Tag: bemusement
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TIL
Today I Learned. I’ve lived in this house for exactly 33 years as of yesterday, and never realized until just now that the city sewer treatment plant is only 3000 feet away as the crow flies. That’s closer than Safeway and shorter than some of my regular walks. I always knew the plant was in…
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Just trying to figure out…
Spent about 30 seconds reading the fiery Twitter responses to Nate Silver’s extremely mild and hesitant heresy. Nate is a longtime loyal Democrat, a solid Hillary supporter. He tries to be data-driven, but all of his data is shaped toward the need for the Party to win. Today he said that the Party would have…
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Paging Duane Jones
I’m rereading Duane Jones’s book. In one chapter he describes a problem with innocently risque material: The Jones agency had produced a successful magazine ad for Heinz ketchup. A painting showed an elegant waitress holding a silver tray with a single bottle of Heinz, standing over a well-dressed businessman at lunch. The headline said: What…
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Speaking of geomagnetic confusion…
Speaking of confusion and vortexes…. I opened the door just now to see what the weather is doing. A dude in a pickup truck cruised by at a normal speed, casually sitting with elbow on the window, IN REVERSE. He didn’t seem to be backing into a driveway or aiming for a trailer, just heading…
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Usable acronym for a movement
BreakingPoints headlines a poll of 18-30 voters. They’re HARDASS realists. Most agree with the accurate statement that ‘No matter which party is in charge, nothing changes.’ Most agree with the accurate statement that ‘America is a dying empire led by bad people’. Dying Empire Led by Bad People = DELBP. DELBP = DELETE BOTH PARTIES.
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Still more word boundary peeve
Last month I was amused by Substack’s hyperactive AI algorithm. When you leave out a space after a period, the combination of two words with a dot between them automatically triggers an ad for a website. Now it appears that Facebook’s algo is doing the same thing. The webmaster for Spokane News must have typed…
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OTOOOOOH
Here’s an odd one. Religion Unplugged sees a Christian angle in the trial of billionaire Bill Hwang. They call him a philanthropist. Admittedly this is a complex situation. On one side, Hwang is a standard superselfish Chinese billionaire who loves betting for its own sake and loves to gain status by owning everything. The perfect…
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Dogs resemble owners /// EDIT: FAKE NEWS.
UPDATE: THIS WAS A FAKE STORY. I STEPPED INTO THE TRAP! I APOLOGIZE. ================================================================ Fake story: For some reason the big Aggregators like MSN and DailyMail are hitting hard on every business closure lately, even the ordinary and predictable ones. If the news is accurate, Red Lobster’s closure is predictable. They made an obvious mistake…
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It must work, but why?
The Trump cult email spam continues along the same lines. It’s not political or economic in any way. Nothing about borders or walls or jobs or China or Israel. It’s all pure whipsawing emotions, like an obsessed menopausal ex-wife. Today’s subject line: “I would never have expected this from YOU, of all people!” Marketers must…
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Sell amortize, sell non-amortize
Nash was the greatest of all amortizers, so the exceptions to the rule stand out. Hudson had two unique inventions, the failsafe brake system in 1936 and the stepdown body in 1948. Nobody ever copied the failsafe brakes, which were the BEST SAFETY FEATURE before seatbelts. AMC continued installing the simple failsafe system on its…
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AI and fingers
AI famously has trouble with multiples like fingers and headlights. It tends to run wild with a pattern, giving people seven fingers or giving cars six headlights. Just now I got an email from Quantum Fiber, the successor to Pacific Bell and Qwest and CenturyLink. The heading says “there’s an outage in your area”. Here’s…
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Cultural mismatch
Recently Google fed me an ad for a huge can of Wagyu Tallow. Huh? Tallow is a generic industrial byproduct, used in soap and commercial soup stock. Wagyu beef is supposedly a high-prestige type of beef, prized by home cooks and restaurants. The cultural dissonance made me itch. I finally scratched the itch. Apparently Wagyu…
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Close can’t close, must close.
This item isn’t important but I couldn’t resist the headline. The story does fit the general theme of institutions proudly going bankrupt to avoid contamination by horrible civilization and life and beauty. Sacrificing all to support chaos and riots and crime and war and ugliness. Good riddance, churches and Hollywood and journalism and libraries. Not…
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Just tickled
Just a trivium that tickled my fancy. In 1958 Chrysler made only two special racing-equipped 300Ds. One was bought by famous racer Norm Thatcher, who souped it up even more and set several major speed records. The other was bought by Herbert Magee, a California chiropractor with no known connection to racing. He picked it…
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Why so innocent?
Younger activists are more innocent and shockable than we were in the ’60s. Even though we had MUCH less information available, we talked and rumored and gossiped among ourselves and figured out who was a nark or a spy. We understood Agents Provocateurs, we knew who was an Agent, and we tried to warn each…
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