Does this magazine cover make me look . . . old? :-D

For example, you might stumble across an October 1978 issue of Seventeen magazine with a 13-year old Brooke Shields on the cover . . .

I was thinking about selling it on ebay (along with the other issues in the stack) but you know, I might need to hang onto it a little while, first.

At least until I’ve read “Teen Pregnancy: Whose fault-boy or girl?”

Edgy teen  market journalism, 70s style — can’t resist!

Profit margins on the gasoline business are very slim. The profit margin on gasoline sales was only about 6 percent in 2006 (noted in that NPR article’s Bottled Water sidebar). That’s why you seldom see a gas station without a convenience store or Wal-Mart attached any more. Gasoline is the barely-above-cost incentive to get you to stop someplace where you’ll then hopefully buy a bunch of other stuff.

Wouldn’t it be nice if basic economic cause-and-effect phenomenon like this were taught in our schools? Then maybe people would be a bit less likely to jump to unwarranted conclusions about price-gouging every time supply disruptions or commodities trading drives prices up.

Did you hear the one about the programmer who outsourced his own job? I read about it on Slashdot.org, the “news for nerds” Web site. A pseudonymous poster wrote, “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.”

Wired says the story is probably apocrophal, but even so, mightn’t it be an early clue to the new direction?

The only trouble is, offshore outsourcing is awfully hard to do when you’re a writer.

OTOH, considering how cheaply many freelancers give away their time, perhaps it’s possible to find a subcontractor here in the U.S.

Hmmm . . .

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

“I ate three lumps of it. But I spat two of them out, so I really ate one and a half of them.”

Ooookay.

Welcome to the mind of a man who, to protest an act of animal cruelty that never happened, cooks and eats a domestic dog. And then exults that his act was “art.”

It’s a mind where 3-2 = 1&1/2.

The worst part is that he got attention for this. Which is all he’s really after, anyway.

Technorati Tags: idiots

Now it emerges that the Face on Mars is really . . . a MESA?

Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us all that film footage of Big Foot is a guy in a gorilla costume.

Oh, wait . . .

Technorati Tags: Mars, Face

This assumes you shop at the higher end of the supermarket food chain — and also assumes the time you spend preparing meals has a dollar value. If your definition of home cooking is to prise open a #10 can of franks-n-beans and dump some in a saucepan, the argument falls apart ;-)

Otherwise, as says one Mark Bergen, “pricing specialist,” Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota: “Simply put, restaurants are more efficient than you are.”

Some nice data about the resturant biz in the article too, though. Their profit margins are under 5 percent. And “most turn over more than their entire staff each year, a rate that has contributed to a decline in service over the past 10 years, experts say.” Yeah, that does explain a lot.

And of course, some requisite hand-wringing about portion size and how that’s making us fat. As if the doggy bag had never been invented. After golfing with my parents last weekend, we stopped at the Doug’s Fish Fry in Cortland. They were offering a fried oyster special. I ate half of mine and had the other half for lunch yesterday. Mmmmmm. (Heat them up under the broiler, a minute or so a side, just until the breading starts to sizzle, crisps them back up without overcooking the oyster.) (A trick I’ve perfected by reheating the ubuiquitous “chicken fingers” that my daughter often orders when we eat out.)

I’m not advocating a steady diet of deep-fried breaded whatever, of course, but in moderation? And they were oysters!

Technorati Tags: restaurants, dining out

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

– C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingnes,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Technorati Tags: religion, science

My only beef is that Anderson goes a little too easy on environmental doomsayers, conceding that they may be “sincerely fearful of climate change” while focusing most of the piece on people who conceive apocalypse through the mechanics of religious prophecy.

It would be more fair to note that religious fanatics are “sincerely fearful” of moral corruption, believing it propels us toward global disaster. The ingredients are therefore identical. Start with widespread evil and thick-headedness. Then swap in some scary physical processes for a wrathful deity and voila, ya gots your post-modern secular kablooey.

The question is: who are you going to believe?

*(and I feel fine.)

I mean, yodeling the William Tell Overture? Rossini’s Large al factotum? The only question is why it took someone this long to figure out it HAD to be done.

Technorati Tags: music