I recently came across what I think is the most polite way I’ve seen of letting someone know that they are a liar. (I’ve taken the liberty of changing the names and faces.)

This is certainly more polite than what I usually do, which is click the “report spam” button on Facebook. I don’t think that actually does anything, although I’d like to think eventually you would get kicked off Facebook if that’s all you did on there. In a perfect world they’d at least train a bayesian filter to hide that kind of stuff from me.

With email forwards, I’m even worse. When I get something particularly egregious, I take the time (generally very little is required) to see if it’s true (it usually isn’t). Then I hit reply-to-all and call them out for being a liar. Well, I usually don’t use the word “liar”, although maybe I should start my messages with “You lie!” in a large, bold font from now on. Instead I just state the facts with links to my references.

In my heart of hearts, I had the best of intentions with this approach. I envisioned a world where people are simply unaware that they are lying, and that, once they are made aware that they are lying, they would stop lying because lying is bad. I honestly did. Well I guess to some extent I was being a jerk, otherwise I wouldn’t reply to all. But still—if I was disseminating false information, I would want someone to tell me so that I would know better. I was (almost) doing unto others as I would have them do unto me!

And at first I thought I was succeeding. Most of these ridiculous email forwards stopped coming to me. Then I found out Stephanie was still getting them from the same people. The people sending this garbage had said to themselves something like, “Kip doesn’t like it when I lie to him. He’s a jerk and tells everyone I’m a liar. I’ll just stop sending my lies to him, but I’ll still send them to everyone else.”

Oh well.

A little over a year ago, I posted my impressions of Pandora, the free online radio station website thingy. At the time, I was liking it, though after a while I started losing interest and stopped using the site.

Last month, I saw a cartoon about Pandora on Hijinks Ensue. The cartoon hit on a problem I also had with the site. I left the following comment there, which I thought was interesting enough that I’d share it as a blog post.

Kip: I like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana

Pandora: Hey, you must love Red Hot Chili Peppers!

Kip: No, really I don’t. Well OK, I like Under The Bridge, but most everything else is thumbs-downed.

Pandora: Great, so you wanna make babies with RHCP! While I keep playing them, I bet you like Foo Fighters too.

Kip: Yes, actually I do like them a lot

Pandora: Great, so you like any alt-rock from early-to-mid 90s. I bet you love Alice In Chains!

Kip: Can’t stand them

Pandora: I’ll keep a few more Alice In Chains songs in rotation in case you needed 15 years for them to grown on you. How about some Soundgarden?

Kip: Please stop

Pandora: Candlebox?

Kip: Okay time to stop

Pandora: Here’s another Chili Peppers song since you love them so much

Today I ran across what might possibly be the only cool Facebook app I’ve ever seen. It takes random Facebook status messages from 2009 and makes a collage of them. I thought mine was very interesting:

I’ve been using Mint to track my money for a few months now.  Most of you reading this are cool people who have been using Mint since before I heard about it, though, so I won’t bother explaining how the service works.  I guess I’m supposed to set up budgets or something, and if you don’t it kinda guesses based on your past expenses.  Then it alerts you when you go over-budget in a category.  Which is nice sometimes, but other times you get things like this:

Okay, so ummm... what am I supposed to do about it?  If I could have payed only twenty-three dollars I would have.  Maybe they need an “e-mail a complaint about this to your congressman” button or something? :)

How to tell if Kip will hate a television program: ask yourself, “does this show feature amateurs doing some kind of performance, after which they are critiqued by three judges, one of whom is foreign and mean?”

If the answer is yes, then Kip will hate the show.

Once upon a time, approximately two days ago, just as I finished mowing the sixth of an acre of grass within which my house resides, an unfamiliar man in a wifebeater pulled over in front of my driveway in a dirty 1992 Ford pickup truck.  “This is unusual, even for North Carolina,” I thought to myself as he exited his vehicle and approached me.

“Would you be interested,” he proceeded to ask, “in good deals on meat?”

Is this a metaphor? a euphemism?  What plans might this stranger have?  A classic fight or flight response ensues:  if he means no harm (which is almost certainly the case) but I run, I look like a fool and possibly, depending upon his race, a bigot; on the other hand, if I hold my ground, I save face, but I could possibly be abducted and (let’s say) fed into a wood chipper.  He’s approaching, time is running out, what am I going to do??  Ultimately I decide to risk the wood chipper.

“I’m sorry?” I respond, as if I didn’t understand him (which is at least partially true).

“I have good deals on steaks, chicken, and beef.”  A strange wording, considering that “steak” is a subset of “beef.”  I make a mental note to ponder this at a later time.  After all, “steak” is a particular type of beef which (I presume) has high demand elasticity at low prices, so it is worth mentioning.  I mean, it’s not like he’s going to have every type of beef, so specifying up front that steak is one of the types of beef he carries will efficiently answer a nearly-inevitable follow-up question.

