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…]

I have been writing about the travails of wait staff in restaurants but I learned today of an outrageous practice in some restaurants in which, if the diners leave without paying, it is the wait staff serving that group who are expected to pay the bill!.

That can’t be right and surely should be illegal. Is this some isolated case or is it common policy?

It looks like the FCC may soon relax the prohibition on using cell phones on planes.

The Federal Communications Commission said it will soon propose allowing passengers to use their cellphones on airplanes, setting up a debate that will pit the technically possible against the socially tolerable. [Read more…]

Cleveland was rocked last year by the revelation that a man had imprisoned three women in his house for a decade, fathering a child by one of them, before they were rescued. It seemed bizarre that this could have happened in a city in a neighborhood where the houses were so close to each other, and triggered a lot of discussion and guilt about how it could be that no one noticed anything untoward. [Read more…]

Sri Lanka is a developing country where there is a class of people who are not only extremely wealthy but determined to flaunt their wealth in the most ridiculously extravagant ways. The latest example of this kind of disgusting ostentation is a wedding that had 126 bridesmaids, 25 best men, 20 page boys and 23 flowers girls. [Read more…]

We may have a solution to the autoplay problem that has been annoying some readers. Thanks to everyone who provided data on whether they had autoplay problems with the embedded videos, the culprits may have been identified. After going through and tabulating all the responses, a pattern emerges and here is what I found. [Read more…]

I am fascinated by the way language evolves and so enjoyed this animation from the British Open University that in just ten minutes gives a flippant but informative history of the main steps in the development of the English language and the origins of many of the words and phrases that we use. [Read more…]

Bill Watterson, the creator of the iconic and much-loved Calvin and Hobbes that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995, walked away from one of the most successful comic strips in US history at the height of its popularity, when he felt that he had said and done all that he could with that particular medium. Thanks to my daughter, who was an even bigger fan of the strip than me, we now own all the C&H anthologies and they remain fresh upon re-reading. [Read more…]

Kentucky senator Rand Paul apparently likes to liven up his speeches with ideas taken from film plots. That’s fine but Rachel Maddow found that he seemed to be lifting the descriptions of the films from Wikipedia without attribution. And it was not just an isolated practice but done several times. When confronted about this practice, Paul reacted initially with bluster and indignation, saying that this was the work of ‘haters’ and an insult to his honor and that he regretted that these days he could not challenge them to a duel, as if he were a character from The Count of Monte Cristo, which as many of you know is an adventure story primarily concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness, it focuses on a man who is wrongfully imprisoned, escapes from jail, acquires a fortune and sets about getting revenge on those responsible for his imprisonment. (Note: I couldn’t resist making a small joke by lifting the rest of the sentence from the word ‘adventure’ straight from the Wikipedia entry.) [Read more…]