it from screenshots. Image removed.
  • [screenshot of instructions to make checks payable to "The Iowa Department of Iowa"] If they didn't notice they got their own department name wrong when telling us how to make out checks, what are the chances that the rest of the instructions are correct? 🧐🤔
  • This morning I had to explain the saying "in like a lion, out like a lamb" to a colleague who is my age and was raised in the US, but evidently without the same exposure to folksy clichés I received.
  • I'm so glad I don't believe everything happens for a reason.
    Case in point: last night one of you posted something that reminded me of the 1985 song "Crazy in the Night." I'm certain I hadn't heard the song in at least 30 years. It's not popular or particularly good. But when I went to YouTube and typed in "crazy" it was the top suggestion to complete my search term. The top one. Of all the "crazy" things I could be searching for, the algorithm thought that was the most likely one. 🤔
  • TFW you contacted a client on March 30 to ask about a late payment, and they swore they mailed the check on March 23 and implied that you must have misplaced it, but then it arrives with a postmark of March 30. 🤭
  • If you go to the Alamo Drafthouse site right now, the first thing you see is a promo for the film "Everything Everywhere All at Once." Below that are search filters, set to their defaults, which are: Everything, Anywhere, and Anytime. It's as if the site was built in anticipation of this moment.
  • Earlier today I accidentally watched part of a YouTube video that turned out to be an objectivist retelling of "The Ant and the Grasshopper." I stopped watching after another, socialist ant led the grasshopper to a government welfare center after scolding the titular ant for not sharing.
    Just in case there is anyone out there who knows as little about ants as the neocon pundit who made the video, let me fill you in on something Aesop certainly knew:
    Ants are social insects. There is no such thing as a solitary ant. They do not gather food for themselves, but for the colony. If the colony is threatened, they will immediately put their lives on the line for the greater good. The fable does not need another character to be the socialist ant. All ants are socialist. 
    The fable is not about being lazy & hedonistic vs. working hard for oneself; an ant *has* no self. The fable is about thinking of oneself only vs. thinking of the whole community. The grasshopper is refused food because they don't have the community's interest at heart.
    In other words, objectivists are grasshoppers, even though they may try to convince you they are ants. Do not feed the objectivists.
  • [link to article] When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will shoot 9-year-old girls in line to get photographed with the Easter bunny and have to flee the state.
  • [photo of lawnmower ad: "Show your grass, Who's the Boss"] Remember, folks, your grass can't be truly simpatico until it's seen the sitcoms you grew up with.
  • Well, that's a first. An email contact form that doesn't allow exclamation points, slashes, or parentheses in the text of the message, allegedly for security reasons. State Farm needs a better programmer.
  • TFW a medical clinic surprises you with a sheet of boilerplate about their "no surprises" billing policy that specifically does not apply to the doctor you're about to see. And then they take your blood pressure.
  • Hey, animal-rights advocates: the time to express your views about what organizations should not be allowed to exhibit at an event is during the planning stages of that event, not days before it. Please know that you are welcome to volunteer in the planning. Thanks! ♥
  • I enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I get that an action movie needs lots of fight scenes, but much like with Domino in Deadpool 2, I was left a little disappointed that even with infinite improbability to work with, the writers still consistently chose violence. 😟 [Friend noted: except when they explicitly chose kindness instead.] Yes, but the character pleading for kindness was not the one who had seen the infinite possibilities!
  • Musicians who go over time and don't know or don't care that someone else is waiting to go on after them before the rain starts and everyone leaves
  • If at least one UU minister doesn't scrap her plans to write a Mother's Day service inspired by season 2 of Russian Doll, I will be surprised and disappointed. The trick will be to do it without spoilers.
  • Who is twitter, the twit who bought it, or the twits who use it?
  • [headline: Mystery plagues high school after 100 former students and staff get brain tumors in NJ] I dunno what's more alarming, that something in that school has caused at least 100 people to get a rare cancer, or that their doctors diagnosed 100 cases of a rare cancer without getting at all suspicious.