It’s been half a minute already; etiquette dictates that I supply some form of response.

“No thanks.”  There, I’ve responded.  My manners are so awesome.

He barely gets a quick “you have a nice day” out before he walks back to his truck.  Which I now notice has a freezer in the truck bed.  Secured into place with a single bungee.  As he drives away, I am filled with questions.  Where does this meat come from?  How did he come to acquire it?  Is this a side job, or his primary source of income.  For that matter, is it a source of income at all?  I’d like to think he just sells meat as a hobby.  After all, even the most rudimentary efforts at the appearance of legitimacy are lacking.  Maybe a logo on the side of the truck.  Or a dress code consisting of pretty much anything other than a wife beater.  I think such things would more than pay for themselves after a relatively short time.  How significant are the savings, compared to a grocery store?  How many other people are willing to buy meat from the back of some guy’s pickup truck?  Regulated food markets have produced enough contamination scares of late, how many people are willing to risk meat from some guy’s truck?

Or maybe I’m overthinking this.  I have a tendency to do that.  I wonder why that is.  Do I find comfort ruminating upon things which are ultimately meaningless?  Is it a way of escaping thoughts about deeper topics?  Or does everyone do this and just not write blog posts about it?  Or maybe I actually do think about things more than other people.  Some form of scientific modesty principle prevents me from leaping to that conclusion, anymore than I would leap to the conclusion that somehow the sun actually revolves around me.

Oh wait, I’m doing it again.

I have a way of remembering to do things that might be idiosyncratic, or it may be completely normal.  So I thought I would reach out to the dozen or so people who read this little blog to see if you do the same thing.  So here’s the scenario:

Let’s say I want to remember to take a CD to the office with me tomorrow morning.  I will pick out some very specific action that I know I will take tomorrow—like picking up my keys off the bedside table—and I’ll visualize myself doing that while thinking to myself “don’t forget that CD.”  I only need to spend a minute or two concentrating very hard on picturing myself picking up the keys while thinking “don’t forget that CD.”  Then in the morning, when I’m picking up my keys, the thought “don’t forget that CD” will magically appear in my head.

I believe this is technically a form of self-hypnosis, or something like it.  It works most of the time, but only recently did I start to wonder if other people use this little trick.  When the thought comes popping into your head, it feels very much like deja vu.  In fact, I think I figured it out when I was curious about the feeling of deja vu when I was little (this was before I learned there was even a term for it).  I reasoned that surely I didn’t have some buried “memory” of a future event, so I tried to induce deja vu like this.  Eventually, I got it to work.

So does anyone else do this?  If not, you should try it, it really works.

Yesterday’s xkcd cartoon discussed the terminology “The West” and “The East”, and how it was confusing to an American:

His map isn’t exactly in line with what I’ve inferred the meanings of these terms to be, so I modified his map a bit to reflect my (also confusing) understanding of these terms:

Generally, “The West” and “The Western Hemisphere” have a meaning roughly equivalent to “First-World Nations”, with the exceptions of Japan and (maybe?) South Korea.  Which is to say, something similar to “developed democracies which were aligned with the United States in the Cold War.”  This generally includes Australia and New Zealand, which makes the map pretty nonsensical.  Sometimes “The West” includes Mexico and Central and South America, but I didn’t mark the map this way because that’s not usually how I hear the term used.

Oddly, “The East” does not mean “Not ‘The West.’”  It is more synonymous with “The Far East”, which is to say, “places where Asian people live.”  That includes Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.  I suppose that if the “Middle East” is really the middle of the east, then “The East” must include all of Asia and Africa.  But I think “Middle East” is a whole other discussion.  You could also debate whether India, Indonesia, and New Guinea belong in “The East.”  I just drew it based on what I’ve inferred.

In either map, I think it is clear that the terms are ambiguous and only loosely correlated to their geographic meaning.

Sometimes I wish that I had a really crappy car.  ‘Why?’ you ask?  Because then when someone is tailgating me, particularly when I am already going 5-9 mph over the speed limit and there is a perfectly good lane to my left not being used, I could just slam on the brakes so that they would hit me.  After all, it would be their fault (who’s to say I didn’t see a deer about to run out onto the highway?).  They would learn the hard way not to tailgate, their insurance would go up, and they’d get a ticket.  Maybe they’d even be over the legal blood-alcohol limit and spend the night in jail.  Jackpot.  As for me, I’d just be out a crappy car that I didn’t care about to begin with.  I guess if I did it too many times the police or insurance companies might catch on.  Oh well, it’s not like I’d actually do that.  I’d probably react much more passive-aggressively.  Perhaps by writing a blog post about the tailgating incident.

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s Count von Count from Sesame Street, singing a song in which the word “count” has been bleeped out, with hilarious results.  (The video’s pretty old—maybe everyone has already seen this and they just forgot to tell me about it.)