cellio | Entries tagged with humor

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?

I posted the preceding on the "great unanswered questions" page on our wiki at work. In keeping with the name, I've received no answers.

Why does Windows 8 hide the control to shut down the computer? The discussion in the (currently-)top-voted answer makes a good deal of sense. And I actually didn't know that it's now considered safe to just turn a running computer off; decades of "don't do that" have trained me not to.

Back in July 530nm330hz posted a review of a new book of lessons from the talmud, specifically tractrate B'rachot (blessings). Based on that review I recently bought the book and I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's organized by talmudic page, so I first jumped to the entries on particular pages that I know and love -- how does God pray, different themes of concluding blessings, the tussle over leadership where they deposed Rabban Gamliel (I previously wrote about that one), and one or two others. Now I'll go back and read the rest. I hope this book is the first in a series.

I forget where I came across this special "de-motivator" image, but why should I keep all the fun to myself? (Image behind cut.) ( Read more... )

Courtesy of

shalmestere:

From Fantasy in Miniature: Check, Please, on playing a certain game with Death.

From Meirav Beale on G+: an epic tale of technology and grandparents. Excerpt: Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Fernadale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

From Lilie Dubh on G+: The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor. Thoughtful and well worth the read. (Language is not 100% work-safe.)

From Language Log: What would Jesús do?

Lost your cell phone and don't have another phone to call from handy? Nyan Cat can help. (This came via G+ but I've lost track of who posted it.)

From Law and the Multiverse: Legal responsibility for insane robots.

Bill Walsh writes about an episode of the Amazing Race in which teams were required to use a manual typewriter to type a supplied passage. The passage contained the number "1". Sadly, Bill notes, the token old people had already been eliminated. Apparently hilarity ensued. (I presume there were no remaining middle-aged people either. I assume that most people of my generation would have known what to do.)

And the title of Bill's post? "LOL 101". :-)

Thanksgiving food: it's not too late! Thanks to

shalmestere for pointing out this Thanksgiving dinner flowchart.

A great rant on web-service protocols (that is, SOAP versus REST) from a former coworker: the S stands for simple.

Law and the Multiverse on Once Upon a Time: is Rumpelstiltskin's contract valid?

Found via Google+; let's hope this works without a G+ login since the post was public:

Somebody commented: add "check Snopes before forwarding that crap for the 10,000th time". Yup.

It's summer. High heat and humidity are normal for summer. I get that. But I still hold that, for Pittsburgh, temperatures in the 90s and heat indices in the 100s until 10PM and by 10AM are abnormal. Just sayin'. I sure hope I can catch a ride to Shabbat services tonight; there's nothing to do about the walk home, but it'd be nice to not arrive soaked in sweat. Especially since I'm leading.

Buying subcutaneous fluids from the vet is expensive, except that they had a price-match policy so it wasn't. But they restricted that policy, so I asked for a prescription. I was going to fill it online but it'd be easier not to, so today I talked with someone at CVS who determined that yes in fact they could order these (by the case -- which is fine). So today I dropped off the prescription and met the full force of the paperwork engine. After supplying the cat's birth date, drug allergies, insurance information, primary care physician, and a few other things, we were ready to go. I wonder if Giant Eagle, where I had the Prednizone filled (but they don't do fluids), just punted on this info, filled in N/A, or what.

I got a postcard notice of a class-action suit this week. They know their typical audience: "how much can I get?" and "how do I get my money?" were in bold; "what is the suit about?" took rather more digging. I've gotten money from a few class-action suits over the years (and I'll send this one in too), but I always do so with some degree of ambivalence, not knowing which ones are real (and people should be compensated) and which are "it's easier to settle than prove plaintiffs are on crack" -- and in the latter case, how I feel about benefiting from ill-gotten gains given that the defendants are going to pay the money out anyway. But I also admit that thus far I haven't been motivated enough to actually research any of these cases... the moral high ground is way over there, not here where I'm standing, it would appear.

Links:

The comic on this Language Log post made me laugh. Three negatives in six words indeed!

In the spirit of the song, kinda: Weird Al, Stop forwarding that crap to me (video).

Google+ circles you can use. Social networking: new media, same old problems.