  • 🎜 Super Mario Bro! Thers
    Here's. A. Game. With Mario
    And with his plumber brother Luigi
    The. Theme. Song's. So catchy you
    Might have to scrub your brain with a squeegee
    If you play with friends, they'll have to wait 'cause
    Only one can play at a time!
    You can play all day, at least until your
    Thumbs. Turn. Blue.
    There's a princess trapped in each castle, but it's
    Not your princess most of the time!
    When you have the chance, you'll more than likely
    Skip. A. Head.
    It's a game that leaves nothing to chance.
    It's all down to your skill,
    Muscle mem'ry, and having a few
    Hundred hours to kill.
    It's a game, you'll have to agree,
    That asks a lot of your whole family.
    Even if they don't watch the screen,
    There's no escape from this tune.
    You just completed a LEvel!
    You're going to the next LEvel!
    After first raising a FLAG onto a POLE!
  • The New York Times' morning newsletter devoted a bunch of space today to explaining the NFL draft because "many readers of this newsletter are not football fans. Still, I think the draft is [...] a delightful case study of human hubris." But the article just boiled down to "past performance does not guarantee future results," which is a lesson I would think the Times' readers would have already heard. 🤷
  • You know those plug-in gizmos that heat up a liquid to "freshen" the air or diffuse cat pheromones or whatever? If you haven't had the thought, "I bet if that thing shorted out, it could fill the house with acrid smoke in a matter of minutes," you should. And maybe don't leave it unattended. Being UL listed doesn't make a gadget safe, just safer.
  • How has nobody made a "Mohs Madness" elimination bracket for teaching the mineral hardness scale?? I can't be the first person to think that scratching one mineral against another is like a sportsball game.
  • Defensiveness is a viscous cycle. The more you stir, the more it resists.
  • I can't stop thinking about how all of the plastic in the world is eventually going to break down into microplastics. And nothing yet has evolved that can eat microplastics. Eventually something will. Will it be friendly?
  • Why have I never noticed before that Florida and fluoride are really similar words?
  • "Human beings are more interesting than other human beings are, at times, inclined to imagine." David Graeber and David Wengrow, providing an uncharacteristically concise summary of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
  • Since the name of a famous anthropologist can also be (more or less) a brand of blue jeans, I think Disney's mascot should be Marcel Mouse.
  • I know a lot of people have a lot of problems with Avatar. But if I could get James Cameron's ear, I would ask:
    Why did you say the gravity is lower on Pandora if you were never ONCE going to show things falling slowly on screen? All you'd have to do is slow down the frame rate in the wide shots. Right?
    Why are the Na'vi the only creatures on Pandora that only have four limbs? It would have been so much cooler if they had six. C'mon.
    And of course, given more than a decade between the first and second films, why did you not take any of the critique into consideration?
    Unless this film [The Way of Water] is a whole lot better than it looks, it is going to go over like a submarine. 🤦
  • AutoZone Guy: I gotta get me a belt. This is embarrassing.
    Me: I saw a high school kid wearing his pants that way just this morning.
    AZG: kids these days...
    Me: I mean, it's not hurting anybody. I just can't believe it's still in style after 30 years. Isn't there anything new to do?
    AZG: Maybe I'll just wear a bungee cord.
    You heard it here first. The new thing.
  • I remember the first time the power went out and the laptop I was using kept running. I was in my usual spot in the carrel towers in Burling Library, and I could hear the cries of anguish from the computer lab all the way at the opposite corner of the building and a floor down. These days the cries of anguish come from the printer, wifi router, radon fan, refrigerator...
  • we're all billionaires if we leave the hyphens out of our phone numbers
  • Costume idea: dress as Fortune, but OUTRAGEOUS. Carry slings and arrows.
  • `git blame` is such a great tool for collaboration. Every team should have the ability to tell conclusively who it was who broke something, how, and when. 🧙‍♂️
  • [regarding the Australian accent] Cold : hate :: love : height :: width : hoit
  • When I would list things for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Emporia, people would show up at my door within minutes with cash in hand. Sometimes not enough cash, but still. In Omaha more often than not people say they are interested and then back out hours or days later, or they want me to drive across town to meet them in a parking lot behind a closed business, or they want to pay with gift cards, or something else shady like that. It's weird. There are a lot of weird people here, and we can't blame Facebook for that.
