David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 264

Careful Or You Could Wake Up Swedish

There are so many things to be careful of these days. Air pollution. Carcinogens. Cholesterol. Urban violence. I just saw a new one to add to the list. If you aren’t careful, you could wake up Swedish.

Okay, maybe this isn’t a real danger. However, it did pique my interest when I saw the article. Apparently, Navy veteran Michael Boatwright was discovered unconscious in a Motel 6. Upon awakening at a hospital, he spoke only Swedish and said his name was Johan Ek.

Doctors apparently diagnosed Boatwright/Elk with Transient Global Amnesia. There are reportedly quite a few things Boatwright/Elk doesn’t remember, and his connection to Sweden is unclear. He’s apparently visited the country before, and people on the Internet claim to recognize him as someone who moved to Sweden at some point, but where and when Boatwright/Elk learned to speak Swedish is unknown. One thing he definitely doesn’t remember: how to speak English.

I hope the guy ends up being okay, but it doesn’t sound like he’s in any real medical danger. It just sounds like something really odd happened to him.

Regardless, just hope you don’t go to sleep one night and wake up Swedish. I blame IKEA.

The Excuses For The Hitler Banner Don’t Really Wash With Me

Thailand’s premier university is apparently having some problems because it allowed students to put up a graduation billboard mixing Adolf Hitler with a group of superheroes. They are apologizing, but they are also offering some excuses. I’m not really buying them.

According to the article, the billboard “was painted by ignorant students who didn’t realize Hitler’s image would offend anyone.” The article also reports that the teaching of Thai history involves mainly Thailand and that world history is barely covered, the holocaust not at all. However, the school dean also describes that he called the responsible students in to explain themselves and they said it was supposed to show that the world has both good and evil and that Hitler was supposed to be conceptually juxtaposed against Superman, Batman, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man.

That means that the students were not simply ignorant. Whether the university was or not, the students clearly realized who Hitler was enough to use his image to represent evil. I don’t think you can say they didn’t know who Hitler was or what he did based on gaps in their education. Clearly, the students are better educated than their university gives them credit for.

Frankly, I think the students well understood that Hitler’s image could offend. At the same time, I don’t find fault with their concept, but rather the execution. Since their idea was to show that there is good and evil in the world and that the forces of good (represented by the superheroes) protect the world from the forces of evil (represented by Hitler), I don’t think the concept was a problem. I actually kind of like the concept. The problem was that the execution wasn’t good enough that people could understand what they meant. Their intention reportedly wasn’t to label Hitler a superhero, but the billboard didn’t make that clear. People were confused as to what the billboard was saying.

I don’t know why the university didn’t simply say that the students had not intended to portray Hitler as a superhero and screwed up in making their billboard confusing. That is apparently what actually happened and would have been much more believable than simply saying that the students were too ignorant to know who Hitler was right before making statements that clearly showed that the students knew full well.

Ignorance just doesn’t appear viable as an excuse here.

Asiana Confuses The Source Of Their Damaged Reputation

Everyone probably had already heard anyway, but I mentioned yesterday how a television station made a major boffo in releasing fake names of pilots from the crashed Asiana flight that were racially offensive. In an interesting twist, , claiming that their reputation has been damaged.

I think Asiana is confused.

The boffo over the fake and racially offensive pilot names has certainly hurt the reputation of the news station involved (KTVU) as well as the anchor and the NTSB. However, I’m pretty sure that the main current damage to Asiana’s reputation came from the fact that ONE OF THEIR PLANES JUST CRASHED!

Seriously? How is some news station getting punked like this supposed to have hurt Asiana’s reputation? Is there much that can really be hurt right after a crash?

“Hey, Rob. Let’s book us a flight on Asiana.”

“No, Neil. Somebody got tricked into thinking that they had pilots with racially offensive names. Let’s pick another airline that’s recently had a plane crash. I’d be much more comfortable with that.”

This just boggles my mind. By the way, apparently the intern at the NTSB did not make up the fake names, just falsely confirmed them without authority. That really raises the question, where the hell did these names come from? More interestingly than why the intern confirmed the names without authority, why did the intern confirm those names? They definitely weren’t right.

