Who is the target demographic here?

So, I listen to podcasts. This should not come as news to anyone who reads this blog, as I've already told you three. One of my favorite podcasts is NPR's "Piano Puzzler", where you hear a famous tune in the style of a famous composer. It's pretty cool to hear "You're the top" by Cole Porter in the style of Igor Stravinsky. Haha! Igor!

Anyway, this week's episode kicks off with an ad for Sirius satellite radio, which sold itself, to NPR listeners, as having over a hundred channels of music, news and sports, including (and I quote the ad here because I wouldn't even believe it otherwise) "Howard Stern". How, exactly, are you going to convince a bunch of hippie commie veggie liberals to listen to your satellite radio company? By assuming that they are a bunch of infantile slack-jawed beer-swilling mainstreamers! Brilliant!

Hooray!

The world is now a slightly better place. Also, I have something in common with someone famous.

I'm back now.

I was all, "I'm gonna post!", but I never did. I'm a punk, as the young bastards say.

Anyway, I have been having a bad few days. Class sucks. Work sucks. I got rear-ended, and the other person just drove off. Bleh. On the plus side, there was no damage to either me or my car. Things have gone downhill since Mike and Kim left. They sometimes do.

Also, you should watch this. Good, but not so good you'll need a cigarette after. Much better if you happen to know the first names of everyone involved in writing and performing the music (Hint: It's John.)

Happy Birthday!

I have learned that two of the sites at which I waste so much of my time have their seventh birthday today. Congratulations to them both! I suppose that means that, on November 15th, 1999, any possible productivity I might've one day had was squashed, sqelched, and pre-squandered. That's right, I went there.

Nothing else is going on, really. And when I say nothing, I mean I went to bed yesterday at two pm, and got up this morning at nine am. I had a brief period of wakefulness for a few hours in the middle there, but really, I'm more well-rested than I've been in months. And yet, I could still go for a nap.

On the origins of speaking...

Does anyone out there remember 1337? Anyone? No? Okay, time for yet another edition of "linguistic historical primers"! Yay!

So, waayyy back in the day, there was this newfangled method of connecting one computer to another, called the "internet". Now, I'm taking you so far back, that at this time, the internet was not yet advanced enough for porn. (At least, no pictures; I'm sure there were some dirty stories floating around). The fearless nerds who traversed this untamed frontier started to develop their own language, designed to be incomprehensible to anyone who did not spend great amounts of time thinking about how some keyboard characters looked like other keyboard characters. (For instance, the number 58008 looks like the word "boobs" when you put it on a calculator and turn it upside down.) This language came to be known as "leet/1337", since only the "elite" computer nerds understood it. After about six months or so of putting up with this nonsense, it fell out of style, and the true mark of the "elite" became: proper use of English while on the internet. Who'da thunk it?

Now, of course, the internet and its subsidiaries are available so widely that you are considered a nerd if you don't send text messages via cell phone while IMing all your bbf's on AOL. This, in turn, has spawned a whole new form of "leet", known to CNN.com as "text-speak". Oh, those crazy New Zealanders. Land of Xena and Frodo, you have officially earned the respect and love of nerds world-wide. Well done.

Holy crap! # 100!

In honor of an arbitrarily impressive number, this post's arbitrary theme is: horrible political puns!

Starting off light, the Diebold voting machines!

Diebold: putting the e in e-lection.
Hack the vote!
Diebold: let your vote die... bold... ly... (weak laughter)

Saddam's sentencing!

Finally, a dictator who's well-hung!
Saddam: soon to be a participle. A dangling participle!
Something about six feet underground and two feet above it!

Political ads!

Political ads! (See, because political ads are already so bad, and puns are bad... I'll stop now.)

Anyway, I already voted. It was fun. I got to have all the thrill of filling in little ovals with all the power of being 1/9000000th of the decision for our state governor. I was a partial abstainer; I didn't much know or care who would be the best people for the U of M and MSU boards of regents. I also voted for one Libertarian and one Green, just because I think it would be fun to see them go at it. If you want to prevent your government from doing harm, set them up to be unable to do anything at all. I think the founding fathers had this in mind. Think about it. Then vote anyway; at least you'll be complicit in whatever high crimes our elected officials commit while in office. See? Voters are important!

I don't have a title today.

It was a long day at work tonight, and this morning, toward the end of my shift, my boss called me in to his office to have a chat. It turned out to be very little; he just wanted me to answer some questions about how the lab is doing, business-wise. In fact, the only thing I actually did was to write down three numbers on a sheet of paper. Hooray! I contributed! ...

At any rate, the numbers related to statements about how people felt about the work environment at my hospital. These statements were put out by the Gallup corporation, and are of the type "I feel ownership toward my environment" or "I have a 'best friend' at work". I was not, incidentally, asked to agree or disagree with these statements (thank God; I disagreed with most of them, which is more depressing than never having known that people can feel that good about going to work); I was only asked which of these statements needs the most work.

Okay, I didn't explain that very well. And frankly, you probably don't care about my work. My super-short version is: This morning I got paid for a half-hour's work, and all I did was write three numbers, randomly.

Bwahaha!

God bless America, I guess.

I don't know what I'm going as for Halloween next year, but the year after that, I already have planned out. It will be 2008. Bush will be out of office, effectively, and both parties will be looking to put up a replacement (actually, every party will be putting forth a replacement, but if you don't start hearing about third parties in a week or so, you can assume it'll just be the two who are serious about it). The politics will be a little bit extra fierce, and since this year's election is actually making me physically ill, I do not look forward to the next presidential bid.

Which brings me to my costume: the scariest thing I can think of is... political capital. Spoooky! It'll be fun/nauseating to see what issue(s) become(s) big for the next election, especially since gas prices went down by almost a dollar last month, so this year's big "energy dependance" idiocy kinda fell flat. Whatever they are, though, you can be sure I'll be covered in representative analogues for them to scare the hell out of... um, poli sci majors, I guess.