I take care of my elderly parents and they would not last very long without me. I have fears of what could happen to me but they’re greatly compounded by having people dependent on me. I’m so glad I don’t have any children, at least.

All my life Spring has always been a happy time for me. This one has just sucked, though, even though the weather has been near-perfect.

I bicycle past a catholic church that has a banner that says “JESUS WELCOMES YOU WITH OPEN ARMS” and a drawing of Jesus nailed on the cross. I’m like … wait a minute, is that actually a joke? Jesus’ arms are open because they’re nailed to a piece of wood?

And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.

Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”

Even if they hear and enter the order correctly, the probably of exactly that ending up in the bag is still pretty low. At least the food service robots might get that part right.

My cursive writing is … cursive writing. I went to elementary school in the '70s when that was still being taught and I could not do it now with a gun to my head. All those capital letters like I and S and G that all look the fucking same.

This is why I always liked the “Butlerian Jihad” in Dune where people entirely banned “thinking machines”. Because there’s no fucking way humans would still be around in 10,000 years without something like that having happened.

anthropogenic climate disintegration

I like this better than the milquetoasty “global warming” or the even weaker “climate change”, but I prefer “Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating” because of the handy acronym.

Or they can’t fucking write. I’m a programmer and many of my colleagues over the years have been entirely unable to form a coherent idea into a sentence or paragraph. For a lot of them, that’s why they became programmers in the first place.

“This meeting could have been an email. That I accidentally deleted.”

expressly designed to carry on regardless

I’m surprised they didn’t borrow On Error Resume Next from Visual Basic. Which was wrongly considered to be the worst thing in Visual Basic - when the real worst thing was On Error Resume. On Error Resume Next at least moved on to the next line of code when an error occurred; On Error Resume just executed the error-generating line again … and again … and again … and again …

That is absolutely (n > 1) * ("ba" + 0/0 + "a")

A lot of CD units from the 2000s were wired to connect to a 6-CD changer mounted in the trunk, and you can get an adapter cable that provides an AUX input this way. I drive a 2001 BMW and I’m able to play music from my phone over the car stereo with one of these (cost around $50).

This worked a lot better before I was forced to buy a new phone without a fucking headphone jack. I have a USB adapter that works but the signal level is much lower than a normal headphone jack so the maximum volume is a lot lower.

how often do you really get mad enough at someone that you hang up on them?

“I love you.”
“I know.”

I think that comes from pro wrestling.

The only non-functioning payphones I ever saw were the ones where the handset had been sawn off.

We had a smoking room, but it was only for seniors.

Oldhead here: we slammed the living shit out of those phones.

I was less impressed when I learned that all the actors in that scene were on bicycle seats. But then I was more impressed when I learned they only had one ladder to let them down to take a pee.

Another fun Life of Brian fact: the production re-used the Tunisian sets built for Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth television series. Zeffirelli was furious that the Tunisian authorities allowed this; he apparently did not know how money works.