“Your daughters won’t even want dolls once I get through with them.”

I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it’s still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that’s also the part that is less important.

I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.

Monty Python used to be my favorite comedy group. Now it’s the Cleveland Browns.

Wow, I hate to bring up Spanish smoked paprika then.

Put black garlic in everything.

I started watching TV cooking shows in the late 90s (e.g. Good Eats, Iron Chef, Naked Chef etc.) and I would just cook what I saw for my friends. They were all “wow ChickenLady you’re such an amazing chef” for a few years until they started watching that shit themselves. Then they were all “you should have used white balsamic vinegar and black garlic in that”.

I always liked United Snakes.

Sure, fascists gonna fasc.

Franco did do the Allies a bit of a solid by not hooking up with Hitler. Britain would have lost Gibraltar and then all of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Hitler wouldn’t have needed to waste so much military strength in the theater and could have concentrated more on the Soviets (and started Barbarossa earlier in the year). Even their fucking jets would have worked a lot better.

Microsoft’s business model has always been getting businesses who are even stupider than them to give them tons of money. Nothing is ever going to change that calculus.

Interestingly, the calorie counts on food packaging are derived from the Atwater system (and later modifications) that estimate digestible calories from the amount of fat, protein and carbohydrates in each food item. These numbers are based on experimental research on food substitution and weight loss/gain done in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The calorie counts for alcohol are similarly based on the measurable amount of alcohol in each drink, except that the number used (7 kcal per g) was just a complete guess on Atwater’s part since they couldn’t do equivalent substitution experiments involving booze.

I had a friend in college whose parents were big into world government and had founded an organization to promote that. Talking to them was a weird experience because 1) they felt every problem facing the world could be solved by a one-world government, and 2) they actually felt achieving that world government was a realistic possibility. And it wasn’t like they thought the solution was just the USA taking over everything; they were very critical of everything about this country.

I don’t know if this is irony or not, but that friend is now worth $34 million after her parents’ company went public. She doesn’t say anything about world government any more.

My dentist plays a '70s soft rock channel. It’s really impressive how good the production is on that stuff, and people could actually legitimately sing! No autotune or melodyne in sight.

I thought Imagine Dragons was a band I’d never heard until I checked out some of their songs and realized I’ve actually heard them a million times … always in grocery stores shopping at night.

That’s what I said now

I notice they always have their shoelaces tied, too.

Horseshoe crabs have nine different types of eyes. Even that tail is essentially a kind of eye, covered with photoreceptors. Not sure of the relevance of this horseshoe crab fact, it’s just fucking interesting.

Squirrels have eyes on the sides of their heads and they’re pretty fucking good at climbing and jumping. Next theory …

“This email could have been a meeting.”