Bits and rants from Tony Emond
Dilbert creator Scott Adams: “Apparently Swedish laws are unique. Â If you have a penis, you’re half a rapist before you even get through customs. And if your condom breaks, that’s jail time. What I’m saying is that the Club Med in Sweden is a nervous place.”
Also Swedish condoms apparently break all the time, so I think I’m going to vacation somewhere else!
I’m not a fraud specialist, nor do I want to encourage people to defraud authorities, but if you’re going to pretend you’re pregnant so as to get state benefits you really should stop claiming after 9 months. A pregnancy that lasts more than 3 years becomes suspect at some point.
As if there weren’t already enough known reasons that lead the North American economy to collapse in 08, here’s another — the SEC didn’t see anything bad developing because its staff was too busy looking at porn. So they didn’t see it coming because they were distracted looking at a lot of people coming. They lost sight of the money and concentrated on the money shots. [insert your own porn-themed joke here].
A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.
Yes, perseverance is often something to be commended, but it’s really time for that guy to admit he has a problem.
You may or may not know, but this week is National Procrastination Week. I really wanted to mention this before Thursday, but, you know.
In a spectacular display of the sort of current-events knowledge and attention to detail that made her an ideal fit as White House Press Secretary under George W. Bush, Dana Perino went on some Fox News pundit show and affirmed that no terrorist attacks took place in the US while Bush was President. Which must mean that I and millions of others just imagined seeing the WTC buildings collapse into a heap of rubble.
Today is World Toilet Day, a day of awareness so people can reflect on their less fortunate counterparts who do not have access to proper sanitation facilities. I think it was invented by people who like to make bad puns. The organizers hope that this will lead many developing countries to make sanitation infrastructure their top priority, but I and many others would settle for it being number two [/rimshot]. People who visit the web site are encouraged to twitter their thoughts on the event, but frankly I don’t think that’s such a good idea. So if you’re having a party tonight and there’s an awkward pause just connect your laptop to your TV and celebrate with a mass viewing of 2G1C.
Ah, the good old days of dialup internet and restricted university access, a time when people started wanting to know what this “internet” thing was about… may they never come again, except perhaps in parody form: Mastering the Internet and Mastering the Internet Part 2.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what this video is. You have to see it for yourself.
Amazon.com — the US version, not the scaled-down imitation you get in other parts of the world including Canada — is a pretty wonderful store, and although they’re famous as booksellers they’ll sell most anything. Including, and I did a double-take when I saw it, an artificial insemination kit for your pet. Now I’m not a pet owner or a pet expert, but really, shouldn’t you go to your veterinarian for this sort of thing?!?
Engineers rarely make good graphic artists, as graphic artists rarely make good engineers. Rarely is this truism better illustrated than in this poster for the Manchester Metroshuttle entitled “Making the City Work Together”.