perfidy

The other day, I posted a couple Letterman Top Ten Lists. If that got your interest wound up but unsatisfied, well, here's where to go to get more. This page has all the early, pre-CBS top ten lists, and lists from CBS up to 2001. Note that the earlier lists are the intellectual property of NBC or its parent corporation, and used without permission. For your more recent lists, you can go to the Top Ten archive on Letterman's CBS page, which has the most recent ones back to August of 93. So there's a little overlap there. The search function on the CBS page works pretty well, but for the older ones, use google.

For your enjoyment, a couple random top ten lists:

Top 10 Children's Books NOT Recommended by the National Library Association

10. Curious George and the High-Voltage Fence
9. The Boy Who Died from Eating All His Vegetables
8. Legends of Scab Football
7. Teddy: The Elf with a Detached Retina
6. Tommy Tune: Boy Choreographer
5. Joe Garagoila Retells Favorite Fairy Tales but Can't Remember the Endings to All of Them
4. Ed Beckley's Start a Real Estate Empire with Change from Mom's Purse
3. Things Rich Kids Have That You Never Will
2. Let's Draw Betty and Veronica with Their Clothes Off
1. The Care Bears Maul Some Campers and Are Shot Dead

Top Ten Greatest Books of All Time About Guys Named Steve

10. "War and Peace and Steve"
9. "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Steves"
8. "The Grapes of Steve"
7. "The Steves of Wrath"
6. "Steve Grapes Steve Wrath Steve Steve"
5. "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, Steve is From Cleveland"
4. "Where's Waldo? Is He With Steve?"
3. "Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume VIII: 'Mysterious Guys Named Steve'"
2. "The Joy of Sex with Steve"
1. "The Bible" (King Steve Version)

The Ministry's continuing series of educational posts, uh, continues with our nation's 43rd State, Idaho. Today we focus on Idaho's two most significant exports, militias and potatoes:

• More Than Just Potatoes. Well, Okay, Just Potatoes
• No, U-da-ho!
• The Potato State
• Get Your Whites Their Whitest!
• Potatoes and Neonazis ... Two great tastes that taste great together
• You say potato, I say ... potato
• Cogito ergo spud: I think, therefore I yam
• We don't care if you spell potato with an "e"
• The White Potato Supremacist State
• Don't let the sun set on you in our state, Yam
• That's Bwawz, not Boy-zee
• The reason there's only 49 contestants in the Ms. Ebonics pageant
• Home of Mr. Potato Head
• Imagine your compound here!
• Like the Connecticut of the West
• Our state flower is the Syringe, but don't confuse us with New Jersey
• Birthplace of TV
• Proud home of Ezra Pound and Ruby Ridge

The local incarnation of my regional ultramegasupermarket makes dinner fare for the young stud on the go: pizza; chicken in various cooked states and configurations; pot-pies; uncountable pounds of mashed potatoes and mac-n-cheese.

The other day I chose an exceptional meatloaf, my favorite example of all the loafed foods. This place makes a decent meatloaf- a tad salty, a touch greasy, but otherwise about as pleasant a gustatory experience as any right-thinking person might expect from a meatloaf. Today's lunch is a cold slab of that 2 (3?)-day-old meatloaf. It started as a slab, anyway; I had to cut it down to fit into my container, and subsequent travel broke things up a little further.

Anyway it's lunchtime and I'm about halfway through it, just, you know, eating and diggin' on my meatloaf, when it suddenly occurred to me that in color, shape, and size I might appear to be eating bits of a turd. And not like the tootsie rolls the cat leaves for you. A dense all-American turd that destroys plumbing, fouls the air, and makes communists afraid. Something that only the bowel of a flesh-eating man's man- like, say, Ted Nugent- might produce.

So that's what's on my mind right now.

Um, what are you having...?

There are numerous examples of distorted language I, and I expect you, hear every day. Mangled pronunciation. The dearth of subject-verb agreement, and the new tyranny of the pronoun "they". Weird pluralization too, like the time in Atlanta when an airport announcer implored passengers, at least three times, to retrieve their "luggages"; I about had a hot, frothy fit on the spot.

