grab & go!

apparently the washington post has problems with berkeley breathed’s brand of humor, and pulled last week’s opus strip. salon has full story, including the post’s reluctance to run an installment featuring lola granola’s conversion from amish nudist to radical islamist. they really shouldn’t be so pc about the amish… i hear they don’t use the interwebs much.

in other news, the nyt magazine apparently thinks $40 for a wifebeater is a good bargain (the link to it from the front page reads “Cheap Find: Cotton Tank Top”); the Great Arlington Coffee War has made it to the usnews website (sans the customer’s side of the story); and lacking for a third interesting thing, i give you this: a texas school district that is trying to force a five-year-old boy to get a haircut. i might as well throw in a mention that my uncle made the front page of the wapo on february 15, 1967, for the same thing - the headline ran, “youth fights order to cut long locks.” *sigh*

for a long while, in a previous professional life, i was a tobacco control advocate. i worked on the framework convention on tobacco control, coordinated legislative proposals in “the global south,” and helped review “how-to” manuals released by such august organizations as the UICC and the american cancer society.

it was interesting work, and i was, i still believe, fighting the good fight.

but as with many well-intentioned projects, there comes a time when the work spontaneously becomes reductio ad absurdum. such is the case with old morris tobacconists, in the city of victoria, british columbia.

Rick Arora is caught in a situation you would only expect to find in a dark comedy about bureaucracy run amok. If he covers up the historic signs on Old Morris Tobacconists, the City of Victoria is threatening big fines.

If he doesn’t, the Vancouver Island Health Authority plans to charge him under provincial laws banning tobacco ads and displays where people under 19 can see them.

my take remains the same as it was when i discovered harpercollins had removed the cigarette from the jacket photo of clement hurd, the illustrator for goodnight, moon (coincidentally one of my favorite children’s books ever): enough already. pre-verbal children won’t become smokers because of a barely-visible butt in an old black-and-white photo, and i seriously doubt teenagers are going to have an uncontrollable urge to light up after seeing antique signs for “house blend tobaccos” and “havana cigars.”

yes, public health measures are by nature coercive. but when they attempt to rewrite history, they go too far. such exercises are more fitting of stalinists and the taliban - company that public health advocates in “free” societies should be loathe to keep.

hat tip: james.

going into effect on july 1 in virginia: a law “preventing school bus drivers from using cell phones while driving.”

*sigh* we really need a law for that?

a pilot program to bypass customs! what could possibly go wrong?

it really makes a lovely juxtaposition with those haldol-happy ICE officers. anyone else think we were a more humane nation when we had the immigration and naturalization service, rather than immigration and customs enforcement?

i tell ya, i really should stop reading the morning paper.

where does dartmouth find these people? (to be honest, i’m surprised she wasn’t teaching mcm 1110 at brown. and boy, just reading the word oeuvre gives me flashbacks to mc66.)

hat tip: todd

for some reason, my phone won’t let me input “laloca” directly. it automatically assumes an “i” after the second “l,” or when pressed, will let “p” be input. but even sliding my finger over i-o-p after inputting that second “l” won’t make the “o” hot.

can anyone with an iphone attempt to replicate the problem? i see it with beejive and other safari inputs…

[another annoyance: the phone’s insistence on capitalizing the “i,” no matter how often i dismiss the correction. e.e. cummings would never use an iphone to write poetry…]

attempting an 85 hour work week with one day off: nutso.

attempting same without the support of a very tolerant g: insanity.

following up with a 105 hour work week: quite possibly suicidal.

sleeping for 2 days straight when it’s all over: priceless.

(oh, and paying off a nasty credit card in the process? part of why I’m engaging in this insane experiment. I don’t need IRB approval if it’s just me, right?)

so your project increases your max billables to 15 a day for 14 days straight. and on day one, the system craps out before 11am and you spend the next 12 hours watching the screen go from blank to server error to eventual document.

at least I got dinner out of it. I’ve has worse dates.

i was assigned a five million word article for the features section on the number of my choice.

i chose zero. a real number, but not a natural number. i think i was spoiling for a fight.