Low-Fi Nose Blowing

It has been mentioned here that in the US, car commercials concentrate on the Important Stuff: the stereo.  The iDevice commercials are out and consist of everything being right with the world, according to Prophecy, and concentrate on the great camera and many colors in which the phone is available.  Ah... advertising.

• If you watch LivePD, you'll notice rows of people sitting at computers, looking incredibly serious and busy. LivePD isn't live, and those people are surfing pr0n and watching COPS reruns. shhhhhhh........

Remember when someone made a video a McDonald's burger, proving it never grew mold or broke down? Turns out it's the same for 4 day old cheese fries. Or so they tell me.

• I finally had Turkey Day turkey, only 10 days after Turkey Day. This means my turkey came early. We took everything to my parents' place and they invited Penny too. She was excited to meet everybody. Within 5 minutes, she had pooped on the floor. Not at all embarrassing. If she weren't so friendly, I would have been denied my own turkey. The dog has never done that before. I'm so happy to see you I could defecate.
• As if that weren't enough, she's on meds for this worm and that worm. It's Vet Bills all over again. My PTSD is killing me. I'm doing all I can to stay off the nightly news.

When looking at/for android apps, you can find 12 word-find programs, with tiny differences between them. You can also find a buttload of even more completely useless or questionable apps. I happen to have a few in mind: mushroom identification, flower and plant identification, learn 31 new languages, Burger King Russia, dna testing (dare we ask how the sample is obtained?), gay chat (because gays chat differently?), Lego (because an app is way more fun than actual physical Legos? Or just advertising the next, horribly expensive version), gesture control (I have a gesture for this), coloring book (just shoot us now), 7 minute workout (sure, let your phone kill you), Nintendo emulator (why not a Pong emulator?). My favorite, Lego aside, is the coloring book. Have we really come to the level when coloring books are a thing of the past? Crayons are so 2000 - get the app!

Maybe we can come up with a few suggestions... hmmmm....

• Turn signal emulator (banned in New Jersey, might be too complex and foreign for the rest of the country)
• Sex app: virus-free! Better than getting no sex at all (hopefully)
• Signature app: why should you stoop to actually picking up a pen?
• Virtual Reality Walking App - since you don't leave the couch anyway, why not show the grandkids what it was like.
• Ice Cream App: since you're unbelievably neurotic and think that a bowl of ice cream will put 100lbs on you, or you're lactose intolerant, you can fire up a vision of eating real ice cream! It even lets you pick the flavor... no weight gain, no spending your days off in the bathroom. If you order the right flavor, you get a second scoop. The second scoop will put weight on you.
• Text app: it's been a long day of looking at cat pictures. You're bushed. Fire up the text app... it will stay online all night, texting random people and telling friends your deepest secrets. All this while you recover from your near-fatal repetitive stress injury.

• Watch out - a clever spouse might figure out their Christmas gift. The parent firm of Kay and Jared jewelers exposed the order information of all their online customers. It's ok, they fixed it (groan)
• If you live in Ames, Iowa, for some reason, and don't believe in paying parking tickets, you're in good shape: the online parking ticket payment system got breached.
• If you're a Quora user, a data breach exposed 100 million users. Quora's response was delightfully understated: "We have discovered that some user data was compromised by unauthorized access.... "
• In case anybody's counting, and even if they're not, do you see a pattern here? Breach after breach, from local to national to international. It's because no one gives a rat's ass about security. No one will until the cost of dealing with the incident trumps the cost of implementing security. In other words, the cost of failure is already built into the budget.

The British Film Institute will no longer fund movies where the villain has facial scarring, to "remove the stigma around disfigurement".  No word on eye patches, gold teeth, large noses, sitting in chairs stroking cats, fangs, short people, invisible, more than 2 eyes or breasts, unibrow, people dressed in black, or male pattern baldness.

I'll be petitioning the BFI to no longer fund any pictures with a right-handed cast. There is a pervasive stigma against the left-handed, which cannot be allowed to persevere.  Move to England - we have no stigmas left!

• Why are we not done with the "unsubscribe" spam yet?

