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I’m watching Millionaire on GSN right now, and I just saw an ad for this.
If you don’t feel like following the link or are reading me via RSS or something, it’s an omelette pan that has a switch in the handle that makes the sides flip over and fold the thing. Valued at $70, yours today on Sale Of The Century for the low low price of just $19.99.
I have something like this in a kitchen drawer. It’s called a SPATULA.
Really, folks, is it that hard to fold a freakin’ omelette? Put in your filling, fold over the right third (with your handy-dandy $3 heat-proofed spatula), cook a little more (if you’re melting cheese or something), then slide the folded half out onto your serving plate and use the pan to fold in the other third. I just did it last night.
Plus, I can just imagine what fun it will be to clean all of the egg that oozes down into the crevices formed by the folding bits.
Going back to the previous post about People Being (Freakin’) Stupid, there must be a market for this crap or else they wouldn’t advertise it.
In a bout of semi-random Web surfing, I came across this thread about DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), which if you’ve been under a rock for the last seven years or so is a video game where you are challenged to step on pads in time to music. It requires fast feet and a damned lot of memory and dexterity, and good DDR players are truly a sight to see.
Anyhow, this is one of your standard bitch threads about what annoys you when playing the game. And a lot of it is typical elitism (“OMG! I can’t stand it when someone plays Song X on EASY! Like, they’re wasting time I could be using to get an AAA rating on Song X+42!!!!111!!! LOL!!”), but some of them were generic arcade complaints that surprised the hell out of me, because it was stuff that simply WOULD NOT HAPPEN when I was an arcade rat in my teens. To wit:
- Stealing tokens: A common bit of video game etiquette is to (ideally unobtrusively) place a quarter/token/whatever up on the lip of the marquee of the machine to indicate that you would like to play the next game. If several people are waiting their turn, you place your token in the line, and when your token is at the front of the line, you get to go. Apparently there are idiots now who think they can get away with attempting to pocket someone else’s token. Unbelievable.
- Messing with the controls: There were more than a few complaints of people standing around and then stepping on the pads while you are playing to intentionally screw up your game. I would never DREAM of pushing a button on a machine someone else was playing. Ever.
- Generally getting underfoot: There is a practice known as “shadowing”, which is when someone jumps up on the other unused pad (a DDR machine has two pads side by side, one for each player) while someone who is playing solo, and doing the steps for the song alongside. I would find this TERRIBLY distracting. There were also several complaints about parents with their rugrats letting said rugrats stumble around the feet of the active player instead of keeping them the hell out of the way, and then yelling at the player when the kid inevitably gets themselves hurt.
There were quite a few other complaints, some reasonable, some asinine, but these were the ones that jumped out at me. And all I can say is: What. The. HELL. When I play arcade games, anyone who gets so close to the screen that I can see their nostrils better than what I’m playing quickly receives repeated elbows to the ribs until they get the picture. Working the controls causes arms to flail, you know. Terribly sorry there. And, yeah, we had quarter-moochers, but anyone who tried to outright STEAL quarters in the coin line would be dealt with quickly, harshly, and often physically. And DO NOT TOUCH my control panel. You shouldn’t even be that close to me anyhow, but I’m paying for this game, and if I come up a smart bomb short because you thought you were being cute, I know who I’m taking out my frustration on.
Bottom line, if anyone pulled crap like this back in the day, they would be on the receiving end of a Grade-A asskicking. It didn’t happen. These were the biggest faux pas you could make in the scene. In 25 years of gaming, someone has touched my controls uninvited ONCE (costing me a man in a game of Tapper, by the way), and the only reason that guy didn’t get thrashed is because he was known for being mentally unstable anyhow, and I frankly didn’t wanna be entwined with him anymore than I already was by virtue of being regulars at the same arcade.
