Breathing is Overrated

A Philadelphia Jewish cemetery was vandalized the other day. Because, you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a dead Jew.

• Subway chicken has been revealed to be only 50% chicken - the other 50% is soy filler. Semi-vegetarian chicken!

On today's news: guitar strap pocketbooks. As a guitar player, I have to go and shoot myself now.

• My coworker, who uses very complex equipment, just requested training on the Windows Snipper (screenshot) program. Oh, my head...

I often recommend keeping your passwords in password keepers. Popular password keepers have just been found to be leaking personal information. Read it and weep.  I recommend Keepass, which wasn't studied.

• I don't often touch Hollywood, except for the funniest and most egregious nonsense, but this one really bowls me over: Kaley Cuoco and Big Bang Theory co-stars 'offer to take $100,000 per episode pay cuts so actresses Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch can get raises.' 
• Meanwhile, Mrs lefty is annoyed over Kaley's constant calls to me since she got divorced.

Unless someone is doing a monumental job of trolling, there is now a connected CampStove that provides real time data about the strength of your fire. And now, Chinese hackers will be the first to know you've hit 200 degrees! Folks, this will only get more stupid...

• Today is World Book Day. Books were incredibly important to me as a child, as I preferred their company to people. They allowed me to escape whatever I thought my life was and I'd stay up til all hours of the morning escaping. Here are a few favorites:
• Douglas Adams; Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a 5 book trilogy of hilarious, abstract humor, from a master of the language. Also read his 2 book series, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (there is currently a tv show on BBC America). Douglas (RIP) is my absolute favorite and I'd pay to watch him pace around a stage, saying whatever came to mind.
• Robert A Heinlein: I think I've read every one of his Future History series (with Lazarus Long), as well as everything else science fiction-y that wasn't oriented toward dragons. This man's writing and worlds truly kept me up til strange hours, instead of doing homework or trivial things like sleeping. He had a remarkable sense of the future and a very enlightened attitude towards sex for his time.
• Samuel Shem: House of God is an informative and hilarious story about residents in a New York hospital and their guru. It's difficult to make this sound funny, but read it. There was a sequel and a movie too, although I've never seen them.
• How many of these 20 classics have you read? It's British and I don't agree with every book listed, but I (embarrassingly) come up with two. You?

 Both fascinating and terrifying is a nondeterministic universal Turing machine using DNA molecules, as candidates for future organic computers. They will use DNA instead of silicon. The DNA can replicate itself to perform more calculations as needed.  Mark this date... SkyNet is becoming reality.

• despite Microsoft's touting of its latest OS as its "most secure," Windows 10 had the highest proportion of vulnerabilities of any OS (395), a 46 percent jump from Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (265 each).

My wife just brought home a package of table grapes. I didn't know these existed and am a little scared to try one.  If possible, I'd prefer couch grapes, as they're much better-suited to my lifestyle.

YAHOO!!!!!

Yahoo, the company to watch for routine security breaches of up to hundreds of  millions of users, in an SEC filing, blamed the 2014 - 500 million account breach on unnamed senior executives and its legal team for failing to properly investigate. This was a state-sponsored attack (in the current climate, we blame Russia for everything, but I'm thinking not). "...certain senior executives did not properly comprehend or investigate...". Further, Security discovered that the attacker had taken copies of the user database backup files with personal data of Yahoo users. This same attacker was busy again in 2015 and 2016 but this was not investigated, resulting in 32 million accounts being exposed.

At this point, if I were a Yahoo user, I'd be screaming, closing accounts, and ceasing all use of Yahoo products. If I were a shareholder, I'd be screaming for the heads of everyone on the board. Speaking of which, the counsel is leaving without severance and the CEO will not receive a cash bonus for 2016 and will forego her 2017 annual equity award (more than $10m). There are 43 consumer class action lawsuits, with possibly more to come.

These guys are truly The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. You will notice that the senior executives went unnamed and they managed to insert some uncertainty by claiming executives did not understand, slightly tinging the Security team. Other reports indicate the board simply ignored Security.

Hey Dum Dums... security is everybody's business. Companies need to lead in top-down manner, where everybody up TOP practices good security and it gets reflected down, making it part of corporate culture. So long as those up top don't understand and/or care, this is going to be a problem for all companies. Apparently Yahoo is too dim to learn from their multiplicity of mistakes.

Once again, close any Yahoo accounts you have and don't use any of their other products

Just Return the Crap and Be Done with it

Wee Wee Water

At the risk of sounding like a very popular neurotic Jewish comic, what's this nonsense about running water and peeing?  I vaguely remember hearing that if a woman wanted to pee in the bathroom or for a medical test, she should run some water. Then I remember hearing about old men having to run water to pee in general.

