There’s something about the new year that makes me want to get better organized.  I spent some time over the holidays fiddling around with things trying to straighten them out. 

I completely redid my entertainment center, removing the old piers and bridge and replacing it with a single rack.  I mounted the TV in the kitchen on the wall to get it off the counter and free up space.  I also organized all my caps, which freed up a lot of space in the closet (and made it a lot neater than the previous pile).

But while I was at Linens ‘n Things yesterday I came across this neat little toothpick dispenser.  Perhaps I’ve gone a bit mad, but for some reason this thing gives me great satisfaction.  It was a total impulse purchase as I didn’t even know they had them until I saw it while walking by. 

I was somewhat appalled when I first heard about tourists still going to Thailand after the tsunami.  I understand that they will need continued tourist revenue to help rebuild, but it seems to me that the tourists might want to at least wait until they’ve gathered up all the dead bodies.  I can’t understand how someone could sit on the beach sipping mixed drinks with bodies still washing up.

I know that some of these people had non-refundable tickets, but couldn’t they have considered helping out instead of demanding their champaign reception (I heard on Fox News that some Russian tourists had arrived and were complaining loudly about not getting champaign)?  If I had non-refundable tickets that couldn’t be changed, then I’d consider checking with the relief organizations to see about helping out (I was relieved to see that a number of people are doing exactly that).

Personally, I wouldn’t be capable of going there and playing on the beach like these tourists.  At least I couldn’t do so until the cleanup is well under way.

Do not, under any circumstances, no matter how pathetically she begs, give German sausage to your dog. 

If you violate this admonishment, I cannot be held responsible for the Green Cloud of Doom™ that will likely result.

If you should happen to spray Oust into a room it is a good idea not to yawn immediately afterwards.  That crap will stick to your tongue.  Or so I’ve heard… 

It seems that all that is required for a TV show to be cancelled is for me to like it.  Conversely, crap shows stay on the air for ten years.

Yeah, I know Dead Like Me was kind of cheesy, but I liked it. 

Perhaps it’s rock-and-roll blasphemy to ask this question, but can someone explain to me the popularity of Bruce Springsteen?  Even at the height of his popularity in the 80’s I was curious as to why people liked him. 

Was the market for gravelly-voiced singers not being properly filled by Bob Dylan at the time?

Humans tend to be good at quick pattern recognition.  I suppose this could be advantageous in determining whether something is a threat (or perhaps food) quickly.  We can scan an area, recognize a pattern, and immediately associate that pattern with some set of memories, whether they are good or bad.  Corporate marketers take advantage of this by trying to associate the pattern of their corporate logo with good things in our heads.

But our quick recognition capability sometimes causes us to miss subtle differences.  At least it does at first.  We often feel that something isn’t quite right and decide to take a closer look.  I say all this in way of getting to the point of something that happened yesterday in Southlake.  As I was driving into a parking lot I noticed a young woman with a T-shirt that had what I at first took to be a familiar logo.  As I was getting out of my truck, she was getting into a Mustang across from me and I finally noticed what her shirt said.  She probably thought I was staring at her breasts, but those were just incidental, serving as the background for the message on her shirt.  I think if you’re going to wear an obscene bastardization of a logo that most of us associate with high-carb surgary goodness then you shouldn’t be surprised if you get a few looks.  Further, it’s probably a bad idea to wear a shirt like that in the general public where small children might encounter it.

Here’s the shirt for those that are curious:

I just saw a commercial for Florida orange juice.  Normally, this wouldn’t warrant comment, since it seems like they’re always running in one form or another.  However, this commercial was a bit different.  It flashed up the dates and names of some of the hurricanes that hit Florida this year along with a voiceover reminding us that we’re helping to rebuild Florida with every glass of orange juice.  Is it just me or does this seem a bit sleazy?  It reeks of opportunism and strikes me as being in poor taste.

If you’re tempted to complain about your job, consider that it could be worse.  Popular Science has released its latest list of worst jobs in science.  So what’s the worst job in science this year?  Anal wart researcher.

“I see about 15 butts a day, and a third of them have warts,” says nurse practitioner Naomi Jay of the University of California at San Francisco. Jay and infectious-disease doc Joel Palefsky were the first to run extensive clinical studies on the sexually transmitted diseases that afflict the anus. “He’s the tushie king, and I’m the tushie queen,” Jay boasts.
…
And the only way to detect this rare but deadly disease is to ask a highly trained nurse like Jay to scrutinize your derrière. “A giant anal wart can be a couple inches large and blocking the anal opening,” Jay says with her customary vigor. The bright side? “In 13 years I’ve only been pooped on twice, and that’s not bad.”

When I hear about this (or the tampon squeezers), it makes me glad to have a job that doesn’t involve nasty bodily emissions. 

David Kopel picked up an old post of mine on Condoleeza Rice’s position in regards to the Second Amendment.  This, in and of itself, wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been linked by Glenn Reynolds. 

A one-line indirect link from Instapundit through The Volokh Conspiracy nearly killed the squirrels and broke the rubber bands that run my puny little webserver.    The good folks at Dreamhost rebooted the server, which had been wedged by the traffic spike, and everything appears to be back up now.

Update: Here’s some more information on her position from a follow up post.

Update the 2nd:  Behold the awesome power of the Insta-Volokh-alanche: