amit.asaravala.com

If, for whatever reason, you haven’t yet invited the wonder that is TiVo into your living room, consider this: TiVo lets you pause commercials so you can see all the fine print that the marketers don’t really want you to see.

Take, for instance, KFC’s new ad in which the company touts its “Kitchen Fresh Chicken.” While the camera pans over buckets of tender chicken, the off-screen announcer tells you that the KFC stamp means that your food is “delivered fresh and cooked fresh in your KFC kitchen.” But if you pause the picture on this scene, you’ll be one of the fortunate few to catch this comforting tidbit splayed across the bottom:

Fresh claim not applicable to wings or in select areas on the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii.

Mmmm. Now that’s good eatin’!

It’s weird, isn’t it, how we like new things that look old?

If you have a Web site and haven’t analyzed your logfiles yet, I highly recommend doing so right away. For how else would I have discovered that members of the US Social Security Administration have visited my site recently? Oh yes, it’s true:

128: 0.37%: s00dab8.ssa.gov

86: 0.20%: s00dad2.ssa.gov

148: 0.38%: s00ded0.ssa.gov

304: 1.05%: s3abab9.ssa.gov

As those lines from the log analysis reveal, at least four people — or one person on four different computers, or four different computer applications — have accessed this site a total of 666 times. Yes, 666.
Now, I’m not one to believe in underworld numerology, but that’s just uncanny.

My best guess is that this has something to do with my recent lament over the sad state of the Social Security system. If so, would one of you SSA folks please respond and tell us once and for all: How do you plan to repay us young folk when you’ve spent all that money we gave you out of our paychecks?

Ugh. Spot the bad grammar in this AP article about the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”:

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay bought the scroll two years ago for $2.43 million. Having already been on display in Indianapolis, Irsay plans to send what may be the Beat Generation’s quintessential text back to the road from where it came.

Dear fortune-cookie fortune writers,

This is a proper fortune:

This is not:

Please stop being lazy and come up with more of the former. I’m tired of finding dull aphorisms in my cookies.