Category: Life

I’m not saying I’m low rent or anything, but all the spammers are trying to sell me knockoff Timexes.

My toddler attends a preschool thing at the local religious school. I was under the impression it was a Christian school of some sort, but he came home with this idol, so I’m not sure:

I have seen that sort of thing in Lovecraftian nightmares.

I lost 1d4 SAN just looking at it.

My wife points out the Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is our age.

I guess I can go from wasting my life to wasted my life at any time.

In 1992, if you said Ice-T, the rapper responsible for “Cop Killer”, would one day appear on Sesame Street without controversy, they would have thought you were mad.

Fifteen years later, your prediction would have come true.

Want to know what to get me for my birthday? How about a Unique Cave Home from ebay?

Historic, regionally famous cave: 15,000 square feet, divided into three main chambers.

The front chamber houses the main part of the 3-bedroom finished house.

The middle chamber holds the laundry room, storage, and a spare bath. The middle chambe made a great party room. 80 feet by 80 feet.

The back chamber still has the stage where Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, Ike and Tina Turner, the MC5 and many other bands performed.

Property: 2.8 scenic, partially wooded acres provide excellent privacy and the feel of the country right in the middle of town, just several blocks from shopping, dining, and other conveniences.

Energy efficiency: Geothermal and passive solar keep the home comfortable year-round without a furnace or air conditioning. In spite of the vast size of the home, our energy costs here run about the same as they did in our 800 square-foot starter home. The home naturally stays a little cooler than the average above-ground home, but we found that we acclimated quickly and easily.

Kitchen: The kitchen is the crowning jewel of the house, with nearly 400 square feet and a floor plan that lends itself well to cooking for one person, two, or parties of a hundred guests! Some of the features include a customizable Jenn-Air cook top, two convection ovens, Kitchen-Aid triple sink, large island with secondary sink and breakfast bar, and granite tile countertops.

Occupancy: The house could still could use trim and finish in several key areas. Trim is not a safety feature and not required by code. The City of Festus granted us an occupancy permit in May of 2008, and we have been living here happily ever since.

You choose whether to hire pros to customize before moving in, or live here and take your time getting intimate with the space while making your decorating choices.

Water features: The property has at least three groundwater springs, one accessible via a cistern in the middle chamber of the cave, one that yields an average of 100 gallons a day that drips into an indoor pond in the front chamber, and one near the woods that creates a shallow pond. During heavy rain, the property gets as many as fourteen beautiful waterfalls from the cliffs.

Anyone know how much huge closing concrete doors would cost? I’d call it NOGGLAD.

Has anyone else noticed that free rein now appears more and more in print as free reign?

I’m not sure if this means more and more people are using it in reference to the growth of government and are consciously making a pun (I doubt it) or if educational standards or cultural references have obscured the horsemanship origin of the phrase.

Today, I changed the paperclip in my sainted mother’s toilet.

This time, I used a rubber-covered one, so it should last a while.

In retrospect, it really wasn’t that hard to stop a Rough Riders 4x4s at all. As I recall, any of the obstacles in the commercials would easily stop the production models.

Ad on the back of the new Yellow Pages:

The Destroyer	A Mortgage Broker

Easy home equity credit and low, low mortgage rates as the destroyer. That’s a mighty deep ad.

Everyone sing:

“Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. Don’t suffer in silence.”

Put it into your head-based jingle rotation along with Frederic Roofing for more fun.

Instapundit links to a piece from a book about higher education or something, and the author relates a story about a faculty member teaching a graduate level course on technical writing wherein the faculty member gets in trouble for having a potty mouth:

“I will no longer tolerate,” the chair writes in his letter to my friend, “what can only be described as your insensitive, vulgar, and obscene language in the classroom.”

The colleague’s intent in a graduate-level, academic tech writing class (i.e., not a vocational training workshop) is not just to teach students how to type memos, but rather to challenge students to consider how they know what they know as tech writers. This can be achieved while they expand their knowledge of their field, which exists right in the oily hinge, right in the fishy craw of the intersection of higher education and the corporation. Given the mess such a collision must be, he and I agree, some form of institutional critique is vital, and this sort of three-dimensional, reflexive analysis can, over time, only make students better tech writers. To know your context is to know your work.

Like many of his grad students, the complainant is his age, and already works as a tech writer. For much more than his salary.

Oh, give me a break. The “ends” of which academic types, particularly in soft sciences, of technical writing is to deliver correct and useful information to people who need it. Take it from a technical writer. Any time spent on institutional critique and three-dimensional, reflexive analysis is a waste of time unless you want to become a professor of technical writing somewhere since the whole expertise on Dickens’ view of male/female relationships isn’t working out.

