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