Lots o' Links

This post is just a way to pass along a few things that have caught my attention the past few days:

What do you get when you cross a little-used street, some assorted colors of chalk, and a damn good artist? A bit of street art that looks like something it definitely isn't.

Not to be Politically Incorrect or intolerant or anything but anybody besides me have a problem with the idea of 'child marriages'? Even if the bride is 3?

Sometimes, the camouflage thing just doesn't work...

All in all, I'd say that this story is an example of the principle of Unintended Consequences. That, and a little Beaurocracy Gone Wild...

While it may not be an Olympic sport, rumor has it that there's going to be an additional venue at the 2010 Games in Canada.

If you're going to do a crime, you might want to give a little thought to your escape plan so you don't make the same mistake this guy did.
If you think election time in YOUR town is goofy, annoying, silly, tedious, or otherwise not worth your attention, you might want to compare it with what happens in San Francisco (don't forget to check out the videos).

Musical Magic

While Britain may not be known for its cuisine or dental care, there is one thing that they've pretty well got the world commodity on: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

To give you an idea of how good these folks are, here's their rendition of the theme from
"The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly":

Line, line, everywhere a line...

The past few days, I've spent more time than I could possibly have wanted standing in a variety of lines - at the bank, at the grocery store, and so on. Being an inveterate (but not invertebrate) observer of people, here are a few of the things that I've noticed:

• There seem to be an inordinate number of dumbshits that plan to pay for a purchase with a check, but refuse to start filling the damn thing out while they're in line. Instead, they elect to wait until their entire purchase is rung up to start writing - apparently, they're afraid the date or name of the store will change while they're not looking...
• A transaction of pretty much any kind that involves a guy is accomplished in fairly short order; one where there are two women will most likely take anywhere from 5 to 10 times longer, depending on how well they know each other - regardless of how many people are piling up in line. There seem to be VERY few exceptions to this...
  
• An ungodly number of people wander around that are unable to remember what kinds of food items are available in various fast food establishments - necessitating that they get up to the cashier and stand there staring vacuously at the menu for several minutes while they try to make up their minds. The pictures on the menu only seem to confuse them...
• Some folks never seem to have learned line etiquette: they see nothing wrong with bolting from line 'A' to line 'B' when 'B' appears to be moving faster - only to want to reclaim their previous position in 'A' when it starts going.
• There are families that are so close that every last one of them - including Uncle Bob, Cousin Leroy, Grandma Moses, and their dog Ralph - want to share the experience of standing in line.
• A (fortunately rare) few people don't even seem to grasp the very concept of lining up - they'll wander up to where several people are waiting their turn for whatever product or service is being offered and try to get what they want instantly, if not sooner. Pointing out that there are others waiting - who arrived before THEY did - generally results in look of surprised bafflement as they try to come to grips with the idea that they can't have what they want. Those few that don't get looks of befuddlement are usually of the opinion that they are the most important thing in the Universe, and try the "I'm in a hurry" ploy - and get offended when it doesn't work.

There's one good thing about lines, however: as a vet, any time I go somewhere that there will be other vets, we KNOW how to stand in lines.

Yum, yum!

I've just recently finished one of my (very!) rare forays into McDonalds for a meal.

This time, I elected to go with the Chicken Select option with Honey Mustard sauce. As I was eating, I got to reading the label on one of the sauce packets (keep in mind that items are listed in order of percentage of content):

• water
• sugar
• dijon mustard (distilled vinegar, water, mustard seed, salt, white wine, citric acid, tartaric acid, spices)
• soybean oil
• honey
• corn syrup solids (um... isn't 'solids' kind of contrary to the idea of 'syrup'?)
  
• distilled vinegar
• modified food starch (modified from what to what?)
  
• egg yolks
• xanthan gum
• salt
• mustard flour
• titanium dioxide (wtf?)
  
• sodium benzoate as a preservative (great - the sauce will probably last longer than I do)
  
• propylene glycol alginate (don't know what it is, but it sure sounds appetizing, don't it?)
  
• spices (apparently I don't need to know which ones)
  
• tumeric
• artificial color (FD&C Yellow #5, FD&C Yellow #6)
• contains egg ingredients (I wasn't sure about that 'egg yolks' part, until they added this)
  

I'm not sure if that is supposed to be food, or a list of contents for a chemistry set...