Regardless, I’m amazed that Asiana thinks this is where their reputation took a hit. I’m even more amazed that they are considering suing over it, particularly considering that the ability of crash victims to sue Asiana is so up in the air.

KTVU Shows Chicago Sun-Times How To Really Be Offensive In Reporting On Asiana Flight

I’m sure you’ve already heard about KTVU’s little problem in reporting on the Asiana flight crash. However, one thing that may not have occurred to people yet is how KTVU has thereby shown the Chicago Sun-Times how to REALLY be offensive when reporting the news.

After all, the Chicago Sun-Times caught a little flack when they tried to be clever by referring to the crash Asiana flight as ‘Fright 214′ because some people interpreted that as making racist fun of Asian accents. However, that’s nothing compared to reporting the names of the pilots from the crashed plane as “Sum Ting Wong,” “Wi Tu Lo,” “Ho Lee Fuk,” and “Bang Ding Ow.”

Trust me, check that link again. There’s a video where a woman reads these names and still doesn’t realize that anything is incorrect.

I mean, the Chicago Sun-Times thing is kind of difficult to come to a decision on. It could be interpreted as racist and perhaps would have been better not used if that was thought of, but it’s obvious that the racist interpretation was not intended. “Sum Ting Wong,” “Wi Tu Lo,” “Ho Lee Fuk,” and “Bang Ding Ow” is something else entirely. Clearly KTVU has something to teach the Chicago Sun-Times about how to be offensive when reporting the news.

Apparently, some intern at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) got a call from KTVU and decided to play a prank on them. I’m not sure why, but I’m sure Daniel Tosh will be hiring him real soon (though the NTSB is likely going to be firing him even sooner).

Regardless of any of that, the mind still boggles at how KTVU didn’t realize what was going on. That anchor even read the names and didn’t miss a beat. I know anchors can be somewhat mechanized in their performance, but still. No one realized that someone had played a cruel joke? No one?

The NTSB had to get into the dumb behavior act by stating that “A summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority.” Really? You needed to say that? I always thought it was within the authority of interns to lie about the names of pilots from crashed aircraft while simultaneously making lame racist jokes. No crap? You really didn’t tell the intern he could do this?

I know that some jobs have to be performed fast and that sometimes doesn’t leave people time to think. As a result, they sometimes do things that make them appear to be the most boneheaded person on the planet. However, as much as I try to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, I’m still shaking my head on this one.

The Starving Of The World Are Going To Kill Us For Copying Park Rangers

I’m not sure how many of you saw this already, but apparently a park ranger from Death Valley National Park posted a video where she fried an egg in a skillet using only the heat of the desert sun:

This wouldn’t be such a big thing, but apparently people started copying her. For some reason, these people weren’t using skillets, just preferring to cook the eggs on the ground. So many people were doing this that the park had to ask people to stop because of the mess it was making. Though weather conditions have reduced temperatures in the park to the point that this isn’t an issue anymore, I’m thinking this is the sort of thing that is going to cause the starving of the world to rise up and kill us. Possibly eat us as well.

I suppose I should explain. Given the fact that people weren’t using a skillet, I’m guessing that they didn’t eat the eggs afterward. It’s possible, but I don’t think there’s much of a chance of it. Further, think how many eggs must have been involved if the park service finally had to ask people to cut this crap out. It must have been an awful lot of eggs. Just think about that.

After all, how many people could have been fed by those eggs? I don’t necessarily think that we are obligated to feed everyone in the world who is hungry, though I’d rather we did so, but the amount of food that we simply waste is staggering. There are hungry people in the world and we have so much food that we have no problem dumping tons of it all over the ground simply to watch it sizzle like we could have already seen in an already available video.

Next we’re going to grow endless fields of wheat and then just set it on fire to watch it burn because we aren’t hungry right then.

I’m not good enough that I send all my spare money to feed the hungry or anything, but this even struck me as a little bit over the top. We may have more food than we need, but we can at least not waste it and demonstrate that in such an obvious fashion. Someday the hungry are simply going to kill and eat us. Weakness from hunger is probably the only reason they haven’t done so already.

I Award Comcast “Worst Spam Control”

I would like to take this time to award Comcast “Worst Spam Control” ever. Thank you. They suck.

This all started when I asked my wife to send me an email last night. She’s off at grad school and I needed some information. She sent it, but I didn’t receive it. I had her send it again. I still didn’t receive it. Eventually, I figured Yahoo was having issues sending and went to bed. However, in the morning, I still had nothing.

I checked my spam folder on my Comcast account. There was nothing in my spam folder. I delved into the email settings and found that it defaulted to not saving copies of email marked as spam. That meant they were deleting anything they thought was spam and I never saw it, never had the chance to tell them it wasn’t spam and fix their filter settings.

Mind you, I’ve still been getting spam.

I delved around a little more and found a safe list. It said that emails on this list would be delivered. I added my wife’s email address. Then I got no email all day. In fact, I didn’t get the message I sent to myself containing a file I needed at home. I tried from my work address as well, but didn’t get that either.

After an online chat with a very cryptic help person (my only guess is that English was not her first language), I managed to interpret that if you used the safe list, you ONLY got email from the people on the safe list.

What a dumb feature. There was nothing on the page for setting that option that indicated that it was such a draconian setting (the help person suggested I copy my entire contact list into the safe list, but I need to get email from people I don’t already know and don’t keep an extensive contact list because that just helps out spammers when they manage to get into an account). Besides, they used the term “safe list” which is already a known term in email filtering for a list that will override the spam filter, but not block anyone not on the list. There was nothing on the page for the setting to indicate that they were using the term in anything other than the normal manner, or any warning that anyone not on the safe list would be blocked.

Of course, I turned off the safe list. Then the help person explained that all the emails I should have gotten today that were blocked because of the “safe list” setting were irretrievable. Because they’d been mistakenly blocked, there was no way to ever get them again. There could have been a bill in there, a story acceptance, or anything. I just have no idea.

Hold on though, it gets better. I had my wife email again once I had the safe list turned off. Still nothing. I checked the spam folder, but there was nothing there. Mind you, I had checked the setting earlier in the day telling Comcast to retain messages marked as spam, but still nothing.

Finally, I turned off all spam filtering and had my wife resend. Finally, the email came through.

So, thanks Comcast. Thanks for still delivering me spam while blocking my legitimate mail with no apparent way for me to tune or even find out what the hell you are blocking. Thanks for using a term that already exists to mean a different thing and block all my mail for a day. Thanks for making sure that I could never get that email that you mistakenly blocked back. Thanks for having semi-helpful tech support. Thanks for wasting a great deal of my time and making my use of your service extremely more frustrating than it needed to be. Thanks for having spam controls that are so poorly designed and explained that I’d rather just shut them off entirely than try to use them. Thanks, you suck.

Summer Reading List Strikes Blow Against Literacy

No, you didn’t read that title incorrectly. Apparently, a Long Island school district is catching crap right now because their summer reading list contained a great number of errors. I’m a bad person for typos myself, but I do have to admit that this isn’t the most shining moment in the promotion of literacy.

Some are smaller and sillier, though embarrassing. For example, I am familiar with Emily Brontë, but I am unacquainted with Emily Bonte. The same goes for George Orwell/George Ornell.  Less understandable is The Great Gypsy by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m not sure what the hell that is, but I kind of want to read it.

I know these errors aren’t really that big a deal, but I have to admit that I took notice of this. I can only hope the kids do better than whoever made the list. Perhaps this school district needs a tiny bit more funding.

Just check out the list for yourself and see how many errors you find. After all, it’s usually much more fun to do something snarky than to actually positively address a problem.

An Idea To Make Purse Dogs Less Objectionable

I know that not everyone finds purse dogs (you know, the itty bitty little dogs that some people, not always women, carry around in purses like a fashion accessory) objectionable. However, I think we can agree that most people do. In my view, we will call these the ‘sane people.’ However, regardless whether or not you agree with that proposal, I have an idea to make purse dogs less objectionable.

Ventriloquism.

That’s right, ventriloquism. Let’s totally separate out the argument that people with purse dogs seem to have a problem with treating their dog as a fashion accessory and thereby mistreating the animal even if they are not literally abusive (some, not all). Let’s also separate out the argument that seeing someone carrying a purse dog down the street is horrifying on many (taste, good sense, etc.) levels. Beyond all of that, aren’t purse dog practitioners missing a grand opportunity?