So the following question occurred to me: Have people just gotten ruder over the last ten-fifteen years or so? It’s not like the stuff above is some super-secret behavior that only arcaders know, it’s COMMON SENSE. Don’t steal. Don’t get in someone’s way if you can help it. Don’t screw someone else up if they’re doing something. Do you reach over and punch buttons on the checker’s cash register at the grocery store?
I’ve said many times: People Are (Freakin’) Stupid. Are they really THIS stupid? Even OUTSIDE of the red states?
My new Palm took a dump on me last night. Turns on to a white screen. For a while the screen was coming back if I did a hard reset, but now it isn’t even doing that. Plus, it’s turning on intermittently. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ex-Palm.
So, this morning, a couple of phone calls with PalmOne, and I’m off to the post office to schlep the thing off to them so they can (they claim “fix”, but I’m thinking more “replace”) it.
And when I’m sending a $250 piece of electronics through the mail, you bet your ass I’m covering myself, so I bought the insurance, which ended up almost doubling my shipping costs.
And while I’m driving home, I think to myself: what the HELL do I have to buy insurance for? Aren’t I ALREADY paying the USPS to take my package and send it to the location I dictate? Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that part of this service would include a) the guarantee that the service so contracted is actually carried out accurately, and b) that the parcel arrives in the same condition that it’s sent in?
If I ran, say, a dry cleaner, and one of my machines chewed up a load of laundry, and I didn’t accept responsibility for the problem when the people came back and received a basket of shredded clothes, I would be out of business before you could say Movin’ On Up.
It’s not their official motto, but it’s on a plaque in front of the main post office in New York, so they should be beholden to it anyhow: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Apparently keeping the package in good shape isn’t a job requirement.
Hey, sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. Let’s just say it’s been an…interesting month. As in the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Fortunately, every so often items come along that are too good to pass up. The Four Of You know (often because you’re the ones playing them with me) that I’m a big fan of board games. And a lot of the games I play are European in origin, which means that on occasion the language used in the game’s directions, cards, and such is not English. Sometimes the language barrier requires a little more effort to play a game, and sometimes, the game is abstract enough that it doesn’t make a difference. The latter is the case with Reiner Knizia’s Einfach Genial, which was published in Europe last year. The English translation is “Simply Ingenious”, but the name given to it in the English-speaking parts of Europe is “Mensa Connections”. It is an excellent game, and was one of the five finalists for the 2004 Spiel des Jahres, one of the higher honors that can be bestowed upon a board game.
The Four Of You have probably heard of Mensa, the society open to people who can score in the top 2% in a standardized intelligence test. I have some opinions about this group, and to a wider extent about intelligence tests as a whole, but they aren’t really germane to this piece, so we’ll save them for another time. (Suffice it to say I’m not a member. By choice.)
At any rate, each year a bunch of them get together and play a boatload of games and decide which of them are fit to carry their “Mensa Select” seal, which means they think that those chosen are good games for smart people to play or something. (Where I come from, Select is the rating given to beef that isn’t good enough to be Choice or Prime.)
(I further feel compelled to point out that if you were to take the top 10 games for a given time period as voted on by the Mensa folks, and the top 10 games for that same period voted on by the knowledgable gaming community at large, the lists would differ significantly. Infer what you will from that.)
Anyhow, I direct you to a letter to the editor of the Seattle Weekly, for the week of December 8-14, 2004:
An interesting concept [Gift Guide 2: Mind, Body, Spirit, “Play, Einstein!” Dec. 1]. Unfortunately, Roger Downey missed a major opportunity. Had he gone to the site of American Mensa (www.us.mensa.org) instead of British Mensa, he would have found information about Mind Games and some 75 games Mensans have tested and designated as Mensa Select over the past 16 years. The list includes such games as Apples to Apples, Scategories, the Poll Game (made in Seattle), and many, many more.
The board game he mentions, “Mensa Connections,” cannot be sold in the United States under our licensing agreement. We tested it last year at our games competition and found it wanting. We did not want the Mensa name on the game in this country.
