By Ben |
  • [regarding Senator Matt Gaetz, who bragged about having sex with minors] If the gates of heaven are pearly, the gates of hell must be matte
  • A ska musical about the gay couple who raised Mary Poppins
    you know
    The Mary Poppins Daddies
    I'm only about 25 years late with this joke.
  • I just did a search for "uncle terwilliger waltzes with bears," and was told that a related search is "human skin lampshade." 😱
  • [headline: Study shows humans selectively bred corn to be less aggressive] Not to mention, detassling results in unicorn.
  • TFW someone calls their Instructable "inscrutable"
  • Tip: if you crank the color, brightness, and contrast all the way up, you can see that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" was actually filmed in color on a planet where the sun sines.
  • How is there no Kiki 💥 and Bouba ☁️ cartoon show? Everybody in the world would know them by name, no translation needed.
  • This evening I realized that the middle school teachers I remember most clearly are the ones whose classes were the least structured.
  • Today I learned that the word "limn" has nothing to do with limnology.
  • TFW every other mandarin orange in the bag was seedless, so you peel one and pop it into your mouth whole, and suddenly you've got a MOUTHFUL OF SEEDS. So many seeds.
  • Who wants to try their hand at dream analysis? Wrong answers only, please.
    This morning I dreamed that I went to Home Depot and couldn't find my car afterward, so while I was looking for it I got into a conversation with a woman who was waiting for her airport bus to be repaired. We hit it off like old friends, but we failed to get each other's contact info before her bus was ready to go. I did learn that she worked with llamas in Novosibirsk.
    So I went to Novosibirsk, which in the dream was near Vancouver, like a Russian protectorate inside Canada. It was mostly Soviet era listening posts and forbidding government buildings, but they also had a shopping mall and a water park, for the spring break crowd. Spring breakers were walking around in bathing suits along with the guards in full length wool coats and fur hats.
    I employed some locals to help me find the llamas, but they were more interested in steering me to the food court for a commission. The shopping mall was brutalist architecture + neon, kind of a Blade Runner aesthetic. There were impoverished peasants selling their last possessions in the hallway outside trendy clothing stores. In the food court there was an escalator that was kind of like a big belt sander - you'd press yourself up against the belt, and it would pull you up to the next floor by friction.
    I finally found the llamas in the Home Depot, where they were porting customers' sheet goods. I talked with my friend's coworkers, the llama wranglers, and they made a big fuss about my having come all that way, but I said it's not like that, I'm married, we're just friends. I got her contact info, and it turned out she was a friend of my mother-in-law's.
  • [headline: Earth's inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests] Astrologers scrambled to explain why Mercury in retrograde is so much more influential to human affairs than the thing that accounts for most of the gravity we experience on a daily basis.
  • every once in a while, my brain radio plays that Imagine Dragons song about "it's where my demons hide," but the line is changed to "it's got whipped cream inside."
  • I love that Google Maps now pans with the curvature of the Earth instead of the Mercator projection. It only took 25 years to fix the original sin of Mapquest's rectangular tiles. 🤦
  • I've been reading La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman (a prequel to His Dark Materials), and I now have more questions than answers about daemons. Can your daemon be bigger than yourself, like a horse or an elephant, and if so, can you ride it? Can it take the form of an extinct animal, and if not, how does it know? Can it take the form of another human, and if not, why not? We see a (bad-mannered) daemon peeing and pooping in this book, so they must eat something... what happens to the food inside them when (children's) daemons change size? When they change size, do they retain their mass?
    If the books were purely fantasy, all these questions could be waved away with magic. But in addition to witches and giants and angels and zombies, there are scientists ("experimental theologians") in this world who must be working on questions like these. I want to hear more from them. I suppose there's fanfic. 😬
  • It suddenly struck me that the Owl and the Pussycat said, "let us be married, too long have we tarried" and then proceeded to tarry another year and a day while looking for a ring. 🤦
  • TFW you ask for volunteers to "demo" and forget to specify whether you meant demonstrate or demolish.
  • TFW you realize that the reason your computer's fingerprint reader doesn't recognize you anymore is because you couldn't find the sanding block the other day.
  • Nothing like experiencing how someone else does a job you used to have to remind you that you were pretty good at it.
  • If someone who is in hospice is called a resident, and a doctor or nurse who is interning is also called a resident, then do you have to rely on context to know who is being talked about?
  • [headline: Deer Caught Gnawing on Human Bones] Mama don't know Bambi's gettin' lunch
    at the body farm
    doin' somethin' unholy
  • Dall-E thinks that the phrase "bush cherry" is a violation of its content policy. Happy valentine's day! It's a plant, I swear.