After all, the art of ventriloquism seems to be under-practiced in contemporary America. Considering that and the fact that these purse dog people are already horrifying the rest of us, shouldn’t they at least consider throwing us a bone and learning ventriloquism? Anytime they talk, they should make it look like the dog is doing it.

Just imagine:

“You have a purse dog?” a horrified passerby on the street incredulously remarks.

“It’s not what it looks like,” the dog in the purse apparently replies while the human carrying the purse stands mute. “I’m actually a mad scientist trapped in a dog’s body and this person is just a robot designed to carry me around. Think Krang from  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

“Oh, all right then,” the formerly horrified passerby replies. “Carry on then.”

See how much better that would be? I think it’s the least these purse dog people can do to try to make it up to the rest of humanity. Frankly, and though this is just my personal opinion, I think they owe us.

Criminals Need To Stop Dressing As Superheroes. It’s Confusing.

Criminals really need to stop dressing as superheroes. It isn’t apparently helping them any and it’s confusing for the rest of us. Perhaps they are intending it to be ironic, but it doesn’t seem to be helping much as a disguise. Though it is giving us all a laugh, it would seem more appropriate if they dressed up as villains.

Let’s consider the as of yet unnamed 16 year old boy who robbed the Colorado State Fair in a Batman costume. I’m guessing the Batman costume was supposed to hide his identity, but when video of him in the costume during the robbery was shown on TV, he turned himself in. I guess it must not have been enough of a disguise if video of him in the costume still prompted him to turn himself in. If that is the case, though, why did he dress up as Batman in the first place? Perhaps he should have chosen something that more sufficiently obscured his identity. That would seem to be the point.

Thomas Williams is a different story altogether. According to this article, the 6-foot-5, 23 year-old, 295-pound Williams was caught vandalizing a high school while wearing only a pair of Spider-Man underpants. Obviously, disguise wasn’t likely the motive behind such a clothing choice, unless perhaps his most recognizable features are obscured by underpants. Although, there is always the possibility that he hoped that police would be unwilling to touch him and he could get away. Regardless, Williams must have discovered what most of the rest of us found out at a much earlier age: Underoos do not confer super powers (though at least it was underpants for a super-powered hero, as Batman would have been even more ridiculous since Batman doesn’t even have superpowers for one to hope the Underoos to confer).

(On a side note, the best quote from the above article is: “Police reports gave no explanation for Williams’ attire.”)

In any event, criminals need to cut this out. Dressing as superheroes while committing criminal acts mixes things up. Superheroes don’t usually commit crimes. Beyond that, they’re just making themselves look stupid. You know they don’t admit to that part when they get to prison. (Oh, you like to play dress up?)

 

Tennis Players I Think Aren’t Lookers

I was pretty surprised to hear that BBC commentator John Inverdale was concerned with whether or not  Marion Bartoli was “a looker” when she won Wimbledon (hint: he didn’t think so). I mean, I don’t know a lot about tennis, but I was never aware that looks played any significant part of the sport. However, maybe Inverdale knows more about tennis than I do. As such, let’s look at a few tennis players that I don’t personally find to be lookers.

First, John McEnroe:

Sorry, Mr. McEnroe, but I’ve always thought you were kind of homely. Guess that’s important right now.

Next, Andre Agassi:

Yup, some people may like the way this guy looks, but I don’t particularly agree.

Of course, I couldn’t forget Björn Borg:

I don’t know what the general consensus on him is, but he definitely isn’t my cup of tea.

Next? Pete Sampras:

Sorry, Pete. I don’t find you attractive. You played some great tennis, but apparently looks are now being considered. Sorry about that.

Finally (for the purposes of this list only, I’m sure I could come up with other fugly tennis players), and perhaps most appropriately in view of Inverdale’s comment (if you get my meaning), Bobby Riggs:

That’s definitely an odd-looking man.

Anyway, not trying to cause trouble here or anything. I just figured if we were now ranking tennis players by attractiveness then perhaps I’d add in my two cents. I’m no tennis authority, but I can call somebody ugly with the best of them.