You know what I really like? Those factory reject green olives sold under the euphemistic label “salad olives.” They’re cheap; they taste just as good as the fancy, Platonic ideal ones; they come with extra, freelance pimentos; and they’re entertaining. When was the last time you saw an olive pitted sideways?

Dear Tropical Juice Co.: Shame on ( Read more... )

We've heard a lot of talk about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and how to curb them. (Note that one does not "reduce" or "diminish" or "decrease" emissions; one "curbs" them.) It seems perfectly obvious that commuting by bicycle drastically reduces the CO2 released into the atmosphere, compared with driving (even in a carpool). But many times in ( Read more... )

You know someone's using far too much aftershave if you're standing on the sidewalk and you can smell it on someone driving by at 25 MPH (40 km/h).

Here's a little spatial reasoning problem you can try to solve in your head, if you haven't already seen it in real life. Suppose you have a bumper sticker on the rear window of your car. (I do; it's ( Read more... )

In a truly incredible display of irony, a trade magazine calling itself Green Car Journal named its 2008 Green Car of the Year: the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid, an SUV that delivers a whopping 21 miles per gallon in combined highway/city driving. With near-miraculous fuel efficiency like that, we can only assume it comes with a free clip-on ponytail, ( Read more... )

It's bumper sticker time again!

During our cross-country drive the infamous torture bill had passed, and ever since I've been dying to create the following sticker-but I couldn't find the right cutesy font until just now. I recycled a graphic I'd developed for the EvolveFISH contest for use in an entry that was, alas, destined for total obscurity ( Read more... )

You know what glib admonishment I can't stand?

It's okay to drink like a fish-as long as you drink what a fish drinks!Not because I'm a heavy drinker: I tipple about as often as I'm offered a free strawberry daiquiri, about once a year on average. I object to the profound ignorance of physiology displayed here ( Read more... )

I finally had a chance to play one of my all-time favorite words in a game of Scrabble. The word was clayey, pronounced "clay-ee" and meaning, of course, "containing a high percentage of clay." English needs more words so wonderfully awkward both to spell and to say. I say it with a "glottal stop" between the "clay" and the "ey," so that there's ( Read more... )

Last weekend Kathy's sister Linda and I attended Kathy's first karate tournament in Ohio. Ever since Kathy started taking lessons, some five years ago, I've referred to karate exclusively as booting heads, in homage to a comedy routine called "Ti Kwan Leep/Boot to the Head" by the Frantics (available on Dr. Demento's 20th Anniversary Collection ( Read more... )

This summer I started seeing on my way to work old, junked bicycles, painted entirely white, at various intersections. Each one bore a sign saying, "A cyclist was struck here." Turns out it was a project by an advocacy group, GhostCycle.org, to raise awareness for drivers and cyclists alike of dangerous locations for bicycling in Seattle ( Read more... )

Social Commentary:

Denali. Yukon. Tahoe. Have you noticed that many of these obscenely huge SUVs are named after places of breathtaking natural beauty that will probably have to be strip-mined a few decades hence, in order to generate raw materials for obscenely huge SUVs?

You have just received 120% of your daily value of irony.

Edit: ( Read more... )