Blogging will be more sporadic over the holidays as I will be together with my children and their significant others. Now that they are older and living independent lives elsewhere, these times together are few and far between and to be savored. I thought that I would pass on a couple of personal recommendations. Others should feel free to add their own in the comments. [Read more…]

In the recent post on how best to discourage monomaniacs, without banning them, from derailing discussions by posting about their pet peeves that have barely any connection with the original topic, it was suggested that one improvement might be to eliminate nested comments that group sidebar conversations together, so that when one scrolls down, comments do not appear in chronological order. Up to now, this blog has had five levels of nesting.. [Read more…]

A scan of 600,000 customer service calls was studied to see in which states people swore at the operators the most and also those states where people are most polite and use phrases like “please” and “thank you”. [Read more…]

There are some news headlines that are irresistible and that one simply has to follow up on. I do not as a rule track the activities of the parasitic British royal family but when I saw the BBC news headline Police ‘told to leave Queen’s nuts alone’, I had to read more. [Read more…]

This year’s Super Bowl is coming up and for the first time it is going to be held in an open-air stadium in a region of the country (New Jersey) where the winter weather can get pretty bad. But what interested me was this news report describing the restrictions on how people can actually get to the stadium. [Read more…]

I start each day with a cup of coffee. I have done so since I became a teenager because children drinking coffee was not as uncommon in Sri Lanka as it is in the US. While I like coffee, I don’t drink a lot, with at most one other cup during the day, usually in the afternoon, with an after dinner cup of tea. But despite my fondness for the beverage, I am definitely not a coffee connoisseur. I drink instant coffee and add milk and sugar to it, a practice that is scorned by the purists. [Read more…]

Readers may recall the story of Chelsea Welch, the server at an Applebees restaurant, who was fired after she posted a receipt on the internet on which a local pastor she had served had written “I give God 10% why do you get 18”. Welch explains what happened and her bafflement at her firing here. [Read more…]

One of my biggest peeves is the media creating ghastly and unnecessary new words that are mash-ups of two perfectly good words. We have had abominations such as ‘snowcalypse’ and ‘snowmageddon’ for what could be more simply described as a severe snow storms, and ‘staycation’ to denote a vacation spent at home. I am sure there have been many others in the past that I have deliberately driven out of my memory because I despise them. [Read more…]

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US, an occasion when family and friends get together to go shopping and fight with other people to get the best bargains. No seriously, at its best, Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, free from commercializing and just spent socializing. In fact, it has become my favorite holiday for reasons given here. (This year we received a Happy Thanksgiving card, which I view as an ominous sign of attempts to commercialize this holiday as well. It was from a firm we deal with and I hope that the practice does not spread.) [Read more…]

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day and in its modern incarnation it has come to signify a day when people trample over each other in order to save money on something that is not an essential item of existence. In previous years, stores have tried to maintain the pretense of treating the day one for gatherings of family and friends by opening in the evening, although this still required workers to come in earlier to prepare the stores. This year, some have abandoned this altogether and are opening on Thursday morning. And once that has been breached, it will only be a matter of a couple of years before stores start opening at midnight on Wednesday. [Read more…]