Jim Blackmore
National Marketing Director,
American Mensa, Ltd.
Thank God for the people of Mensa, for preventing me the unspeakable horror of playing substandard mind-rotting games! Oh, and Jim, if you happened across this in a vanity search, get off your damn high horse: The game can absolutely be sold in the States, and in fact has been available in German form for a year. Ya ever hear of this new concept called “importing”? (The fact that you misspelled “Scattergories” is another joke unto itself, but, again, I digress.)
So here’s the punchline: Apparently this year’s Mensa MindGames event came to a close today, and the list of the recipients of the oh-so-coveted Mensa Select rating made its way onto one of the gaming newsgroups I read.
One of the lucky winners? A new release entitled “Ingenious”. Which just happens to be the domestic version….of Einfach Genial.
This morning, while I was getting dressed for work, I flip on the TV, and there’s The Today Show on NBC, and Matt Lauer is introducing Jose Canseco, live and in person at the NBC News studios at 49th Street and Rockefeller Plaza.
For the non-sports fans, Jose was a baseball player who enjoyed some success in the late 80’s and early 90’s, most notably in 1988 for becoming the first player in baseball history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season, before losing in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games. (As a former Dodger fan, I had to get that shot in. :)) Unfortuntately, those ubiquitous “personal demons” caught up with him, and the twilight days of his career were spent in relative obscurity, if not notoriety.
And now he’s written a book, which I refuse to plug by name (if you really wanna know, search Amazon, I’m sure it’ll pop right up), a tell-all where he not only admits to having taken steroids during the majority of his playing career (and if you’ve seen him, you can file that one directly under “N” for No Shit), but he also outs several other players, including Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Bret Boone, as being regular steroid users themselves. And, of course, the media being what it is, this is causing some controversy, and Jose’s doing the talk show circuit to drum up some more sales.
No shock here. This is the same Canseco who ran a 900-number in his heyday where you could find out what he had for breakfast, who has sold off a great many of the momentos of his playing career, including MVP trophies, equipment, milestone baseballs, and stuff of that nature. Jose’s always been about the Benjamins.
Now, the great thing about writing a tell-all book is that you can pretty much make any accusations you want and the people being accused don’t get a floor to respond. So, of course, Lauer lays in with the questions. “How do you respond to their denials?” “Is it all about the money?” “Why are you selling your World Series ring?” (He was a member of the 2000 Yankees, I believe by trade. One at-bat in the Series itself. He struck out.)
(Oh, now, THIS is interesting. I was gonna link to the ring on Jose’s online store, but it’s no longer there, and at $40,000, I doubt it found a buyer. But you can get a game-worn autographed jersey from when he was with the White Sox (I don’t even remember him BEING with the White Sox) for the low low price of $745.95.)
Of course, Jose neatly dodges everything thrown at him, and, with some blather along the lines of “Something’s gonna happen in a month. I can’t talk about it, but you’re gonna wanna keep watching. ‘Cuz something’s gonna happen. That I can’t talk about. In a month. The something, that is.”, strongly hints that he’s gonna take a lie detector test to prove the veractiy of his claims…on Pay Per-View.
You see it coming, of course. In cooperation with our friends at Oreck Vaccuums, we proudly offer a “You Just Suck”…to Matt Lauer. For letting Jose get away with it.
If Matt really wanted to, he could have put the screws to Jose, but he didn’t. Every time Jose started dodging a question, Matt just took it, and moved along to the next question. Yeah, sometimes he pressed for an answer, but he never once called him out outright for not giving one. Big fat softballs, right across the plate. Might as well have been Larry King.
(And a second one should go to whoever booked Jose’s dumb ass on the show to start with. Because if you had done ANY research at all on the guy, you should have been able to tell that this was EXACTLY where the interview was gonna go.)
I guess Steve Case feels that his untrained kittens have filled the great sandbox that is USENet with enough shit that it’s time to move along. America Online announced yesterday that they would discontinue support of USENet newsgroups for their customers.
