PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

June 30 2002

Crazy Asians

If you’ve ever been to China, you’ll know that people there love to spit. Men, women, children, diplomats, cashiers — everybody spits everywhere, and it’s quite disgusting. Snot rockets are also a national pastime. It’s so pervasive, in fact, that a first time flier tried to open the plane door during a flight so he could spit. Words fail to capture the idiocy of this situation — should I be appalled that the guy couldn’t hold in his spit for the duration of the flight, or should I be shocked that this guy was so clueless as to open the cabin door while in the air?

One lonely comment

June 30 2002

Spycam Sony style

Sony has announced a 1.3 megapixel pocket camera.

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June 30 2002

Farenheit 451

I’m listening to this country song that goes, “I wish I was a lesbian and not a hetero!” Only on KFOG.

More evidence that Texas is becoming a slaughterhouse of truth and free speech: Corporate interests are literally re-writing history textbooks for Texas schools. It would be one thing if this type of corporate interest ass-kissing was limited to the perverse state of Texas, but Texas is the second largest textbook market after California and so publishers who supply the entire nation are changing all their textbooks to please the conservative hard-ons from Dubya Land. Topics such as prostitution in the West during the 1800s, rainforest destruction, sexuality, and pollution levels in American cities are being censored by all sorts of industry groups and religious pundits.

Among other things, those books were criticized as “anti-technology,” “anti-Christian” and “anti-American,” and for saying there was scientific consensus that global warming was changing the earth’s climate…

“I don’t mean that we should sweep things under the rug,” Ms. Venable said. “But the children should see the hope and the good things about America.”

Let’s see: state-sponsored religion, coerced patriotism, concelament of wrongdoing — sounds like all the necessary ingredients for a communist regime.

To its credit, Texas did pass legislation in 1995 to counter these kinds of censorship by limiting textbook changes to physically defects or “factual inaccuracy”, but true to form, the conservatives have been able to distort the law and allow all sorts things to be considered as factual inaccuracy.

A reference to Farenheit 451 would be appropriate at this time.

Do you feel lucky?

June 25 2002

Me Tarzan

Women, apparently, are doing much better in college than men — so much that they’re kickin’ ass and taking names. The Washington Post reports that college women are doing better than men in basically everything. Fifty-seven percent of US college graduates are women, and that number increases in minority groups. The consensus is that this will create a huge social disorder because the number of marrigeable men will decrease, thus leaving a population of women who truly are too good for most guys. And it can’t be corrected because “You don’t create these marriageable men out of the blue at age 30 or 35” (at least according to Mr. senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.)

Frankly, I’m not surprised. There are still plenty of people who still think that the sun revolves around the earth. Pop culture idols have resorted to names that a monkey could remember: J-Lo, Jay-Z, Ja-Rule. Maybe I should change my name to Ja-Vay so as not to confuse the order taker at In-’n-Out. As far as I can tell, it’s cool for guys to be idiots. But why?

I think it’s a conspiracy. Everybody knows that the world is actually run by beautiful women, and technology has advanced far enough that guys are no longer a necessity for our species to continue. Therefore, women have simply decided to stop stringing us along and have opted to just let us fall by the wayside. I think I should go become a contruction worker now.

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June 21 2002

People watching II

What‘s better than people watching, is watching people watch other people because you can instantly tell what the watcher is thinking. For instance, when walking down the street behind a girl, you can gauge her attractiveness simply by observing the looks that she gets from people walking towards her. Men will generally get within 6 feet and give a quick stare up and down. If she is very attractive, guys will pass the girl, and then turn their head for a better look from behind. Women start staring about 10 feet away, and don’t look up and down but concentrate on a particular area of said girl. The more intently a woman stares, the more attractive this girl will be. If an observing woman finishes off her stare with a contemptuous glare, then it is almost certain that the girl is very attractive. Yes, fascinating indeed.

Do you feel lucky?

June 21 2002

Dreamweaver

Often in my dreams, I am fully aware that I am dreaming, and consequently am just waiting for the dream to end, while I’m still dreaming – if that makes sense. Am I actually conscience and in control while I’m sleeping, or does my mind just act as an audience member to my sub-conscious dreaming? I would probably think the latter because whenever it happens, I stop doing whatever it is that I’m doing in my dreams and wait for myself to awaken. It’s a disconcerting feeling when I am trapped by my own sub-conscience – I bet this is what people with split-personality disorder feel like.

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June 15 2002

Golddiggers

My esteemed alma mater released a study on what city-women want: guys with money. In fact, San Francisco was found to have the highest number of golddiggers out of 23 American cities. I’m not surprised at all.

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June 15 2002

People watching

I love people watching around the Bay Area, mainly because other people’s lives and conversations can often be very entertaining. Of course, people watching requires that one make the effort to leave the house and go somewhere, so leave it to the Internet to bring the fun to my screen. In Passing is a compilation site of random overheard conversations (many from the Bay Area) that people submit.

“Well, they used to be real pants. They were this morning.”
— A girl talking to several other girls, on the bus

I think I should register the domain, www.PeopleWatchingInMyUnderwear.com.

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June 15 2002

Pimps ‘n hos

A Canadian math teacher gets suspended for giving a quiz with problems involving pimps and hos.

Rufus is a pimp for three girls. If the price is $65 per trick, how many tricks per day must each girl turn to support Rufus’ $800 per day crack habit?

My problem really isn’t with the content of the questions — pimping economics are a real world problem. The issue is that the teacher was so lazy that he went to the internet to find math problems (and from a joke site, of all places.)

One lonely comment

June 14 2002

MS is good

For every bad thing that Microsoft is responsible for, there are just as many — if not more — substantial features that they have brought to the PC. For instance, have you ever seriously used Microsoft Word, or Excel for complex documents? They rock. Windows 2000 was truly a milestone where PC computing finally become easy to use, bringing to light Microsoft’s army of usability designers. For those of us who just want a PC to work without having to slave over some obscure HOWTO written in Finnish and then translated into English by Babelfish, we feel that Microsoft has done a good job.

I’ve been using XP for a couple days now, and I’d say that it’s worth the upgrade just for the ClearType component. ClearType is another Microsoft innovation that brings beautiful font-aliasing to a whole new level on LCD screens by using the individual LCD pixels more effectively. The end result is that your fonts look like they do on paper, without the jagged edges. If you’re running XP on an LCD screen, do yourself a favor and go to the ClearType configurator.

I’ve had my share of Windows crashes, but that’s old news from versions of Windows that nobody should be using anyway. I give them a lot of respect for all the cool things that they’ve made. Of course, their business practice is a whole other issue — primarily that they’re assholes — but we all know that already.

There is one thing that has resulted from their bad business: IBM refuses to put a Windows key on my ThinkPad. It is very irritating that I can’t do a Win-D or Win-R combo.

Do you feel lucky?