  • My deep thought of the morning: The Earth is flat, in the same way that Kansas is flat. The surface is perpendicular to gravity, within a percentage point or two. The curvature of space is what makes the flat surface spherical, not any outside force. A planet is not a sphere in the same way that a ball is a sphere, because the ball's shape is determined by the curvature of its surface, whereas a planet's surface is curved by its mass.
  • Tonight I realized the heptapods from Arrival are Time Lords. Think about it: their written language is made of circles. They see time as wibbly-wobbly and nonlinear. They travel in a ship that has its own gravity, appears to be bigger on the inside, dematerializes with a whoosh, and sticks out like a sore thumb. And they go where they're needed but are infuriatingly hard for the locals to comprehend.
  • You know, the movie What the Bleep do We Know?! got a lot of stuff wrong, but they did show a deaf character using video chat on her smartphone in a subway station three years before the iPhone debuted.
  • If F=ma and v=d/t and a=v/t and w=Fd
    then w=mv², correct? 
    Which means E=mc² is just Newton's laws of motion with one specific velocity? 🤔
    [friends disproved this, but it's a conversation starter]
  • How come bagel purists get upset about blueberry bagels, but i never hear complaints about people putting bacon or ham on bagels? 🤔
  • Just heard someone say "back when Twitter was still a thing," and honestly I can't get enough. Let's all say that.
  • If the Skywalkers were ancient Greeks, their name would be Astropod
  • I enjoyed the movie Slumberland on Netflix, but it's hard to know who it's for. It's an adaptation of a comic strip from a hundred years ago, but I only know that because my parents had an anthology of old comics that I pored over as a kid. I don't know how many other people had that exposure! As a movie it's very much like Inception for kids, but is there demand for such a thing? I guess we'll see.
  • My half asleep brain wants to know, "What do you do with a Meghan Trainor earlye in the morning?"
  • O noes, I ignored all the increasingly desperate emails from Whirlpool about their 15% off sale, and as a consequence they are now offering me 20% off! That'll teach me!
  • Google Analytics just sent me an email to complain that the /user/login page of one of my sites is blocked from indexing by the robots.txt file. 🙄
    um... that's intentional, thanks...
  • [Onion headline: Bored Census Bureau Employee Changes Every Ohio Resident's Name to Laura] Fun fact: my name was changed to Laura on two different occasions.
  • Facebook just showed me an ad for a robot lawnmower sold by Heisenberg Robotics. Suggested motto: "You can know where your robot lawnmower is, or how fast it's going, but not both"
  • I feel like there's a joke to be made about windows by Overton rather than Andersen. Like, when Overton initially makes their sales pitch to a customer, is it completely unacceptable, but over time it gradually starts to sound OK? Were the windows smashed at the Capitol on 1/6/21 Overton windows?
  • If I had had any respect for 45's creativity, I would have lost it over his using the nickname "Ron DeSanctimonious" when "Ron DiSastrous" is right there.
  • typo of the morning: "The competition is open to armatures as well as professionals." I've just been reading a book about possessed taxidermy, so that's where my mind went.
  • Tonight I learned that the reason we call the star Betelgeuse is because somebody in the 13th century accidentally wrote "Yad al-Jauzā’" (Orion's hand) as "bad al-Jauzā’" (after the walnuts). I feel like Douglas Adams would have been very pleased to know this.
  • [photo of Kilimanjaro] Mush-a-ring-a-ma-do-dum-a-da
    Whack for my daddy-o
    Whack for my daddy-o
    This is Kilimanjaro
  • Is a bun dance of caution like the Safety Dance?
  • Ok, so I watched RRR last night. It's... like a kung fu movie and a Soviet propaganda film had a child who was raised on Bollywood in Modi's India.
  • The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Kind of like gravitational lensing of the light from distant galaxies.
  • [link to actual trailer for Asteroid City] We told an AI to "make a trailer for a Wes Anderson film about an alien encounter," and this is what it produced.
  • This morning my brain woke me with a problem: although the verses of Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive" sound like the verses of "What Does the Fox Say," the choruses are incompatible. I wasn't able to solve it by waking up.
    Ducks say "quack"
    and fish go "blub"
    "This is it," the alpaca lisps
  • [link to "Twisting" by They Might Be Giants] One of my favorite memories of attending a music jam pre-pandemic was when, after a series of lugubrious folk and country songs, the next guy in the circle broke into this song. He didn't care that he and I were the only ones who knew it. Such joy. ♥
  • I'm a little disappointed to learn that the refrain in Neon Trees' "Animal" is "Say goodbye to my heart tonight," and not as I had thought, "Take a bite of my heart tonight."
  • With SpaceX's Starship in the news, I'm thinking of the other Starship, and specifically the lyric, "If this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each other." What does it mean? Are they not included in the world, or will they not be lovers?
