On humour and irony

Okay, as always there is a standing invitation to post comments at the end of this message. For one thing, it inspires future comments, for another it tells me people are actually reading what I have to write.

Now recently in my reading of Fast Food Nation, I found out that until 1990 McDonalds used 7% cotton seed oil and 93% beef tallow to fry their French Fries, that's why the fries taste so good - they tasted like meat! In 1990 McDonalds changed the recipe, and now use 'natural flavour' if you know what natural flavour is, you must work in the industry because apparently it is about the most secretive business out there, even more so then Darth Cheney Vader. The way artificial and 'natural' flavour is made, what it is made from, who makes it, none of these items are discussed by the companies that do it yet we consume boat loads of the stuff all the time.

See what happens? Someone commented on Fast Food Nation, so now I devote an entire paragraph to what I read last night. Get your own paragraph, write a sentence. Its a good deal, you write a sentence, you get to read a whole paragraph! (One minor catch, your sentence has to inspire some thought.)

So last night I did not skate, I used the elliptical machine instead. It was profoundly boring. This boredom was compounded by the fact that the cable signal was out so I couldn't watch TV while I was training, instead I had the rare opportunity to listen to "your call is important to us, someone will be with you shortly" as I churned away on the trainer. It took over an hour from when I initiated the call until I actually got a human being to tell me to power cycle my VDSL de-muxer (unplug and plug back in the black box under the T.V.) It was about ten minutes after I got the human that the problem was sorted out. By the time it was sorted out, the show I wanted to watch was over, I had done my push-ups, squats and of course the elliptical training, so having a working TV by then was a bit of a write off. Well done Bell Telephone (ExpressVu), another shining example of why I hate you!

So while I'm in a bad mood I'd like to turn to the patently ironic, I got this from the Huffington Post, Conservative Authors Sue Publisher. The first paragraph of the New York Times article says it all: Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

I love the part where the "author" of the tract, Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror said: It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. He added: Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company? Hmm, could it possibly be that Regnery is acting like a capitalist company because that is what they are? The neo-cons lobbied to have less government regulation, more vertical and horizontal integration, and now the same guys who Swift-Boated Senator Kerry are upset because their "publisher" is making "jillions of dollars". In the Huffington Post someone commented that in other news a heard of cows went were engaged in a civil action, apparently the farmer was not compensating the cows satisfactorily for the manure the farmer was spreading on his fields.

Finally speaking of humour, my friend Kevin was asking me about a Free Google Internet Access.

Well that inspired me to look up some other Google Tools:

Google Romance: Why not search for love in the statistically significant majority of the right places?

Googlegulp: Suitable for well becoming smarter I think?

Need a job? Get a job... on the moon.

Not a technology per se, but an explanation of the inner workings of Google, and I thought they used clusters of old cheap Linux PCs.

A not very effective mind reading search engine.