bunsen_h

Why do so many of the phone-spam calls involve air duct cleaning?  I'd have thought that the market for that scam was more than saturated.  Not that I want phone spam for carpet cleaning, pet laundering, tree washing, etc., but they might get more business out of the population they're pestering.

At this point, I'm getting some mileage out of pretending that the Indian-accented callers with spoofed local phone numbers are calling for gay bondage phone sex, or trying to rent out their sisters.
 

I just had an unpleasant thought: The eviction of "the Necromancer" (AKA Sauron) from his base in Mirkwood, in the Hobbit movie, is going to involve the wizards standing around, zapping the Evil Eyeball with their wands/staves.  Bleah.

ETA: "Expello maloculus!"

In harmony.

Aaargh.
 

I am not a fan of Peter Jackson's work in Tolkien's mythos.

He changes things that don't need to be changed.  He adds action scenes that aren't internally consistent, nor consistent with the rest of the story; he removes thematic elements and chunks of plot that distinguish Tolkien's work from the generic extruded fantasy product of other writers.

Look, I don't object to his removing Tom Bombadil from The Fellowship of the Ring, as such, though it did lead to a series of plot deviations based on the knives that the Hobbits (originally) took from the Barrow-Downs.  (Those changes could have been corrected early in the story, if Jackson had wanted to.)  Bombadil was somewhat incongruous in the original book.  And there's only so much time and complexity that can go into a popular movie (though Jackson could have refrained from adding some dramatic but incongruous action sequences).

I won't complain at all if the Elves of Rivendell aren't doing the "tra-la-la-lally" thing from Tolkien's The Hobbit.  It's cute in a children's book, but it's seriously weird when contrasted with the Elvish people of The Lord of the Rings.  The Hobbit is notionally written by Bilbo, and he's an unreliable narrator — explicitly unreliable, with regard to his taking the Ring from Gollum.  And there's no way that Bilbo's claustrophobic wandering through the tunnels and caves under the Misty Mountains, in total darkness except for a dim glow from his sword and for the greenish glow of Gollum's eyes, could be portrayed in the movie medium.  I accept this; these changes are necessary.

But why do we have to have Gandalf telling Bilbo, in advance, that his sword Sting is of Elvish make and will glow blue when orcs and goblins are near?  Rather than letting Bilbo discover this for himself... and giving him just that little bit more to talk about to himself in the caves in the dark?

"You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated.  After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it." — Jubal Harshaw, in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  That's what I keep thinking about.

I haven't seen the movie, though I probably will after the initial rush has finished.  I've seen some promotional clips, and it seems to keep coming back to Jackson's need to change things that were perfectly fine in the first place, and probably better before the changes than after.
 

I've noticed that a lot of the ready-to-cook food items now carry warnings about how well-cooked the food has to be to be safe.

But how do I measure the internal temperature of, say, ravioli immersed in boiling water, to make sure that it's at least 74°C?  (Just 73° wouldn't be safe.  Or just waiting until it floats and has a reasonable texture for eating.)  Or the internal temperature of a pizza in the oven?  These would be tricky to measure even with the resources of a well-equipped lab.
 

"... And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking out singin' a bar of "Alice's CEGEP" and walking in. And friends they may think it's a movement.

"And that's what it is, the Alice's CEGEP Anti-Fee-Increase Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar."
 

If you'll forgive a brief cane-shaking kids-today-like-crappy-music comment (of the kind I've been making ever since I first heard music not selected by me or by my parents)...

Science, as a discipline — loaded word, that — requires long-term focus, both to learn a subject and to observe experiments.  You need to notice anomalies, exceptions to an expected pattern; if you're very lucky, they can lead to discovery of something novel and important.  If you're attracted by videos full of hard cuts, in which the longest uninterrupted segment is somewhat less than a second long, you're probably not going to do well in research.

(To say nothing of the bizarre and distasteful assumptions embedded in that video, about which much has been said elsewhere.)

Now imagining Magnus Pyke doing a voice-over: "She blinded me!  With science!  It's a Girl Thing!"
 

1. A member of a couple of social groups sends out a message to all the other members, inviting them to a social gathering. [Hmm, I'll have to see if I can get to that.]


2. One of the other members sends a curmudgeonly reply to all, warning that "crowding several people in a small area is unhealthy.  Regulations are in place limiting the number of people to a given area.  Unless there is very good ventilation, you are breathing a 'primordial soup' of viruses and bacteria that other people carry."  [Sheesh.  It's what we Earth-people call a "party".]


3. Another of the members sends a reply to all: "The man has definitely lost all his marbles.  Where does he get the idea that he is entitled to dictate the conditions under which a personal party is held?  He is definitely older but in no way is he wiser.  The man deserves to have no friends at all and he still doesn't understand why?  Absolutely impossible."  [Harridan, that's thee.]

Other groups don't seem to have quite such an incidence of pots calling kettles black and other socially-dysfunctional people.  The sad thing is that I was able to guess the general tenor of the two replies just from the identities of the senders.
 

I checked my class schedule, and realized with a shock that there's a course that I've completely forgotten about all term -- I haven't been to any of the classes, read any of the material, done any of the essays/assignments/course-work.  It's some kind of history/sociology thing (I can't even remember the details), an arts elective I need to complete for my degree, and everything is now riding on the final exam, which is in just a couple of days.

I picked up one of the thick, heavy course texts, and realized that with my current sleep deprivation / cognitive impairment, I can barely follow the material, let alone cram an entire course worth of uninteresting material in a short time.

Then I woke up a bit more and remembered that I completed the damn Ph.D. something like 17 years ago, and the B.Sc. with the arts electives was finished 25 years ago.

There are times when I really dislike my subconscious, and I think the feeling is mutual.
 

Over the last couple of days, I've had a strange combination of depression and housebound twitchiness, enough to push me to go through the list of recruiters and job-search sites provided by my former employer. Given my "eclectic" set of skills, I knew that the effort was likely to be frustrating.

(That's not counting the IT recruiter sites with seriously broken systems, of which there are far too many.)

Some sites have drop-down lists allowing me to identify skills which I have and which are in demand. It's disheartening that out of a list of some dozens of desired qualifications, I'm good at one, mediocre at two more, know nothing about any of the rest, have never even heard of at least half.

And now the automated recommendation messages are starting to come in. "Based on the information you provided us, we think that the following positions are good matches for you!" Let's see, I have no experience at all in any of the must-have skills, and the location is 50 km from here. Why exactly is that being recommended? Unsubscribe...

I've got an interview Thursday with another recruiting agency. I'm not holding my breath, but at least it sounds like they'll be filtering their possible positions to match what I might plausibly be able to do.

So what is this "chocohol" I keep hearing about?  What about "shopohol"?  "Workohol"?  And so on.

Implicitly, they're things that one can be addicted to, just as an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol.  At least, that's what I assume is the implication when I hear people referring to workoholics, shopoholics, and so on.  But as a form of word retroconstruction, this "[X]oholic" really doesn't make a lot of sense when one is describing a compulsion for [X].  An alcoholic isn't addicted to alc.

Please: "shopping fiend".  "Chocolate fanatic".  "Compulsive worker".

I have the same twitch reaction to "[Y]gate" being used to refer to "a scandal involving [Y]".  The Watergate scandal had nothing to do with water; it's the name of a hotel.