Robert Hutchinson's Journal

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

Comedy minute
From a New York Times story. Quoting the portion relative to my sense of humor:

"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.'

"It’s distracting," he continued. "It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere."

A Yahoo spokeswoman said it was impossible to verify Mr. Bradbury’s account without more details.

You'd think that a Yahoo spokeswoman would already have some details on the non-in-the-air-ness of the Internet.

Ha!
Just noticed, on the label of a bottle of concentrated laundry detergent:

"concentrated detergent
use less"

I'm edgy.
I have been feeling an itch lately to write about stuff that (arguably) wouldn't fit in a personal journal. "Political" topics like feminism, fat acceptance, and anarchism--but not necessarily limited to those. If I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't put it here ... maybe on my Dreamwidth account?

The tricky part is where I really dislike my writing.

I also feel like I made this same exact post on here a few months ago, but I'm too sleepy to go check. That's the mark of a fine blogger, right there.

My junk supply is endless
Pepperoni P'Zone for only $5!

. . . because it's 90% bread.

(But I kid. It was okay.)

Junk!
I like Pepsi Throwback.

Also Pizza Cravers Doritos.

Come back in July, when I tell you about my flossing technique.

. . . to Texas
This was part of a postmark on a letter we received at work a while back. The last line, with all that it implies, just cracks me up.

From taxes . . .
I sent in my federal tax return last month, along with a payment of X dollars.

I got a letter a few days ago that explained that, due to an error I had made in not noticing that I could qualify for extra stimulus money, I was actually due a refund of Y dollars. The very next day, I received a check for said Y dollars. Yay!

Except. If I'm reading the letter right, it wasn't just that I overpaid by Y dollars, but that I was due a refund of Y dollars from the beginning. It would seem to me that I am also owed my original payment of X dollars.

So, what should I do? Contact the IRS ... excuse me, the Treasury Department right away? Wait for the other check they're likely to send along soon? Read my tax forms more carefully? Well, all right, I've already learned my lesson on that last one.

Double G
I'm going to promote this from a mere Facebook status update, because I am genuinely curious: does anyone else bounce in their dreams?

It seems to happen to me whenever I have some distance to travel by foot that would normally take several minutes. It's like the dream is doing the best it can to speed up the process, without completely breaking my suspension of disbelief. Basically, imagine someone running across the surface of the moon, only way more exaggerated than even that--I'm getting maybe 30 or 40 feet in the air on each bounce. And despite it happening over and over in my dreams, I always have this little fear in the back of my mind that this shouldn't be possible, and gravity is going to reassert itself in the middle of one of my bounces and give me many broken bones.

That's not weird, right? Right?

Pass/fail/incomplete
So, I got cheesed off about the whole AmazonFail thing a while back (mass de-ranking of books, many GLBT-related). As far as I know, the subsequent events were A) it was undone, and B) Amazon sorta kinda took responsibility without actually apologizing.

This is going to sound like the most whiny-LJ-kid post ever, but now I'm trying to decide if I'm comfortable with buying things from Amazon again. I know it's my choice and all that, but I don't want to feel like an ass who made a bunch of noise that didn't mean anything, at least not when compared with how convenient I still find using Amazon to be.

Thinking.

The power of the Triforce
I rarely make a post just to link to something, but I feel like I need to here:

Tiger Beatdown

A feminist blog/journal, with a large focus on pop culture stuff. Also the best review of Little Women ever. And there's Shakespeare's unfairly-forgotten character, Mercdouchio. I'm dying over here. (Pun not intended, except now that I've noticed it, pun totally intended.)

Anyway, I'm working through the archives, and I love this website so damn much, and I need to tell people about it. That is all.

Ub
Holy God the congestion. I want to have my sinuses surgically removed. Or filled in. Whatever makes more sense topologically.

I need more of these posts
I feel really good right now. I have music and snacks. I have Gmail and Twitter "running". I'm reading blog archives. There are cats in the house.

Ahhhh.

No Z, Amazon
I'm going to bitch some more. I understand if you don't find this as irritating, or as interesting, as I do. (And I know the Z in the subject line makes no sense, but as Calvin would say, "otherwise it doesn't spell anything".)

Here is, apparently, an official statement from Amazon.

Problem #1: This is not an apology. Telling us that you did something embarrassing is not necessary. The embarrassment is already fully established.

