I just saw an ad that said: “Never touch, breathe, smell, or handle cat litter again.”
I have no particular hankering to handle cat litter, but if the alternative means giving up on being able to touch, breathe, and smell, then thanks but no thanks.
P.S. – I would like to apologise most abjectly for this post’s title.
P.P.S. – I would like to, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to.
In Green Lantern Corps #35, a member of the GL Corps receives the order to “decimate each and every Zamaron.”
Now this is a Zamaron:
So this, presumably, is a Zamaron decimated:
Here’s hoping the economy improves so that DC can afford to invest in dictionaries for its writers. But the odds are nine to one against it.
![Good news! She's real [Lucy Lawless as Xena Warrior Princess] Bad news! So is she [Lucy Lawless as D'Anna the Cylon]](http://praxeology.net/xena-and-cylon.PNG "Good news! She's real [Lucy Lawless as Xena Warrior Princess] Bad news! So is she [Lucy Lawless as D'Anna the Cylon]")
Imagine a world where Conan, Xena, and Blackadder were real people while Hitler, Mussolini, and Churchill weren’t. A world where the Battle of Helms Deep really happened but the Battle of Hastings didn’t.
Sounds like a better world than the real one – until we add in that it’s also a world in which humanity has been conquered and enslaved by some combination of Martians, Cylons, and damn dirty apes.
What world is this? According to a substantial percentage of the British public, it’s the one we live in.
So cheer up, fellow Americans – we are not alone.
Headline just seen on Google news: “Nurse also among those who killed at nursing home in Carthage.”
Turns out, as I suspected, that the headline needs either to gain a “were” or to lose a “who.”
There’s a famous story about Fred Smith at Yale submitting for class a business plan for what would one day be Federal Express, and getting it back with a C and a comment from the professor: “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.”
That’s such a delightful story that it really ought to be true; but here’s what Smith himself says about it:
The first phase really started when I was an undergraduate at Yale in 1965. I wrote a term paper for an economics class in which I simply observed that as society became more automated, companies like IBM and Xerox that sold early computer devices needed to make sure that their products were dependable. … How do you get your computer parts quickly when your system goes down? You couldn’t depend on the post office. I believed you’d need a faster, more dependable, and more far-reaching kind of delivery system. That’s what the paper was about; it was not a full-blown business plan.
Today that paper is kind of famous, and it’s because of a careless comment I once made. I was asked what grade I got on it, and I stupidly said, ‘I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C.’ That stuck, and it’s become a well-know story because everybody likes to flout authority. But to be honest, I don’t really remember what grade I got it. I probably didn’t get a very good one, though, because it wasn’t a well-thought-out paper.
From which I infer that the famous quotation (never attributed to any professor by name) is, alas, inauthentic.
Obama (on Leno) just said that the problem with the boom was that it was based on “paper money.” Then he quickly corrected himself and said “paper profits” instead.