T h o u g h t s
Or Perhaps 'Complaints'

This is a collection of thoughts which I have had, which I find amusing or profound or otherwise just interesting. Or perhaps I was bored and had some extra energy in the typing fingers. Some are funny, some are serious, some are just plain weird.

I think that probably everyone in the United States can produce a Columbia House Membership card pretty much on demand, regardless of whether they are a member or not. I happen to have upwards of 35 membership cards, though I do not want to become a member and have sent them several letters to that effect. But as for me, instead of checking my house cleaner's Social Security number before employing them, I will have them prove their citizenship by showing me a Columbia House membership card.

In an old IBM user's guide at work I came upon at work, there was an entire pamphlet of rebus-looking directions on fixing your computer. Here is a sample:

Translation: (1) If you see the IBM logo, then everything is OK. (2) If you see the NOT OK picture and you are puzzled, consult the IBM user's guide on the page with the NOT OK picture.

Now, it was very nice of IBM to include a picture guide for illiterates who have trouble with their computers, but do they really expect someone who can't read to be able to fix hardware/cmos setup problems and hardware failure? Suppose they get to the "consult IBM user's guide" step; what do they do then? Perhaps IBM included this pamphlet to just reassure the illiterates?

The long and short of it is that IBM seems to be part of an international conspiracy to keep America illiterate. Having enormous amounts of our citizens illiterate is rather beneficial to wealthy corporate-type individuals, because of the theory of mercantilism; there is only a limited amount of wealth, and so the more impoverished everyone else is, the more wealth you can have.

I am in the process of devising a series of ways to know when you are mature. The first on this list is:

Most of the people in the US are aware of the Witness Protection Program. I don't know if it actually even exists -- the only information I have is from movies -- and I would not be so surprised if it actually didn't. However, I have a question. When they relocate a family and give them new names and stuff, it seems that it would be easy for gangsters to find them simply by looking up their birthdays in some database. So it seems logical that the Witness Protection Program gives the people new birthdays as well, right? I know they must let you pick the names that you get, so do you get to pick your birthday too? I suppose this way you could have legitimate legal fake ID.

And now I wonder: since you can get a legal name change (not by going through the Witness Protection Program, I mean), can you also go and get your birthday legally changed? I will have to contact my lawyer on that. (Or, I will have to get a lawyer and then contact them on that.)

You'd think they'd get the message by now. Don't they have a blacklist or something in the telemarketer business? Like the "these people never ever buy anything and sometimes they verbally abuse you" list? My family has never bought anything over the phone, and yet we receive 2-3 calls per day urging us to do so. Since obviously the telemarketers are not being very efficient by calling us, and probably have gotten the hint by the time I've hung up, sometimes I think they're doing it just to annoy me.

Here are my strategies for dealing with Telemarketers:

• Any call which starts with "Please hold for an important call" is not an important call.
• If they call your house and ask for the wrong name, and then correct themselves, or if they take more than 10 seconds to look up your name, it's a telemarketer.
• Calls (usually surveys) which are made by automatons are fun. Answer all their questions with very loud, overdriven screaming. If the automaton waits for you to finish your response, place your phone by a loud speaker or jam down a touch tone button.
• Calls made by actual humans are particularly annoying. They are damn good at what they do. At first, you think their tone of voice reflects the Overly-obsequious-but-I'm-just-doing-my-job-and- I'm-tired-of-being-harassed-and-please-don't-shout-at-me inflection, which it does, but the truth is that it is all just an act. In fact, telemarketers are trained for weeks to be able to reproduce this tone of voice, for the purpose of making you feel sorry for them and sometimes actually listen to their sales pitch. Do not be fooled!
• Telling telemarketers that the person they called for has died is often an effective tactic.
• Telemarketing calls are not always a waste, though. An interesting and novel strategy is to try to sell them something in return. Say something like, "Well, no thanks, but would you like to try MY long distance service?". This is likely to throw them off guard. If this doesn't work, try trading their product or service for various household articles that you've got handy. ("Okay, I'll trade the encyclopedia set for this three-quarters-full bottle of tile cleaner and an old Eurythmics LP?")

In order to reserve my spot in history, I've coined a word. "Tomophone". Tomophones are words which are spelled nearly exactly the same, have meanings which are utterly indiscernible from each other, but are listed in separate dictionary entries. Examples of this are "Provision" and "Proviso", and "Motto" and "Mot" (which happens to be "Tom" backwards). If you find any other Tomophones, feel free to Mail me!

A really bad way to count is to count how many there aren't and then subtract from infinity.

While I think the microwave is a wonderful invention, one thing that I don't like about it is how arbitrary the times are. Practically every time I microwave anything, I put it in for 8 seconds, 42 seconds, 1:11, 1:23, 2:22, 2:34, 3:33, 3:45, etc. merely because I like those numbers, not because they cook the stuff correctly. This often leads to burnt or undercooked food. But anyway, I might as well have just one button on my microwave, because I never cook real food in it, and the stuff that I do cook I usually only put in for 42 seconds, which is close enough to every other microwave time so that I can get by with it. Now this wouldn't disturb me, because I have sort of figured out by now that I often do things sort of abnormally, but it has become increasingly apparent to me that lots of people do this! Have we all gone so mad that we treat microwave times religiously? Well, I don't know... you tell me.