  • I had a dream this morning that the CDC said after having COVID you need to exfoliate using a 3-4" mesh. I triple checked the spec and then went to get Jessie some livestock panels from tractor supply, but they were sold out.
    In waking news, Jessie is doing fine and does not need to exfoliate, thanks.
  • PHP 8 finally supports named arguments!
    >>> str_replace("doesn't work", "works", "This doesn't work!");
    => "This works!"
    >>> str_replace("This doesn't work!", "works", "doesn't work");
    => "doesn't work"
    >>> str_replace(subject: "This doesn't work!", replace: "works", search: "doesn't work");
    => "This works!"
    Now I just have to remember the names of the arguments. 🤣
  • I just saw a conversation about the Uvalde shooting in which someone replied to criticism of the police by saying, "It's easy to criticize the police." That was it, that was the whole argument. I guess the implication is that it's harder to do the job than to criticize the job, but it reads another way.
    You know what? Other jobs are tough, too. I don't happen to have one of them, but I know people who are firefighters, soldiers, and heck, elementary school teachers. It is indeed easier to criticize the police than any of those people. Why? Because they do their jobs effectively, consistently, and with integrity. They have more training than police officers, and they are held accountable when they make mistakes. 
    This shooting reveals a lot of room for improvement in a lot of different areas, but one of them is that if the police did their tough jobs as well as other people do their tough jobs, they would be harder to criticize.
  • HTML email flaw #72: When you don't have the right font for a friend's email signature, so your software substitutes Webdings.
  • [headline: Janitor corrals curious cougar in empty California classroom] The article says "custodian," but I guess that would be Too Much Alliteration for one headline.
  • [XKCD comic that says "electron gyroscope" is another word for electromagnet] The magnetizer/demagnetizer my dad made me when I was a kid shall henceforth be known as an electron gyroscope.
  • I was pleased to see that Walgreens has really beefed up its "BOGO free" selection, because I'm trying to cut down on buying one and getting one.
  • [Onion headline: Montessori Sunday school teacher encourages kids to invent their own gods] BREAKING NEWS: Onion writer accidentally invents Unitarians as a joke
  • My favorite thing about airports is seeing how diverse people's opinions can be about appropriate attire and behavior while still coexisting peacefully. It's even better in the international terminal, but any airport will do. My seatmate from Omaha to Chicago was from Boston and had all the Boston attitude. At first she wouldn't stand up to let me past her seat and was watching rock videos so loud that I could hear the lyrics from her headphones. But after the flight attendants spilled some of my coffee on her, she gave me an earful about how flying has become an awful experience. I said everyplace is understaffed and everyone is overworked. She said her flight yesterday was canceled and she had to drive five hours for nothing. I asked what brought her to Omaha, and she said she had taken the train, which was nicer, but that she had gone to a ranch five hours south of Omaha. None of this story makes sense, but I didn't want to antagonize her further by asking questions.
  • The other day when walking the dog, my thought process went like this: 1. There's a shopping bag stuck in that rosebush. 2. That rosebush looks like it's trick-or-treating. 3. That's the best rosebush costume I've ever seen. 4. Now I know how to decorate our bushes for Halloween.
  • TFW you can't tell whether the electronic white puck on the coffee table of the Airbnb is an Amazon or Google surveillance robot, and then you realize the gadget you're talking to is in fact a coffee cup warmer.
  • R2D2 : Machu Picchu :: C3P0 : ? [friend suggests Acropolis]
  • [Link to an article about how the SF writer Alfred Bester tried (and failed) to teach Isaac Asimov a lesson about womanizing] Gentlemen: be like Alfred Bester. Not the fictional one from Babylon 5 though... Be like the real one he was named after.