After I hit a certain age, I noticed this effect in reverse, sorta. I'd do my Manly Duty, washing dishes, and a short way into it, I had to pee. It sometimes takes me a while to catch on (to most things) and in a while, I noticed it.  It was a sad day for me, like maybe I should celebrate by signing up for AARP or Medicare.  Whenever I washed dishes. Whenever I got water from a faucet. And yesterday, was the final insult (I hope): while pouring Marshall's personally refrigerated Special Spaniel Water into his dish, the Pee Alarm went off again. What's happening to me?

BUT WAIT!!! If you keep reading, we'll spell out an even more absurd point, and we'll send it to you for nothing! Not even an additional handling or reading charge!  One day when filling up Marshall's water container for his refrigerated Special Spaniel Water, I felt the Urge. I thought I had outsmarted my body by going to the bathroom before I filled the container. But POOF - there it was. Only I didn't really have anything to give... yes, it was Phantom Pee Urge. This brand new diagnosis will be rushed through committee and will appear in an interim diagnosis supplement for all physicians.

• After weeks of sex with a transexual, a man kills her for "that sick thing between her legs." I'm thinking the guy must have had a small vision issue. Did he possibly miss the superfluous genitalia? For a few weeks? Is it THAT dark where he does it?

I hope your holidays were nice. 

I got a rock.

Speaking of the holidays, I thought it might be a good time to stand around the menorah, light some candles, and sing Jewish folk songs. Then I remembered I'm not Jewish.  Ok, I'm an ex-Jew... I gave it up for lent.

• The best quote of xmas had to come from my nephew, who asked the wife a question: "Do you get gift cards?" Yes. "Well, if you get any from Toys R Us, would you give them to me?"

There were a few neato mob brawls at malls over the holidays, including one in Ohio that resulted in a mall closing down. Hmmm... organized mobs.. at about a dozen malls... who's doing the organizing?

• Men are from Mars, women are from Betelguese. We had some communication issues in our marriage that we straightened out, to great relief. However, my coworker and I are going to require 145 intensive sessions of Communication Marriage Therapy to be able to work just poorly with each other. The more we talk, the more my eyeballs try to look at each other and end up rolling like a slot machine. [this takes place over text messages]:
• ME: put the red one on the green peg
• HER: all I have is green
• ME: yes, the green one. put it on the red peg
• HER: ok. what about the fact that the peg is wood?
• ME: they're all wood
• HER: I'm so stupid
• ME: why are you stupid?
• HER: because I couldn't do yesterday's work
• ME: the machine was down yesterday
• HER: nobody told ME
• ME: then you're not stupid, are you
• HER: that's ok, I'm stupid about other things
• ME: don't worry about it
• HER: I have to - it's my nature
• ME: ok, try to keep yourself up all night, worrying about it
• HER: I will, thanks. now I'll shut up.
• and people wonder why I wander up and down the aisles, laughing maniacally, cursing randomly, and banging my phone on the desk, like some sort of new-age morse code.

I wanted to get some stuff done today but I'm having some difficulty. I have a bit of a medical condition that comes and goes, generally in the morning. I asked the doctor what to do and he said to drink some caffeine-containing beverages. The medical condition, by the way, is called Tired, or as we know it, Tired. My coworkers cannot drink Mt Dew because it makes them fly around the room, frequently bumping into ceiling fans. It's a ($&#ing mess to clean, especially when it gets on your clothes. I can drink Mt Dew and feel absolutely nothing, either from sugar or caffeine. So I drink a cup of coffee every morning. It helps me wake up to the horror that will become my day. The only problem is that I run the risk of falling back to sleep for a few hours, which tends to be frowned upon, even for my friends in government. Yes, the doctor is flummoxed as to how caffeine can take up to four hours to be effective. I'll get up from my desk, pick up a pen, and start shaking wildly. This starts my own bouncing off the walls. Fortunately, due to fear of heights, I do not bounce all the way to the ceiling fans, much to my wife's dismay.

Nobody seems to have even a halfway decent answer to this question (why I don't make it to the ceiling).  They also can't figure out why coffee takes so long to take effect. As you'd expect, I have a theory. I always have a theory; usually waaaay out there in left field, so far out of the box that no one can find it, even with satellite assistance.  You see, I am asleep most of the time. Only when the caffeine hits am I awake. While I think I'm falling asleep, I'm actually already asleep. Another one solved, Holmes.

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My wife just went for a nap. This causes some sort of quantum time warp where she sleeps but in our subjective reality, it can last anywhere from five minutes to sixteen hours (you think I'm kidding?). This is precisely why we cannot understand quantum physics, or Nap Physics, as we Nap Physicists prefer to call it.

After the subjective nap time has elapsed, she will emerge from her cave, looking 3/4 asleep, not having seen her shadow or me. If I say Good Morning, she may acknowledge me in a voice that would make a frog sound like Pavarotti. She'll tell me she came out for something to drink. When I ask if she's ready to get up, she tells me she's not done sleeping yet. This is either the most brilliant statement about sleep ever, or .....