Dear lefty

• Janice Mung, of Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania, asks why it's difficult to hold a number of birds in your hand.
• It is helpful to limit the number of birds in your hand to the amount you can comfortably handle. Swallows are non-migratory. 

If you're feeling at all unsafe, now's a great time to move to New York. First they protected you from large sodas. Next up is legislation making it a misdemeanor to send pics of your junk to an unwilling recipient. You could face a year in jail, a fine of $1,000, or both. If you wind up in jail, you'll get close-up views of your cellmate's junk. New York: The New California

In an absolute shock and surprise, the UK is way ahead of New York, with this offense being the same as showing your junk in person (and causing offence, of course).

• Say what you want about George HW Bush, but his passing got some people a day off work. He will be remembered fondly.
• I suspect the former president died several years ago and they forgot to tell him. He looked pretty bad.

Dumb De Dumb Dumb

According to the Federal Communicators Network, even if you're trying, you're probably not writing for the average American. The long and short of it is that Americans have become more stupider over the years, as measured by Science.

Nearly 52% of U.S. adults score below Level 3 proficiency (i.e., they score Level 2 and below), with almost 20% of our population at the very lowest levels of performance.

A score of 3 on this test is considered proficient.
We can't have the Proles questioning policy, can we?







Dear lefty

• Roberta Ohmebum, from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, asks why her dog chews and rearranges her network wiring
• Because he's smarter than you.

All the Windows News That's Unfit for Mainstream Media to Mention

Windows 10 security questions prove easy for attackers to exploit.
You don't even have to read it - you get the idea.

Q. Why do Windows users always get on top?
A. Because Microsoft can only fuck up.



Mein Gott - It's Faceyspaces and It's Not Good

Internal Tensions are strangling The Facebook, for the last 600 days. 
Rather than waste any time caring about these issues, Lord Zuck has inaugurated the new Loyalty Test and its cousin, the new Loyalty Guarantee. It's a little helmet they put on employees. If they're stressed, they might not be loyal, so the Loyalty Guarantee helmet, which wipes out their personality and replaces it with a zombie-like pro-Faceyspaces worker drone. Should they decide to talk to the press, their head will ring so badly they'll wish for the peace and quiet of Afghanistan.

• In some buildings, there are more 'Black Lives Matter' posters than black people
• ex-employees have been talking out of school, further demoralizing current drones employees.
• Lord Zuck states that the entire kerfuffle is a result of biased press.

The files obtained in the UK have been released/leaked/put out to watch the world burn. Read them.  The best revelation was that The FB was fully aware of tracking you closely was creepy, so they went ahead and did it. They updated their cell phone app to require 'read call log permission.' The beauty of it is the engineers figured out how to ask for the additional permission without appearing to ask for it. The program read call logs and mined your call info to better suggest people you know on FB. Are you grokking this? They used your own phone calls to market to you. When you install the app, it requires a ridiculous amount of permissions, because it invades the phone and eats all possible data. You gave it permission. It loves address book info, and what marketer wouldn't?

I don't blame the evil scum FB - they have every right to do this, plus their users rubber stamp everything. At very least, access FB in your browser - not with an app. Even Messenger listens in.

Yul Kwon is Faceyspaces' 'privacy sherpa', but the position caused all sorts of misunderstandings. It was later clarified that privacy sherpa did not relate to user privacy - it related to FB's privacy. He was there to prevent leaks and see that no valuable (damning) information got to the press. They may be evil, but they're not stupid.

So next time FB suggests you might know Margie Wong, who you've been sleeping with when your wife goes out of town and who you exchange sexts with daily, you'll know where they got this information. Since FB knows you're married, your wife will also get Margie as a suggestion. A lot. Eventually she'll ask who this Margie Wong is who keeps showing up in her suggestions.



Ever go to a restaurant with a ridiculous wait time and get on the wait list, with your name and number? You'll be shocked to find this information is also mined. Pretty soon the way you walk when you leave the house will be subject to inspection.. the better to market to you.

If you must leave information, including when purchasing something, make one up. Same for motels with hourly rates, but you didn't hear that here.