Sting nettles

I have come realize that there is a stinging nettle plant in my backyard. I discovered this on my finger. It hurt, and I was quite surprised at ho w a plant can actually inject you with acid. Cool stuff.

Anyway, I didn't really know what stinging nettles looked like. So I went to Google, and clicked on the first image it returned.



The image is part of a page that I found funny, though I tend to find humor in lots of places. The first two entries show poison oak and my stinging nettle, with nice pictures of both. The next two entries show pictures a bear and a mountain lion, taken in some dim basement museum somewhere.

It makes the stinging nettle look much fiercer than the bear.

Witty comment here

After all of this talk about unnamed sources, you would think that the BBC would have this figured out by now. I guess not.

(Of course, by the time you read this, they might have fixed it.)

Funnier than it needs to be.

Say you took Dave. (Please!) And you made him less funny, but still funny. And you gave him a job as a copywriter. But you only made him write about one product each day. (That's all he would probably get to anyway, but that isn't the point.)

He would make the description of said product funny. And so it is at woot.com. Their description of the product of the day is usually very funny. I've never bought anything from them, and their customer base seems a little bit cult-like. But I still go there to read the product descriptions.

Unfortunately, you have to go here to view the old descriptions, and then only if someone on the message board decides to copy it. But here are a few samples:

Initial IDM-1731 Portable DVD Player with 7” LCD: My Dog Skip may not play correctly due to unit’s antiskip protection.

Belly-up™ Athlon XP 2500 Complete System: You only get savings like these as the result of other people’s misfortunes, be they bankruptcies, police seizures or child labor. We consulted a guy we know who took an undergraduate Ethics class, and he assured us it’s OK to gain from Northgate’s misery as long as you don’t get too smug about it. Remember: if you have to go to the hospital for three or four days, this computer will probably be right back in the greedy clutches of the same repo men who cleaned out Northgate.

Taz Foot Massager and Mystery Speaker Bundle: THE SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS
Wisdom from the Woot! School of Marketing
Lesson 001: How to Unload “Taz” Foot Warmers

OK, there’s not really any good way to spin this, so we’ll just tell you what happened. One of our purchasers was at an expo in Ypsilanti, trying to make time with his favorite sales rep. She’s just his type: he’s got a thing for girls with corrective footwear and lazy eyes. (Something to do with his first girlfriend, we understand.) Anyway, the two of them end up lacquered on root beer schnapps in a hotel bar, and before we know it, a shipment of these ludicrous things arrives at Woot HQ.

As to whether he scored, Gus isn’t saying. We hope so, because back at the warehouse, we feel like we got the e-commerce analog of a “Cleveland Steamer.” Don’t look it up.

Casio SPF60-1AV Sea PathFinder Watch: Ping! Ptingg! Gunshots carom off of the pavement; you hug the cathderal wall that much tighter. A tantalizingly short block away beckons the pier and, beyond that, the sparkling expanse of the bay. You’ve just stolen the supersecret Delta Chip from a rogue engineer who planned to sell it to spies from the Enemy Bloc. Now you’re pinned under fire from said agents.

Now! You bolt across cobblestones for the water, zigzagging to make a worse target, your footfalls syncopating with the ping! of the gunfire in a tormented mambo of peril. As you reach the blessed blue of the sea, you hurl a grenade behind you and dive in. Under the surface you hear it: bleep bleep bleep! You gracefully dog-paddle in place and look at the dazzling electro-luminescent face of your rugged, stylish SPF60-1AV SEA-PATHFINDER watch – it’s 4 p.m.! Time to take those pills to kill that tapeworm you picked up in Karachi.

But you have something more important to do. The watch thermometer shows a balmy water temperature of 82 F, even when the depth gauge says you’re twenty feet below the surface. So you slip your collapsible scuba gear (not included) out of your left sock and take a leisurely undersea swim toward Pointe Noire, home of the disguised-lighthouse headquarters of the local Enemy Bloc spy cell. You’re not afraid, not armed with this water-resistant, devastatingly attractive Casio timepiece, with functions including five daily alarms, a stopwatch, a countdown timer, altimeter and a barometer. No, you’re pretty sure this won’t take too long. The tapeworm pills can wait.

You can vote at 18, drink at 21 ...

I get lots of free magazines. People seem to like asking me to subscribe to their magazine for free. I get the pretty boring Home Magazine. I get the always fun and often strange Budget Living Magazine. And I get the totally sketchy, suggestive article headlines but less interesting articles, so sketchy that I hesitate to leave it lying around, Best Life Magazine.

I also get Computer Games magazine. I read this one when I'm bored, even though I don't have time to play many games. (They did tell me about Hamsterball, though, which is lots of fun.)

In the June issue, the column at the back is called "Of Human Bondage: The latest moves in the game ratings game." I don't think the article is online. But it talks about how the game ratings board is trying to keep up with ever more intricate and violent games. And how kids tell their parents that the "M" rating stands for "Minor", when it really means "Mature 17+".

Delia Stone, a spokesperson for the FGRB, is quoted throughout the article. (I don't know who the FGRB is. Family Games Rating Board? All I know about is the ESRB.

Anyway, midway through the article, Ms. Stone comes up with a very memorable quote. The set up is the aforementioned kids who convince their parents that M stands for Minor.

"And then the parents come to us and ask why their children are playing games that teach them to beat up hookers, which isn't an appropriate activity until you're well over 18."

If you diagram the sentence, it might work, since the word "activity" references playing the game, instead of beating up hookers. I think.