Regruntled.com

Obama’s decision to renege on his promise to accept public financing seems to have triggered a number of editorials.  US News & World Report calls him a “serial flip-flopper” and notes:

 

Change we can believe in? No, change we can count on, because as soon as he takes a position, we can count on the fact he’s going to change it in front of the next audience.

 

It’s official.  Obama is just another weaselly politician.  He may be the most talented weaselly politician in a generation, but you still can’t believe anything he says.

 

 

I thought this was a sick joke, playing on the tendency of small children to put objects in their mouths.  Does the back of the box have diagrams of the Pediatric Heimlich Maneuver?

 

Maybe not.  The Kelloggs web site lists the product.

Wonkette accuses Cindy McCain of stealing recipes, one for oatmeal butterscotch cookies in particular.

• Cindy McCain’s recipe at Parents.com
• Recipe at Hersheys.com

I don’t know which is more pathetic, Cindy McCain pretending to be an apron-wearing, cookie-baking homemaker, or the self-appointed Recipe Police googling everybody’s recipes to detect plagiarism.

Reader TTB sends this story. It used to be that “news” was something that actually happened. Nowadays news is a video that someone says they’re going to show someone else a couple of days from now, that might or might not turn out to be fake, not that it matters, because you can’t see it anyway:

Peckman said the general public will have to wait to see it because it’s being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.

“No one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary,” he said.

Note that Add-Art overwrote the banner ad.

Friday update: maybe we can see it after all.

If it has

,

then it’s not the ,

is it?

Well, OK, but before and after what? Before and after 50 Gs in a centrifuge? Before and after sitting on the dashboard all afternoon? Before and after the lettuce spontaneously mutates from Greenleaf to Iceberg? No. Before and after purchase. The image on the left is what the fast-food place advertises. The image on the right is what you actually get.

Weight Watchers Diets and Recipes has a whole series of before and after fast-food pictures. Not for the squeamish.

 

Yes, it really is Meat Loaf in the Go Phone commercial. Eddie from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Selling cell phones. Rock legends gotta eat, I guess. And what’s with Tiffany? She was 6 years old when this song came out. Maybe Ellen Foley wasn’t desperate enough.

Researchers tested computer keyboards in a London office and found high levels of bacteria:

In one case, a microbiologist recommended the removal of a keyboard as it had 150 times the recommended limit of bacteria.

That meant it was five times filthier than a toilet seat that was swabbed in the same test.

The main cause of a bug-infested keyboard is eating lunch at your desk, as the crumbs encourage the growth of millions of bacteria.

Poor personal hygiene, such as dodging the wash basin after going to the toilet, may also be to blame.

Vindication! I’ve occasionally washed my hands up to my elbows with anti-bacterial soap after using keyboards in an office full of coughers. Now I can point to some research. I’m no longer obsessive-compulsive, just prudent.

Freakonomics has an interesting study of TV weather forecasts in the Kansas City metro area. On average, the forecasters were 85% accurate in forecasting tomorrow’s precipitation, declining to 73% for 7-day forecasts. The problem with this that it only rains in Kansas City 14% of the time, so if a forecaster simply always predicted that it would not rain, he’d be accurate 86% of the time. And that’s not just for tomorrow’s weather! He could always predict that it would not rain 7 days from now, or 30 days from now, and he’d still be right 86% of the time.

The article goes on to discuss hiring practices at the TV stations:

When directly asked if accuracy mattered in forecasting, every station manager and meteorologist said it did. But when asked what steps they had taken to measure and ensure accuracy, they were without answers.

No meteorologist or television station kept records of what they predicted, nor compared their predictions to actual results over a long term. No meteorologist posts their accuracy statistics on their résumé. No station managers use accuracy statistics in the hiring or evaluation of their meteorologists.

Reader jde alerted me to a new product in Japan: a soybean simulator. The idea is that instead of fidgeting by popping bubble wrap, one can fidget by popping soybeans out of their pod. The pods are plastic, the beans are plastic, and the beans can be popped out over and over again.

I’m not fond of soybeans, but I do like peanuts, and I do find it satisfying to open the shells. But I eat the peanuts, and I open the shells in order to eat the peanuts. I don’t eat the peanuts because I like to open the shells.

There is something perverse about separating an activity from its reward, and offering people a fake activity without the reward. It’s like teaching Pavlov’s dog to ring his own bell.

See also:

• Bubble wrap