Captain Paranoid's Unsupported Hypothesis

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door...

These shmaltzy feel-good Christmas stories rarely bring me cheer. But this one about a Walmart employee being trampled to death on Black Friday gave me a smile.

When I saw today's Google Logo, I thought, "What is this, Village People's Day?" Then after a second, oh yeah, Veteran's Day.

My favorite comic goes multimedia on Caribou Barbie.

My Mom went into Washington Mutual the other day and asked the teller, "So what's going on with you guys?  Are you going out of business?"
The teller responds, "Oh no, we are doing fine, in fact we just got new uniforms.  Does that sound like a company that is going out of business... that they would get everybody new uniforms?"  My Mom answers, "No, it sounds like a company that is wasting a lot of money."

I found an old dusty videotape of the David Letterman show from 1989
and being a compulsive list maker, made a list of the commercials from that episode.

By the way, Guests were Paulina Porizkova and the Proclaimers. The Top Ten list was, "Things Eastern Airlines tells prospective pilots."

Commercials:

• Hersheys - Betty Boop, 3 Stooges and Howdy Doody
  
• Suzuki Sidekick
  
• Michelob
  
• Coors Extra Gold
  
• Eureka Boss Vaacuum
  
• Introducing the Nissan Access
  
• Pizza Hut - 2 medium pizzas for $12.99
  
• Ryder
  
• Loreal
  
• Ford Probe GT
  
• Suave Shampoo
  
• Weight Watchers
  
• Coors Light Silver Bullet
  
• Introducing the Mitsubishi Eclipse $10,397
  
• New England Telephone
  
• Dead Bang Movie promo. Hey no deadbangmovie.com back then
  
• Piedmont Airlines. Now how will I get to Raleigh/Durham?
  
• WBZ promo
  
• Hyundai
  
• Energizer Bunny
  
• Bufferin
  
• Castrol GTX Oil
  
• Doritos: Crunch all you want, we'll make more w/ Jay Leno
  
• Hilton Hotels
  
• Dick Butkus for AquaVelva
  
• Nissan Access again
  
• WBZ again
  
• NBC Promo
  
• Weaver's Chicken
  
• Dodge Dakota
  

Watch four vapid losers, some with Bachelors Degrees (maybe)
see if a real world problem can be solved by trying something
idiotic. Watch then exclaim, "That's so stupid, it just might work!" as
they endlessly high five each other.

Can we stop runaway trailers by strapping gigantic retro rockets to the side of an
Airstream trailer? Wasn't a Darwin award handed out for something similar? This latest episode is only worth watching because of their lax safety protocol that nearly turns one of the crew into toast -- literally.

Can a plane drop a boat at 100+ mph to do a mid-ocean rescue? Well, yeah. It's called an inflatable life raft. But what if we shape the boat weirdly so it supercavitates just to make it unnecessarily unreliable and more dangerous?

There are so many things wrong with this show; it makes me want to hurl my TV off my balcony second city style.

Oh my valve.
-Ignatius

Ron Paul in reacting to Huckabee's Christmas message gave my favorite quote of Sinclair Lewis:

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (Lewis c. 1930).

So Here is Huckabee using that as his campaign strategy seven decades later.

Here's another quote for Huckabee:

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room (or closet.) and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret..." (Matthew 6:5-6 RSV)

Scrabble Time for Blank hogs



How many of the 14 delicious bingos can you find of the pattern: BACON??

Need a some hints? Highlite to see clues

1	All of them start with A, B or C, except one. Which isn't really much of a hint.
2	There is one each where a blank is one of JKWZY.
3	The same hint works for 5 of them: Sounds like a rockstar that offed himself. (Captaino couldn't get one of them)

Highlite to see ANSWERS

ABSCOND

BALCONY

BANNOCK

BEACONS

BONACIS

BOTANIC

CABEZON

CARBONS

COALBIN

CONFABS

CORBANS

CORBINA

COWBANE

JACOBIN

Far be it from me to make fun of a tragedy, oh wait, that is exactly me.