Screwball cat

I've written before about my weirdo cat, Elf, and I thought folks might like to see what the little stinker looks like - so here you go:
And to give you an idea of how goofy she is, here she is in "stealth" mode (believing that she's invisible) in the bathtub, waiting for me to completely enter the bathroom so I can be ambushed:

Needless to say, it can be a bit disconcerting to head into the bathroom, only to find a sight like that greeting me...

Holidoozie

I went to see what the deal was with this post over at MT Politics, and damn near busted a gut laughing. It's priceless - go see for yourself :-)

Selective Perception

I was just outside the wifi-enabled coffeeshop where I often hang out, having a cigarette, when a grossly overweight woman exited. As she passed me, she felt obliged to tell me "You know, smoking is bad for your health."

My rejoinder?

"And fifty pounds of lard on your ass is bad for yours."

Self-righteous git.

Inconsiderate @55holes

I'm something of a people-watcher, and I've noticed that there are a lot of gonzos out there that seem to move about the planet with absolutely no concern about anyone else. To wit:

• Gonzo tooling down the road, playing "What's my lane?" without taking the time to see if anyone else is wanting to use the same road he is. Oh, and he isn't bothering with that little stick thing-y on the left side of the steering column.
• Doofus that doesn't seem to grasp the concept that the vehicle should be parked between the lines in the parking lot. Rather, said doofus opts to park the vehicle straddling the line.
• Shitbird on a bicycle that elects to park the fscking thing IN FRONT OF the doors to the convenience store, rather than at the bicycle stand six feet away.
• Twit that doesn't understand that there are little screws that let him adjust the direction his headlights point, leaving them aimed into the eyes of oncoming drivers so that everybody can see that he has high-intensity halogen headlights.
• Moorons that tool around in inclement weather or dusk/dawn - sans headlights - in light blue and/or gray vehicles that do a simply wonderful job of blending into the background. After all, they can see just fine, so why should they concern themselves with being seen?
• Dipstick with cellphone that feels obliged to share his half of the conversation with everybody within hearing distance. Bonus points for having an annoying ringtone that everyone gets to listen to a half-dozen times because the dipstick "can't find" his phone.
• Shitheads (mostly young, but not always) that think it's perfectly reasonable to have a 1,000-watt stereo system with ultra-mega-bass in their car, and have the damn thing cranked up so you can hear them coming from a block away - forcing you to 'listen' to their 'music', whether you want to, or not.

Similarly, something I've seen in offices are those individuals that can't be troubled to consider the effects of their actions on the cleaning crew: having more wastebaskets than they really need, and using every last one of them; people overloading a wastebasket or trash can simply because they aren't the one that has to empty it; people that leave messes (large and small) behind only because they aren't the ones that have to clean up said mess. I'm not saying these folks should be doing the cleaning crews job - only that by showing even a little consideration, they could avoid making the cleaning crews job harder than it has to be. I know how much most cleaning crew people have to do, and every inconsiderate slob they have in their 'area' makes their jobs that much harder, and take that much longer. Myself, I operate under a simple rule: I don't make any more of a mess than I would want to deal with: if I'm emptying the hole-punch, I take the extra few seconds necessary to make sure I get all the little dots in the trash, instead of letting them scatter all over hell-and-gone; if a trash can or wastebasket is full, I'm not afraid or "too good" to pull the bag out, tie it off, and start using a new bag rather than try to cram 20 pounds of crap into a 10-pound bag, or balance a bunch of new crap on top of what's already present.

Sadly, there isn't really any way to even semi-politely tell someone "Yo! Asshole! You aren't the only person on the planet, and the entire fucking universe doesn't revolve around you. If it isn't asking too much, you could maybe get your head out of your ass and consider what's going on around you?" Either that, or we find a way to start installing plexiglass belly-buttons on people, so they can see what they're doing...

Cookies

No, I'm not talking the edible kind, but the Internet ones.