  • People comparing The Last of Us to The Mandalorian are being distracted by Pedro Pascal. Both stories are News of the World.
  • [screenshot of someone's post "Wut wut!" being helpfully translated by Facebook to "Get get get get get!" allegedly from Wolof] How are there five "get"s in just two "wut"s?
  • [April 28] To commemorate Jerry Springer's death, I thought about sharing Weird Al's parody of "One Week." But damn, it has not aged well. We do not use those words anymore. 😲🤫
    [sister 'Becca commented: I noticed that Jerry Springer died the same day as the woman who falsely accused Emmett Till, so I imagine he’s aggressively questioning her in the waiting room of the afterlife and will soon bring in Till as a surprise guest to confront her.]
  • Watching a permaculture tour on YouTube, sand each time a rooster crows, the auto closed captions say [Music] ❤️
  • Pro tip: the correct passive voice is "our business was broken into," not "we had our business broken into." The latter implies that you hired someone to do the job.
  • It is asinine to use the word "stupid" when you mean "asinine." Too bad it's so pretentious to use the word "asinine"..! And it's only pedantic if you explain the difference.
  • [May 11] The fact that liberals (myself included) raised hell about Trump's immigration policies but not about Biden's demonstrates that for us it was always mostly about politics and not race. The fact that conservatives haven't objected to either demonstrates the reverse.
  • I think YouTube should rhyme with jujube
  • [link to XKCD Siphon cartoon] It's been over a hundred years since a user reported a bug that caused in-game time to pass more slowly when too much information in a spot caused processors to lag. We are glad to say we have resolved that problem now.
  • Every once in a while, my brain decides to sing "The Cremation of Sam McGee" to the tune of "Deep in the Heart of Texas."
    There are strange things done 'neath the midnight sun (clap clap clap clap) by men who moil for gold
    And the arctic trails have their secret tales (clap clap clap clap) to make your blood run cold
  • Statistically, half of all Great Danes are Below Average Danes
  • This morning's brain radio mashup:
    Sometiiiimes I think it's a sin
    Just to see what condition my condition was in 🎵
  • I am struck once again that it has taken so long for Babybel and Depeche Mode to work out a deal to use "Your Own Personal Cheeses." You just know that entire careers have risen and fallen with the hopes of such a deal.
    Or maybe Laughing Cow would be better. "Something to eat with breads, something that spreads..."
  • There's a White Room in the Grinnell College student union, and every time I see it I get the song in my head, even though it doesn't have black curtains and is nowhere near a station.
  • Given that c is the speed of causation...
    And correlation is not causation...
    Maybe warp drive is a jump to conclusions.
  • Me: I feel like GrubHub should be a decentralized repository for larvae.
    Coworker: Who says it isn't?
  • This is your passive-aggressive reminder that assertions of questionable fact without legitimate citations are just gossip.
  • My morning thought: If "the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup," does that mean the day is all downhill once you drink it? Are they warning you not to drink their product?
  • Last night Jessie and I watched the original Hairspray movie from 1988. Now that I've seen all three versions, I'm struck by how each successive version plays up the jail time more than the one before it. In the original, Tracy is the only character detained, and it's so minimum-security that the other inmates give her a new hairdo with AN ELECTRIC IRON. By the time the show made it to the stage, about half the characters are BEHIND BARS and singing a song about being in prison. 
    At the same time, though, Penny's "treatment" has gone from being imprisoned in her bedroom with bars on the door and window and being shocked with a cattle prod, to maternal disapproval. So... it's a wash?
  • What if you had one of those classroom alphabet charts, but for the entire Unicode character set? 🤔😱
  • The argument that you shouldn't say "chai tea" because it's redundant is timely, because I was about to use my PIN number at an ATM machine so I could take a taxi cab to give snack food to my puppy dog, kitty cat, and itty bitty teeny tiny bunny rabbit who all live in the Sahara desert.
  • If you write the English alphabet like the periodic table, with the vowels starting each row, the first two rows each have four letters, and the last three rows all have six letters each.
  • Back when I was writing fiction in high school, one of my stories was set in a place that had no magnetic field, so instead of NSWE, their cardinal directions were this way, that way, thither and yon. It still pleases me, how whimsical that was.
  • [June 24] Every headline about the Wagner Group has me singing "Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit..."
  • In case you have someone in your life who brings up the argument that cis men will pose as trans women in order to commit sexual assault in women's bathrooms, I would like to share this snappy argument I found yesterday:
    • Sexual assault is a crime no matter where it occurs, so if someone wanted to do it, they would not benefit from doing it in a women's bathroom. There is no reason to go to the trouble.
