The good times

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At the office today someone put out candy bars in the kitchen. The box had a sign telling people they can buy them and support some organization, and there was an envelope in which to put your money.

That reminded me of a classic prank Deion invented (and used against me) back in high school, and I recommend you all give it a try sometime.

So I’m selling candy bars for some dumb fundraiser thing, I don’t remember. They were two bucks a pop. I set up a box with an envelope and a sign on it. I put the box in the room where we used to work on the newspaper, so that as people went in and out of that room they could buy some candy bars. Sounds like a fine plan right? Just come back later and collect the loot.

Sure enough, after I left Deion comes along and crosses out the $2 price and writes “Sale $.50!” on the sign. I come back a while later to find significantly fewer candy bars, and an envelope full of quarters. As I reached into my wallet, pulling out the money I’d need to subsidize the cost of Deion’s “sale”, I remembered how great it is to have such good friends.

Too cool to bash the French

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So although everyone agrees Iraq is in violation of resolution 1414, the French said they’d veto any resolution that supports the use of force against Iraq. With this move, it became cool for US citizens to really bash the French.

Now that’s not cool, but it’s become cool to be the guy who observes how uncool it is to bash the French – how childish that is. It’s cool to call those who bash the French a bunch of childish neanderthals.

Well I’m starting a new trend, it’s called bashing the people who bash the people who bash the French. Aside from the phony air of “I’m to good for this” they give off, really most of them are guilty of the same childish activity except they direct it at other things. The same people who say it’s immature to make fun of French people seem to think it’s perfectly okay to use equally childish insults against President Bush. Oh, it’s just fine to make fun of President Bush, but this other country… the sophisticated land of France… lay off them! That’s just too much. The US was so immature when they said “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”, but the French remain a sophisticated culture when they threaten to veto any resolution authorizing the use of force against a country that is clearly in posession of dangerous illegal weapons.

Well it’s time to get your noses out of the air, you hypocritical closet self-loathers. It’s now cool for us to make fun of you guys.

I encourage everyone to join this new movement.

Sweet Furniture

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At the Natick Mall two weeks ago, we stumbled across what must be the coolest furniture store ever. It’s called LoveSac. They don’t make anything except these enormous bean-bag looking things (they’re not actually bean bags, they’re filled with shredded foam). You can get them as large as 6 feet and fit 3-4 people on them. They are comfortable as hell. You can re-shape them so you get back support for sitting upright, or flatten them out for lying down. How cool is that?

Classic Onion article makes a comeback

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This week The Onion re-ran the “Hammurderer” article – one of the most hilarious articles they’ve written. It reminds me I meant to come up with a list of my favorite Onion articles of all time. Here’s a first shot at such a list (in random order):

There are some other classics but I can’t find them all… I guess they don’t keep them all archived online. Damn.

Capitalism at it's finest

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This is a great story of a woman who set up a porta-potty in her front yard and charged money to St. Patrick’s Day drunkards to use it.

The awful part is the cops shutting her down at the end. Ridiculous. She can’t charge money for this, but it would be fine if she set it up for free and had drunk bastards crawling around her yard?

XML too hard for programmers

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An interesting article posted on Slashdot from the author of XML. Having worked a fair bit with XML parsing, I would agree with a lot of his concerns. Although I guess I can say my code is more “extensible” after having moved to XML as an input format, I sure had to write a lot more code, including introducing and fixing new bugs and writing lots of little workarounds for the Java-based parser I was using (Xerces).

What a stupid motto

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Is it just me, or does the motto for the new Saturn ION make no sense whatsoever: “Specifically designed and engineered for whatever’s next.”

How did they specifically design for a concept that is by definition vague? Is that the joke? Screw Saturn and their lame jokes.