The pizza man cometh

Domino's Pizza Tracker is now online. You can track any pizza that you have ordered for delivery from the moment that you place the order to the time it leaves the shop. Why would you want to do that?

Fast Times, in their article Cheesy Goodness satirically suggests that the service is being done to reduce buyer anxiety. Yes, people become anxious about when their pizza will arrive. If it's been 32 minutes since they ordered, they panic.

To me, this is a sign of a society gone nuts. We are so stressed out and so desperate to have control over something in our lives. I don't know how I'll pay off the credit card that this pizza is being charged to, but I know to the tenth of a second when my pie has been sliced and boxed. I'm safe; I've got it under control.

Technorati Tags: food, humor, internet culture

The Law is an Ass, Again

Drugs offender keeps £4.5m after 30 barristers refuse to take case - Times Online

In England, a drug dealer found himself unable to afford a lawyer because the Crown had seized the £4.5m he had earned through the sale of drugs. Legal aid barristers refused to act on his behalf because they said the mandatory government fee was too low. The man represented himself in a court hearing set to determine what was to be done with his money. The judge declared the pusher acquitted because he lacked proper legal representation. The money was returned to him. He walked out of the court a free man and a millionaire.

Dickens, in Oliver Twist , has a character declare that the law is an ass if it says that a wife always acts under her husband's direction. The law has found a new way to be assinine.

Technorati Tags: England, humor, irony, law, absurdity

Grow a mind--read some books that have been translated into English

The British Booktrust has put up a web site dedicated to books translated into English. Particularly interesting is a page of “Top tens”. The lists include “10 Far east and South-East Asian novels in translation” and “10 novels in translation from the Spanish diaspora”. Shamefully, there are no lists of poetry in translation.
The site is heavily dependent on “Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to World Fiction (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide)” (A&C Black).

Technorati Tags: books, translating, reading

You have to be an idiot not to watch TED Talks

TED: Ideas worth spreading
TED is short for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It is an annual conference, held in various places around the world. Leading thinkers are invited to give an 18 minute “talk of their lives.”
The web site has links to 200 such talks. They are magnificent, brilliant, wonderful.
For a DVD of the 2007 conference, check out “The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED” (Daphne Zuniga, Steven Latham)

Technorati Tags: art, design, education, internet culture, technology, TED Talks, video

This is what capitalism is all about

“Free Tibet” flags are being manufactured in a factory in China's Guangdong province. I wouldn't want to be the salesperson who closed that deal.
The Chinese should look on the bright side and view those protest rallies that are receiving worldwide tv coverage as free advertising for their products. What next? Dalai Lama bobble head dolls?

Technorati Tags: China, human rights, humor, politics, Tibet

Head scratching time

Artists hosting head lice for show
A group of seven German artists are “hosting” head lice as part of an art exhibition in an Israeli museum. They are wearing shower caps to prevent the lice from spreading. Perhaps the lice will create an itch sufficient to cause the artists to scratch. The scratching might stimulate some blood flow, which in turn could, possibly, reach the brains of these artists, and maybe, just maybe raise their IQ's above the submoron level at which they are now operating.

Technorati Tags: art, avant garde, fine arts, lice, Israel

But, is it art? Or narcissism?

WSJ.com carries an op-ed piece by Michael J. Lewis which questions the manner in which art is being taught at Yale and other universities these days. He lights on a most extreme case--a woman who uses self-induced miscarriages as performance art.
Lewis' thesis is quite commonplace: that an apprentice artist should study “the tradition” before moving on to experimental art. His example is, to put it mildly, astounding. Aliza Shvarts, the artist in question, claims to be challenging the “reality of miscarriage” as it exists as a “linguistic” construction. By turning miscarriage into “art” she thinks she is taking away the power of those who use the word's negative connotations to control people. What will happen to our vocabulary of disapproval, should this trend continue? Are rape, murder, bigotry merely linguistic constructs? Can art really make them go away?

Technorati Tags: art, avant garde, censorship, education, pop culture, fine arts, Yale

Is this the 12th century?

The corpse of a Catholic saint, Padre Pio, who has been dead for forty years has been dug up and will be on display in a glass coffin in the Italian town of Foggia. Apparently a plastic mask, made from a cast of his face, will be involved in the display.

The Times of London “Faith Central” page (see link above) comments on the role of relics and the “veneration of sacred remains.” It all seems creepy and regressive to me. Can faith be brought to life by a corpse?

Pio was an object of controversy and was even banished from teaching for a time.

In his life, Padre Pio was reputed to smell like flowers and to have the ability to be in two places at the same time. He was also reputed to have had stigmata on his palms. “The Pierced Priest” as one book calls him, was also accused of having had intimate relations with women. That's the first claim about him that I can readily believe.

Padre Pio is the subject of numerous books. There is a “Top Ten Books about Padre Pio” list available on Amazon and you can buy medals, keychains and other item online at the Padre Pio Gift Shop. He makes a good living for a dead guy.

Brewer must stop using 'Legal Weed' bottle caps

The caption 'legal weed“ cannot be used on the caps of a beer made in Weed, California. This ruling from the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau was made to protect consumers from being ”mislead“ about the contents of the beer. In other words, so that they would not think it contained marijuana.

The decision is indicative of how the little guy, in this a microbrewery, is subjected to excessive, and unjustified, regulation which is not applied to larger companies. The same federal agency has not, to date, ordered Budweiser to stop using ”this Bud's for you“ as a slogan.

Technorati Tags: business, censorship, humor, trade

This is some deal

Pakistan Taleban praise release, runs the BBC headline. The Pakistani government has released an elderly militant after several years in prison in the hope that he will return to his faction and broker some sort of peace deal.
His followers welcome his release and say they will stop fighting with the Pakistani government when President Musharraf resigns, the government stops being pro-American, Islamic law is enforced in the tribal areas, and NATO leaves Afghanistan. Thank goodness they are so flexible.

Technorati Tags: Pakistan, politics, Afthanistan