Category: Humor

My New Low-Impact Drinking Game

Because I hate myself, I have begun to dip into the seemingly endless parade of made-for-TV Christmas movies currently running on the Hallmark channels. Furthermore, because the stories are so contrived and because the acting and direction are so pedestrian and because I seldom am exposed to so much concentrated blondness, I devised a drinking game. It’s a perfect drinking game for me because I seldom drink.

The rules are simple: take a sip if you see a person of color in the background of a scene; take a heavy slug every time a person of color has speaking lines in a scene; polish off a bottle if the movie’s leads are people of color.

Happy Holidays!

I need a flux capacitor to fix this…

I recently wrote an article for TidBITS about the app’s resurrected text-box-linking feature. A reader responded with complaints about Pages 7:

Whatever, it is still the most ignorant word processing software. I can open a document in Word I made in 2007 with office 2016- with Pages no way. I have to update to a more recent version. That’s not just cloudy it’s ridiculous and nobody I know who uses a Mac uses Pages. If they would have made it backwards compatible then it would be a viable software. But as we know Apple only does things (basic word) to their convenience on many levels.

I responded to the “backwards compatible” complaint:

I just dug up an old Word .doc file of mine that was last modified in 2004 and had no problem opening it with Pages 7. I can also open files made with Pages 4 in Pages 7. The rumors of Pages’ lack of backward compatibility may be exaggerated.

Turns out, this reader had a…unique…interpretation of what backward compatibility entailed:

Pages 3.0.3 will not open documents created with later Pages. That’s a problem.

Pages 3.0.3 was released 10 years ago. I suppose I could climb into my Delorean, travel to Apple in 2007, and deliver the Pages 7 file format specs to the Pages 3 development team, but that almost certainly would split the timeline and cause serious instability in the multiverse. So I probably won’t.

I guess the disgruntled reader wins this round.

I am not David Redux

[Author’s Note: A couple of decades ago, I wrote the following essay after I was called, yet again, “David” instead of “Michael” during a meeting. It lived on a site of mine for a while until the site, and the service that hosted it, went where all evanescent internet sites go. However, today I saw a cartoon by Chris Hallbeck that made me realize that Michael-David-derangement-syndrome was a real thing. So here’s the essay, brought back from the misty archives.]

I Am Not David

It doesn’t happen every day, but 2 or 3 times a year someone will call me “David.” It might be in a business meeting, it might be at a party. Almost always it is someone who has been introduced to me within the last 10 or 20 minutes.

Perhaps it is a failure of short term memory. I’m sure that’s part of it, and, as far as it goes, it is a failure with which I can completely sympathize. Lord knows, I’m terrible with names myself, and always have to take great pains whenever I’m introduced to anyone new to remember the names I hear so I won’t make a complete fool of myself. But it’s not the inability of other people to recall my name that bothers me. No, it’s that they almost invariably think that they know what my name is – and somehow, they always think that it’s David.

I have nothing against the name as such. It’s a good, traditional, easy-to-spell, eminently pronounceable, honest, work-a-day, dependable name. It’s just that a) it isn’t my name, and b) there’s no reason I can see that would make people think that it is. Some names, when you hear them, tend to conjure up a stereotypical image or two: Mortimer. Quincy. Bubba. But what quality is it that inheres in “Davidity”? I just don’t see it.

I know several genuine Davids. One of my best friends is David the neurologist. Another is my cousin David, the lawyer-turned-restauranteur. There’s also David the musician, David the Shakespearian scholar, and David the multimedia producer. No one could mistake any one of them for any of the others. Other than the fact that they are all adult males, there isn’t much that links them together other than the fact that they are named David and that I know them. They are not each other, I am not they, they are not I.

A friend of mine once suggested that calling me David was a form of crypto-anti-semitism: after all, David is a Jewish name, and I am Jewish. Calling me David is, according to this theory, an attempt to deny my individuality and pigeon-hole me in an ethnic category. Although I do love conspiracy theories, this one doesn’t work for me. I know of a lot of non-Jewish Davids: David Copperfield, David Letterman, David Rockefeller, David Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriet), Dafyyd Ap Gwilym. Not only am I Jewish and they are not, I don’t know Micawber, have never been to Indianapolis, haven’t entered politics, don’t have show-biz parents, and don’t write Welsh poetry.