I love the quotes from the spokesdrone: “We are seeing that traffic on newsgroups is pretty minimal at this point.” Gee, could that be because your idiot members turned it into such a festering pile of crap that nobody can stand to deal with the signal to noise ratio?
Proof once again that AOL is the scumsucking parasite of the Internet. I am proud to offer them what I hope will become a regular feature here at Chez Fred, the inaugural Oreck Vacuums “You Just Suck” award.
I GET LETTERS: When someone sends you email, it’s yours. You can do what you want with it at that point, including posting it for the world to see. So we’re going to look at the disclaimer at the bottom of this one first, that we might all enjoy a hearty laugh:
> Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including any attachments,
> is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain
> confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the
> intended recipient(s), you are hereby notified that any dissemination,
> unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution of this email and
> any materials contained in any attachments is prohibited. If you
> receive this message in error, or are not the intended recipient(s),
> please immediately notify the sender by email and destroy all copies
> of the original message, including
> attachments.
Yeah-friggin’-right. :) And you’ll soon see why they would like their email recipients to follow this policy, because they are about to display themselves as total and complete boobs.
A little background, which you may or may not already have: That link on the navigation bar to the left there that says “My Resume” does in fact link to, well, my resume, under the whimsical title “Look What I Can Do”. Now, to get this straight: I am not actively looking for a new job, I like the one I have, but at the same time if the right gig came along, I’d be willing to listen, as any sane person should. However, there were some early indications that this was NOT the Right Gig:
> To: “Look What I Can Do!”
> Hi Look,
Right off the bat, I knew this one was gonna be something special. One line down:
> This is xxxxx from Thinking Minds Inc.
Thinking Minds. Apparently not.
> We are an ERP consulting firm
> specializing in project staff augmentation for large enterprise
> projects.
Ah, this is starting to make sense. If you haven’t filled out your Buzzword Bingo card yet, this one translates loosely to “We are headhunters with no technological skills whatsoever, who throw any and all candidates at the positions we need to fill to see what might stick.”
It then went on to list the gig, and the requirements therein:
> Position title: – “Clarify Configurator / Developer”
> Requirements:-
> * Resource should have 3+ years of experience in Oracle.
> * 2-3 years of experience in the following (Mandatory):
> *J2EE
> *Unix
> *BEA Weblogic
> *Clarify Configuration
There’s the missing piece. Yes, I’ve used Clarify when I was at Microsoft. No, I don’t know the first damn thing about how it works on the back end, nor have I ever represented such. Clearly this jackbag simply searched the web for resumes including the word Clarify, and spammed every single hit he got, without regard to whether the candidate was actually in any way qualified for the position, or, for that matter, without concern for what an utter ninny such an action makes him look like.
And finally, the kicker:
> Location: Oklahoma City, OK. Duration: 1 Months
Yes! By God! Let me drop everything for a one-month gig in freaking OKLAHOMA CITY!
This is the kind of gig that, if I had more free time on my hands, I would respond to, just to talk to this recruiter guy and see how much I could totally screw with his head. I have a special level of Hell reserved for temp recruiters anyhow, but it’s clear this guy needs a ticket on the Express Train…
I hate it when a sports team names itself for a state instead of a city. The Golden State Warriors, the Colorado Avalanche, and the Utah Jazz, among others, are guilty of this. In the case of the Warriors, it’s for marketing: they don’t ACTUALLY play in San Francisco, but they want San Franciscans to support them. Hell, the stinkin’ New York football teams don’t even play in freakin’ New York!
Golden State, though. That one always chapped me. California is a big place with many major metropolitan areas. How DARE these guys claim to represent the entire state! ESPECIALLY with the Lakers down south winning championship rings?
