Amusing: October 2003 Archive Page

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach's candy. With that in mind, it's important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won't put a damper on anyone's holiday spirits to wear high-visibility costumes when going from house to house, to have kids trick-or-treat with an adult, and to inspect all candy for tampering. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that eating just a single kernel of candy corn manufactured by a company other than Brach's Confections will give you a deadly case of full-blown AIDS. --"Patrick Carlin CEO, Brach's Confections" --Generic Candy Corn will Give You AIDS (Onion)

Another great example of The Onion's mastery of social satire.

Microsoft's menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it's especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th "Inside PCMag.com" newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it's still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was the last time you saved a file on a floppy? --Lance Ulanoff --Icon See It Now (PC Mag)

Hmm... this may be true in the business world, but the ledge of the whiteboard in the front of every computer room starts collecting abandoned floppy disks around midterm time, and there are often ten or twelve there by the end of term. I suppose this could be taken as evidence that students are abandoning such floppies, but my point is that they are still in use. Only once or twice have I seen an abandoned Zip disk. Nevertheless, I have a little keychain USB drive that I use to bring files back and forth from the office.

In critiquing the "cut" and "paste" icons, Ulanoff says "What a clipboard and a document have to do with pasting is beyond me." It sounds almost like Ulanoff doesn't know that "cut" and "paste" are references to actually taking a pair of scissors (or a razorblade knife) and clipping a chunk of text off of one page and actually sticking it on top of another page. When I was working for the (sadly defunct) University Journal as an undergrad, we would re-use graphics and logos, and while I don't recall whether we actually kept them on a clipboard, I think we kept them in the front cover of a notebook. So the clipboard icon makes sense to me. Ulanoff's point is, of course, that these images come from the print world -- a world that is more and more remote, and more and more metaphorical, to users of electronic text.

--'The other phone's a little...' (No Media Kings)

Jim Munroe is a new media generalist -- a writer, interactive fiction designer, and video filmmaker. I enjoyed his video ">interactive," and was Googling just now for something or other, and came across this short film, with a very dry, understated punchline that made me laugh out loud. (I'm not sure what the title of the phone vid is, so I just quoted part of a line.)

It's poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It's failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A's clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives. --Carlin Romano --Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me? (Chronicle)

Another fine suggestion from Jim.

You have now entered the Stephen Kings' home page... a place for the many of us whose daily lives are defined by who we are not. --Oh the Horror! Being Stephen King

From Mike Arnzen's Goreletter.

Missed your daily dose of Panda Cam? Don't have the time to watch our pandas sleep? Boss expects you to do work? | Well, we have the solution right here. Our newest feature, the Daily Panda, lets you recap the daily escapades of Hua Mei, Bai Yun and Gao Gao thanks to our Panda Cam time lapse video. So go ahead, get some work done? we'll keep track of the pandas for you.
--Panda Cam Live from the San Diego Zoo (San Diego Zoo)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

--Muppet Terror Alert (Geek and Proud)

Found on Sarcasmo's Corner

Raelians have made fun of the media that gave such extensive coverage to their cloning story. --Brigitte McCann --Rael's Clones a Hoax? (Calgary Sun)

This article refers to the burst of media attention this odd sect got over claims that a human had been successfully cloned.

Dear Dennis:

Rosemary asked me to pass on the following passage from J.P. Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth" (which is actually a good book).

"Our review of Proto-Indo-European culture omits volumes that have been written about the reconstructed vocabulary, since much falls under the category of predictable phenomena or else items not readily retrievable by the prehistorian from any other source other than language. Day, night, earth, sky, clouds, sun, moon and star can all be found in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary. We may be confident that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were physically similar to us and that many of their anatomical parts are linguistically retrievable through the comparison of Indo-European languages. Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar struggling to determine whether Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for 'breaking wind'. English dictionaries may occasionally shrink from including such vulgar terms as 'fart' but the word gains status when set within the series: Sanskrit pardate, Greek perdo, Lithuanian perdzu, Russian perdet', Albanian pjerdh 'to fart loudly' (distinguished from Proto-Indo-European *pezd- 'to break wind softly')."

Ciao,
RobertProto-Indo-European CultureE-Mail)

Not one, but two different words for breaking wind. Ah... this... THIS is why I became an English professor!

--Movie Posters Redone in Lego

Noticed that you had written about our site, The World Rock Paper Scissors Society (www.worldrps.com) on your blog before and thought you may be interested in the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International World Championships taking place on October 25th.

Couple notes about the Championships:

- We have built a new Championship specific site at www.rpschamps.com
- We expect to have about 1000 of the World's best players competing
this year and have athletes registered from the UK, 6 US States and Canada.
- Winner will receive $5000.00 (CDN) and more importantly will be able to claim the title of RPS Champion of the World (2nd place $1500.00, 3rd $500)
- We have some various video clips in Quicktime format that can be Viewed here: http://www.rpschamps.com/videos.html

Graham Walker
World RPS Society
gwalker@worldrps.com --Rock Paper Scissors ChampionshipsE-Mail)

--Senators butt heads over Iraq funding (Yezbick)

Is there subliminal editorializing in this headline? :-)