  • Rabbit hole:
    1) Nellie Bly's childhood nickname was Pink, and folks at the time seemed to think that was a normal name.
    2) Why shouldn't Pink be as common a name as Rose? Is the color named for the flower, like rose? Checking Wikipedia...
    3) Pink and phoenix share the same etymology?! 🤯
  • Aargh, Lyft cancelled my early morning ride to the airport while I was sleeping! 🤬🤬🤬 What good is a reservation if they don't honor it? I can't even see what the explanation was, if any, because the notification was truncated and there was no email.
  • Wow, LaGuardia is really *nice* now! 🤯 I guess they got tired of being the butt of every joke.
  • I am so glad I'm not someone who believes everything happens for a reason. Here's what just happened:
    1. Jessie referred to an article of clothing as sweaty
    2. I free associated to Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and we joked about how he named a restaurant after vomit
    3. I further free associated from the song's chorus to the Talking Heads' "Once in a lifetime" but told no one
    4. I turned to Facebook and saw that one of my friends shared a meme hours ago referencing the Talking Heads' video for "Once in a lifetime" but not including the title or the words sweaty or spaghetti.
  • [Headline: Former Nebraska administrator Butch Hug runs a tight ship at the CWS] Probably the most sportsball name ever.
  • [Link to video of the Hollywood Argyles performing "Alley Oop"] About once a year I get this song stuck in my head. Upon rewatching this video of it, I noticed the audience persists in clapping on 1 and 3 through the whole song. But at least it's better than the Sha-Na-Na version that uses ALL MAJOR CHORDS for some reason (!!!). A wedding cake doesn't have this many layers of whiteness.
  • I am 100% ok with Christian prayer in public schools as long as it's Matthew 6:5.
  • Well actually, bread doesn't really rise. It's just displaced by denser, cold food. And you don't rise in the middle of the night to bake bread, you're just displaced by denser, cold sleeping people. [by analogy to pedants who insist that warm air and warm water don't rise]
  • On the drive to and from Kansas this weekend, I listened to "The New Jim Crow." It's a good book, and important, but very repetitive. Entire paragraphs appear in multiple chapters, probably so people can read a single chapter out of context, but in audio format it was pretty tedious. This morning while picking berries I started listening to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for the 7th or 8th time. It does not repeat. Each sentence is individually crafted and assembled into an edifice that has stood up for 50 years. Different times call for different measures. Each time I read Z&AMM I find new details I've missed before. For example, the Goethe poem that the narrator paraphrases in an early chapter, seemingly just making conversation, foreshadows the ending of the book. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but I never noticed that before because it's so casually slipped in there: he says the word "kin" and free-associates to the line from the poem, and then Sylvia asks him what he's thinking about, so he summarizes the poem, and it doesn't seem to have any significance, but there it is, the ending of the book.
  • I wonder if speakers of other Germanic languages think that the paradoxical thing about a Klein bottle is that it's generally not small. See also: baby Groot. [friend comments: never accept a Gift from a German.]
  • TFW you are so used to being bit in the ass by using == when you meant === that it takes you hours to realize you used !== when you meant !=. 🙄
  • Our local ice cream truck plays "The Entertainer," except the first line is slightly less than a half step higher than the rest of the tune. To keep my skin from crawling, I actively imagine it is passing by me to produce a Doppler shift. This requires some mental gymnastics when I can see it's right there.
  • Judging by the trailers for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, they hired the character animators from DreamWorks. I know it's Tatiana Maslany with motion capture, but look at those movements, those facial expressions. She's Fiona, and Hulk is Shrek.
  • If you think you're unprepared for gas to go over $9.99, just imagine how every single gas station is going to have to change every pump and every digital sign.
  • I thought it was dark that an ice cream truck in Omaha plays Swan Lake, but I just heard one play "It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down." Husbands and wives, little children scream for ice cream...