When I was little, I used to confuse the word "pubic" (as in "pubic hair") with "public". It is a rather unfortunate coincidence that the words "public" and "pubic" are very similar, since one would assume that they have quite contrary connotations. This is not true. One of the things that upsets me a lot about the world is that I seem to find pubic hairs everywhere. They are easily identified by their curliness and ovular shape, so they are definitely pubic hairs. And they're everywhere. On a spatula at a party. In my drink. Inside my new CD. I can only think of two ways for pubic hairs to get into my drink. The first (and less likely) involves the hairs flying or climbing out of the person's pants and jumping into my glass. Since I don't quite think this is what is happening, the logical conclusion is that people seem to like to stick their hands down their undergarments and then touch my food and spatulas and CDs immediately afterwards. Well, if you are one of these people, STOP!

Okay, now here's something I hate: when bands write the names of the songs on the album, except they're all out of order (ie. the first song on the back of the case is not the first song on the album). Examples of this are "Meat Puppets II" (Meat Puppets) and "Life's Rich Pageant" (REM). What were they thinking? It isn't artsy or funny; the end result is that I end up not ever learning the names of the songs, which seems like a sort of silly objective.

Hey, I wonder what happens if you patent The Sun or The Moon or the Atlantic Ocean or something. Probably nothing, probably they just laugh you out of the patent office.

Something saddening: Our culture's perspective on food has progressed to the point where you will frequently see advertised "With Real Apples!" on things like Apple Pies. That is a little bit scary. It is at least not as bad as when the word Real has a Trademark sign after it, like "Made with Real^TM Cheeze" where both Real and Cheeze are just brand names for some synthetic orange foam.

The flavor of this deodorant is Drive. What the hell.

In version 2.0 of Microsoft Word for Windows 3.1 (and perhaps other versions), there is an amusing quirk to the already wickedly pathetic grammar checker. Basically any time you use the word 'from' or 'form', and run a grammar check on the sentence, it will ask you if you perhaps meant the other of the two, because mistaking 'form' for 'from' (and vice versa) is a "common typing error."

The commonness of this error can be testified to by Word's own description of the grammar rule. Type in the following sentence:

I would like the from.

And run a grammar check. The grammar window will point out 'from' and ask you if you meant 'form'. Click on the button that says "Explain...", and you will get the following explanation:

"Writing 'from' instead of 'form' is a common typing error. Check the context of this word to determine if the noun or verb 'form' should replace the preposition 'form'."

Note the last line: "... or verb 'form' should replace the preposition 'form'." As we see, the error IS in fact common, even to the Grammar Experts at Microsoft! (Though they have fixed this in Word version 7.)

Hey, here's another reason to add to the huge list of reasons why they couldn't travel through time in Back To The Future: Don't forget that the Earth is flying through space Fairly quickly, and so a point on earth, relative to anything cosmic (as opposed to a movie camera on Earth) would be out in space days later! And, seeing how the car kept its velocity after it travelled back in time, and how we all have incredibly high but slowly-changing velocities, even if the car were to end up on Earth again, it would probably be shooting at extremely unsafe speeds in all the wrong directions!

So THERE, Robert Zemeckis^*... let's try to be a little more REALISTIC next time, OK?

^* The director of Back To The Future.

The English word "Obvious" comes from the Latin word Obvius, meaning "in the way of" or "in the path of". To me, this says something very important and deep about the meaning of the word obvious and the nature of mankind.

I won't bother detailing it to the reader here because it should be obvious.

I think that the male equivalent of menopause should be called "Manopause".

Man, it would really suck to be Jesus, because when Christmas comes around, I mean, what do you buy for God? "Well, uh, dad... since you like, own everything, I got you this tie, ok?"

Here, I haven't the energy to follow through on this, so someone make these, make a whole bunch of money, and then send me a dollar or something?

My confection idea: A sort of "Jelly Beans on-the-cob". Jelly beans mounted on a sugary or jelly-beanish cob, like an ear of corn.

I think that if cloning ever becomes a viable thing, that Serial Killers should Not be able to clone themselves. Because, you know, like, DNA Testing wouldn't work any more, and we could never catch them.

If a racketball-ball is called a racketball, shouldn't a racketball-racket be called a racketracket?

More seriously: Recently I've been doing more solo walking than I normally do (there are many trips from Dorm to Class and Vice Versa), and I have consequently been experimenting with different walking techniques. One which I have found particularly interesting is to see how far you can walk with your eyes closed. Find a nice stretch of pedestrianless and impediment-free sidewalk, and then close your eyes and keep on walking. Somehow I can't go further than about 10 paces (20 steps) before becoming so disoriented I feel like my next step will be off the edge of a chasm. In fact, if it is a sufficiently windy and overcast day, I found that you can walk about 10 paces and stop, and then totally forget where you are. A very interesting exercise for the imagination.

Did you know, that if you eat as much ketchup as there is in an apple (which is none), that has the same nutritional value as eating the apple itself? The conclusion is that we don't need to eat anything at all, as long as what we're not eating is ketchup.

I like riding in big things such as buses, since when big things hit other things, they do so much damage that it hardly feels like the big thing was injured at all. This feels so true that I can psychologically extend it to hitting things like buildings and other equally big things. It even feels safe to fly in large jets.

On anything which has only one setting, that setting is invariably wrong.

I think that one of the most difficult things in the world is to talk to dentists. I mean when they have their hands and Implements of Dentistry in your mouth. At my last dentist visit, she kept asking me questions about college and such while she was excavating my teeth, and seemed to be expecting answers, but all I could manage was like "ungllulug" and "aoollaah". Then she'd be taking x-rays and have me bite down on a lead thing and instruct me not to move my head Or Else The Beams Might Go Into Your Brain, and subsequently continue to ask me questions. Rrrr.

© Tom Murphy 1996

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