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed "parme" into Google and it offered to auto-complete to "parmesan crusted tilapia recipe". That was in fact what I was searching for, though I was going to just say "fish", but I hadn't realized Google's mind-reading was that good. :-) I didn't remember to follow up at first opportunity from a different IP address, though, so I don't know if profiling was involved.

(My question, still not satisfyingly answered as this recipe didn't do it so well, was: how do you get the cheese to stay on the fish? I was speculating about egg, as you often do for breading, but this recipe called for olive oil. I ended up with fish and cheese in proximity to each other, which was tasty but not what I was going for.)

Larry Osterman passed along this video showing upgrades from Windows 1.0 through to Windows 7 with all intermediate steps (except Windows ME, which doesn't play the upgrade game well, it appears). It was amusing to see what did and didn't survive upgrade (Doom almost hit 100%!), and amazing that it actually worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody on ukelele (video), from siderea. I didn't think I could imagine it, and I was right. Nifty!

Cool bedroom, and not just for kids! Link from talvinamarich.

The internet is for cats. Cats in sinks. Be careful; this is like TV Tropes on four legs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

And finishing up with another one from siderea: this funny ad for milk (involves cats).

Google Art Project appears to be collecting high-quality images from art museums around the world. I haven't explored much yet but it looks like it'll be nifty.

I thought this picture from APotD of the moon and Venus over Switzerland was a painting rather than a photo when I first saw it. Pretty!

I've often wondered what "X% chance of rain" really means -- anywhere in the geographic area during that time period, or something more specific? I found this answer informative.

The comic in a recent Language Log post made me laugh out loud.

Speaking of language, so did this 101-word story (link from

arib). Go, read!

This elaborate prank on a phone company with terrible customer service is making the rounds. As

nancylebov put it, some people deserve live muzak. (Hey, the Firefox spelling checker knows "muzak". But not "Facebook".)

Who knew Facebook was so complicated? -- a flow chart for one "what comment to post" decision tree.

Reminder: the Jewish Life and Learning project over at Area 51 is still looking for people interested in participating in a beta.

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

Scene: I have turned one of Dani's tapes of Israeli dances into MP3s and am typing (well, pasting) in song titles.

Me: Does "Haman" mean something other than the villain in the book of Ester?
Dani: Desert food.
Me: Oh good. "Ta'am Haman" had the potential to be highly disturbing...
Dani: Nothing good could come from the direction you were going.
Me: I know. Maybe next time you could help me out with capitalization or punctuation or something?

That said, I'm not sure there is a consistent way to transliterate definite articles that get pasted onto the front of the noun. Sometimes you see something like "ha-man" or (in a title) "HaMan", but not always.

(If you've read this far and don't know what I'm talking about, "man" is the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert for 40 years, and "ta'am" means "taste" or "flavor".)

This week we finally got some routine legal documents in order. Snippet from today's review meeting:

Me: Just out of curiosity, this place in the boilerplate where you cite [a particular act], don't you have the name wrong? It doesn't really matter, I don't think, because this is in a section heading and you have it right down in the legally-binding paragraphs below, but just checking...?

Lawyer: I never noticed that bug in our template before.

Me: My work here is done. :-)

My professional training follows me everywhere, I tell you!

(Medical power-of-attorney, and it's HIPAA, not HIPPA.)

Dani pointed me to Fantasy In Miniature. here are three that caught my fancy. I have just doubled the subscriptions to

fantasyinmin. (I wonder who the other one is.)

From

siderea: The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft.

Toleration versus diversity (David Friedman) was an interesting read for me.

Chat-based ask-the-rabbi service, for when email is too slow and asynchronous. Apparently they also do SMS. (It's Chabad, though they don't make it particularly easy to discover that.)

Some things are just wrong, like:

The world's largest gummy bear (video), via

talvinamarich.

If you're on the run, maybe you shouldn't update Facebook with where you are... and it gets worse. Via

siderea, who found it on

risks_digest.

The reviews of this product are entertaining (via

ginamariewade). And in a similar vein, geeks who haven't seen reviews of The Story About Ping yet should correct that oversight (link from Dani among others).