  • I'm headed to bed early tonight - teaching my soil ecology class at 7am ... which is 1pm in Nigeria! I've learned a lot from adapting my talk to better suit their biome, crops, and earthworms... and their unfamiliarity with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
  • It's been ten years today since Jessie and I road tripped to Savannah. At the time they were still playing up the connection to "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." I wonder if people like the story more or less now that the actor who played its villain has been judged a villain in real life? 🤔
  • Lotta people comparing the new JWST images to '80s Doctor Who graphics, but I think Babylon 5 is a better comparison. Of course, today's computers can render in real time what used to take an Amiga all night. 🤷
  • overheard home improvement show, I swear to god I am not making this up:
    Man: When we took up the linoleurm, we found thur wuz yaller shag carpet, which I figger we can use fer --
    Woman: Terlet seat cover!
    M: A terlet seat cover, or around the base of the terlet. It's already stained!
  • ReCaptcha: Please select all images with tractors.
    Not just the farm tractor. Keep going.
    The front-end loader is also a tractor.
    And the bobcat. That is also a tractor.
    OK, you're human.
  • I bite my tongue every time somebody describes a digital photo as "no filter." It's filters all the way down. And algorithms and heuristics. You just mean you didn't tell the camera which filters to use. 🤷
  • Me: [sleeping]
    My brain: there should be a Zootopia version of Sister Act called Creatures of Habit
  • If your vermicompost goes anaerobic, that's
    vermentation
  • One of the many missed opportunities in Endgame:
    [Rocket and Star-Lord back toward each other, firing weapons]
    Rocket [terrified]: Whose side is the *flerkin* on??
    Star-Lord: I think she's on our side.
    Rocket [more terrified]: Whose idea was *that*???
  • I just realized how the X-Men get into the MCU.
    Deadpool and She-Hulk both break the fourth wall at the same time, creating a portal by way of the audience.
  • It's funny how I must have watched Swiss Family Robinson at least ten times in the early days of home VCRs, but I don't think I could recognize any scenes from it. Meanwhile if I walk into the living room and see, say, Harry Sullivan climbing over a boulder, my brain immediately goes, "The Sontaran Experiment!"
  • [Sept 11] Never forget: on a ten point scale, 9/11 is only 8.2.
  • I was reading an article when I tripped on this sentence: "In 1981, his efforts netted Mollison a Right Livelihood Award, also known as The Swedish Nobel."
    🤣🤣🤣
  • I had a nightmare that I had a tablet and I got the access code (a path tracing puzzle) wrong, and it was taunting me by making me watch old video clips between tries without being able to skip ahead or turn off the volume, before I could try again. I was eager to get in because against all odds (or not; they have had a ton of turnover lately) I had just got a job in the SNL writers' room, and I wanted to let folks know, but the tablet thing was not getting me off on the right foot with my new colleagues.
  • I may have joined the Duolingo group on Facebook just to see people freak out about the major UX change that dropped yesterday. You know, to put my own reaction into perspective. It's a big change, totally changes the rules of game we were all playing, and some warning or choice in the matter would have been nice, but compared to them, I'm ok with it!
  • Somebody should remake The Nightmare Before Christmas, only Halloweentown should include Ciudad de los Muertos, and in order to get from there to Christmastown and back he has to pass through Diwalitown and Hanukkahtown and Solsticetown and Kwanzaatown, and they all get to sing songs about how they don't really want Santa there either. 🤷
  • It makes me happy that there is a language code (zxx) for non-linguistic content. It's delayed retribution for the flapping-mouth hand gesture.
  • This morning I had a dream that I was at the Super Bowl (!) and after the game I wandered onto the field and found a bunch of LP records that someone had scattered around. As I picked them up, I became convinced they belonged to [friend] Max Farber, and sure enough, I found him seated in the front row with some friends and the rest of his record collection, unaware that a player had grabbed some of them and thrown them onto the field. I hope that Max and I will see each other again someday, but I'm 100% sure that's not how it will happen.
  • How can you tell a hobgoblin from a regular goblin?
    Hobbes' goblin is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
  • [headline: TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging] If you're accused of taking 70% of gifts that are meant to be humanitarian aid for refugees, and your defense is that begging is against your rules and you're trying to stop refugees from asking for help, then you might be part of the problem.
