Alan’s Blogometer

Photogamer: In your pockets by Kenn Christ.

He is at Fair Grinds. He wants a Times-Picayune. There is fifty cents in his jacket pocket for a Times-Picayune. He knows this. He recalls putting the two quarters into his jacket pocket for the purpose of purchasing a Times-Picayune from the paper box in front of Fair Grinds. His jacket is draped over the chair that sits across from him at the table where he has set himself up with his laptop to write. He gets up to fetch the two quarters. He looks in one pocket and does not find them. He looks in the second pocket and doesn’t find them. He looks in his pants pockets, but he knows the quarters are not there. He looks in the inner pocket in the jacket, but there is none. He looks in one jacket pocket a second time and does not find them. He looks in the second jacket pocket a second time and does not find them.

He then picks the jacket up off the back of the chair, swings it over his shoulders. As his hands exit the tunnel of the sleeves and just as the jacket comes to rest on his shoulders, he reaches into his right jacket pocket and grabs both quarters between his thumb and two foremost fingers. He folds his shoulders and doffs his jacket and returns it to the back of the chair, cradling the quarters in his palm.

He looks at the quarters and it occurs to him that logically, he could have just scavenged his jacket pockets a third time as the jacket hung from the back of the chair.

At that point he understood something about doing without thinking, but he soon forgot it.

This had me laughing out loud. A great sense of humor bas Barack Obama. From Why Republicans Fear Obama by Byron York at the National Review Online.

“You notice that people who’ve been in Washington too long, they don’t talk like ordinary folks,” Obama began. “We had this debate in Las Vegas, and somebody asked me, ‘What are your weaknesses?” So I said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t keep track of paper that well, I’m always losing paper, my desk is a mess.’ And then they asked the next two candidates. And one candidate says, ‘Well, my biggest weakness is I’m just so passionate about helping poor people.’ And then the other one says, ‘I’m just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems.’ So then I realize well, I wish I’d gone last and then I would have known.”

I found a Susan B. in my change this morning. Did someone give it to me in lieu of a paper dollar or did they mistake it for a quarter? She was short lived. The date is 1979. The new Sacagawea dollar now competes with a series of presidential dollars. It strikes me that our misogynist society cannot stomach women on their currency, they must retaliate with the 43 big men. Lovely Lady Liberty is on the reverse of the presidential coins, of course. I adore her, but she’s awful quiet. Statuesque is our feminine ideal.

Not in Firefox, at least.

Why doesn’t my Macintosh’s dictionary recognize the widely accepted spelling of okay? It bothers me that this word is not in my computers dictionary. No one likes to be corrected, especially when they know they are right.

Via Mr. Gloomy Pants who found it via Suspect Device. The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2007 from the Buffalo Beast.

Don’t Fear Starbucks is an article about how Starbucks drives the sales in independent coffee shops by introducing more customers to blended coffee beverages. I thought that I might shoot this off into an email to Robert Thompson of Fair Grinds, but I thought it would be more interesting to see how long it takes him to find this post and comment. The article does describe Starbucks’ predatory monopolistic practices. (Personally, I think that Starbucks is an embarrassingly pasty white aberration of American culture.)

Billy Welliver just wrapped up the Wedding Journal on Cox 10. I’m watching public access tonight. Interviews with Entergy executives, videos of weddings, a Cox representative touring the town asking people questions and buying their dinner. I’m listening to a fellow tell me about Cox Plugged In and the History Art Contest. Deadline has passed for submissions. Confusing, yet fun.