Admittedly, not a scientific study.

Well, not really a study at all.

More of an exposition.

This might actually be quote of the month, come to think of it, but it’s early yet.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
– George Carlin

Glommed from GraphJam

Speaking of low-brow humor and memes, this, via an email from my ever-precocious daughter: One definition of “meme”, from the always interesting WolframAlpha

Actually, it’s a pretty old story, but just hit my inbox today, for reasons unknown.

I used to fashion myself as some form of entrepreneur, but clearly, I need to rethink that.

So asks Earl J. Wilkinson, CEO of newsmedia trade association INMA (International Newsmedia Marketing Association) in a blog entry from which the title to this post was cadged, verbatim.

Look, I’m prepared to be first in line to buy the hype. Yet I was first in line to see “Ishtar,” too.

I would have enjoyed the movie more had it not been promoted as a game-changing, must-see movie with two big Hollywood mega-stars. Given those high expectations, I was bitterly disappointed.

At minimum, I suspect the iPad will be a short-lived spark that will spur other tablet revolutions – revolutions that will always be compared with the original (kudos to Apple). Yet the product also smacks of eight-track tapes, something if shown publicly in a few years will date you instantly to 2010. At maximum, I wonder about the “Ishtar” effect – a good product that, through too much hype, will never live up to expectations.

I hope I’m wrong.

Heck, he might well be wrong, but the reason I’m not queuing up at the local Apple Store on Saturday morning is similar to his concerns above. Even if the initial “wow” factor is high, this first version is certain to be subsumed by its follow-on, and by the time that (and it’s attendant hype) appears in the marketplace, I won’t even be able to fob off my crappy v1.0 iPad on my daughter as I upgrade.

[wik] 2010-04-01, Early AM – Oh, hell. I can’t let Minister Buckethead get any farther ahead of me on the technology curve. I just ordered the 64GB WiFi+3G model. I blame my Safari browser, on which I was too lazy to set the home page to anything but apple.com. If it turns out to be a disappointment, at least Ministerette Patton can use it as a beefed up iPod. Just trying to keep up. But I still didn’t queue up at the Apple store – I purchased it on-line. So there.

Found in a Friday/Saturday op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, this tidbit from Peggy Noonan, while trying to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest:

…I’m speaking of the interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.” Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

Conflict of interest clearly avoided, and a public service offered.

From Reuters:

Nurses’ union: Care does not include sex

(Reuters) – A union representing Dutch nurses will launch a national campaign Friday against demands for sexual services by patients who claim it should be part of their standard care.

The union, NU’91, is calling the campaign “I Draw The Line Here,” with an advert that features a young woman covering her face with crossed hands.

The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.

The young woman witnessed some of the man’s other nurses offering him sexual gratification, the union said. When she refused to do the same, he tried to dismiss her on the grounds that she was unfit to provide care.

“This type of action is not part of the job responsibilities of carers and nurses,” NU’91 said.

The case has been reported to police, the union added.

If you are in a book store and cannot find the book for which you search, you are obviously in the…

Did you hear about the new Octo Mom Breakfast Special?

14 eggs, no sausage, and the guy at the next table is going to pay for it.

Even in a down economy, it turns out. Let me set a quick stage for you:

My wife decided we were switching from Comcast cable service to the still-somewhat-new AT&T uVerse service. Her reasons, while I’m sure good and valid, are a mystery to me.

Nevertheless, after waiting two weeks for an install, she got a visit this past Tuesday morning from the AT&T guy, ready to do his thing. He said it should take no more than two hours. We were having three cable connections in the house replaced, with the attendant three new cable decoder boxes.

Several trips seem to have been required between our house and the nearest fiber drop in the neighborhood, half a mile away. Odd, but no matter, right? It then got progressively more weird – four, count ‘em, four trips were made to the house by yet another AT&T installer, each time bringing a cable decoder box to replace one of the ones that Spanky, our installer, found not to be in good working order.

Five hours after he’d started his two hour job, Spanky left, happy with the job he’d done. TV was working at all three cable boxes, and the wireless access to the internet was also working. He’d personally verified it, using one of my wife’s laptop computers. I’m certain he verified it, not just because wireless worked on our other laptops, but because when I checked Gmail, he’d left himself signed in on my wife’s Thinkpad, to his personal Gmail account.

It goes without saying that IQ might not be one of the top ten attributes AT&T uses in choosing its installers. More on that in a minute.

In addition to flawless TV and wireless access to his personal Gmail account on my wife’s computer, he also left the rest of my network (the wired part, in the office upstairs) completely horked. It appears not to have occurred to him that anyone still uses wired Ethernet connections. Dealing with all the wires he’d casually disconnected and dropped behind the desk, while reconnecting the several switches and the router in the office after I’d gotten home from work took a solid hour of my time.

But it was all made worth it when my wife told me “the rest of the story”, this evening. How she’d forgotten to tell me yesterday, I don’t know, but once I heard it, the delay didn’t matter.

Spanky, who reportedly had AT&T support on his most worn-out cell-phone speed dial button, was upstairs near the end of our ordeal, trying to get a good picture on the device connected to the upstairs cable box. My wife walked upstairs in time to help him with his travails, however, shortening what might have been a 7 hour install (how does AT&T make any money at this?) into “only” 5 hours.

The picture he was getting was fuzzy, and it was cycling up and down the screen, for reasons he and Albert Einstein, his telephone correspondent, were unable to determine. Mrs. Patton to the rescue – she pointed out to him that he should be connecting to the 25″ TV 5 feet away from him, instead of attempting to get a good signal on my daughter’s fucking 7″ screen karaoke machine.

[Wik] True story.
[Alsø wik] Seriously.
[Alsø alsø wik] I shit you not.
[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] On further review by the replay official, my lovely wife, they only needed to replace three of the devices, not four. And karaoke machine has only a 4″ screen, not 7″, which casts Spanky’s ineptitude in a whole ‘nother light. The author regrets any inconvenience caused by these inaccuracies.
[See the løveli lakes...] Speaking of inconvenience, this morning (2/7/2009), the service went tits-up, and they’re rushing one of their MENSA candidates out to resolve the matter. Tomorrow fucking night, between 4:00PM and 9:00PM