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One of the slight drawbacks to an otherwise plum pick for an office in the WAG empire is its close proximity to a small experimentalist lab. The lab contains a sonicator, which inspired me to purchase headphones (on the group account) in order to block out the new and interesting form of aural Chinese Water Torture. It also now contains a student who sings.

I’m fairly sure it’s the student singing and not a recording, as the moo-sounding pitch fluctuation is not constant. It starts rather softly, then gets louder as the singer becomes more confident, no doubt related to the fact that no one has walked in and demanded an explanation for the humpback whale sound. It doesn’t last more than a few minutes at a time. Although I would love to meet the source of this sound, I know it can never be. For as anyone who’s been caught singing in the shower knows, once a private singer finds out there’s someone listening it’s impossible to go on singing. Such personal expression must be done alone. I must imagine who this person is.

I know which research group the person is in, and I can guess what subgroup. I can determine what kind of work the person does. More importantly, however, this person is probably reasonably happy. This person does not know the realities of the wall thickness in the sub basement of the BI, and likely is similarly ignorant to the soul-crushing facts of life as a graduate student. This person inspires me by reminding me of an earlier, more optimistic time. Perhaps I will sing in my office when I think no one is around.

I was in the express checkout line in a local grocery store this evening, and I got stuck behind two people that were having some sort of problem at the cash register. I later found out that they were trying to buy a telephone calling card with a corporate credit card. The store employee was explaining that it was store policy to only accept cash or debit card payment for the calling cards. Credit cards were not accepted.

I have no idea why the store policy is constructed that way. But it was clear that’s what the policy was. The employee called the store manager to the front to help with the situation. One of the two people in front of me was a woman, and she had this exchange with the store manager:

Woman: I understand that’s the rule. Can’t you make an exception just this one time?

Manager: No, ma’am, we can’t. It’s store policy.

Woman: But it’s just this one time!

This exchange cemented in my mind the idea that while people generally seem to appreciate that rules are necessary, many people simply don’t think these rules should apply to them. Rules are for “average folk”, people who simply don’t know any better. But I’m me. Surely you can make an exception for me. I’m not some “average folk”.

The exchange also reminded me of the statistic that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe they are smarter than the average American. People seem to be able to appreciate abstractions, at least in some sense, but for whatever reason these abstractions oh so rarely apply to them.

Go figure.

I have long been a fan of that famed Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza (sometimes seen in the wild bearing the moniker “Hawaiian”), and for this gustatory leaning, I have taken much social abuse. It seems there is a large sector of our society (indeed, perhaps a majority) which decries the use of fruit on pizza.

Considering only from the top of my head, I cannot think of any other fruit (in the popular rather than the botanical sense) which oft toppings a pizza. Perhaps it is simply this uniqueness exhibited by the pineapple which causes so much petty yet bilious animosity in otherwise convivial gourmands; people may simply fear the singular beauty exampled by the delicious Ananas comosus.

What’s more, this animosity seems to be entirely one-sided; I have heard of none campaigning for any pineapple quota mandate, yet many are highly vocal about its complete removal from all pizza-form comestibles. Is this animosity inherent in pineapple-on-pizza detractors or is their argumentative behavior always brought forth by the opposite side’s “How is it that such an otherwise rational and likable person as yourself can have a distaste for and, further, disparage that most companionable of toppings, the sweet, tart, and generically delectable pineapple?

Having only questions but no answers, I open the floor to spirited debate about the issue.

Resolved: that those who dislike pineapple as a pizza topping should fulfill their heart’s deepest desire and go marry that goat they’ve been dreaming of so longingly. That and that they suck.

You knew I had to post this. And, no, it doesn’t really have anything to do with falling in love with a goat. But a Sudanese man was forced to marry a goat after he was caught having sex with it.

Isn’t that priceless? Read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again. “But a Sudanese man was forced to marry a goat after he was caught having sex with it.” Yes, I know, there are websites dedicated to this phenomenon, but we’re talking about a real life man having sex with a real life goat, ostensibly without the intention of taking pictures and posting them to the Internet.

Anyway, the goat’s owner hears a loud noise out back, goes out there, and finds this dude deflowering his goat. The man was ordered to pay a dowry to the goat’s owner, and possession of the goat was exchanged.

But let’s go back to how the goat’s owner finds out about this. “Honey, do you hear that? It sounds like something is scaring the hell out of the goat. I’m going to go check it out; I’ll be back in a minute.” Thirty seconds or so of travel time to the goat’s location follows, and then BAM! You see some dude mounting your goat.

And you know the conclusion wasn’t drawn instantly. It’s not like the guy walks out there and immediately thinks, “Oh my God, that guy is having sex with my goat!” It had to be something like, “What in the hell is that behind the goat? Is that a guy back there? What is he looking for? Wait, what is he doing to my goat? Oh my God, that guy is having sex with my goat!”