18-button mouse (really), via

nancylebov.

Everything I know about work, I learned in the SCA, by

metahacker.

Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)

dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!

From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): Shopping while Black: a social experiment.

From a coworker: this wedding gift won't open until it's in the right location. Only 50 tries. Fun!

What cats would say to you if they could talk (GraphJam).

I enjoy Bill Walsh's writings on language and copy-editing, such as common punctuation problems. And sometimes he makes me laugh, as in this work of a punctuation vigilante.

(Aside: RSS feeds to LJ seem to be broken again.)

Sukkot started with rain, as in this thematic haiku from

richardf8. Saturday I noticed that the lights in the sukkah were out; Sunday we determined that power to the entire garage (from which that extension cord was run) was out. The garage outlet doesn't have a GFI and the breaker wasn't tripped; I had not previously known that a GFI might be elsewhere on the circuit. It turns out that the line from the basement to the garage goes through an outlet in the furnace room that has a GFI, and something -- presumably the rain and my lights -- tripped it. (Mind, I've been using that configuration of lights for ten years without prior problems...) There is now an annotation in the breaker box about this.

Last week Rabbi Symons and I completed our study of midrash on the Akeidah. (I still owe a couple write-ups.) Saying kaddish d'rabbanan at that point was quite satisfying. He asked me what's next, I said I picked last time, and he proposed something that sounds good to me. (I'll reveal it after he confirms that there is a sufficient body of interesting material.)

A new Dunkin' Donuts opened in Squirrel Hill last week. I knew they were getting kosher certification for the doughnuts; I hadn't realized that they were getting it for everything. So they sell breakfast sandwiches but that's not really bacon or sausage. (I haven't heard if it's turkey or soy.)

Two interesting links from

magid: the referendum (or mid-life re-evaluations) and watching whales watching us.

From

chaiya: Improve Everywhere does invisible dogs. Nicely done, including some of the community response. :-)

From a coworker: unfortunate domain names.

And now for something completely different...

The husband of a member of the Debatable Choir posted video from our Pennsic performance.

I didn't know enough chemistry to fully parse this geeky comic by ohiblather, but I still laughed out loud when I saw it.

xiphias reports research that seems to be begging for an IgNobel award. As he points out, it's worthy because first it makes you laugh and then it makes you think. I mean, what publishable conclusion would you expect from researchers doing an MRI on a dead salmon?

I feel fortunate that "talk like a pirate day" fell on Rosh Hashana, meaning I was shielded from most of the antics. But I enjoyed top ten halachic problems for a Jewish pirate, forwarded by dglenn. Should I be worried that I have defensible answers for several of them?

Fun website mash-ups from metahacker and others. From one of the comments: "OKAmazon: People who had sex with this person also liked..."

Signal boost: kyleri makes hand creams, lip balms, soaps, and similar items, and she is currently having a sale. I bought some of her creams at Pennsic and am happy with the results.

I haven't turned off the spelling checker in Firefox on this machine yet because I do sometimes make typos that it catches, but this post almost made me do so. :-)

Today is clean-out-the-browser-tabs day.

Wrong tomorrow tracks testable predictions made by public figures to see how they turned out. (Link from nancylebov.)

The next weird financial gimmick -- life-insurance futures. I can see all sorts of ways this could go wrong; do they? (Link from sethg.)

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF), aka the incompetence study. It's 76 pages long so I haven't read it yet, but I don't want to lose it. (Link from siderea.)

We've just finished mid-year performance reviews at my company, so No Surprises from Rands in Repose caught my eye. "The surprise has nothing to do with money. We’re not talking about compensation here. Yes, you did a splendid job this year and I think they should be throwing raises, bonuses, and stock your way. But it’s even better if it’s clear why you think you did a splendid job. Can you articulate it? And you might know, but does your boss? Can he explain to you, in detail, how well you kicked ass? I didn’t think so."

"Dear Old People. We don't want to kill you. You're our parents and grandparents and we love you. But if you throw a cranky fit and keep us from getting decent, affordable health care, you can figure out how to work your own [damn] PCs and cable boxes and remote controls from now on." (From Reddit via brokengoose.)