You want to teach a technical writer something, teach him or her how to suss out information from the misanthropes on the development team, how to actually freaking open the software or somewhat understand the thing they’re writing about, and how to make a good business case that documentation isn’t a waste of time and saves money on help desk calls and whatnot. But teaching them how to approach their jobs as though they’re academics ain’t it.

Nor is teaching them that swearing is professional in any way shape or form. The tech industry already skews to younger people who have already developed the habit of f-bombing everything in sight to show their intensity and passion instead of, I don’t know, showing quiet competence. I hate to see that taught in the universities as good institutional technique.

I just got a credit card statement in the mail today for my Commerce Bank Small Business Visa. I’m turning around and paying it right away because I missed the last deadline by a day because I’d been in the practice of letting a couple of bills collect before I sat down and wrote a bunch of checks.

So I sit down and look it over. The statement date is November 18. Today is November 26. It took Commerce Bank eight days to get this to me, which gives me a little more than, what, two weeks to turn it around without exorbitant penalties.

I called and told them it was poor form, and the customer service representative sat in silence while I said, procedurally, this was a dirty trick, and I was displeased with the way they conducted themselves. I’m not the best guy at venting my spleen on the phone, and certainly I had no end game (I want a free night at the hotel, I want a charge removed, et cetera), but even calling them to complain ultimately made me feel smaller than if I hadn’t called because I don’t expect the policy to ever change because we are a nation of small fries (and now, Goverment Sponsored Entities formerly known as Big Businesses).

But I am empowered, through this blog, to tell you, gentle reader who is searching for photos of Natalie J. Rabb or Commerce employee tracking the business’s online response. So there you go.

At this point, I sometimes want to throw up my hands and say, Big Government, Big Business, what’s the difference? It’s all about ossified bureaucracies and procedures designed to glean every possible drop from you for their own purposes. I guess the difference is choice, which means Big Business needs to trick you, whereas government just has to tell you, so it’s quite a big difference indeed.

Things your little army cannot afford to equip its soldiers with? We give them to our children:

On the other hand, watch for bands of swarthy looking men in cars with Michigan plates driving from Target to Target, buying each out of this item using cash.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are drinking the water.

Sorry, Mr. Wilde.

A phishing scam that sends you an e-mail form to fill on the dotted line? Sweet!

Dear Account User

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some Hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name, password, date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.

Due to the congestion in all Hotmail users and removal of all unused Hotmail Accounts, Hotmail would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

* Username: ………………………….
* Password: …………………………..
* Date of Birth: ……………………….
* Country Or Territory: ……………..

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Hotmail Team

——————————————————————————–
Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger Get it now!

Bonus for including a hyperlink to a fake domain offering malware downloads instead of MSN Messenger. Demerits for absolutely abhorrent grammar and style.

Every generation must live through its own 1970s. After a decade of an unpopular war, opposed by reflex and not because you might be drafted to fight it, so now we’ll have this generation’s Carter.

Hopefully, it will only be that bad.

John Kass might just be offering a nice eulogy for America courtesy of the Boomers:

On those nights when they were young, they smoked pot in the streets and listened to Dylan in the car and dreamed of the risks they’d take.

But now, as Baby Boomers grow old, they welcome those police surveillance cameras on the light poles outside their homes, thinking the cameras make them safe. And they rush toward the warm embrace of big government and promised security.

I don’t know why Kass isn’t a blogosphere favorite. He’s the best columnist in Chicago.

Bookworm recounts a conversation with a liberal friend, who has a mantra when confronted with the liberal leaders’ plans as stated in the liberal leader’s own words:

No, he’s not.

No, they’re not.

That’s just not true.

It’s sort of like this DJ friend I have, also a liberal coincidentally, who doesn’t know a lot about the lyrical content of the songs he plays. He only knows to play something up tempo and something slow for the people to dance. So he’s caught by surprise when the bride writes on his little information sheet, “Don’t play ‘Soldier Boy'” and he asks the groom, “Is that don’t play ‘Soldier Boy’ or should I play it?” and the groom says, “Play it,” and then the bride rushes off and the bride and groom withhold payment. You know, those words mean things.

I wonder how many voters of either stripe don’t actually listen to the words, but like the hip beats that the parties spin. I’d like to think that the subrational party does it more, but I imagine there are the subrational in our party, too.

But when a Congressman says he’s going to take 401(k) money for the slush fund, you’d better believe he means it. If a leader of a country threatens radioactive fire upon a democratic nation that happens to be mostly Jewish in population, you’d better hear more than the tone of the voice.

(Plus, free taunt: For someone who calls the blog “Bookworm Room”, I have to say, “You have some books? How cute!” Which reminds me, I need to get an update to the Noggle Library to account for the 3 or more new bookshelves.)