The Avs play in Denver. Nothing wrong with Devner. It works for the Nuggets and the Broncos. Are the Avs and Rockies embarrassed to be in Denver? On the other hand, the New Jersey thing, I totally understand. :)
The California Angels always bugged me, too. California has FIVE baseball teams. Who are THEY to suggest they are the state’s official team? One of the few good things Disney did, when they bought the team and realized that most people knew where Anaheim was and associated it with a rather large amusement park holding of the same parent company, renamed the team to the Anaheim Angels. Amaheim. Great. That’s where you play, that’s the name of the stadium, you should be named for the city. Perfect.
Well, apparently that’s not good enough for new owner Arte Moreno, who bought the team the year after they won their first World Series, in 2003. He feels the need to glom on to Southern California again, and has renamed the team to The Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim. Gawd. What a pain in the ass. Bad enough when the Ducks did it, but that was Disney capitalizing on a movie. This makes no sense at all.
Arte’s not fooling anyone, and that’s a hell of a nice way to say thanks to a city that renovated their multiuse stadium into a beautiful baseball park just for the team that stayed.
I’m waiting to see what happens when The Loe Angeles Angels of Anaheim roll into D.C. to square off against The Washington Nationals, Formerly The Montreal Expos, at This Used To Be Halliburton Stadium Until The FTC Buried Their Dumb Asses, So Now We’re Named For A Nice Quiet Product Like Sprite Field.
As one might expect, the folks on the Air America radio network morning show were up in arms when it was announced that Kerry was conceding the election. “How COULD he?” “Keep fighting!” “I thought every vote counted!” As a Kerry supporter, I was embarrassed.
GET OVER IT. HE LOST.
Yeah, I’m not thrilled about it, any more than I am about the realization that I live in a country where much of the Midwest, South, and approximately half of Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada are inhabited by ABJECT IDIOTS, but come on.
Trying to find a legal loophole in the Ohio elections when your candidate has been all but mathematically eliminated is every bit as weenie as the tactics these folks have been accusing the Republicans of to keep potential Kerry voters away from the polls. Maybe the system needs fixing, but it’s the one we operate under by now, and by those rules Bush won the election, so shake the man’s hand, call it done, and go back to work trying to make the country better with the tools you have at hand. Prolonging the inevitable just because “you owe it to your supporters” (which, by the way, translates to “we poked some of your campaign money away for just such a situation, and it would look even worse if we just pocketed it”) just makes you look weak and petulant.
Yeah, so Limbaugh and Hannity are gloating right now. I’m sure it’s a lovefest over at KKKVI. At least you guys will have a job for another four years or so.
So, because I’m a foodie, I like looking at restaurant menus online, particularly of regional places I don’t have access to because I live in the Pacific Northwest, like Waffle House or Sonic Drive-In.
Well, this morning I found myself surfing to a Midwestern chain called Cracker Barrel that has been around for some time, but I’ve never seen one, much less dined in one, because they just aren’t out here in the West. And the food is what you expect, and looks pretty good – chicken and dumplings, biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak, the usual hearty fare.
You will see me make fun of Midwesterners a lot here, because my mom grew up in Iowa, and that qualifies me to do so, I think. And I’m not gonna let you down here. After looking at these scrumptious looking dinners, I got to the desserts.
Specifically, the Frozen Mug Ice Cream Sundae. SOUNDS like a good concept, yes? Sounded damned good to me. I read on:
“Hot Fudge, Caramel, Chocolate, Strawberry, Blackberry, or Sorghum Molasses… topped with whipped cream, roasted almonds, and a cherry.”
SORGHUM MOLASSES?
SORGHUM FRIGGIN’ MOLASSES?
I will point out that for all of their cooking skillz (and they do have skillz, so long as you don’t wander into the fog known as “ethnic cuisine”) these are a people who still haven’t figured out how to make a decent loaf of French bread, and are known to use ketchup as a viable substitute for tomato sauce, but by all that is good and holy, MOLASSES DOES NOT GO ON ICE CREAM.
Remind me not to eat at Cracker Barrel.
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