  • The main thing I notice on picking French up again after 6 years is that I hardly knew the language at all when we went to France, and yet it was more than enough to get by. As a tourist, you don't really need past or future tense. And if you're only speaking, the written endings of verbs don't much matter. So you can get by in French without really conjugating at all. Not so in Spanish.
  • Remember how the clock on your computer used to disagree with your watch and the clock on your VCR and the one on your wall and your car stereo and so on, and then between the Internet and GPS all the clocks have gradually come into agreement?
    I wish something like that could happen with thermometers. I have at least four thermometers in this room, and they disagree about the air temperature by as much as 5°.
  • French Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Seventeen Icons (Dix-sept Icônes)
  • [headline: Radioactive waste found in Missouri elementary school] "Safety of our students and staff is our absolute top priority," said the administration who hadn't tested earlier for contamination despite the school being located in a SuperFund site.
  • The idea that we're living in a simulation cracks me up. Like, you can imagine another universe that is somehow more real than the one we're in, and you prefer your imaginary one. How is that different from the fundamentalist belief that earth is some kind of training ground for eternity? Putting a scientific whitewash on superstition doesn't make it science.
  • [photo of a rented dumpster with built-in porta-potty, labeled "redbox+"] I had been wondering when Redbox was going to get into streaming services.
  • [Oct 24] If you thought last night's Doctor Who plot was unnecessarily convoluted, here is the song it featured ["Ra Ra Rasputin"], performed by a Jamaican band based in Germany, singing about a Russian in English at a concert in Poland.
  • [regarding the announcement of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor] 👴🏻👨🏻🤵🏼🕵🏻👱‍♂️🤡🌂🙋👴🏻👨🏻👱‍♂️🤵🏼👴🏻👱‍♀️👱‍♂️👨🏿‍🎤
  • [Oct 26] Thanks for all the birthday wishes!
    I don't have a lot of associations with the number 47, but one is that that was the highest UHF TV station we could receive when I was growing up. Channel 47 was nominally a religious station, but they acquired a library of old shows and movies from the '50s and '60s and would screen them in marathons. You might have Little Rascals all one day, and Godzilla movies all the next day, and Mickey Rooney - Doris Day movies the next. I know it wasn't the inspiration for U-62 in the movie UHF, but it could have been, in that it didn't seem to care what the market wanted. I spent many a sick day or a cold winter afternoon turning my brain to comfortable mush with Shirley Temple or Charlie Chan. Thankfully I don't remember the details, just the experience.
    Not sure what that has to do with my 47th year, besides the number, but it's an anecdote for you.
  • You know how "¡Three Amigos!" is "The Magnificent Seven" as a comedy, and "A Bug's Life" is "The Magnificent Seven" as a cartoon? If they'd combined them, it could have been "¡Three Hormigas!"
  • Just realized Everything Everywhere All at Once is set in the same multiverse as The OA.
  • I take great comfort from knowing that I will never botch anything in my career as badly as Duolingo's recent software update. Some people like it, most are ambivalent, but a lot of very outspoken people HATE it, and it was totally preventable. I work with three other developers, and we often don't do as much testing as we know we should. But a company as big as Duolingo has no excuse for cutting corners. And without a channel for user feedback, all the complaints are happening on social media, which is also just 🤦🤦🤦
  • [video thumbnail of a pair of feet with red painted nails wearing a pair of water bottles (including water) as shoes, tied with blue satin ribbons; shared by an account called Happy Galore with the tagline, "This young whiz shares how he slashed his electricity down by half"] I will not click the video I will not click the ad I will not click the obvious clickbait
  • [photo of a book excerpt: "Apple Computer is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages."] Ah yes, famously, computer engineers in 1976 already had laptops and could fit 40 to a garage and were unclear about what decade it was.
