Um... WHAT?

So, I'm over at Passive-Aggressive Notes, when I come across this entry regarding a note put on the artificial sweetener drawer at some office. The note reads "HOW ABOUT GOING TO THE GYM INSTEAD" [ALL-CAPS and lack of punctuation preserved from original].

My initial reaction was: But... what? I mean, you... Do you... Ummmmmm.

Or, translated: Seriously, what the hell? Did non-overweight people stop using artificial sweeteners? Was there a memo? I wouldn't have gotten it, being overweight, but... was there?

Because, I mean, even leaving aside diabetics (and contrary to popular opinion, it's possible to be skinny and diabetic), what about someone who is generally in reasonable shape who just is trying to keep their unnecessary calorie intake to a minimum? I mean, sure, unless you're a serious coffee fiend or drink a lot of tea you probably aren't using a lot of calories of sugar, but even a moderate coffee-and-or-tea drinker could easily be adding 100, maybe 150 calories a day that way. Even if you aren't "dieting", that's not a bad reduction. Or if you don't care about that, it's not a bad way to reduce calories in one area that you can use to have a bigger piece of pie or a couple ounces of pretzels without increasing your overall intake.

Seriously. Do people ever stop to think... about anything?

It's like people who mock someone ordering a diet coke with their fast food. It doesn't matter how many calories the food has, you still are consuming fewer calories if you skip the sugared soda. That's how math works: when you subtract a number from a starting value, your result is a smaller value than the one you started with. (Unless you subtract a negative number, but food typically doesn't have negative calories.)

Nappus Interruptus

Things that will wake me up, guaranteed: The sudden cessation of all white noise in the apartment coupled with the sound of four separate UPSes beeping.

Luckily, the power outage was only for a bit over an hour, as our heat depends on the power and it's, um, not warm out.

Dude.

So, over at Questionable Content creator's Jeph Jacques livejournal, which I periodically peruse, I found this comic. If you're too lazy to click, the important part is this statement: "Stop using 'win' and 'fail' as complete sentences."

The post's a month old, so rather than post a comment there, I'm just gonna put it here, where no one will see it.

I can't really understand the animosity towards this practice. People have been using one-word reactions to things since long before the internet. Back in the Jurassic era when I was a kid, it was things like "cool" and "awesome" (and "tubular", but I'd like to forget about that one). Or, of course, the all-purpose "dude", which, depending on tone, can convey a myriad of reactions. There's even a precursor to "pwned" from pre-internet days: "burned".

Sure, it gets annoying when the only thing someone seems to be able to say is "LOL" (or, more likely, "lol", because the shift key is apparently only for SHOUTING these days), and I want to smack each and every person on the internet who uses it as punctuation (lol i guess lol *smack*). But "win" and "fail" aren't trying to convey anything more than an instant reaction to something, so why should it be any longer than that one word?

You can't put a price on human life

Unless, of course, you are Joe Lieberman.

Or anyone else who has done their best to gut health care reform.

Well, I'm disappointed

Three chefs. I liked two. The third one won.

My reaction? A big 'whatever'.

I recommend....

Over at Making Light, this post on cold-weather safety contains links to helpful posts on how to avoid hypothermia and other winter troubles. (If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, save until June.)

Right now it's a comparatively balmy 36°F outside here, and I'd be willing to bet at least one of the sets of sirens I've heard this morning has been for someone who thinks that means it's not cold enough to be dangerous. (I live near a fire station, at which all the ambulances for the area are also housed.) They were wrong.

Sure. I believe you.

Via Penny Arcade, I was linked to this post about a group called the Entertainment Consumers Association. To sum up if you don't want to read:

ECA is an online organization. They offered a free one-year membership coupled with some discounts on video games. Some people who signed up decided to cancel after some of those discounts disappeared. A few people found a cancel button online, but it was later removed. People were instructed to use snail mail to cancel their purely online service.

Now, the post I link to includes a letter from the president of the organization that attempts to explain this by placing the blame for the cancelled discounts and the need for snail mail cancellations on scammers. In part, he says:

We explained that we are working on ramping up infrastructure to become more automated going forward, but due to a small but active number of members who were repeatedly joining, leaving and re-joining the organization – in an effort to exploit our member benefits and unduly take advantage of our partners' generous offers – we would require a mailed letter, as per our membership agreement.

The problem with this statement, in my mind, is that they require you to provide a credit card number, and therefore presumably a billing address and a real name, to join (yes, even with the free membership). It would be trivial, one would think, to prevent people from signing back up again if their name and billing address matched a recently-cancelled account, or to prevent them from getting any deals aimed only at new members. So I'm a little dubious about their reasoning.

Please note I have no dogs in this fight. I'd never heard of the ECA before today, in fact. But I was struck by the completely sense of dishonesty I felt behind the published statement, not simply in that passage, but overall. It had the distinct odor of CYA, with just a hint of the scent of Lying Corporate Bastards.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: don't piss off the intarwebz. Everyone, including people not even remotely connected to you, will find out.

Pet Peeve #ILostCount

I just love reading a random blog and seeing, in the comments, someone roundly and smugly criticize someone else for using singular 'they'. I especially love it when that comment is followed up by a person basically saying how it's the result of how uneducated modern people are.

Look, you may not like it, but a) it's been in use a long, long time, b) it's accepted professionally by some editors and style guides, c) IMO, it's a lot less clunky than saying 'he or she', and d) (also IMO) it's a lot less bother than rewording your sentences entirely to avoid it.

If you're going to bitch about it, at least show some awareness that it's a matter of opinion.

Next up: I will tackle the myth of the double negative in my essay, "Why conversation is not mathematics."

Mid-Top-Chef reaction

Michael V (interview): Kevin cooks the kind of food I cook on my day off.
Michael V (to Tom C. during walkthrough): I'm making couscous and tzatziki.
Me (to Michael V's image): I can make those on my day off. Or any other day. What does that say about you?

Wow Me or GTFO

I'm going to rant a bit about Project Runway now, and then I'm going to tie it in a bit to my feelings about Top Chef, and then I'm going to wonder if I should go back to watching neither of them and just sticking to the recapper's blogs as I did for S5 of both. Suitable warning: This is extremely long. If you don't want to read lots of words, don't clicky: