Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Junk I Read and Stuff
April 15, 2005

Have you noticed that a large percentage of the people who bother to comment here are in Europe? I find this interesting because I’m not in Europe yet I seem to have a European appeal. What’s that all about? Americans are apparently stingy with their comments.

Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of my internal (as in - not posted on this site anywhere already) blog links with you today. My presentation of these links is not a guarantee that you’ll like any of them, but now you’ll have a small taste of what insanity flavors my output when I start writing Stuff (as mentioned in the title) for this site.

Magazine Ideas
April 15, 2005

What would be great is an online magazine that is like POV Magazine. I really liked that magazine. It was all the male edge of Maxim, but with actual writing, actual news, and intelligent and beautiful women. POV had deeper articles (not just for bathroom reading) with actual useful information in them. The interviews were actual interviews - they didn’t focus on what the women liked in men they dated and how kinky they are. POV lacked the snarky flavor of Maxim - the stupid photo captions, the girls in nurse outfits in the health section, the testicle jokes every other paragraph, etc.

I have some ideas for what my magazine would include. See what you think.

Bad Red Pen
April 14, 2005

Crazy stories listening to Fox News today.

Parents are lobbying teachers to use purple pens to correct papers because their red pens are traumatizing. (As usual, Fox is months behind and factually skewed (dated 2004-08-23) on this story concerning the replacement pen color.) What exactly is it that’s traumatic about red pens? Perhaps if your homework/tests weren’t crud, you wouldn’t suffer the trauma. Maybe the trauma is caused by dreading the poor performance associated with seeing red marks on returned papers, and so after purple pens are in use for a while, parents will lobby teachers for a different color, since purple will have become traumatic, too.

Pat an I had a brief discussion last night about frivolous lawsuits and how they’re wrecking the price of media (like music and movies). There was a story on Fox News about a book a guy had written chronicling several suits that might not have made it past common sense - let alone a preliminary hearing - if people still had any common sense. For example…