    • When people are required to use the bathroom of their assigned sex, such that trans men routinely have to use the women's bathroom, that actually makes it significantly EASIER for cis men to use the women's bathroom, because they don't have to go to the trouble of posing as women.
      - but more importantly -
    • There does not appear to be any evidence that cis men pose as women to commit sexual assault. There are only unsubstantiated anecdotes and speculation.
  • [Headline: Kobach says trans Kansans' IDs will be changed back to their sex assigned at birth] He can't maintain logical consistency even for one press conference. He says it's like having to have your current address on your ID, but if you have to have your birth gender, then shouldn't your ID show your birth address? And your birth vision status as well, which was legally blind. Sorry, Kansans, no driving anymore!
  • "Oh play me some mountain music / like grandma and grandpa used to play / then I'll float on down the river / to a Cajun hideaway."
    So... What I'm hearing you say is, you will go to extreme lengths to escape from mountain music.
  • [photo of Permaculture Design Magazine's "38th Anniversary Issue"] Hmm. Happy... quintritriennial, I guess? Or tricenoctennial? 🤔
  • pet peeve: electronics "protection plans" that don't say what device they are protecting, even though the insurance company presumably would know if you were to make a claim for the wrong device.
  • If caterpillars stand shoulder to shoulder, they make a caterwaul
  • Either Beauty and the Beast is a tale as old as time, or Disney can hold the copyright, but not both.
  • "She said she worked in the morning and started to laugh / I said I didn't and went in to sleep in the bath / And when I awoke, I was alone"
    So... She didn't need the bathroom before work? Or you slept through her using it?
  • It's that thing where you can find tons of instructions for how to do the first step of a two step process, but no instructions whatsoever for how to do the second step.
  • Today I learned there is a suburb of Charlotte named Stallings, and it incorporated the same year I did.
  • [link to XKCD comic about Frankenstein Claim Permutations] Mary Wollstonecraft was the name of the author. Percy Shelley was the monster who created Mary Shelley.
  • If Fritos were fried tortillas, they would be Fritas. So what are they before they are fried? Insects?
  • Is "Let's Hear It for the Boy" supposed to be satirical, or just patronizing? Maybe he has no other virtues, but at least he's monogamous! Let's give him a round of applause for meeting our one, low standard!
  • If we kept a running total of all the electronics Dahli has ruined by chewing their cords, she would still be a less expensive pet than Kooper, but she'd be solidly in second place among the pets. I estimate she's totaled two Mac power supplies, at least 6 pairs of earbuds, at least 4 USB cords, and a webcam. 🙁
  • Nebraska: We are against taxation and wasteful government spending! You cannot have nice things! Starve the beast!
    Also Nebraska: We require front and back license plates and change your plate number every year (for simplicity!), so we will send you two entirely new plates every year, at your expense. You can pay by card with a $$ fee or by electronic check with a $ fee; we do not accept cash or checks. We realize other states may have other systems, but this one is ours. Enjoy!
  • Today I learned that if you want to install Windows onto a computer that doesn't already have Windows, you have to use another computer that has Windows to make the installation disk. At least that's what Dell tech support told me after more than an hour on the phone and turning my laptop (which was fully covered by a support plan!) into a brick. Sigh
  • [headline about an over-the-counter birth control pill that is just progestrone] "Opill will be available without a prescription for women of all ages." ...and to anyone else who wants to experience irregular bleeding, headaches, dizziness, nausea, and loss of libido without the benefits of estrogen. Let's not rule that out. Tons of people drink alcohol for similar side effects.
  • It's the John Carter Effect all over again: "Marvel's Secret Invasion" feels like a ripoff of "Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion," even though the Skrulls debuted almost 15 years before the Zygons. It's eerie how similar the premises are, though.
  • 1) I read my news headlines on feedly.com, including some comic sources such as the Onion.
    2) Feedly now has an AI that reads the articles and tries to identify and flag important points that aren't in the headlines.
    3) "Feedly AI found 1 Product Launches mention in this article:
    "Nike also touted the release of a new polyester emesis bag that customers can dry-heave into if they get too overwhelmed."
  • AFTRA always sounds to me like a brand of aftershave. Which would make Saag Aftra my least favorite Indian dish. 🤢
  • One of the many ways in which the dynamic between drivers and pedestrians resembles the dynamic between men and women is when drivers praise cars for protecting people in accidents. Protecting them from what?
  • Random thought of the evening:
    If you looked really closely at that part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling where God's and Adam's fingers are almost touching,
    I mean really closely,
    You'd see a floating hotdog.
