We got home from watching Sherlock Holmes around 11 last night, to discover that our house was suspiciously cold. Almost Dickensian, actually. Half an hour of fiddling with the furnace and we were no further ahead (and no warmer). It’s funny how you can take the ordinary comforts for granted until they’re not available . . .
December 30, 2009
December 18, 2009
Odd . . . my phone is ticking
I just went into my office to hear an odd ticking sound. At first I thought it might have been a cooling fan on my desktop computer, but it turned out to be coming from the cordless phone sitting beside the tower. When I picked up the handset, it started ringing. I checked that it wasn’t really a call (no, normal dialtone when I turned on the line). Then, when I hung up, the phone started ringing continuously.
I finally got it to stop ringing, but it’s back to ticking. There’s no user-replaceable battery in the handset, so I’ll have to let it run down completely and recharge again to see if it’s just a battery issue or if the phone has gone bad. Irritating either way.
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December 16, 2009
How do you deal with unwanted automated calls?
The phone rang a minute ago, with the long-distance ring. When I picked it up, I got a pre-recorded message starting with “This is an important message about your credit card account. We have attempted to contact you . . .” I’m sure most of you in the GTA get similar calls on a regular basis.
I just hung up, but I wonder if there’s a better way of dealing with this sort of harassment (it’s never a company you already have dealings with). If I just left the phone off the hook and let the recorded message play out, would I tie up more of their resources? Might I even get a human waiting on the other end after I didn’t hang up on the automated portion of the call?
Is the petty revenge (however theoretical it might be) worthwhile? After all, they used misleading information (“my” credit card) to try to get my attention. Is it fair play to reverse the gambit and pretend they’ve got a chance of getting my business?
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December 10, 2009
Combining great music with a sense of humour
Tom Vinson sent this link to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list:
To which Dorian E. Gray responded, “I see your Hallelujah Chorus, and raise you an Anvil Chorus with real anvil:”
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December 7, 2009
A wine sale for the well-heeled
Some very old (and one hopes, authentic) wines to be auctioned off by La Tour d’Argent in Paris:
A total of 18,000 bottles — including wine from Cognac, Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux — will be auctioned.
The sale is intended to raise 1m euros (£0.9m) to renew the cellar’s contents and ensure the restaurant keeps its multiple Michelin stars.
Its wine list is 400 pages long, with no fewer than 15,000 tipples.
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December 4, 2009
Debunking the porn-violence link
After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:
Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.
The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.
Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.
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December 2, 2009
QotD: Thought
[Thoughts are] like cavalry charges in battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Thought for tension-reduction for air travellers
Just think how therapeutic it would be for air travellers, having had to go through the Security Theatre production of shoe removal to, in some small way, pay back the man who brought it to them? Place life-sized statues of Richard Reid at the clearance point for all airport security lines. You’d have the opportunity to embrace an old Iraqi custom of using shoes to show your lack of respect . . . and they’d already be off your feet, ready for deployment.
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November 20, 2009
Those inevitable “new word” lists
David Harsanyi falls into the trap cunningly laid for him by the devious wordmongers at Merriam-Webster:
Like other books Americans have a duty to own — the Bible or “Atlas Shrugged,” for instance — the dictionary does not require an absurd marketing ploy to sell itself.
Yet, every year a barrage of cockamamie “word lists” are unveiled by publishers seeking to bring attention to the evolving English language.
In the end, these lists establish two facts: 1) We are unable to invent any new words of value. 2) If you put a list together, a columnist will probably write about it.
One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian trial.
The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress.
It’s not the lists themselves that bother me . . . it’s the blatantly contrived nature of the words appearing in most of the lists. “Unfriend”? Bleargh.
There is, admittedly, one trend that could prove to be a bright spot. The newly minted “teabagger” gives us hope that crude sexual terms will now regularly be applied to politics, where they can do the most good.
Perhaps “felching” will come to describe how the media gathers material for their coverage of the White House. Oh, wait . . .
