The Broccoli of Death, or something like that

This one isn't mine. It's on the Bread and Honey blog. Apparently, the folks at Cascadian Farms are having fun with packaging.

Interestingly, Cascadian Farms is up in Rockport, WA, which is the home of one of my all-time favorite trivia questions from Washington Trivia:

Q. What started a 15-hour fight in the town of Rockport, WA, on May 16, 1973?
A. Tim Roetman drove a cement truck over a whole group of motorcycles.

The Broccoli of Death, or something like that

I got quoted!

I wrote an article for the STC on the benefits of membership in the organization. It's a good article, based on the idea that being a member pays off heavily. Well, what the heck, the STC picked it up and used it for a marketing piece to recruit membership from the ranks of other organizations: the IEEE, mostly, where there's plenty of room for people to belong to two different professional organizations.

Thursday, I found out that my letter has been getting a little buzz: a marketing specialist is quoting it as an example of Really Good Marketing.

Far out!

I got quoted!

So THAT'S who McCain reminds me of!

During the campaign, I've seen any number of pictures of John McCain smiling with that kinda plump-cheeked look.

It always bugged me: I knew I'd seen it before, but I couldn't figure out where. I was fairly sure that I knew that smile, but I just couldn't place it. Humph.

Yesterday afternoon, it all finally locked into place: I knew where I'd seen the smile before. It was alarming, but true.

So THAT'S who McCain reminds me of!

Guess which party supports veterans better?

According to data compiled by the million-member organization, Disabled American Veterans, Democrats are beating the cookies out of Republicans when it comes to voting to support veterans issues such as:

• Budget
• Appropriations
• Amendments to increase funding
• Emergency supplemental funding for VA

I'm a bit surprised, honestly. Take a look at the chart for the statistics. It's very impressive what the differences are.

Guess which party supports veterans better?

News from the Babe

The Babe is having fun right now, drinking, dining, and shopping with a bunch of the other hearing office chief administrative law judge types in the Carolinas. She sent me the following picture from one of her recent forays into the stores around there.

She found a gadget for holding bananas in the kitchen while they ripen, she said on the phone.

"I've seen those," I said. "They're a little wooden thingie on a stand with a hook to hold a bunch of bananas."

"Not exactly," she said. She sent me the following cell phone picture.

News from the Babe

Chasidic Unix

I was in California for work week before last and I mentioned chasidic Unix to someone I work with. He'd never seen it and was very excited. If you think about it, this is a joke with a very narrow intersection on a Venn diagram, but if you're one of those people who fall into that group, it's boffo stuff. Check it out here.

Chasidic Unix

Follow-up on Ugly Sofas

Okay, I posted the picture a few days ago of the ugly sofa kind of as a one-off, figuring that it was just one of those things that shows up on the net sorta like the picture I found years ago on the (now-defunct)
EvilIrishBastard.com of the explosion of the Hindenburg.

All that being said, I got a lot of email from people who were appropriately repulsed by the sofa. Good, good, good.

But the Internet is an amazing thing. Whenever you think there's just one of something, the Internet proves you wrong. You get turned on by, oh, popping pink balloon elephants, let's say, and you go on the net and lo! there are 5000 other people who get off on the same thing and there are websites and newsgroups and webrings and dating sites aimed at whatever this incredibly niche interest is.

All of this is vamping, really. It appears that there's a website ("No!" gasped the crowd), www.uglycouchcontest.com, that is aimed at just this sort of thing. The website leaves a little to be desired for navigation and layout, but the real focus is the pix of ugly couches.

For sheer horror, I think that the 2008 finalists are a good selection. I'm quite repulsed by the current 4th runner-up, also shown as pic #100, but #77, 67, 63, and 45 are horrible, too. FWIW, I disagree with the idea of a sofa or couch that's been beaten up, stained, or generally abused: some of these could've been good or passable to begin with. No, the ghastly ones are those that are repellent from the instant they roll off the assembly floor, such as #44, 30, 26, and 23.

Dear God Almighty....

Follow-up on Ugly Sofas

The Babe's gone for a bit

The Babe is off on the Carolina coast staring at the sunrise over the ocean with a bunch of the other reigning royalty in their respective offices, decompressing and generally having a good time. I am pleased, though I'll miss her for the next few days.

The Babe's gone for a bit

Still got the flu

I've had the flu all week. My stomach's been upset and I'm generally feeling pretty blah. It's not been fun at all. And, as much as I'd hoped to the contrary, I'm still as sick at the end of the week as I was at the beginning of the week.

So, to perhaps share with you my general feelings of stomach queasiness and general dis-ease, I want to share with you this picture of the World's Ugliest Couch. (Cries of "My eyes! My eyes!" are definitely appropriate here.)

Still got the flu

Good yontiff!

Here's a really bad joke to start the week and the new year:

Q: What do you get when you throw two bass drums and a cymbal down a well?
A: "Da-BOMP-shhhhhh!!!"

May the new year bring health, happiness, and prosperity to us all.

Good yontiff!

Windows Vista is the same old deal from Microsoft

Someone on an industry blog was saying that the problem with Windows Vista is that it's running on underpowered machines. I think that's true: if you spend enough money to buy a hot machine, you may have enough resources to run Windows Vista.

This approach has been a mainstay of Windows marketing since the mid-80s. I remember people installing Windows 2.0 on IBM ATs and, even though the 80286 was ~the~ hot chip in those days, an AT would drop to its knees and gasp for air under the resource load Windows presented. "Oh, no problem!" Microsoft said. "Just slip in one of these Mach-10 cards and you'll have all the power you need!"

IOW, you needed to spend $500 (in 1987 dollars) to repair the damage to your system caused by the $50 OS you'd installed. Or, you could keep running MS-DOS 3.1 and save the $550 in the first place. (Guess which I did?)

When I talked to MS developers I knew and said "Windows is really slow," they'd ask what hardware I was running. When I said that it wasn't the latest and greatest, they'd always say "Well, THERE--" with a finger in the air "--THERE is your problem: you need to buy faster hardware!" The idea that, since I didn't see Bill signing a check for me to get a faster machine with each new version of Windows, so maybe MS should try designing for the systems that were out there always failed to register with them.

It's 20 years later, and MS still hasn't changed a thing: they're designing software that requires a premium computer at a premium price to get the same ho-hum processing power we had had to begin with before we thought about upgrading to the next version of Windows.

I'll stick with WinXP, thanks. It works and it doesn't have the driver problems that Vista is renowned for. Judging by what I'm hearing about the upcoming Windows Longhorn, we may all be sticking with XP until about 2011.

Windows Vista is the same old deal from Microsoft

Hurrah for a little-known scientist: Llewellyn Imbesi!

This just came in from Tom Ciborowski, an old friend who sends great email.

Most of you are probably not aware of the fact that August 13th is the birthday of Llewellyn Imbesi (1854-1928). While he is for the most part unknown, one of his discoveries of nature has been enshrined as "Imbesi's Law for the Conservation of Filth."

"For something to become clean, something else must become dirty."

An interesting note is the fact that in 1937, Merryweather Freeman added the following, known as "Freeman's Extension to Imbesi's Law of the Conservation of Filth."

"Yes, but one can get everything dirty and get nothing clean."

Q.E.D.

Hurrah for a little-known scientist: Llewellyn Imbesi!