  • Pet peeves:
    • When news headlines use the noun form of a country's name instead of the adjective form
    • When they do so even when the noun form is longer than the adjective form, e.g. Greece vs Greek
    • When they do so even though it creates unnecessary confusion, e.g. "Greece fires"
    • When it makes fires harder to put out, because you can't use water on a grease fire
  • That meme is going around again about how supposedly there is a poster somewhere "at NASA" that says a [bumble]bee can't fly according to the laws of aerodynamics [as we understood them at the time] and so it must be the bee's ignorance of those laws that allows it to fly. Here is my dramatization of the scene 60 years ago:
    "In order to get funding, I just told Congress that we understand the laws of aerodynamics totally."
    "Haha, what about bumblebees tho?"
    "Haha, don't be silly, bees don't study aerodynamics."
    "LOL, I'm gonna put that on a poster!"
    "LOL, hold on, let me say it again with bigger words!"
    -- sixty years later --
    People on Facebook: "Ignorance is strength! NASA says so!"
    Ghost of George Orwell: "Hey!"
  • Me: I'd like to cancel my online subscription.
    Omaha World-Herald: may I ask why?
    Me: The price has gone up 300%
    OWH: Can I offer you 100% increase?
    Me: no
    OWH: I'm sorry to hear that. How about 50% increase?
    Me: no
    OWH We don't usually do this, but how about the same price as before?
    Me: no, thanks.
    OWH: OK, I've processed your cancellation, but there will be a cancellation fee of about 50% what you used to pay each month.
  • Lost in the media hubbub about Twitter changing its name to X is the fact that their domain and logo infringe on the trademarks of X.Org, which were established for more than a decade before Musk claimed the .com name. I guess the X Foundation doesn't have the resources to sue.
  • The earth is a sphere, but the surface of the earth is flat, in the same way that the surface of a bowl of water is flat. Like float glass is flat, but not like plate glass is flat. Flat like a bubble, not flat like a tire.
  • Google: We strongly discourage running any OS other than Android, and if you insist on doing so, there will be a warning message every time you start up recommending that you switch back to Android for your own safety.
    Also Google: No, we're not going to make it easy or simple to switch back to Android. Why should we do that? 🤔
  • Score another prediction for Douglas Adams! [Screenshot shows a headline, "Taylor Swift fans 'Shake It Off,' causing record-breaking seismic activity during Seattle shows," with a pic of the seismometer record and a question from my news reader app: "is this article about music? Y/N"]
  • Saw a Barbie-[movie-]related post about how sad it is that girls put their dolls away when they grow up, then took a nap and thought... aren't fashion and cosmetics just playing with dolls on a human scale? Cosplaying as a way of life?
  • [Wikipedia article on Intellivision] My nominee for the next installment of the Mattel Cinematic Universe
  • [Engrish.com photo of a sign translated as "We will refrain from trying on your skin directly."] Raxicoricofallapatorius!
  • I like to think that if I were hired to narrate an audiobook, I would look up the pronunciations of any words I wasn't certain of. Heretics should not rhyme with diabetics, and Enceladus should not rhyme with enchiladas.
  • Just heard an artist say something that sounded like "Paracord weaving comes from the Paracord region of France," and I really hope that's really what she said. Otherwise it's just sparkling nylon kernmantle.
  • I will be a little disappointed if the new season of Marvel's What If? doesn't include an episode that's just Cosmo the Spacedog and Goose the flerken traveling together, Incredible Journey style.
  • A friend posted about the frustration of being constantly updated about the location of a delivery truck while not knowing what the package is that's coming. I feel the need to point out that that is the premise of "The Wells Fargo Wagon" from The Music Man.
  • I just saw the word "bookkeeper" and had a sudden vision of a person in a full-body suit and hood to protect against papercuts when they venture into the library stacks.
  • Thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Saweetie on NPR just now, largely because her smoke detector was chirping insistently the whole time. #keepingitreal
  • Irony: if you write "international phonetic alphabet" in IPA, it doesn't contain the letters I, P, or A.
  • There should be an ensemble movie called Knights of the Realm where all the elderly celebrities with honorary knighthoods get called upon to defend the UK. A reality show would be easier since most of them are not actors, but it would be harder on their egos and probably less entertaining. According to IMDb, there was a 2018 film of that title, with an estimated budget of £200.
  • Freudian slip of the morning, from NPR: "now available in limited qualities."
  • The Blue Beetle's family business should have been septic tanks.
    You know, because scarabs put dung underground.
  • I saw the trailer for Netflix's live-action "One Piece." I dunno, it seems like a lot of trouble just to find a swimsuit that covers your belly.
  • [Sept 1] I am disappointed that the media are misrepresenting the steer that a Nebraska man took for a ride in the passenger side of his sedan as a "bull"...
    ...rather than making jokes about how you're supposed to steer on the driver's side.
  • What do you call rice that has toxic levels of mercury and arsenic?
