Mine: “You like participating in competitive sports.”

Sure, in the aforementioned Bizarro World!

Via Radley Balko, I give you Super Communist Mario Brothers.

See, the deadlines that are the deadlines are not the deadlines. Those deadlines aren’t the real deadlines, just the deadlines that were given to you. The real deadlines are set by whoever can bug you enough to get their particular work done by their deadline, which they can’t tell you or then the magic would go away and the terrorists would win and there wouldn’t be any more unicorns.

Now, the unicorns live in the time between the real deadline and the deadline you get. Terrorists know this and threaten to expose the real deadlines to people who do the work. But project managers know that they can’t let unicorns die, so they hide the real deadlines as their parents and their parents before them hid deadlines in the dread Forest of Real Deadlines.

Of course, you’re responsible for meeting the real deadline or unicorns will turn into horses, so the poor project manager is left with no other choice but to harangue you and rearrange your schedule five times until you give up and do their task before the deadline they told you. But if you are lazy and believe the deadline they tell you, you’ll create another horse.

So basically, horses only exist because lazy people don’t meet the real deadline. But if you find out the real deadline, the unicorn explodes in an atomic fireball. This happened twice in quick succession in Japan, shaming the Emperor and causing him to capitulate to American project managers.

They learned their lesson well, which is why there are no horses in Japan but lots of horses for gay cowboys to ride in the US. Gay cowboys can’t ride horses in Japan, which makes them very sad, but not as sad as if the unicorns all died. So don’t ask gay cowboys what the real deadlines are. They won’t tell you.

I hope this clears things up.

No, not gay, as Mac OS X users. On the heels of my friend Jason loving his company’s 12″ G4 PowerBook, Joshuah Micah Fetang Fetang Marshall switches as well.

But the funniest comment on the switch-hitting is Andrew Sullivan’s (who is gay):

Mine is 17 inches and I whip it out whenever and wherever I need to.

Office “marriages”.

Having a pseudo-wife or pseudo-husband at work may not only make you happier with your job but may even improve your chances for promotions and raises, according to a report Friday.

Non-romantic “marriages” in the workplace are the newest craze in office romance, the New York Post said, citing a survey by Vault Inc., a career research and consulting company.

Non-romantic “marriages” in the workplace are the newest craze in office romance. Marriages for convenience/arrangement or for whom the romance has died I get. But if it’s non-romantic it can’t be romance but if it’s romance it should be romantic and…

Well, there went my brain for the day.

Here are some patterns that could bring me ’round to the idea of knitting. Aside from Doctor Who scarf patterns, of course. What’s that? Never thought you’d ask.

One of the things that annoyed me while doing my sojourn in the “Arts” part of liberal arts was the competition among grad students and professors to affect an otherworldly mien. Knowing nothing about the rest of the world was considered a badge of pride and proof of one’s commitment to your craft. It has long been this way, and C. P. Snow famously lamented the Two Worlds of academia, in which scientists had a basic understanding of the arts (they know who Shakespeare and Faulkner were, they know the difference between a novel and a short story) but liberal arts types would wear their ignorance of other matters on their sleeves (they may know who Einstein was, but are pretty fuzzy on Heisenberg–ha–and couldn’t tell an atom from a molecule if their life depended on it). They would look down on me for my interest in things outside music.

Another affectation was for mundane tasks to be beneath them. Much like dandied country gentlemen of 19th century England, skill at business was a lowering of social status while ruinous debt was a regrettable but understandable part of life. So, too, could professors not be bothered to learn to use a computer or know anything mechanical not directly connected to their art.

So it gives me a bit of shadenfreude to see three officials in the English Language Institute of the University of South Florida lose their steady paychecks because donation checks were carelessly stashed around the office. Checks dating back ten years. The ones that fund their salaries.

Or did, before they were fired.

The Best Blonde Joke Ever, according to Jason.

/me scratches blond-hair-covered head

I don’t get it.

“They think they can get it on MTV on Total Request Live, and if they don’t, it’s for political reasons, not because the song sucks.”

– Keith Oberman on “Bush was Right,” “music” to which he thoughtfully provided a video you should see (don’t pretend you don’t have iTunes and hence, Quicktime) (and if you don’t, well, you just suck. Accept it.)

Surely this will catapult me into the ranks of big time bloggers like that guy from flyover country, the gay Republican, or some political hack. My more commented-upon Canadian-themed post got quite a lot of hate comments from Canadians who failed to read the substance of the post (or, as I judge from the quality of the spelling and punctuation, may simply have been unable to read it). It then also drew quite a lot of counter-hate hate comments from Americans. Ever one to enjoy watching Canadians act in opposition to their self image, I just sat back and watched.

But when a couple of 14-year-olds (or their mental equivalents) began bashing one another the thing got tiresome. As long as they were bashing one another based on their country of residence, I didn’t much care. Then the (self-identified) American began simply just posting potty mouth words without a lot of point to them. Now I’m quite a fan of potty mouth words (fuck, shit, Jerry Seinfeld, crap, children, dickweed, and Canada, just to name a few)–I just require that they be in the service of something. So I just deleted those posts but left up the juvenile name-calling. That caused outrage, so I banned the commenter’s IP address. He came back and resumed the name-calling, and all was well.

Then the (again, self-described) Canuck failed to recognize that a spammer bent on selling him magic beans for his beanie-weenie had simply used a bot to post some innocuous bit of nonsense, and replied to it. I of course deleted the spam, causing much anguish on the Canuck’s part. I replied that as this is my private propertah, all will respect my authoritah, and I’ll delete whatever the fuck I want for whatever reason I want, or no reason at all. Generally I’m pretty liberal about what I’ll let pass, but sometimes I’m just feelin’ the need for delete.

This caused the American to launch into a paroxysm of abuse. So, of course I deleted it, since it had nothing to do with hating (or not hating) Canada. He returned, full of accusations of treason, etc., etc., and I deleted those. Eventually I got tired of the thing and just turned the comments off that post, since most of them even before the juveniles got involved had been fairly stupid anyway. Canadians seem to have a lot of time on their hands and get a wee bit defensive about being a real country (funny how real countries never feel the need to get defensive about their existence). This caused quite a pause, since neither of them seemed to know that a “blog” has “posts” of which their favorite was simply one among many.

So today, while I spent the day out in the warm sun enjoying nature’s plenitude, the American troll was in his dank cave manually spamming as many posts as he could (geez, write a bot like every other script kiddie). I returned to find them, and promptly deleted them. The Canadian troll managed to bang out a couple of insults between bouts of shivering, but as autocratic and random as I am, I elected to let them stay. I’m just kooky that way.

No doubt my American hater will come back with all sorts of things as soon as the public library opens again and he manages to rediscover how to work the automatic door. They’ll probably be deleted and that IP address banned. Since I have very low readership, I don’t mind banning most of SBC’s IP space. They’re pretty lame, anyway.

But I’m so glad I have a hater. Clearly, I’m coming up in the world.