Apr 14 2008
And another thing!
Look, people, if you’re on the road and you decide to do something really rude, like cut someone off or shove in front of someone, the worst, the absolute worst, thing you can then do is get an attack of the guilts and decide to be randomly polite.
Why? Because it screws everyone else up, that’s why.
Apr 13 2008
Sorry about the hiatus, all. I have a few other projects in beta, though none is the labor of love that is mindscalpel.com.
In addition to the coding, I have been focused on traffic. Not the tasty revenue-generating high-volume internet traffic kind of traffic, but rather the paint-drying, teeth-gnashing automobile traffic kind of traffic. And I realized that since an increasing number of us are spending an increasing amount of time sitting in our 0-to-60-in-4.0-seconds sports cars (which, ironically, we never really get to test, since we’re always — that’s right — SITTING IN TRAFFIC), we all need to realize that pretty much every single one of us chooses at least two other people to hate — hate with the hot, hot hate of a thousand burning suns — for the duration of our daily commutes.
Feb 27 2008
Apparently the threat of terrorism is like cumin, or chili powder: sprinkle it on an epic screw-up and it makes everything taste a lot better.
Witness what happened recently in Florida, which was plunged briefly back into the Stone Age by rolling power outages. In practically every article about that event, there was a statement that the blackouts did not appear to be caused by terrorism.
Wow! That makes me feel so much better! It’s very comforting to know that, through no intentional act, an entire slice of United States civilization was taken off-line, just by completely random events. We can all rest much easier now.
One gets the feeling that we’ll start seeing news squibs like the following:
Feb 08 2008
Some blogs and web sites review consumer products by giving you useless and irrelevant information like price, ease of use, feature sets and quality.
Not this one! Here, we’re just concerned with the things that really matter about products – the social problems they solve, or introduce, in real life, not some ridiculously objective findings derived from some comprehensive, carefully-considered, long-term test.
Take, for example, those fancy GPS navigation units that everyone is getting in their cars (and, concomitantly, getting stolen from their cars, which, in my opinion, is just about the height of irony – “Hey, what happened to your highly-precise satellite-linked geolocation unit?” “I don’t know! I have no idea where it is!”).
It’s true, I finally got one as a gift, and I’ve been using it with some success, but mostly with catastrophic failure. So, to save some of you GPS novices out there from some traps for the unwary, I have put together a few pointers from bitter personal experience:
Jan 21 2008
I know you’ve heard the commercials — you’re driving along, listening to the radio, and suddenly some guy says in an incredibly matter-of-fact voice “Hello, my name is Stan O’Hanlahan…”.
And then the hushed, minor-key Piano Chord from Hell plays: “*PLING*”
Stan O’Hanlahan then, incredibly matter-of-factly, spends the next thirty seconds describing an escalating odyssey into Disease Hell that begins with him talking about how he was a normal guy, just driving along listening to the radio, and segueing rapidly (but still incredibly matter-of-factly) into a series of health disasters, most always involving some form of cancer, and usually tossing in a tidbit of soul-crushing detail (”and then my eyes exploded” or “I tried to hug my daughter but my arms fell off”) that is clearly designed to freak you out, finally moving on to how the drug company selflessly developed a life-saving cure that brought him back to normal (with a realistic and lawyer-inspired note of caution, like “of course, this doesn’t work for everyone, and I still have no eyes/arms, but…”) while the music changes from the minor key to a major key, the joyous oboe kicks in, and some soothing woman comes on and breathes the drug company’s name gently into your ear a few times.
Continue Reading »
Jan 18 2008
Substantially lowering the bar for the degree of care zoos owe their visitors, most recent news reports about the three guys who were attacked and/or eaten by a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo seem to focus on whether the three guys were taunting the tiger.
Can someone explain to me exactly how this is relevant to anything?
I mean, if the Zoo is trying to defend itself against accusations of negligence by saying “heck, they would have been perfectly safe if they hadn’t pissed off the tiger,” isn’t that kind of overwhelmed by the fact that these guys were attacked and/or eaten by the freaking tiger?
I feel that this relatively important point is being lost in the chattering inquiry about whether the guys had smoked marijuana, were drunk, or had stood on the railing outside the tiger pit making faces and yelling at it.
If I had known that the various moats, pits, chains, fences and cages in zoos were just for show and the psychological comfort of human visitors — you know, maybe gentle suggestions to the animals that they might want to consider avoiding mauling the human visitors, rather than, say, things that actually prevented them from mauling the human visitors – I can tell you that my zoo-visiting procedures would have been substantially different.