    Hazmati
  • [Headline: The Fastest 60-Year-Old Woman on Earth is Only Getting Faster] This headline will not age well.
  • Can't stop thinking about how the [Neil Gaiman character] Sandman's battle with Satan was literally "I know you are, but what am I?"
  • How was Dwayne Johnson chosen to play the Tooth Fairy?
    Toof actor identification
  • I just wanna say how amazing it is that Roku can make an ultra HD streaming box that runs on 5 Watts and costs like $20 including remote, with nothing more to buy unless you choose to.
    And how dumb it is that TV manufacturers tack one of those on and call it a "smart TV" and surcharge like $100.
  • An advertisement claiming that a credit card "is worth its weight in gold" has me 🤦🤦🤦
  • [Headline: Video shows high school band director arrested, shocked with stun gun after he refused to stop music] There will be NO music after the state sanctioned violence! Only more violence!
  • The instruction manual of our new fridge refers to eggplants (aubergines) as aborigines. Not cool, translator. Totally different etymology. [friend reading the photo commented, "Also odd to be storing curettes in there, but it would be ok I guess."]
  • "J.D. Power and Associates" sounds like a midcentury euphemism for a teenage street gang. The Sharks and the Jets, and their associates, compete for J.D. power
  • Whenever people ask me about Omaha, I find myself saying that it's a great place to drive a car. That's not really fair to Omaha, but our urban planning is also not fair to Omaha.
  • [Headline: Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles] What a shame we can't just reuse the Lego bricks we already have
  • Map legends are funny to think about. Cartographers are just like, there is literally nothing worth looking at for hundreds or thousands of square miles, so we can put a big ol' label on top of it and you won't care. Kind of like those big Newbery Medal stickers they'd plaster right over the cover of children's books.
  • There's a reporter on NPR named Kristin Wright, and I thought she said she was Christian Right. 🤔
  • Dude, if you think the popularity of the newest COVID vaccine is "like kids eating Tide Pods," maybe you shouldn't be working at a pharmacy. 😬
  • All of y'all sharing the meme about how to pronounce axolotl correctly... it's mispronunciations all the way down. If the original pronunciation of a word is the only correct one, I guarantee you are mispronouncing every single word you speak.
  • Among the things I never understood about "The Rainbow Connection" was why it was so commonly used to teach ASL. I mean, you can't do sign language with your hand in a puppet. They are incompatible activities.
  • [Sept 30] Not all of us will be a Dianne Feinstein or an RBG, but can we agree that dying in office is not helpful to others? In a relay race, passing the baton is part of the job description.
  • Amazon's catalog that came in the mail today [Oct 2] is the very definition of insult added to injury. 🤬 They made every catalog obsolete, then they have the chutzpah to issue their own catalog?!
  • I had a random thought this evening. What if - instead of the USPS insisting for almost a century that bulk mailers had to presort their mailings before bringing them in to mail in bulk - what if they instead partnered with print shops all over the country and let mailers just bring in their address lists and one original copy? What if they had got into the information business instead of staying in the shipping business?
  • Synchrony Bank CareCredit®: You can apply for our financing right now while you're waiting for your medical provider, so that you can use it at checkout!
    Now that you've applied, please call this number and repeat aloud all of the information you just silently typed into our secure form. This is to protect you against identity theft! You wouldn't believe how many people mistype their SSN, but our people never mishear, and neither will the folks in the waiting room with you.
    Now that we've verified your info, go to this site on your phone and record a 5-minute video so that we know it's you. How do we know what you look like? Send us photos of your driver's license also. You can do all of this from the waiting room! Isn't that convenient and secure? 🤦
    OMG I went through all the steps only to have my "verification" rejected because I couldn't get a clear photo of the bar code on my driver's license. They will send me a letter in 7-10 business days! Fat lotta good that does me.
  • pro tip: if your online form delimits numbers as ###-###-###, printing them as ####-##-#### on the paperwork will confuse people.
  • Early morning thought: it's weird to call the Afghanistan earthquake [Oct 10] an "act of God" and not the middle east conflict. I'm pretty sure God was WAY more responsible for the latter.
  • Since Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet, does that mean plutonium is now a dwarf element? And Pluto the dog, who is also named after the former planet, can now be considered the eighth dwarf.
  • Maybe I'm getting old and cynical, but now when I hear "Hips Don't Lie" all I think is, Shakira had really low standards for Spanish fluency.
    "You make a man wanna speak Spanish:
    ¿Dónde está
    el baño?
    ¿Cómo se dice?
    ¿Biblioteca?"
  • Japanese viewers of Ahsoka must wonder why it's called "oh, that?"
  • I'm a little disappointed that searching for "movies about cultural appropriation" doesn't turn up A Nightmare Before Christmas. Bring it On, yes, that movie shows that appropriation is unfair. But ANBC shows that it can also be ghastly.