From CNN today:

An emotional Bob Murray, the CEO of mine owner Murray Energy Corp., told reporters Monday night that rescuers have "not left a stone unturned" in trying to find the missing miners.

Perhaps the most inappropriate use of a metaphor this year.

Here is a useless list to study,inspired by having lost a game because
I did not see TYRANNY on a a rack of ?ANNRTY

How many Words can you find starting with Y and ending with Y?  There are 25.
How many Bingos of length seven?  Only 2.
How many of length 7-10?  Just 10 to find.

If you are so inclined, how many of the 66 seven-letter bingos can you find that
contain 2 Y's? in 2 minutes.  Anybody not find Zzyzyva?

So evwhore and I are playing scrabble on a perfectly transparent acrylic scrabble board from www.isatine.com and as always happens, someone accidentally whacks the board when trying to play a tile, usually to the refrain of the other person saying, "you idiot"  and tonight was no exception.  But this time I really whacked the board and tiles went flying everywhere... on the floor, in a candle.  It took sometime to reconstruct the board, but eventually we did but  quickly noticed the the Q was still missing.  "This is a puzzlement.  We've looked everywhere except in the  box of pretzels."  One guess where the Q was eventually found.



Also my play of the night... I playing the part of the blankpig have ??AEFXS.  I immediatley see A f Fi X E S
but no spot.  But then I see RE just sitting on the board, waiting.  By this point I have several glasses of wine in me so I say I have REAFFIXES, but I'm not playing it unless it's good.  Evwhore looks it up and yay for our side its good, so I play it for 101.  It was that kind of game.

One day you are genteelly swigging your Tanqueray, and the next you are headed for prison for fraud. Mr Jenkins, aka Conrad Black seen here in undated file photo.

I needed to ship a package to Canada so I went to a FedEx center. I am the only customer there. The conversation goes like this:

Do you have Ground Service to Canada?

Yes.

I'd like to ship this box 5 day ground to Canada.

Do you have a label already prepared?

No.

Sorry we can't help you.

What are those over there (pointing to labels)?

Those are labels, but you have to fill them out on the internet.

Why do you have labels here then?

Those are for domestic, you need international.

What about the labels that say International? Can you just create one using one of your 5 computers, seeing how busy you are and all?

No. You have to fill one out and come back.

If I leave and fill one out and come back can you ship this to Canada?

No. We don't have ground pickup on Saturdays. You have to go to Venecia (pointing out the window). Maybe they can help you.

There is no such road or city location called Venecia that I can find on FedEx's web site.

This isn't really a customer service center is it? (Do you have any Camembert?)

So I leave the customer service center and drive to a FedExKinko's center just to ask the price for shipping by air.

Can you tell me how much it will cost to send a package to Toronto? It weight 6 lbs. 12 oz. and the size is 24x24x5 inches.

Do you know the zip code for Toronto?

No, not offhand. Can't you look it up? (I don't want to walk out to my car and get the postal code).

No we have no way of doing that.

Your kidding right? You mean you are a shipping center but you have no way to look up zip codes? OK. Does your sister by any chance work at the FedEx customer service center on Kerner street?

I was wondering where I could meet a secret agent with pink hair, but it turns out this women, Erin, is just a cartoon. Apparently there are of lot of geeks who want so badly to know who Erin is that she has like 20 fan sites. She is voiced by San Francisco voiceover artist, Mo Mellady, but she doesnt have pink hair. I am crushed. I havent felt this bad since I found out that Dr. Katz's receptionist was a cartoon as well.

Those stupid fucking dancing shitbags on those omnipresent home mortgage ads that seem to be on every internet page I visit. Yeah, you know the ones, Im talking about. Can someone find the people that created those ads and just kill them? Please?

This is the result of todays laundry. Yes you count right -- 16 unmatched socks. I mean one dozen is ridiculous, but 16? I am tempted to just throw them all out and start over, but I am certain that will cause the missing half to reappear. Oh what stories they would tell. Probably not very interesting stories, mostly involving static cling.

