Zeborah

In which people are awesome

2010-09-05T01:15:39Z

My local Freecycle mailing list has someone offering: "Probably going to be no shortage of these over the next wee while but if anyone was after some broken bricks for hardfill etc, we have a small amount from our chimney top [...] probably about 3 or 4 wheelbarrows full."

The website of a restaurant closed due to damage.

Telecom has made around 300 payphones in and around Christchurch free for local, national and mobile calls. They've also waived fees for phone donations to the Red Cross. Yesterday they tweeted "Operations teams working on how best to share our emergency generation capacity with our friends @VodafoneNZ" and when congratulated on their altruism clarified, "It's all about NZers helping NZers in a time of crisis. Normal rivalries will resume once crisis is over :)"

I've heard stories of:

a dairy [corner-store] owner giving away milk and selling batteries below cost
a pizza place giving away pizzas

Buses aren't running so instead of going to my own church I went to the local Anglican church. Not being an Anglican I don't know whether they might have considered maybe not reading the "Jeremiah and the potter" story about God saying "If you're naughty I'll totally crush you" in the current climate. Yes, yet-another-aftershock did strike exactly then. :-)

Breaking news: Just got a phone call from my manager that everyone in our team is fine though one has been evacuated (she lives in the CBD) and another colleague hasn't been contactable (she lives in another area people have been evacuating from). The library I work in has some damage to our beautiful new ceiling tiles and apparently books are in ginormous piles; the central library on campus has entire stacks (ie bookshelves) fallen over, broken windows, and one floor is said to be "totalled". So now we're waiting to be allowed back in so we can start picking up books...

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In which feminine hygiene products are perhaps not the best source of a good education

2010-07-13T04:56:37Z

Do they still make those bubblegum wrappers with the jokes on them? You know those jokes that had been carefully selected from a jokebook entitled The World's Unfunniest Jokes, by people who've heard of jokes but maintain their impartiality through a strict and willful ignorance of what this joke thing is all about, and who then painstakingly rewrite them so as to leech from them any remaining hint of comedy?

Well, for those of my readers who don't themselves experience that time of the month when you pour blue fluid(*) onto a Feminine Hygiene Product and then go out and ride a horse in white pants, let me just say that FHPs often come wrapped in a similar manner. Except instead of unfunny jokes, we get unfactual factoids.

The ur-FHP Factoid for me will always be "If you put a grape in the microwave it will explode." To be fair, this would probably be true if you inserted the important clause and then turn it on. And "A full moon always rises at sunset" is true for values of "always" that include "at certain latitudes, or at least at certain times of the year", so I'll pass these ones by.

I'll also pass by those familiar factoids like "The human body is made up of ninety-random percent water" and "When you sneeze, the air comes out your nose at randomty miles an hour."

But every so often my eye gets caught by something like "23% of all photocopier faults are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks." Which. I. What? I mean. I'm pretty sure that ninety-random percent of all photocopier faults occur at my workplace alone and I'm also pretty certain that I would have noticed if any of our students had decided to drop their pants, sit on the copier, and attempt to scan their buttocks and do you know how I'd know? Because then they'd have to jump off and waddle across the library casual reading area and main entrance to me at the help desk in order to tell me the photocopier wasn't working, and I'd come back across the room and discover that the photocopier was flashing a "Cannot recognise paper size" error message on its clever little screen.
Maybe this statistic was collated in the first week after the first photocopier was bought by the first company ever to use one, which coincidentally happened to be the week of said company's annual Christmas party?

Because otherwise I can only presume that the writer of this factoid has never actually used a photocopier. Other than, perhaps, to photocopy their buttocks.

And when they print stuff like that, it causes me serious doubts about the scholarship behind their claims that "Human thighbones are as strong as concrete" or that "The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by the Egyptians in 2000BC". Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that these things could be true! But so easily is scientific integrity shattered that I'll never again be able to take it on faith from my [brandname] Feminine Hygiene Products.

(*) Actually I just remembered an ad in New Zealand a few years back in which someone murders someone, disposes of the body, but just as the police sirens approach she notices a small but incriminating pool of blood remains. Oh noes! But wait, she has a brilliant idea! She grabs a [brandname] pad, quickly soaks up the blood, and we cut to the police leaving again, thwarted. Ladies and gentleman, Feminine Hygiene Products, your ultimate murder alibi! (Possibly works with Handee towels too.)

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In which her sister is made of win

2010-02-27T09:10:58Z

So my sisters and I were discussing the various someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet discussions we've been in this week, and I was monopolising the conversation with my stories of arguing with an atheist

(short and obviously biased version: she posted a distinction she makes between secular faith and religious faith; I said that her description of secular faith sounds like my personal religious faith and her description of religious faith sounds like certain libertarians I know; she said I was just proving her point which apparently had something to do with various philosophical concepts she proceeded to introduce; I said that her actual original post remained false; she and someone else tried to argue that the fact that my religion makes me happy is a bad reason to believe and I tried to argue that I care a lot more about being happy than about being right and also? her original post remains false; and so forth until I finally managed to narrow the discussion back to the point where we could agree to stop arguing)

and of a discussion on the QI forum about racism and sexism

(short version, skipping over a whole other bunch of Fail: I mentioned that it'd be awesome if we could have more than 20% women in Series A-F or 23% women in Series G, and more than 4 People of Colour in Series A-F [actually I said 3 but someone mentioned one I hadn't known about] and 0 in Series G; a whole bunch of people said "OMG, you want to choose who gets on based on their gender and skin colour!"; I pointed out that if we eg make a non-sexist assumption that men and women are equally funny, then a show trying to be the funniest but having 77% men suggests that we're missing out on a bunch of women who are funnier than some of the men who get on, and I want a funnier show; then my interlocutors make it really clear, some of them saying it in so many words, that they believe that men are in fact inherently funnier than women and that I'm sexist for suggesting otherwise.)

At which point in the conversation my sister says:

Obviously women are funnier than men. Otherwise why would we call jokes "hysterical"?

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