Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

Now that’s really unfortunate… and gross…

But the question on my mind (besides “How is that guy not vomiting?”) is, “Why the hell were they hauling a whale carcass through the middle of a city on a flatbed truck?”

Found here via here.

But to prove that every cloud, or punctured whale carcass, has a silver lining (ugh… sorry… I don’t want that image either), a few clicks onward led me to this wonderment: a photographic compendium of audio cassettes. Now this is a dead technology, laughably inferior to what we almost take for granted today. But from about 1981 when I got my first little red portable tape recorder from Radio Shack, until 1998, when I got my first CD burner, cassettes were it, baby, and I probably went through thousands of blank cassettes from just about every available brand between the ages of 8 and 24. And if you can’t appreciate that, at least I’ve found someone who can.

What other crazy stuff has been happening in professional sports while I wasn’t looking?

It’s true: I pay very little attention to professional sports of any kind. It’s not that I don’t like them, I’m just usually not that interested. I used to be; I collected baseball cards in middle school, and my peak of interest in pro sports conveniently coincided with “my” Minnesota Twins winning the World Series for the first time ever, in 1987.

Since then, it’s been all downhill. I was excited about the Vikings in 1998, only to be let down by Gary Anderson’s only missed field goal of the year, in the NFC Championship game. I watched the Twins’ tiebreaker game against the White Sox this year, only to be let down yet again by a team that has an incredible knack for falling ever-so-slightly short, again and again. Perhaps this “always the bridesmaid” trait common amongst the Minnesota pro teams is what makes it hard for me to be a sports fan. But more likely, I’m just not that interested, and that’s all there is to it. These days the only professional sports I actually get excited about watching are Wimbledon and the Olympics, and their relative infrequency probably contributes to my enthusiasm.

Yet, I am still drawn in by unexpected developments, like the Steelers’ 11-10 win this week. I knew that was a weird score, and I thought it was cool when I learned that out of the over 12,000 NFL games played in the league’s history to date, this was the first ever to end with that score.

But this fact still caught me totally off guard. I was reading kottke.org this morning and he just casually mentioned that the Seattle Supersonics had moved to Oklahoma City. To quote Dave McFly, “When the hell did this happen?” This year, apparently, and I had no clue.

Oh well.

You don’t run across this kind of stuff every day (anymore)

It used to be that the web was nothing but sites like this: rambling, semi-coherent… well, webs of absurdist humor with no interest in or consideration of making money or doing anything other than amusing an inner circle and confusing everyone else. Speaking of inner circles, there’s a fair amount of stuff on here devoted to Ayn Rand, but not as a genuine disciple of her grandiose quasi-philosophizing; rather, in parody and/or mockery of it.

I was particularly intrigued when I read the microprint at the bottom of the page and saw a passing thanks to someone who, while surely not the singular worldwide owner of his particular name, is nonetheless unique enough that I suspect he is in fact the same person I went to high school with, but who now lives in Sweden. I’m not sure what he’s up to these days, but seeing as his greatest claim to fame in the early ’90s was having screen printed a number of t-shirts featuring a blow-up of a frame from Bloom County, wherein a generic “Liberal” — who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to our band director — is popping prairie dog-like out of a hole in the ground* and shouting “No nukes!”, the connection would not surprise me.

And if you’re able to make any sense out of that last sentence, then you might enjoy reading on…

*OK, it’s not a hole in the ground; it’s a bush. But I was describing it from memory prior to my excessive amount of searching for the image finally bearing fruit, and afterwards I didn’t feel like rewriting the sentence.

Dog inequality in Walt Disney’s world

As I would have suspected, I am clearly not the first person who’s wondered about this.

I generally don’t think too much of Disney cartoons. (Interpret that sentence how you wish.) I appreciate the technical achievement of their older hand-drawn animated features, and I love the Pixar films, but, to paraphrase a political term, those are DINO — Disney in Name Only.

As a kid I had little interest in Disney. I preferred the sardonic, slightly (and sometimes not-so-slightly) twisted humor of Looney Tunes to the ingenuous, wholesome tone of Mickey and friends. But my kids these days are obsessed with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the Disney Channel. (“Hot dog hot dog hot diggity dog!” It’s on right now.)

With this increased exposure to the Disney cartoon characters lately, I am reminded of a particular aspect of these cartoons that has always troubled me. There are two dogs in these cartoons. You’ve got Goofy. He wears clothes, he walks upright, he talks, and he’s generally considered an equal and peer to the likes of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, etc. Then you’ve got Pluto. No clothes, all fours, mute (does he even bark?), pet of Mickey Mouse. (Yes, a mouse with a dog as a pet. What a world!)

I suspect that the problem here is that we’re talking about characters who were never initially intended to appear together in the same cartoon. Looney Tunes has suffered the same fate in recent times, such as with the abominable Baby Looney Tunes (which my kids also like), wherein infantile, diapered (yet surprisingly verbal) incarnations of Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Sylvester, Tweety, and a few other latter-day characters who previously occupied overlapping but distinct cartoon universes now all live in the same house with Granny as their caretaker. It’s fine if one character bridges these gaps — Bugs might appear in cartoons with both Daffy and Taz, but not at the same time; Kermit the Frog might appear on both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, but you’ll never see Fozzie in a twin bed with an F on the headboard, next to Bert and Ernie.

So really… maybe it’s not Walt’s fault. It’s probably just a case of latter day marketing “geniuses” who’ve twisted and combined these previously disparate, carefully constructed cartoon worlds into an illogical hodgepodge… and then thrown in just enough educational content to be able to stick the “E/I” badge in the corner of the screen to meet the FCC’s requirements. (Never mind the fact that cable channels like Disney aren’t subject to FCC regulation.)

OK, I guess I have no explanation. It just makes no sense. (After all, Pluto has been, since day one, the pet of a much smaller animal.)

Caribou vs. Starbucks: The Gingerbread Latte Smackdown

OK, there wasn’t really a smackdown. But if you are an aficionado of the overpriced chain coffeehouses, you probably know that each year between Halloween and New Year’s Day they both offer a trio of “holiday” beverages. The names may vary, but for the last few years I believe they’ve both offered the same three options: an eggnog-flavored latte, a peppermint mocha, and a gingerbread-flavored latte.

Last year they actually both called their gingerbread latte the “Gingerbread Latte.” As I said to SLP (and I think she was somewhat surprised that I chose the analogy, though I think it is apt), it’s like they both wore the same dress to the party. This year they seem determined not to repeat the same mistake: Starbucks has renamed theirs the “Gingersnap Latte” and Caribou has dropped it altogether!

Well, I’m not happy about it! I generally prefer Caribou over Starbucks for three reasons: 1) they’re based in the Twin Cities, 2) I (somewhat pathetically, I suppose) enjoy the ego boost from correctly answering their daily trivia question, and most importantly 3) they have free wifi. I can’t believe Starbucks still charges for wifi, but I suppose ultimately it comes down to the simple fact that they can.

The only thing Starbucks had going for itself with me was that its coffee is marginally better (especially the Pike Place Roast), but all things considered it wasn’t enough to make a difference for me, especially since there are two Caribous closer to me than the nearest Starbucks, and one of them is a drive-thru.

But now in order to get my gingerbread latte fix I’ll have to head to Starbucks… and call it a “Gingersnap Latte,” no less. Drat!

What’s worse, I’ve had two “Gingersnap Lattes” so far this year. The first one had some chunks of… something… in the bottom. They looked almost like pieces of real ginger, but I find that hard to believe, and didn’t bother to investigate them too closely. And the second one tasted more to me like red Plax than gingerbread. Yum!