    From Debt: the first 5000 years by David Graeber, p. 96
  • [Nov 10] I like to say that my experience with leukemia and chemo made me "a connoisseur of fatigue," in that there were so many different, distinct ways to feel tired at different times in the illness. My COVID fatigue is different from all of them, in that I'm too sleepy to think about how tired I am, or about anything else. 😴
  • [Headline: TSA finds gun inside raw chicken] What do you suppose the plan was? Even if the gun hadn't been spotted on X-ray, the chicken would have been stopped by customs.
  • [Nov 20] Someone will probably try to say that last night's shooting means that more LGBTQ+ people need to carry concealed weapons to defend themselves. But the 2nd Amendment has always disproportionately protected the rights of cishet white men at the expense of minorities. Always. It has never protected minorities for longer than a historical blip. Defense of the 2nd Amendment is defense of cishet white male privilege. Prove me wrong.
  • Every time I hit my head while going downstairs in our house, I count my blessings that Jessie and I didn't buy the other house we made an offer on before this one. Both the attic and basement stairs were much more of a concussion hazard than the ones we wound up with.
  • The Drupal Association sent me a notice that it's been 15 years today since I joined drupal.org. What you may not know is that I took my first Drupal job because I was about to meet Jim and Debbie Woolhiser, and I was feeling insecure about my employment situation! It might have been rash, but Jessie motivated me into the best move of my career, 15 years ago.
  • Did my good deed for the day. I mentioned to our neighbor that his house smelled like gas, and the utility found a broken valve on the water heater. They are replacing it for free.
  • So many "reels" and tiktoks and other short video clips end abruptly, they leave me wondering what happened next that caused the video to end there. I imagine a title card saying, "This phone was found by first responders. If you can help identify the body, please call."
  • I enjoyed Wakanda Forever, but it drives me crazy that only about 25% of it was in focus. I'm looking forward to Avatar: The Way of Water because, among other things, it appears to be in focus. If I want to watch blurry movies, I can take my glasses off.
  • My sleeping brain had the realization that the parable of Indra's Net has a real-life counterpart on a burnt-in CRT screen. That is, while the lit pixels are burnt in from being lit, because the inside of the screen is concave the UNLIT pixels are burnt in from the light of THE ENTIRE SCREEN AROUND THEM. 🤯
  • The fact that there's a jury trial against Trump right now means that there are 12 people who don't have strong opinions about him. 🤯
  • There is a person on the Drupal Slack channel who keeps getting kicked out for violating community standards and keeps coming back with different but visibly similar names and avatars and questions. It's kind of amusing to watch. The moderators are like, well, they haven't crossed the line yet this time...
  • [headline: California girl licensed to own unicorn - if she finds one] Sounds like somebody watched Unicorn Store with her parents, and they tried to use city government as an excuse.
  • [headline: Scientific video reveals how much toilet water sprays into the air when you flush - and it's disgusting] Personally, I think it would be great if you had to put the lid down to make the toilet flush, and it didn't reopen until it was done.
  • That moment when you realize an author with a great reputation, but whose books you have always found unreadable, is entirely self-published.
    Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite books are self-published, including my own. But so are some of the worst I've ever read.
  • [Photo of a paint sample labeled Sonic Plum] Who looked at a plum and thought, "let's make it a little more sonic?"
  • [Dec 21] "Fa la la la la" is an example of Yulyulation.
  • [Dec 21] Good Y'all'll to all the southern pagans
  • Your momma's so Irish, she says seamless stockings are "shameless" [because Seamus is pronounced Shamus]
  • I can't stop thinking about how misanthropic one of our local business owners was this morning. He gloated about punching a shoplifter and sending him to jail for Christmas. I hope he gets visited by three ghosts on Saturday night.
  • "There's Kleenex stuck to my pancakes," Tom said, surreptitiously.
  • TFW one of your devices can't get on the Internet, so you use one of your other devices to google the solution, because how else would you solve such a problem? 🤔
  • Minding my own business reading an article, and the author describes Columbus as having been "disoriented" 🤦
  • Do French speakers smoke pot when they turn 80 (four-twenties)?
  • We can only say that The Way of Water got John Cartered because John Carter got Darmoked
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