So why do people consistently call me David? My theory is that everyone has a Platonic name, a name that is really theirs despite what birth certificates, driver’s licenses, social security cards, dossiers, permanent records, wills, stock certificates, and mailings from Publisher’s Clearinghouse may say. This is the True Name, the name by which the universe is uniquely configured to identify you. It has nothing to do with what the name represents, where it comes from, what qualities it evokes, or who else has it. It is simply the True Name, the Platonic Ideal of your name. Mine is, apparently, David.

But don’t call me David. I probably won’t answer.

Ozymandias at Mar-a-Lago

I met a traveller from a strife-torn land
Who said: “An orange and empty head of stone
Screamed at the people . . . Near it, in the grandstands,
Half drunk, a bitter correspondent, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and trembling hand,
Tell that its owner knew his hopes were dead,
Could not survive, insulted by this orange thing,
The crowd that mocked him, as his poor heart bled:
But in his notebook these words appear:
‘His name is Donald J. Trump, ranter of things:
Pay heed to his word salad, and despair!’
No one with brains remains. Past the fairway
On that benighted course, boundless and bare
The greens and empty sand traps wait, unplayed.”

Comic book cities

I was talking with a friend this evening to distract ourselves from our forthcoming dystopian future, and our rambling conversation came around to comic books:

“Most cities in comic books tend to be based on New York, because that’s where the comic book industry was based.”

“Yeah. Like Spider-Man really wouldn’t work in a city like Los Angeles.”

“Or in a small farming community in Kansas. What could he swing from? He’d do a lot of walking.”

“Imagine if the comic book industry had developed in San Francisco.”

“Hm. Well, comics would feature a lot more leather and chaps for one thing.…”

It happened again…

Every so often I’ll draw a cartoon and then, a few days or even a few months later, I’ll see that some professional cartoonist has done something that seems very similar to the gag in my drawing. It’s happened again, this time with the comic strip “Six Chix.”

I drew this cartoon using a caption I thought of a month or so back, and I posted it on my Twitter feed and Facebook timeline on October 2: Disappointed princess

Today I saw this cartoon in the Washington Post, attributed to Isabella Bannerman, Margaret Shulock, Rina Piccolo, Anne Gibbons, Benita Epstein, and Stephanie Piro:

Six Chix inspired by me?

Not quite the same gag, but close enough to make me wonder if any of the artists involved have been following me on Twitter or Facebook.

Coincidence, or the sincerest form of flattery?

Math is hard, even to talk about

Imagine how hard math would be to discuss if the length of a number’s name was equal to the number itself. For example, this might be how you would say 1,000:

That number you get when you take one, and then add another one, and then one more to it and you keep doing that a whole bunch of times while keeping track on, say, an abacus or by getting a big pile of peas, dried preferably because wet peas can be slippery and you might end up squirting one out from your fingers accidentally so it flies across the room and then you have to stand up and look for it because you don’t want to leave a pea sitting on the floor somewhere where you might step on it and mash it into your carpet, which can be hard to clean, especially when the pea mash dries into the fibers, so, anyway, you have a big pile, or maybe a bowl because you would be much less likely to inadvertently mess it up, of dried peas that you then move to another pile, or bowl if you’re using the bowl technique, which I strongly recommend that you do, one by one repeatedly until, your arms aching and your eyes burning, you have one more than nine hundred ninety nine peas in the second bowl.

Apple Watch—First Impressions

My Apple Watch, a 42mm Space Gray Sport, is still in the Apple Store’s “processing” phase and hasn’t yet been shipped, but because everyone else is already posting their first impressions, I would be disappointing my massive fanbase if I didn’t post mine.

So far, it’s a mixed bag:

  • It’s much lighter than I expected: I can’t even feel it on my wrist.
  • Battery life seems excellent. It hasn’t needed a new charge yet.
  • App loading appears to be broken.
  • The Taptic Engine is beyond feather-light. I haven’t noticed a single tap.
  • The learning curve is swift.
  • So far, no alerts to stand up, perhaps because I work at a standing desk. Will investigate further.
  • Siri doesn’t listen.

As I become more familiar with how it fits into my daily life, I’ll be back to post more.

What happened in Super Bowl XLIX

A recap for those who missed it.

Balls were thrown. Some were caught. Some weren’t. Some balls that were caught were caught by the opposing team. Fans cheered. Fans booed. There was a fight.

The most important thing we learned was that putting babies and puppies in commercials has something to do with selling automobiles and beer.

Oh, yes, we also learned that Katy Perry likes to ride mechanical devices while singing.