The history of time travel as a pretty visualization. It's missing a lot of important data; maybe someday they'll fill it out while keeping the format. (Link from dagonell.)

A different kind of visualization: This is why you are fat. I find the KFC Quadruple Down Sandwich particularly shudder-worthy. (Link from ralphmelton, who found it on the way to looking up something else.)

And a whole site full of light-hearted graphs (most recent reminder from cayeux). For example, difficulty of task as perceived by the average person speaks to one of my peeves.

John Scalzi's guide to epic design failures in Star Wars (link from a coworker).

Rabbi's shofar demo turns into a duet. I don't think that's what he had in mind when he decided to teach people about Rosh Hashana in a public setting... (Link from thnidu.)

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

( fish-fest, Mac software, marketing, assorted links )

Last week Erik spent the day at the vet's for an ultrasound (everything looks good, they said; awaiting formal report). When I picked him up, the person at the desk asked me to sign a photo release. It turns out that this was their day to take photos of staff members for their web site, and since my vet had made a special trip just to be there for this ultrasound, she asked that Erik join her in the picture. :-) (No, it's not on the web site yet.)

Thanks to those who gave me DTV advice. I had the wrong mental model for the converter box: I was thinking of it as a passive device, like an antenna, when it is more like a cable box. I don't think I'd realized before today that I will have to always set the channel on the box and not the VCR. That makes recording shows more of a hassle, but I watch little-enough TV that it probably won't be a big hassle. Still, one of the reasons I've never been interested in higher levels of cable service (except for B5's TNT year) is that the box displaces the tuner in my VCR, making recording more error-prone. Of course, VCRs themselves are on the way out at this point, so perhaps I should be looking for a DVR that does not involve a subscription service. (Again, don't watch enough TV to justify paying for a service.) I want to be able to program something and mostly forget about it until I'm ready to watch accumulated shows.

We saw Star Trek this weekend. If you don't think about the plot or the science too hard it's a good movie -- which is pretty much the calibration I expect from Trek. I wonder if the reset will lead to more TV shows or if it's just a movie franchise at this point.

Speaking of movies, thanks to

osewalrus for passing on I'm a Marvel / I'm a DC (YouTube).

A seasonal note: a different kind of Omer calendar. Y'see, Jews are supposed to count the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot, each night. Sometimes it's hard to remember, so people have come up with various reminder schemes. This one builds on the near-universal motivational properties of chocolate. :-) (Some commenters compare it to a chocolate Advent calendar. Advent calendars are completely outside my experience; sounds like I missed out on something tasty as a kid.)

Seen in passing, a useful-looking URL to have on hand: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

Finally (below the cut due to image size) a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. I didn't particularly expect to find it on Language Log, but I'm glad they posted it so I could see it.
( Read more... )

Quote of the day #1: "My parents visited a planet without bilateral symmetry and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt" (from

bitsy_legend and Fred).

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

Time to clean out some browser tabs.

The customer is not always right. Some of these are really funny! Some might not be work-safe. Thanks to talvinamarich for the link.

A coworker shared this collection of funny or bizarre comments in source code.

Can you serve humanity on your kosher china? That's "serve" in the sense of "to serve man".

Via another coworker comes this story about a cyber-attack on a US city. Why haven't I heard about this through mainstream channels? By the way, I had not previously known that ham-radio operators are plugged into emergency-response systems. Kudos.

Pittsburghers: You probably already know that Giant Eagle is test-marketing "food perks", the inverse of "fuel perks". (That is, buy gas from their affiliate to get grocery discounts.) I learned over the weekend that you can get a one-time 5% discount on a single grocery trip by sitting through this video and then entering your advantage-card ID. (And some email address; I've seen no evidence of validation.) You don't actually need to watch the video; you just need to get to the end of it.

Monica

short takes

we cannot escape ourselves

link round-up

laugh of the day

a few links

so true!

random bits

short takes

short takes

link round-up

some reading material

short takes (link round-up, mostly)

yes we talk like this (Hebrew edition)

conversation snippet

a few links to share

very wrong

link round-up

random bits

short takes

link round-up

random bits

random bits

random bits

random bits

a few links

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