Problem #2: "It has been misreported ..." Well, excuse the hell out of the reporters. As I recall, those who reported on this did mention many of the books that were affected in the categories of Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. Guess what a metric ton of those books had in common?

(Of course, even if they didn't, the implied defensive argument is completely illogical. A homophobe who's also a prude is still a homophobe. And please note that I'm not necessarily classifying the de-ranking as homophobic--merely that Amazon looks like they're trying to suggest a reason why it wasn't.)

Problem #3: I don't see this anywhere on the front page of Amazon.com. Now, of course I know that won't happen in a million years. But if you did something crappy that affected all of your customers (whether they realized it or not), the way to respond to all of your customers is not to respond to Twitter or to bloggers.

And now I'm off to lightly smolder some more.

EDITED TO ADD: I wrote this before the extra updates were added to the linked page. Not that that changes my reaction to the first part; just wanted to clarify.

How stupid can some people be?
Amazon.com has apparently decided to be incredibly stupid this week. Let's look at some books by Mary Roach that I purchased recently:

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife: currently ranked 3,812.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers: currently ranked 1,050.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: currently ranked . . . oops, the ranking appears to be missing.

Amazon has recently decided to remove the sales ranking from books they consider to be "adult". And thanks to the work of a lot of people searching Amazon this weekend, we find that what they mean by "adult" is "having anything to do with non-straight people". Books on gay parenting: de-ranked. Playboy pictorial books: still happily ranked. Bonk happens to, in the course of talking about sex, talk about non-heterosexual sex on occasion. So no rank for it.

When a book has no ranking on Amazon, it fails to show up on any bestseller lists. And while that might not seem so bad at first, remember that Amazon has bestseller lists for every conceivable category and subcategory of books. So if you're looking through, say, the bestsellers on alternative parenting or something similar, you're going to be kept happily ignorant of any books that dare to talk about anything GLBT related.

Hell, Amazon has a Gay and Lesbian Bestseller list! Look at all the Kindle books! I guess that format has really taken off. When they "fix" that little bug, I guess the page will just read: "We couldn't find any . . . 'gay' books, did you say? Terribly sorry."

Mary Roach is a great writer. Please buy her books. (I finished Bonk and am halfway through Stiff.) Just not from Amazon--at least not until they thoroughly remove their heads from their asses.

Status update
(Attempting to send this by e-mail, from work)

Due to local flooding, my Internet service has been down at my house
since Thursday evening. That's nothing compared to people having to
evacuate their homes, of course, but I thought I should send a message
just in case anyone was wondering where I am. Hopefully we'll dry out
soon.

WTF & FTL
Not caught up, but I have to commit this to electrons.

Ad for a financial something or other. Paraphrased slightly.

1) "We hear a lot about the economic tsunami. How can that relate to [the other speaker's hobby of] surfing?"

"Well ... in surfing, a tsunami is actually kind of thrilling."

I ... suppose that's technically accurate.

2) "You have to move at the speed of light to stay ahead of the wolfpack."

Oh God wolves have mastered relativistic space travel we're all doooooomed

Beep
I still exist. A combination of a busy work week and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has greatly reduced my recent Internet time. One of these has now ended, and the other proceeds apace. Catching up now.

It's still winter, no rush
I owe the world the rest of my thoughts on my Mystery Hunt trip. This I know.

Soon. Very soon.

Dollhouse, for really reals.
It was ... competent. I'm a little sad that that's my one-word description, but I'm not surprised.

Oh, and having read a little discussion about the show today, I find the idea that this show is supposed to send a feminist message laughable. "Yes, you're supposed to really be disgusted at all the sexy action and adventure! Our audience will not have a single person in it whose primary motivation is to drool over Eliza Dushku! I mean, it's on Fox, well-known for its sober treatment of such material! You certainly won't see sex sex sex in every commercial, or in the interstitial stuff we filmed for the premiere!"

Never mind, I thought of something
Ah, the balance of life.

When it comes to catching colds or the flu, I apparently have a stronger-than-average immune system. I just get congested with maybe a brief fever, while other people have to stay home from work for days.

To compensate for this, my upper respiratory tract is a steel trap. It's been three weeks since I got over being sick, and I'm still starting every morning by coughing up my lungs.

Next time I get a cold, I think I'm going to put up detour signs in my trachea for the duration. Thru traffic only.