Pluto today in a hastily cobbled press conference stated,
"I don't even want to be a planet in your candy-assed solar system.
I am out of here beotches." Pluto had said earlier that
it was considering a better offer from a non bullshit system near Tau Ceti, but it was later revealed to be a mere negotiating tactic, and that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) had called its bluff.

Charon, Pluto's publicist, said that Pluto is just a little depressed and enjoys being a planet and said that it been drinking and did not mean what it had said. Pluto then returned to the podium and wiping away frozen methane tears, begged "Please don't make me a dwarf planet like Sneezy and Doc. Give me one more chance. Lookout Mercury, you could be next." Mercury, currently the wimpiest Planet, did not appear to be nervous, claiming "mad planet skillz and a metallic core...so step off."


The IAU is unlikely to reconsider Pluto's status.


In an unrelated news story, the International Chemists Union (ICU) said that the element 94, Plutonium, had been demoted to a minor substance.


Financial News

DJIA down 41.5
PL down 2.35
NEPT +3.97

Today was a first.... A panhandler on a bicycle rolled up to me to ask for a dollar. I dont even own a bicycle. He should be giving me a dollar.

Every day I find a new reason to hate my Nokia phone.
No matter what you want it to do; it always seems to take far more keystrokes than necessary.

Today's beef is specifically Multi-tap, which is the ubiquitous text entry system using a telephone keypad. I know multi-tap isn't specific to Nokia, and wasn’t even invented by them (see Tegic), but they licensed it -- so they are guilty.

It requires single, double, triple, or quadruple-pressing a key in order to get the desired letter. For example, if you want to type the letter "E" you would press 33. The first time you press 3, it assumes you meant "D", but when you press it again, it decides you really meant "E".

Right away you see the problem. E is by far the most common letter in English, clocking in at an astounding 12.6%. The letter D is a paltry 3.7%. So more than 3 out of 4 times, Multi-Tap forces you to do twice as much work to get the letter you wanted. And what if you wanted to type S? It’s even worse: The S is a quadruple-press, sitting last on the 7 key with it's pals PQRS.

(By the way am I the only one who thinks Q comes too early in the alphabet? It should be moved to right before X. And W? It's a double V. Any idiot can see that. Anyway I digress.)

The frequencies:

P 2.3%
Q 0.2%
R 6.0%
S 6.6%

When you press 7, it decides you want the P key even though its the 3rd most likely choice. And Q? Fuggeddaboutit. It is 33 times more likely that you wanted an S instead of a Q, but you have to do twice as much work to get that S.

So what does this mean to your life in practice? If you send 20 text messages at 5 words per message and 5 letters per word, you will have typed 500 letters. Statistically you will have wanted exactly 33 S, 30 R, 11 P, and just 1 Q. To get those letters you will have pressed:

P: 11*1 = 11
Q: 1*2 = 2
R: 30*3 = 90
S: 33*4 = 132
---------------------
235 KEY PRESSES.

If the letters on a key were arranged in order of frequencies (SRPQ) instead of (PQRS), you would have pressed:

S: 33*1 = 33
R: 30*2 = 60
P: 11*3 = 33
Q: 1*4 = 4

---------------------
130 KEY PRESSES.

You will have been annoyed 105 less times. Multiply that by the number of SMS text messages and you will see why why most modern mass murders are cell phone induced ^{[citation needed]}.

The 7 key is probably the worst offender, but other keys are pretty stupid too. 3DEF is idiotic. 4GHI and 6MNO suck bone as well. Only the 8TUV is accidentally arranged in correct frequency order. I’m telling you the 8 key is a fucking joy by comparison. I don’t mind the 5JKL key so much even though the L is 40 times more likely than the J, because I probably type the J more often than is predicted by statistics alone. I know a Jenny and a Lenny, so I don’t know what the hell should happen in that case. Perhaps get rid of all friends who have names that start with one of those letters.

And this is just multi-tap. Wait until I have time to start ranting about T9.

I took the quiz and only got 6 out of 14.

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jac3he/GiveUpQuiz/hitlercoulterquiz.html