It’s a miracle!

Mildly funny humor. I just know that the artist creates these cards during mind-numbingly boring meetings at the office.
(via Matt Haughey)

This article tells of a woman who used her own sleuthing skills to track down the youths who vandalized her house and cars. The article focuses on the woman’s tenacity and ingenuity, but another aspect of the story struck me: the local grocery store went through receipts for her, and after locating the likely purchase, they went through their surveillance tapes with the woman to identify the purchasers. The article mentions that the perps made a cash purchase. If they’d paid by credit card, would the store have given her the purchaser’s name?
I find it disturbing that the grocery store management went to these lengths to help a PRIVATE investigation.

This is funny.

I watched the first episode of SciFi’s new series Eureka, and I have to say, it was pretty awful. It was very clear to me that the producers came up with a concept and characters first, and then wrote the screenplay for the first episode afterwards. In several cases, characters, character traits, and plot turns bore no significant role in the story told in this first episode. They were seemingly added only as needed exposition for the series.
For instance:

• The dog catcher and the omnipresent dog. What the hell was that all about except to introduce a character in the series?
• The psychoanalyst cum innkeeper has the hots for the the marshall/innkeeper. That subplot had no bearing on this episode. It was clearly included as exposition for the series. Let me guess, they’re going to be romantically involved
• Marshall suddenly decides, with no motivation, to follow the dog into the forest. What do you know, he sees burned trees and cows (important to show’s concept and plot of this episode). What an amazing coincidence!

In addition to that, the portrayal of the relationship between the marshall/sheriff and his daughter was just abyssmal.
I don’t think I’ll be programming my DVR to record the weekly episodes of Eureka.

This just makes me sick:

US Airways wants to make the most out of a nauseating situation. The Tempe, Ariz.-based airline plans to sell advertisements on its air-sickness bags _ those pint-sized expandable envelopes tucked between the in-flight magazines and safety cards.
“They’re in every back seat pocket,” said spokesman Phil Gee. “We figure while it’s there, why don’t we make it multipurpose?”

I’m not too sure what I think of this comic, but hey, it’s not often that computational linguists are mentioned in any context. I’ll take what I can get.

Very silly

From the Richmond Times Dispatch
(via Eliot Gelwan)

While browsing the web this morning, I came across this review of a recent coporate identity redesign. I think the author has some interesting thoughts on the redesign, but I couldn’t decipher his meaning very easily due to his extremely long sentences. An example:

Just recently, in late June, Kansas-based Payless Shoesource, unveiled a new logo and a new direction for their retail stores as a result of new leadership change in the summer of 2005 when Matt Rubel, who previously worked on retail brands like J. Crew, Revlon, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike’s Cole Haan division, joined the company and procured Payless Shoesource in need of a new, more focused direction: to dispel the notion that they only sell “cheap shoes,” to appeal to a more design and budget-conscious customer (in other words, Targetize it) and, ultimately, to somehow deliver on the brand’s promise and strategic direction, “to democratize footwear and accessory fashion and inspire fun fashion possibilities for the family.”

Parsing that sentence gives me a headache.
(To be fair, it seems that the author is not a native English speaker)