I’ll let the goat’s owner wrap up this tale:

“When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up”.

Priceless.

I received an email today that was automatically filtered to my junk mail folder. I go through this folder before I empty it, just to make sure that something that is obviously legitimate didn’t get filtered. Occasionally, I find myself bored, and I will sometimes read a junk email or two.

Today, I had the good fortune of reading one ostensibly from abbigale@earthlink.com. Abbigale was polite enough to write me a one word email. The email?

shagface

That’s it. No image. No non-English characters. No misshapen hyperlink. One word: shagface. What in the hell is that? Who arranges a spam bot to send this one word email to hundreds, or thousands or more, addresses on an email list? And why? What in the hell is “shagface”? Is Abbigale calling me a “shagface”? Are there some oral sex under-or-over tones I’m supposed to be getting here?

The Internet is a beautiful place. What other place could you be where someone drops by, looks you in your face, and simply says “shagface”?

I just read an article at Ars Technica about a virus that chats with you and tries to convince you to install it. It first disables anti-virus software and software firewalls on the infected computer. It then sends out instant messages to everyone on the buddy list of this machine’s IM client. The user of the infected machine never sees these outgoing IMs or any of the conversations that result.

The virus sends a link to all the buddies and asks them to click on it. The kicker?

If the user queries the bot about the link, the virus will respond: “lol its not a virus.”

If you ever ask someone about a link they sent you, and they respond “lol it’s not a virus”…it’s a virus.

Talk about a false sense of community.

I am going to give you a headline, and let’s see how you read it at first sight:

Teacher’s plea deal for sex with boy rejected

Hmm. A teacher whose plea deal was to have sex with a boy was rejected. Obviously. Wouldn’t community service or something be more appropriate? Oh, the plea deal for the teacher who was convicted of having sex with a boy was rejected. Ah, I see. That’s a little different.

I would be remiss if I did not provide a link to the article with this headline. It turns out the online headline is different. The headline I quoted above was from CNN’s RSS feed. It was enough to draw me in. Maybe that was the point.

I didn’t know this, but it turns out in 1997 volunteers at the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City lost control of a balloon and nearly killed a 33-yeard old woman. The next year, Macy’s put its proverbial foot down and trained the balloon handling volunteers in nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, before the parade.

In the following years, Macy’s has slipped on this pledge to train the volunteers, and chaos appears imminent. Exhibit A:

“There’s no, like, training,” said one first-time handler who was given an instruction sheet and told to report for duty at 6 a.m. tomorrow.

Oh, you want training? Here’s your training: hold the f*** on.

To it’s credit, Macy’s has offered voluntary training sessions four times a year and invited all volunteers to attend. The sessions are mandatory for a “few hundred team leaders”. Still, chaos is around the corner. Exhibit B:

This year, in place of the fitness tests, volunteers handling the balloons were asked whether they suffered from asthma or cardiac problems that would impede their ability to walk the two-and-a-half-mile course.

How about, instead of fitness tests or asking if the volunteers are heart patients, we recruit twice the volunteers we need, split them in half, and have a tug-of-war. The team that wins gets to march with the balloons. It seems to require a similar skill set.

Regardless, the situation is more serious than I have made it out to be. When volunteers lost control of the balloon in 1997, it severed a portion of a lamp post, which then fell to the sidewalk. The 33 year old woman was permanently brain damaged and won a $395 million settlement with Macy’s, New York City, and a city contractor.

Here’s to hoping for a safe and entertaining Thanksgiving Day parade.

The lead singer of The Darkness, Justin Hawkins, bought a copy of his own band’s sophomore album on Ebay after an advance copy was illegally offered on the auction site. The Darkness, a giant of our modern musical age, has for the time being prevented the unauthorized release of their album “One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back”, the follow up to their debut “Permission to Land.”

Is it possible to overstate the importance of The Darkness within the world of rock music? No, not really. I say a word, you give me the first thing that pops in your head: ROCK. No, not The Beatles, nor Elvis Presley, nor Led Zeppelin. The Darkness. That’s what I’m looking for. You disagree? You’ve obviously not heard “Permission to Land”.

Mr. Hawkins has something for the true believers to sink their teeth into:

“There’s no way that a fan of The Darkness, based on what we did on the last record, is not going to love this record even more than the first one.”

1-2-3…ROCK!

Ariele and I went to Panda Express for a quick lunch today. [In the interest of full disclosure, Ariele actually brought a smoothie from Jamba Juice into Panda Express to sit with me while I ate lunch.] At the end of the meal, Ariele asked if she could open my fortune cookie for me, which of course I said was fine. She read back the fortune, which went something like

You have a deep interest in all things artistic.

Wow. That’s fairly bold. And wrong. I have a “deep interest” in some things, but very few, if any, of those things are “artistic”. But even so, all things artistic? It was a far cry from “Your future prospects are bright”, or some such nonsense.