I’m sorry, how much does that say floss costs? Why doesn’t someone just start selling floss at, like, $1.00 — which is still a huge profit margin for what is essentially some string run through a bit of wax — and make a killing?
From a travel article about Scotland on sfgate.com today:
At 1,300 feet, you can see 365 degrees to all the other islands in the Hebrides.
Clearly the editor gave 112% on that article.
This one’s from the Economist:
One of the things I never understood when I was a journalist (and still don’t) is the copy editor’s penchant for puns. Typically the last in the chain to see an article, and typically responsible for crafting the story headline, copy editors — for whatever reason — feel its their duty to take perfectly straightforward headlines suggested by writers and section editors and turn them into bad jokes. Why? What’s the point? Are they just bored?
I once asked the copy chief at one magazine why they do it. “It’s a long tradition,” he said.
In other words: They do it because they’ve always done it. And they’re bored.
Some RSS headlines from CNN that popped up on my Google home page today:
Is everyone allotted a finite number of strange coincidences? If so, I feel like I should be running out of them soon.
For instance, the other day I got a message on the answering machine from an old friend and colleague. I didn’t have time to call her back because I was finishing up some work and then running off to a dublit event in the city. Then, on my way home that night, guess who I ran into at the BART station?
Weird.
At the pediatrician’s office, one of the questions on the form asks if my child can shoot urine more than a foot in distance.
Yes.
First, I’d like to say that the Wife is pregnant and we are having a boy. Yes, thank you. It’s true. We are quite excited about this.
But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. The real story is this: In preparing for the arrival of the little dude, we decided to clean the spare bedroom of all the old books we had lying around. And by that, I mainly mean the old textbooks and supplemental reading materials and management guides and coffee table books and started-but-never-finished books and every other in-between sort of book that we’ll never read again and will never recommend that anyone else read again either sort of books. We put all these in five or six paper bags and loaded them into the trunk of our car.
Our town has a large and wonderful recycling center with a not-as-large and possibly wonderful book exhange in it, so we drove our five or six bags full of books over to the center and parked in front of the book exchange. The exchange is basically a half dozen or more bookcases lined up against the wall of the recycling center, and as we hopped out of the car we noticed a few people milling about.
I smiled at them. They looked at me. And this is where the story gets interesting.
I hefted one bag of books out of the trunk, carried it over to the bookcases, and set it down on the floor. “Is there any order to where the books go on the shelves?” I asked no in one particular.
“No,” said a man in fleece just to my left, startling me with his sudden proximity. Before I could quite turn and focus, this man had bent down and was taking books out of the bag I had just left on the floor.
“Oh, hey, thanks,” I said. I watched him for a moment as he dug through the bag, efficiently examining the cover and spine of each book and setting it in a pile next to him. Well, that’s nice of him to help me stack the books, I figured. Then I went back to the car and grabbed another bag.
This time, a middle-aged woman with black hair silently intercepted me before I got to the shelves. Again, I nodded my thanks, but made sure to catch the Wife’s eye as she handed off her own bag of books to another silent receiver nearby. She shrugged.
As I walked back to the car for my third set of books, I tried to understand why I felt a bit unsettled by the exchange. Should we have offered to help sort and stack the books on the shelves? Were we not supposed to bring old textbooks? I lifted another bag out of the car and carried it back, but this time, as both the man in fleece and the black-haired woman descended upon me, I tried to strike up a conversation. “So, are you volunteers here?” I asked.
“No,” said the man in fleece. And then he took the bag from my hands.
“Oh, okay,” I said and turned away. Wait, what?
I turned back and saw the man and the black-haired woman sifting through the contents of bag there in the same spot where I had handed it to them. And then it clicked: They were book scavengers. And it wasn’t just one group — there were multiple competing individuals at work here. They weren’t putting these books away or choosing a few to read themselves — they were taking the best of them so they could resell them elsewhere.
I met the Wife at the back of the car. She had clearly just had the same realization. “Is it bad that I don’t want to give my books to them?” she whispered. We quickly debated the pros and cons of dropping off our books here. It felt as if somehow our posessions — as valueless as they were to us — were being preyed upon before we had even set them down. And yet, that was silly. Why shouldn’t someone else profit off our old books? Weren’t we going to donate them anyway? This way, maybe they would get recirculated to other communities and even other countries that might actually want old physics and psychology textbooks. Right? It seemed to make sense, sort of.
I quickly grabbed the last bag from the trunk and took it over to where a woman with two sets of eyeglasses strung around her neck was waiting. I set the bag at her feet, the way one might tentatively leave an offering before a goddess prone to sudden fits of anger. “Okay, then. Thanks,” I said and backed away slowly. She didn’t return the acknowledgement and started to pick through the paperbacks that had gone unfinished on our shelves for years.
The Wife already had the car running when I slipped into the passenger seat. “Why do I feel so used?” she asked as she threw the car in reverse.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but let’s get out of here.”
And that, my son, is the story of the sacrifice we made to give you your own bedroom.
I gotta say, I always thought this was just an urban legend:
Is there a reason why computer keyboards still have Caps Lock keys? Is there some powerful lobby of FORTRAN 77 programmers that I don’t know about?
At the least, can we move the Caps Lock key somewhere else — preferably somewhere that’s not prime keyboard real estate? I mean, the right pinky finger’s got the sensible and quite important Enter key. So why does the left pinky get the one that’s only used on accident or else by the crazies who think the best way to warn us all about our impending doom at the hands of aliens is to SHOUT IT ON THE NEAREST MESSAGE BOARD?
bookmarked