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October 11, 2009
Dita’s two public images
Dita von Teese has had an unusual career path, from retro-40’s and 50’s style cheesecake model to having her own lingerie line with Wonderbra:
It’s not the usual style of clothing you would expect to see burlesque queen Dita Von Tesse [sic] wearing.
Clad in an outrageous Christian Lacroix wedding dress, the sultry fetish model poses during a fashion shoot in Paris for the latest edition of Harper’s Bazaar Russia.
The 37-year-old is covered from head-to-toe in the ivory-toned gown which is bejeweled with colourful roses and a headdress with a golf leaf design.
With her head tilted to one side, Von Tesse [sic] looks Madonna-like during the ‘Saint And Sinner’ themed fashion shoot, which launches her new Party Edition lingerie range for Wonderbra.
But she also reverts to form by wearing a provocative black outfit.
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Hot, Hot, Hot!
Jeremy Clarkson makes the acquaintance of “limited-edition Insanity private reserve” hot sauce:
It’s an American chilli sauce that was bought by my wife as a joky Christmas present. And, like all joky Christmas presents, it was put in a drawer and forgotten about. It’s called limited-edition Insanity private reserve and it came in a little wooden box, along with various warning notices. “Use this product one drop at a time,” it said. “Keep away from eyes, pets and children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems. Use extreme caution.”
Unfortunately, we live in a world where everything comes with a warning notice. Railings. Vacuum cleaners. Energy drinks. My quad bike has so many stickers warning me of decapitation, death and impalement that they become a nonsensical blur.
The result is simple. We know these labels are drawn up to protect the manufacturer legally, should you decide one day to insert a vacuum-cleaner pipe up your bottom, or to try to remove your eye with a teaspoon. So we ignore them. They are meaningless. One drop at a time! Use extreme caution! On a sauce. Pah. Plainly it was just American lawyer twaddle.
A valid point: if everything these days carries warning labels, the actual level of concern for ordinary consumers drops . . . so real warnings are drowned out by the hundreds of bogus ones put there merely to avert lawsuits, not to provide useful information about the product.
The pain started out mildly, but I knew from past experience that this would build to a delightful fiery sensation. I was even looking forward to it. But the moment soon passed. In a matter of seconds I was in agony. After maybe a minute I was frightened that I might die. After five I was frightened that I might not.
The searing fire had surged throughout my head. My eyes were streaming. Molten lava was flooding out of my nose. My mouth was a shattered ruin. Even my hair hurt.
H/T to Dave Slater for the link.
October 9, 2009
Australian livers: industrial strength
I’m probably admitting that I’m a lightweight here, but a “limit” of 24 cans of beer per day seems, well, not actually a limit:
Australian motorsport fans are ruing militant alcohol consumption guidelines at one of the country’s most popular races – after being limited to a mere 24 cans of beer a day.
Police in charge of the Bathurst 1,000 car race in Bathurst, New South Wales, issued the restrictions before the start of the four-day event this Thursday.
Spectators are limited to one 24-can case each of full-strength beer, although if revellers are willing to consume lower-strength alcohol (3.5% abv or less) they will be entitled to a more satisfactory 36 cans.
Wine lovers have not escaped the heavy hand of the law either, being restricted to a punitive four litres a day.
<sarcasm>A mere four litres? How do they survive?</sarcasm>
H/T to “Fishplate” for the link.
October 5, 2009
Tweet of the Day: Nostalgia
Dita von Teese: I of all people told someone not to “romance the past” the other night. But not everthing was better back then, that’s a fact!
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October 1, 2009
Ephemera
I think this is the first time I’ve seen some of my old work for sale on eBay:
I was the original editor for TH&B Focus, finally burning out on the job midway through the fifth year of publication.
September 29, 2009
If you like bad drivers, you’ll enjoy this collection
Twelve stupid car crashes, including this one, which illustrates that you don’t need to be travelling fast to flip your vehicle:
H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, “Whom the Internet has lately taught the definition of the word ‘schadenfreude‘. Plus how to spell it.”
