Category: i love absurdity

View posts about the absurdity of human antics (amusing or irritating).

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Vanity is good for your health

An oft missed benefit of vanity may be increased physical and mental health, experts say. Strongly caring about one’s appearance may lead to better sleep habits (reducing dark circles and increasing mental acuity), physical fitness (regular exercise has many health benefits beyond looking “fit”), increased resistance to disease (from cleanliness habits), healthier nutrition habits, teeth and skin. Staying out of the sun not only helps keep your collagen intact (which gives skin its elasticity), but reduces changes for skin cancer; likewise not smoking also helps keep collagen intact and drastically reduces chances for lung disease.

Of course, as with any good thing, extremes are not necessarily for the general good (extreme surgeries, over-exercise or crazy diets), so keep your vanity in check – a little goes a long way (and, as it happens, to numerous good results). 🙂

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Cured meat – the other carcinogen

Today I found a news story online (likely to be overlooked in light of the latest shooting spree coverage) about how a new study shows that cured meats (such as hot dogs) increase the risk of lung disease (such as emphysema), independent of other factors such as smoking.

Link (while it lasts) is here: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1643513920070417

What is most amazing and absurd is this portion of the rebuttal by a meat industry representative: “This article in no way changes a basic fact — and that is that cured meats are among the safest meat products on the market,” said institute spokeswoman Janet Riley.

Ha! Maybe that’s true, but what does it say about the rest of the meat products on the market?

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law is not your friend

How many laws do you think we have? Think local (your city/town, your county), state and federal. A few hundred thousand maybe? Enough to keep lawyers occupied in intensive study for 3 years in a specialty (not all laws, just laws about corporate finance or intellectual property), and even then, it’s unlikely that they’d know them all. As a regular citizen, it is your responsibility to follow all these laws… but you don’t even know 1/1000th of them!

This is one of the ways our political system is absurd. You can be arrested and jailed or fined for any number of actions that you have no clue are illegal. And it’s not like the laws are all sensible moral things like “don’t kill people”, but many are obscure things like “don’t keep cake in cookie jars” or “no sexual positions besides missionary allowed”, left over from puritanical control-freaks from centuries ago.

I think we all must be lawbreakers by now.  So revel in your outlawery – just don’t be mean.

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Robert E. Lee quote

The other day, my CEO (who sends a “thought” every day), sends this quote out to the company:

“Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.” -Robert E. Lee

This is funny in so many ways. First off, the quote is inherently funny because it’s a quote about duty from a rebel general who was a pivotal part of a civil war (well, you see, there’s duty to your original country and duty towards your new spin-off country – oh, give me a break Bobby, you can’t even define duty so you shouldn’t be making up quotes for it). Secondly, it’s funny contextually because Mr. Duty was leading a revolt primarily about the right to keep dark-skinned people as slaves and, while not of African descent, our CEO (the quote-sender) is himself dark-skinned (Indian). I don’t think he’d even pass the paper bag test. And of course, there’s the standard corporate ridiculousness of comparing business to war. I’m sorry, but gaining or losing money (or jobs) is just not the same as watching your family get blown to pieces by a landmine or killing hundreds of people with your trusty rifle and maybe gutting a few with a bayonet.

About a month ago, there was another quote about fighting the good fight as a gladiator. Note: gladiators were slaves of a sort – there seems to be some kind of theme with slavery. I’m not feeling especially inspired for some reason.

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o mighty blog

A few weeks ago, I received an email from my hosting service saying that WordPress was available for free installation and I could have a blog of my very own (and being just a tiny bit controlling – I liked the thought of being able to moderate everything about it, including the look). When I first went onto my site admin to try it out, it said I needed to install CGI first, so I enlisted the help of my friend Miguel (see his blog link on my blogroll). When we got together, he helped me create a SQL database (nothing in it, just a placeholder for WordPress to use) and then we tried to install WordPress, creating blog name, user and password and all that, but at the point of install, we got a database initialization error. We tried again, but were unable to figure it out.

I called the helpdesk (yes, my hosting site is nice enough to have live people you can talk to), but the person on the phone, nice but not very well informed, had to escalate my issue to Tier 2 (their more “technical” people). Tier 2 so-and-so emailed me later unapologetically to say that it was my fault for using “special characters” such as a single quote in the name of the blog (which I had done). So I retried with their workaround (grumbling to myself that they could really stand to institute some error exception handling – I work in software development and it’s pretty standard to be able to handle special characters in any input field) and ran into the same error, but at one step later. I contacted them again by phone and again they told me it needed to be escalated to Tier 2 . A day later, Tier 2 support informed me that there was a problem with some tables in my SQL database and I needed to “drop” them. Well, I hadn’t added any tables – they must’ve been added by WordPress, even though it failed to initialize (grr). I dropped them, added a new name and was finally able to get WordPress installed. The only problem was that I couldn’t install my own theme or edit any CSS because I didn’t have permission (via FTP) to my new blog folder! I sent Tier 2 an email suggesting that they should give me permissions to my own file folder and by the way it would be nice if they put in some error exception handling (if not on the backend, at least in the UI to explain to users the issue). They never responded to that, but the next day, I had permission to edit my folder and was able to install a nice theme (Ice 1.0) and here I am!

As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled with the service, but they did get me through the problems and I do appreciate the free WordPress hosting and of course I love absurdity (after the frustration of it wears off, anyhow). 🙂