Hopefully I can find a copy of the ad because visual aids always help, but in case I can’t, there is a recent promotion from a mobile phone company for a family bundle package. The slogan used in the ad is this:
The family that saves together, smiles forever.
Any proper Grammar Nazi will immediately get his hackles up over the gratuitous comma, but it’s the actual phrase that rubs me the wrong way. First, linking saving with smiling seems natural — saving makes you happy, being happy results in smiling. Logical. But smiling over savings, no matter how fantastic, is a transitory experience, not one that lasts forever. This brings to mind an image of the family all gathered in the afterlife, still grinning away over their great cellphone bundled savings, even as they no longer need an unlimited plan to reach through the nether to scare surviving relatives. Alternately I picture a pharaoh being buried with his family, sealed away for all time under a great pyramid, each family member clutching a cell phone to his or her hand. If they had cell phones in ancient Egypt, that is. Or maybe I’m projecting because of that ancient Egypt episode of Futurama I saw recently.
This is a test post from the WordPress mobile app. I believe I will do this in the future only if I succumb to total madness, which extended use of this tiny virtual keyboard on my iPhone will surely cause to happen.
I finally got off my figurative butt and inserted a graphic as part of the masthead for the blog. As of this writing it is a photo I took at Buntzen Lake during a hike in January. I am planning on rotating through a number of images. I’ll probably jazz up the site a bit more in the coming weeks, though I am undecided on how best to do this. I can’t decide between animated gifs or auto-playing midi files. If only the <BLINK> tag was still supported.
In case the image mentioned above isn’t the current one, here it is below (click for full-size):
I have a co-worker who bears a strangely strong resemblance to the character I played in Tabula Rasa. I guess that means Tabula Rasa was fairly good at creating realistic-looking humans. That’s what probably doomed it.
Reference pic is below. The resemblance creeps me out a little. Note: my co-worker does not wear power armor.
Back in the 1980s — you know, that decade that started over 30 years ago — Berke Breathed via Bloom County commented on how the comics section of newspapers was steadily shrinking. He didn’t mean fewer comics were being run. If anything, even more were being showcased. You can only prop up the section with Blondie and Beetle Bailey for so long. No, what he meant was the physical space being devoted to them was shrinking, resulting in strips that were smaller and more difficult to read. The logical conclusion he reached was that the comics section would eventually disappear into a black dot of illegibility.
As it turns out, newspapers will probably vanish before this can happen. Thank you, Internet, for helping save us from unnecessary eyestrain!
But wait, for as the Internet giveth, so does it taketh away.
As per usual Facebook has done another one of its seemingly arbitrarily updates to its site, making it ‘better’ in ways that may elude common folk. The biggest change is apparently the profile page. I check mine so infrequently I’m not sure exactly what is different except it has a strip of photos slapped along the top of it now. I do not understand the purpose or value of this. The other more noticeable change for me is a universal shrinkage of the font size. This doesn’t make the site more readable, it goes against the demographic trend of an aging population and it doesn’t really allow for more information to be displayed. It just makes all the text a bit smaller. I can easily simulate the old look reasonably enough by using the old CTRL-mousewheel trick so it doesn’t particularly affect me. Sometimes I wonder if Zuckerberg dictates these changes just because of the irresistible power to affect 500 million accounts all at once (quibble to journalists: Facebook has 500 million accounts, not 500 million users. I could go out and create 100 new accounts if I wanted to, each one setting the default size of the font to something different using the nigh-amazing CTRL-mousewheel trick). You may be thinking to yourself, “Is this just a real roundabout way of saying I’m getting old and I would prefer sites on the web to not shrink their fonts so my eyes don’t need to squint so much to keep reading them?” and my answer would be “No, haha, of course not!” Because the font is just too damn small for no good reason. And I went jogging last week, anyway. And I didn’t fall down and break my hip. So there.
Also while I’m here, the Royal Bank cartoon businessman mascot they use (I think his name is Arby — get it? LOL!!) is creepy as all get-out. Tip: You do not make your monolithic, billions-in-record-revenue-generating banking enterprise more cuddly and personable by creating a mascot in a BUSINESS SUIT. Especially one with no neck. Creepy.
Fortunately, the pages have been shrunk through the science of something I just made up and they are now small enough to fit on the head of a pin, unlike the collected books comprising The Wheel of Time, for example, the weight of which could serve to batter down doors or stop a runaway cruise ship (like in Speed 2. I never really watched that movie but I did manage to catch the ending on TV once and I stood there staring at the screen, baffled and amazed at the sight of an actual runaway cruise ship. It was a definite ‘What were they thinking?’ moment. Good call by Keanu to bail on this sequel. That good call was subsequently offset by the many other terrible movies he went on to appear in, unfortunately, but a boy’s gotta eat).
I did not jog today due to spending a little more time with Tim getting and setting up his shiny new computer with patented* Harry Potter** interface, but I am rescheduling for tomorrow. Since it was also windy as all get-out today and I hate running in the wind (not to be confused with running like the wind) I am not too upset about putting it off for another day.
* it probably isn’t actually patented but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was
** seriously, the opening steps on initial startup that HP (Hewlett-Packard) forces the user to go through looks like some weird Harry Potter-esque thing with weird disembodied hands (Tim called them jazz hands)
Today is 1/11/11. It’s either the highest-scoring day ever or the lowest, depending on the scale you use.
Only 11 years, 1 month and 1 day until until 2/22/22 rolls around! (Did I do the math right? I hate math. Barbie was spot-on there. The old dumb Barbie, I mean, not the new computer scientist version that fools no one.)
I don’t know which is creepier, all of these mass death events (“500+ blackbirds”, “thousands of fish”) or the fact that Google maps allows you to conveniently peruse all of them.
One of my resolutions for 2011 is to write more and to that end I have declared January official Write At Least One Blog Entry Per Day month. This sometimes leads to what one might call filler posts.
Such as this one.
Oh, here’s something kind of weird. As of tonight the Vancouver Canucks are the top team in the NHL, with 55 points and a record of 28-8-5. They have the fewest losses of any team and are tied for the most wins with Pittsburgh and Detroit but have two games in hand on both teams. I’m not sure when the Canucks were last on top of the league in January but I’m thinking it was approximately never, so it’s nice to see now. Go Canucks and all that.
Maybe they just needed 40 years to warm up and become Stanley Cup champions!