  • If queer people have gaydar, do sexual predators have a pedometer?
  • Sites that don't pop up a login overlay until after they've already displayed restricted content 🤦
  • The sad truth about Spider solitaire is that no amount of strategy or practice or undos can help you if one of the five deals has no consecutive numbers. 😢 Fortunately that doesn't happen often, but it's game over when it does.
  • [photo of plastic dachshund skeletons] There's nothing spoopier than ear bones and like 50 ribs
  • Yesterday the line for airport security was so long, I thought they should have animatronics to keep us entertained.
  • [headline: Spider web invention a credit to Omaha brothers' stick-to-it-iveness] OK, so there is one situation in which "stick-to-it-iveness" is a more appropriate word than perseverance.
  • Jessie and I belatedly watched "Us" last night. The more I think about it, the more I think it is a modern Doctor Who episode, minus the Doctor. It follows the formula:
    1. introduce characters
    2. introduce monsters
    3. monsters explain themselves
    4. fight, monsters get upper hand
    5. monsters explain themselves more
    6. fight some more
    7. abandon entire premise for no apparent reason
    8. monsters lose?
  • [link to article about how the American Ornithological Society will rename dozens of birds named after controversial people] Take it all the way to the top - rename the organization after Turtle Island. Saying bird species can't be named after people means little if your organization is named (indirectly) after a person.
  • [YouTube video: Chicago's Radical Solution For Broken Tipping Culture] If doing what should have been done all along can be called radical...
  • If Captain Marvel isn't named after the company but rather after fellow character Mar-Vell, perhaps Captain America isn't named after the country or the continent but rather after fellow character America Chavez. That star on his shield represents the star-shaped portal through which she brought super soldier serum to the MCU in the 1940s. She swore the scientists to secrecy, but they named their creation after her.
  • Alamo Drafthouse's loyalty program is called "Alamo Victory." 🤷🇲🇽
  • [Engrish photo of a window sign: Boston Pizza NOW COOKS SERVERS"] This is why you need a clean separation between front-of-house and back-of-house staff.
  • You know what's weird? That banks and doctors' offices treat our birthdays as some sort of secret password even though all kinds of people know our birthdays. Were we supposed to randomize them? Maybe add some letters and special characters to make them harder to guess?
  • the Parthenon was built via parthenogenesis
  • It's odd that "animal rearing" is both the complex process of raising an animal to adulthood and the simple process of getting it to lift its front legs.
  • I'm not the first person to think of a mashup of Take Five and the Mission Impossible theme. But I may have been the first to think of a mashup of Music Box Dancer with The Baby Elephant Walk.
  • [November 25] Today it's been 25 years since the end of Babylon 5 and 60 years since the start of Doctor Who.
  • You know how we always say that people's prefrontal cortexes aren't done developing until sometime in their early 20s?
    I just realized this morning that that's why so many people feel like they're still in their 20s decades later. That's when their brains stopped growing. 🙀
  • Spectator sports should be classified as reality shows. Change my mind. 
    [in comments:] I was thinking about it in the context of scanning news headlines. Why is every college or pro team's win or loss considered more newsworthy to the Omaha readership than the decisions made by our own city council, when the impact on our actual lives is more like that of who got eliminated on Dancing with the Stars this week?
  • It's not a REAL quarantine unless it lasts forty days. Otherwise it's just sparkling medical isolation.
  • [December 2, regarding disgraced Representative George Santos]: So... Extra charges on donor credit cards? That's where the bar is for expelling a Republican lawmaker? Interesting, 'cause I'm pretty sure Santos isn't the only one who's done that.
  • Reasons why the "Last Christmas" episode of Doctor Who is probably my favorite Christmas show ever:
    • It makes the case for secular Christmas as an excuse for spending time with your loved ones because you never know which year will be the Last.
    • Nick Frost's Santa is the realest Santa Claus that there is, in that he is in our heads. And he makes the case that the Doctor also is similarly real in our heads.
    • It's both funny and scary, even after repeat viewings.
    • It doesn't have any scenes that make me embarrassed to show it to people.
    • If there are any plot holes, they are excused by face-hugging alien dream crabs.
    • It doesn't include the Wham! song of the same title.
  • I remember when Rachel Maddow got sick, Chris Hayes stepped up and did his best impression of her. So why can't the Late Show go on without Stephen Colbert? Does no one want to be his understudy? The Show Must Not Go On Without the Star
  • Adventures in marketing, Saturday edition. I receive an email from an unfamiliar domain claiming to be from our Nissan dealership, enticing us "Lost Souls" to bring our car in for service it doesn't need (it's electric! boogie-oogie-oogie) within 30 days for 10 dollars off. All of the links are invalid. As in, they are not links. They look like links, but they go to the word processor of whoever wrote the message. 🤦
  • How I wish the picnic table conversation had gone in tonight's [December 9] Doctor Who (no spoilers):
    "Ah, it's nice to have a family... Again."