For those that aren't familiar with them, Internet 'cookies' are little bits of information stored on your computer by some (most, actually, nowadays) Web sites to keep track of what you do on the site. All they are is little bits of text that is stored on your computer - rummage around in your computer, and I'll wager that you can find a directory called 'cookies'; have a look at what's in it, and even open up a few of them with a text editor to see what I'm talking about. It's also worth mentioning that the cookies you get on one particular site can ALSO be for organizations than the one you're visiting:

While this is a truly great idea for places like blogs (to keep track of your user info for making comments, for example), online shopping (what items you have in a 'shopping cart' or your user ID), and so on, they're also subject to being abused.

You see, cookies like these can be set to expire at the end of whatever time the website wants them to - anything from the end of your current online session to many, many years in the future. As long as the cookie hasn't expired, the website can use it to keep track of your specific computer, and what you do on their site.

What a lot of people don't know is that a lot of sites are signed up with various marketing outfits to try and gather as much information as they can about who visits their site: when they visit, how often, how long they stay, what they look at, and so on. When enough of this kind of information is collected, the data can be analyzed (or "mined") to determine some fairly precise profiles - not just of users in general, but even specific users if they have broadband (or a permanent or semi-permanent connection [and thus unique Internet 'address'] to the Internet). To verify this for yourself, configure your browser to 'always ask' whether or not to accept cookies; I think you'll be amazed at how often you get a little popup dialog! And while you're doing that, also have a look at when those cookies expire. I just did a visit to the New York Times website, and the first cookie that my computer asked me about was set to expire in 2015. Now why in the name of Cthulhu would the NYT need/want to keep track of little 'ol ME for that long?

The reason I bring this up is that I have my web browser configured to 'always ask', and set to apply my answer to ALL cookies for the site in question, and I've noticed that a lot of websites are defaulting to trying to get me to accept their cookies for really long times - most of them seem to want to expire in 2038. Now, this is fine, as I say, for blogs or an online store (if/when I actually start to buy something), but it seems a bit much for a site to try to give me a cookie like that when I first drop into their main page.

Granted, in MOST cases, these cookies aren't that big of a deal. But the operative term there is "in MOST cases". Personally, I don't think that any of the online marketing and data-collection outfits has any inherent 'right' to keep track of where I go and what I do on the Internet; and I'm enough of a privacy and rights advocate to think that companies and people shouldn't be trying to collect the kinds of information that's possible with cookies unless they both tell the user what they want to use the cookie FOR, and limit the use of the cookie to a specific purpose and for an appropriate period of time. Otherwise, the use of cookies will be subject to even MORE 'mission creep', resulting in even more personally-identifiable information being collected simply because the site owners can. For example, if (say) Amazon wants to give me a cookie, then they shouldn't do it until/unless I actually indicate that I want to buy something, limit the use of that cookie to keeping track of stuff I want to buy, and have it expire at the end of my browser session - and clearly tell me what they want to use it for (and ONLY use it for that purpose); giving me a 'forever' cookie immediately when I arrive on their site should be strictly verboten.

As I said, I have my browser set to always ask me whether or not to accept cookies, and to apply my answer to all the other cookies the site tries to feed me; I am very intolerant of cookies being set to expire later than I think is necessary or appropriate, and generally tell my browser to have them expire at the end of the current session.

Executive Toys

Over the last few weeks, I've had the misfortune of spending more time than I'd like in a number of different offices - including those of some executives.

Something I've noticed is that the more 'important' someone is (or believes themselves to be), the greater the likelihood that they have one (or more) 'toys' in their office.

I don't mean Slinkys, or dartboards, or stuff like that; what I'm talking about is crap like indoor artificial waterfalls (varying in size from desktop models to something that likely needed a dolly to haul it in), personal water coolers (the kind with bottles on top), and any number of other things that could have some vague functionality and usefulness. Except that in a few rare cases, these 'toys' are not in real, actual use - in fact, most of them had clearly not been used in quite some time, but were still cluttering the office of the executive in question.

I'm left wondering: did these indivuals buy these things with money from their own pockets, or (as I'm afraid) did they manage to exercise their 'authority' to get them in a probably petty exercise of power? If these items were purchased with 'company' money, what did the rest of the staff think about it, and what was the effect on office morale?

For myself, I don't think I'd want to work where anyone was allowed to buy crap like that using 'company' funds - it seems to suggest that there's simply too much petty politics, power games, and other nonsense to make it tolerable, never mind enjoyable, place.