Category: junk thought

Titanic vs. Lusitania: Get Rich Or Die Tryin'

I’m almost tempted to print out this TIME article in broadsheet format, just so I can read it while wearing a monocle and puffing at a comically large pipe – feasibly while fiddling with an extravagantly well greased moustache.

From mid-article:

The results told a revealing tale. Aboard the Titanic, children under 16 years old were nearly 31% likelier than the reference group to have survived, but those on the Lusitania were 0.7% less likely. Males ages 16 to 35 on the Titanic had a 6.5% poorer survival rate than the reference group but did 7.9% better on the Lusitania. For females in the 16-to-35 group, the gap was more dramatic: those on the Titanic enjoyed a whopping 48.3% edge; on the Lusitania it was a smaller but still significant 10.4%. The most striking survival disparity — no surprise, given the era — was determined by class. The Titanic‘s first-class passengers had a 43.9% greater chance of making it off the ship and into a lifeboat than the reference group; the Lusitania‘s, remarkably, were 11.5% less likely. – TIME

The discussion later in the article about polite behaviour  vs fight-or- flight self centered action is interesting, but I can’t help but notice that ‘polite behaviour’ basically saves rich ladies, a category I will likely never be counted in.

Piano and Flute and Acoustic Guitar

Why is on-hold music still so terrible? We’ve obviously got phone and music technology working fairly well these days, why can’t we successfully combine them into a non-iPhone application?

Is there a concern that if they start providing CD quality music, people will call in just to record a swath of “Non-Specific Adult Contemporary Instrumentals vol XIV” for resale on the streets of Bangkok?

A Brief Refresher

I understand why it’s easy to confuse the two:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqcEo5CNTQ]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S90z0jJDAQ]

Both were written by the same fellow, Jesse Fredrick.

Jesse Frederick is a film and television composer best known for writing the themes to television shows such as Perfect Strangers, Full House, Family Matters, and Step By Step. – Wikipedia

Almost Too Honest, Subway

Took this phone cam picture at our local Subway the other day.

Like An Honest Type Thing“Ehhh, it’s like a friggin’ mayonnaise type thing, know what I’m sayin’? A light dressing, sorta. Like an edible-petroleum-product kinda sauce?”

I was also pretty impressed with their follow up punch: admitting flat out that the “secret sub sauce” is just Zesty Italian.

Wonder Years

I’m mostly posting this for the lovely Jessica, since she can’t stand being made to feel bad by other people’s awkwardness.

This was one of the earliest memes I remember covering the internet from end to end – I seem to recall it was also one of the first to be set to music, although that music now seems to be lost. This was first a tripod page, where the video’s only image was also taken from. The site would automatically begin playing a looping wav file of the poor little bugger, a wav file which was later ripped down and sent around seperately.

Mike Blount – the kid in question – has unsurprisingly been unable to avoid the internet for the rest of his life, and thus has had to accept his early stardom and even parlay it into his own later-life blog.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7mozA-ptI]

There was, in a sense, a happy ending to all of this – Mike eventually realized he didn’t even want a future girlfriend, what he wanted was a future boyfriend.

Sports Illustrated

UghListen: I don’t get the swimsuit issue. You get 12 months a year of sweaty homo-erotic stick and ball handlers, then you get one issue of half-dressed ladies.

When I was a boy at Catholic grade school, I recall many of the lads flipping pages of ye olde National Geographic looking for the indigenous boobies –  is Sports Illustrated the equivalent for middle aged men carrying on dispassionate marriages, too constrained by the bounds of civility and upbringing to go out and buy a playboy? The softest of core brought into the house under the cover of respectable football player ogling?

Knifin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

Shock Knife

Apparently rubber knives are out with the police.

Now when they train to deal with a switchblade carrying jacked-up ’70s hooligan wearing bell bottoms, they utilize The Shock Knife – essentially a plastic handle with an electrified “blade”. Supposedly the shock knife doesn’t injure, it just hurts. That doesn’t make me feel better about the fact that their most prevalent PR image looks like a sexual predator version of Halo’s Master Chief though.

Master Chief

Here’s a brief youtube video of a curtain training to defend itself against stab attack:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoc-t63A7zc]

Sarah Silverman

Sarah SilvermanI caught Sarah Silverman on Letterman last night. I’m thinking this is about the greatest height her career can reach, and I’ll be glad when she slides away into obscurity.

The first time I saw the awkward-making she calls comedy I thought it was interesting – as a single bit. The truth is though, you can’t create a memorable multi-decade career with such one note material, ask Carrot Top or Gallagher or Yakoff Smirnoff.

I do think it’s worth mentioning though, because her character represents something of a demarcation point.

In the same way that Andrew Dice Clay’s (brief) fame was made on the backlash to the ’80s image of strong women in positions of corporate and political power, combined with the general ’90s societal movement towards Political Correctness, Silverman’s career is made on the dying gasps of the notion that women are either saints or sluts, with no shades of gray.

Certainly important ground to unhallow, but her point is lost when the humour is out of it – and currently it’s like she’s held on to a single Sacha Baron Cohen caricature a half decade past its due date.

Her comedy is almost a necessary venting function for societal noxious gas,  but I’ll be glad when we’re done belching and can move on.