    "When did you have a family before? And where?"
    "Oh, I lived with the Ponds for a few years, here in England."
    "Who were the Ponds again?"
    "Wellllll... I guess you'd say my in-laws."
    "You were married... To a human?"
    "Not exactly. It's complicated."
    "Any kids we should know about?"
    "I had a granddaughter, a long time ago."
    "When did you have kids?"
    "You've met my daughter! Jenny."
    "How did you have a granddaughter before you had a daughter?"
    "...Timey-wimey?"
  • Last night the documentary we went to see in the theater was screened in slow motion, deep voices and all. After about 15 minutes the projectionists fixed it and gave us coupons for popcorn. I feel like they would have recognized the problem sooner (rather than thinking it was just a sound problem) if we weren't all so accustomed to slow mo in documentaries.
  • Pretentious French jazz channel in the coffee shop is playing the Super Mario Bros theme. Saxophone, clarinet, drums. No improvisation.
  • My morning dogwalking thought today was that with all the words English has borrowed from other languages, it's weird that we have no active verb for being born. We can understand the construction of, say, "yo nació" but the closest translation in English is "I was born."
  • ChatGPT is halfway decent at writing song parodies, but I gave it an easy one ("Here We Come a-Wassailing" to the tune of "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk) and it totally dropped the ball. Those lyrics would get booed off any stage anywhere.
  • Isabella Stone?
    Only if it's the jingle bell rock.
  • Me, on Duolingo: hey, Ukrainian is really easy if you already know Russian!
    Also me: you know, lots of languages do just fine without all these cases and conjugations.
  • [Headline: Baby found alive in tree after Tennessee tornado] in case you ever wondered what situation "Rockabye Baby" was describing. Also, the baby in question is named Lord. He is risen indeed!
  • Are you a nother? Someone who noths? Are you nothing right now? Nothing is nothing to another.
  • Me: please describe the biblical encounter between shepherds and angels in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.
    ChatGPT: In the shadowed folds of ancient Bethlehem, when the celestial spheres aligned with cosmic intent, shepherds, mere mortals, found themselves ensnared in the eldritch dance of divine revelation. From the stygian abyss above, phantasmal entities, heralds of the ineffable, manifested in forms indescribable, shattering the veil of earthly understanding.
    The shepherds, trembling under the weight of cosmic truths, heard the cacophony of celestial tongues, a chorus both sublime and maddening. Wings of cosmic horror eclipsed the firmament as the astral messengers imparted revelations beyond mortal ken, whispering of an otherworldly birth, a harbinger of esoteric destinies.
    As the shepherds gazed upon the eldritch visages, sanity teetered on the precipice, for the cosmic revelation bestowed upon them transcended the boundaries of mortal comprehension. In the hallowed night, the veil between dimensions unraveled, and the shepherds, mere playthings of the cosmic forces, bore witness to an epochal event, an aberration in the grand tapestry of the cosmos.
    Me: describe the angels in more detail please.
    ChatGPT: The angels, if such a term could befit the abominations that descended upon Bethlehem, were ethereal entities draped in shadows woven from the fabric of interstellar chaos. Their forms defied geometry and reason, limbs extending into fractal tendrils that coiled and writhed with alien purpose. Eyes, if one could name those eldritch orbs as such, glowed with an otherworldly luminescence that seared through the sanity of any mortal daring to meet their gaze.
    These celestial entities emanated an aura of cosmic dread, an aura that transcended the boundaries of mortal fear. Feathery appendages, reminiscent of wings but distorted by the malevolence of the celestial realms, rippled with the spectral winds of unfathomable dimensions. As they hovered above the shepherds, the very air quivered with a dissonant symphony, a disharmony that echoed the discordant melodies of forbidden realms.
    In their presence, the shepherds were ensnared by a paradoxical blend of terror and reverence, their mortal senses overwhelmed by the eldritch beauty and horror that radiated from these emissaries of the cosmic abyss. The angels' voices, if one could call them voices, reverberated in the minds of the shepherds, carrying revelations that transcended the frail boundaries of human understanding. The celestial messengers, envoys of an arcane agenda, bestowed upon the trembling mortals a glimpse into the ineffable tapestry of the cosmos.
  • [XKCD comic: Hydrothermal vents] Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.
  • I'm still testing negative for COVID, but last night I lost my sense of smell. It's weird, but not unpleasant. Everything smells fresh and clean.
Facebook quips