There's a Market for Anything

Hello!

It took me by surprise at first, because I couldn't even imagine it would be desired, let alone popular enough for an entire product line. But as time went by, it became increasingly clear that Cottonelle toilet paper must be specifically designed to allow a finger through. Either that or they've failed rather spectacularly to make a useful toilet paper. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that there is enough demand for a TP that includes a high likelihood of a surprise connection between fingertip and sphincter that such a product would be on the market and available wherever normal alternatives can be found.

It puts me in mind of a Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson quote from an old Stuff or Maxim magazine. This is from memory; I no longer have access to the magazine and I can't find the quote online.

I still maintain that the best piece of ass I ever had was when my finger went through the paper.

Maybe Cottonelle can work out a sponsorship agreement with him.

Blog Blogger Bloggest

Way back in the dim, dark history of websites I started to make them. I wasn't very good at it at first, but nobody is and few people ever got to be exceptional. There just weren't many good ways to make websites look good at first, especially with the number of differences between browsers and at first there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG editor. I think, actually, Mozilla had a simpe editor but it wasn't particularly good for much more than very simple things.

Along came Dreamweaver. It was - supposedly - powerful and excellent. I got a copy for work. I hated it.

Here's how it changed my workflow: I used to code pages by hand in a simple text editor. But Dreamweaver allowed me to use a visual editor to almost make the web pages I wanted. After I made each one I needed to make changes by hand so I would wade through oceans of pointless, confusing and distracting gibberish and often simply give up and go back to the text editor.

So really it added time (and frustration) to my workflow. I stopped using it and haven't gone back to anything like it since. That was in about 1998. I still use a text editor. In fact, I'm writing in one now!

Heroes of Pulp Fiction

Adventure Comics #372

When I was just a little kid, I read the comics that my oldest brother inherited from our even older cousins. I didn’t choose anything; I just read whatever was available. Mostly these were DC’s Adventure Comics from the late 60s featuring Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Superboy, you see, would travel 1000 years into the future to fight evil villains with a great big group of teen heroes who had all been inspired by his own legendary self. They were colourful and campy, filled with teenage drama and science fiction. In other words, perfect!

The concept of artists and authors being responsible for these works never occurred to me. There were just the stories and the characters, and that was good enough for me.

Hey Baby, Nice... Nevermind

I've never been much of a Green Lantern fan. Not sure why, he's just never really captured my imagination. But I'm always interested in the latest comic-based movies, so I was checking out the Green Lantern trailer when something grabbed my attention.

Or maybe I should say a lack of something grabbed my attention; a lack of clothing. Yes, in typical comic book fashion, a female character is exposing her chest in a way that's just barely legal and is definitely in violation of physics. And it makes it even more glaringly obvious when she is the only character showing any flesh and also the only female character in a room full of male characters.

It's Stifling in Here!

Photo by David Shankbone

Said Fox News chief Roger Ailes of the reasons behind Glenn Beck's departure: "Advertisers who get weak-kneed because some idiot on a blog site writes to them and says we need to stifle speech, I get a little frustrated by that."

I spent a little time wondering what he meant by "stifling speech". It's obviously not about Beck's ability to speak. That's unchanged. And he can do it in public, too. Then there are the books that he publishes. He's losing his TV show at Fox, but I haven't heard that his radio show is over. Oh, and he has a website.

So what does stifling speech mean to Roger Ailes? I guess it means that nobody is willing to pay Beck millions of dollars to speak on TV. With that it mind...

Stop stifling my speech!

Speak Easy

In my dim recollection of school, I was one of the people who sat at the back of the class and I only tried to communicate with the person directly in front of me. The one exception was Physics, but that was because Mr. Harp was awesome. He looked precisely like every man in every Herman comic strip and was easily a billion times funnier. I wanted to sit close enough to hear everything he mumbled.

Anyways, there were times that I knew the answer to the question the teacher was asking ("Anyone? Bueller?"), but I almost never spoke up. I never really understood why teachers would ask the students. Weren't we supposed to be learning from them? Surely they knew the answer. And they were getting paid to make sure that knowledge was passed on to us. Waiting for some smarty-pants to blurt something out - right or wrong - was a waste of time. And I don't recall that it achieved any kind of class unity or even competition. Did the less knowledgeable students want to become more like the brown-nosers? I doubt it. And it certainly didn't make the ones with the answers more popular.

The Tenacity of the Nerd

Years ago, for whatever reason, there was a job position for a resident nerd on ships that traveled around the world. I don't know why it existed - and I don't know if it still does - but I do know that one particular British nerd became famous as a result of it. He was a young man who was aiming to be a doctor until - like me - he discovered there wasn't much good he could do for people while he was puking or passed out on the floor. What to do? Become a clergyman, I suppose... Nah. Jump on a boat and be the resident nerd!

So one day, while strolling on a beach in Chile (the life of a resident nerd is tough), he picked up a rock. Upon nerdy close examination, he found a mysterious creature inside it. It looked a lot like a barnacle, except it was missing the main feature of a barnacle: the barnacle-y shell. Everyone knows barnacles secrete a shell. That's what makes them barnacles! Apparently what everyone knows isn't exactly true. Mr. Resident Nerd had found himself a barnacle that avoids the whole secretion thing and simply burrows into a rock.

Now, I know what you're thinking. If you're not a nerd you're thinking, "I'm surprised I've gotten this far in the story. Where did I see those chairs I really liked...?" If you're a nerd, however, you're wondering if Mr. Resident Nerd is haunted by the discrepancy for 35 years and devotes every waking hour for 8 of those years to nothing but studying every living and fossilized barnacle known to humankind in the hopes of figuring out what really defines a barnacle. Let me help both of you out. Non-nerds, you saw them at INspiration Interiors, but they were kinda pricey. Nerds: yes.