humor

For some reason there's been an especially high level of spam lately. A lot of it's for ForEx (foreign exchange) schemes, which makes sense with the dollar tanking -- a small investment in Euros or Pounds a couple years ago would have made a nice return. I'm not sure teaming up with the guy that's spamming you about it is really the best way to enter the field, though.

But the spam that's really getting my attention is the stuff with totally made-up words. This morning, I submitted spams with titles like "intercalative parafloccular" and "jager nomistic fipple". I mean, how gorgeous are those phrases? A science fiction writer could name an entire galaxy of futuristic devices, new worlds, and extraterrestrial characters from what I delete from my spam queue every morning!

I don't know the story behind these images at all, but they certainly say more than their allotted 1,000 words! The creators of these pictures of free range workers say only that they wanted to illustrate the commonality between office working conditions and the way chickens are raised (i.e. in cage batteries vs. free-range). Of course, no matter how chickens are raised, no matter how happy or unhappy they are on their farms, their ultimate end isn't all that pleasing for the chicken (I imagine -- I've never asked a dead chicken how they felt about it all).

By now the story of the Klingon interpeter request by a mental health facility in Oregon has been seen everywhere, discredited, dismissed, and retracted--see for example Alas, a Blog's overview. Seems the original statement by the mental health pros was misread, some journalists wrote a misleading article, it was picked up by the wire and circulated widely, and now the story has killed itself. The county issued an official list of languages they could, conceivably, find a need to hire interpreters for--for example, if a patient came in who only spoke Slovakian, the county would hire someone proficient in English and Slovakian to act as an interpreter.

When I was a young'un, back in the late '80s, I heard a tape of a comedy bit in which a metal-shop-esque instructor teaches the practical ins and outs of torture--a play on the US training of torturers in Central America. I can remember a couple of lines:

"The first thing you're going to need is a big table. I prefer metal because it lasts longer..."

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Alas, Dick Cheney, We Hardly Knew Ye

Of course, that's because you hardly let us...

The Smoking Gun managed to get a copy of an obituary mock-up for Dick Cheney accidentally made public on CNN's website a couple days ago. Apparently most news organizations have nearly-ready-to-go obituaries in their files for famous personages, "just in case"--CNN is only unusual in having posted them to a public part of their website (a mistake which has since been remedied).