But nothing in spoken English gets up my ass so thoroughly as vacuous business-speak, and one simple word in particular makes me want to climb up the tower and either ring the bells madly or snuggle into a cozy sniper perch: "solution".

I'm not completely unaware of the use of the word as a noun largely devoid of meaning. Every technology company since 1994 either provides solutions, builds solutions, or can help you find your solution. I often wonder, in fact, what companies were doing before they all devoted themselves to making solutions. What I didn't appreciate though was that the word had filtered down into everyday simple ad copy.

Last Sunday I was going through some prices on laptops by a certain electronics distributor. It was there I read not one, not twice, but several times, text describing a model as a "solution". The ad would read something like, "This is IBM's most rugged solution"; or, "Look no further for a solution under $1200"; or, "ACER's new frammis chip is the solution that drives their portable solution". A what? For what?! I thought I was after a computer...

Solutions answer problems. And wanting a new computer is not neccessarily a fucking puzzle.

Let me put it another way. Say you and I are working on my non-green, hippy-hating SUV. Let's keep the example simple, and we're doing something routine...say we're, I dunno, replacing the razing wire strung around the roof. And let's say that at one point I tell you I need a 3/4" wrench, you hand me a 3/4" wrench, and say, "there's your Craftsman bolt solution." I would take it, rap the top of your mushy head with it, and ask you whether that felt like a solution or a wrench. Because it's a fucking wrench.

Your car is not your "transportation solution". It's a fucking car. Your steak is not your "nutrition solution". It's a fucking steak. My scroty bag is not my "reproductive portability solution". It's my nutsack. Um, and so forth and so on.

So. If you use this word regularly yet you are not a scientist or mathematician, fucking cut it out already.

This concludes this installment of The English Bitch. We now return to The Buckethead Show, already in progress.

I pose a purely rhetorical question, apropos Minister Geeklethal's earlier comment which includes a reference to "the all-consuming white and black ball".

Ignore for a moment the fact that, at least in the final, the ball wasn't white & black:

I'm a guy, so I don't know if that not-black, not-white color is taupe, mauve, or some other made-up name.

But, on to my rhetorical question: When did FIFA decide to allow brand advertising on the ball? Have a closer look, at this picture:

Is it just me, or does it look like a sneaky product placement by Kotex? At least Nike, when doing product placements related to soccer balls, makes them both transparent and interesting, with goofy, snaggle-toothed football wunderkinds like Ronaldinho.

Ministry Crony EDog alerts us to the happenings in Japan, wherein one may see an interesting festival:

It's not at all like our Independence Day. But perhaps a little more colorful. If by colorful, you mean phallic. You can see more pics and commentary at EDog's heterosexual life partner's blog, The Daily Disappointment. The Ministry would like to extend its deep and sincere thanks to the both of them, our lives are richer for having seen all of this.

Uber-blogger Murdoc, whose scrotal heft is such that the airlines try and make him check his nuts whenever he flies, discusses Army and USMC helmet technologies and fielding programs here.

This is an interesting snippet, from the '03 article he cites:

"...replacing the old “Kevlar” as it’s commonly called, which has been around since the early 1980s."

Which is factual, inasmuch as they existed and were fielded to certain units in time for Grenada (camo BDUs too, for that matter). But I tell you that I went to basic training in 1989 and finished AIT in Jun 1990, and was issued a steel pot at both, as were all trainees. Training cadre and other permanent-party folks all had k-pots though. I didn't get a Kevlar brainbucket til I got to my first unit.

I'm not sharp-shooting here, honest. Just pointing out that there's a difference between a piece of equipment "existing" and having it issued across the force that I think alot of folks might overlook.

Thankfully absent from Murdoc's discussion was his analysis of the Army's Purple-Helmet Warrior Concept.

Among the myriad World Cup tales of soaring victory and crushing defeat; of passions, hatreds, life, love, death; of suffering and pride locked in the orbit of the all-consuming white and black ball, comes another story. A story of practicality, fulfilling urgent needs, and micro-economics.

Leave it to the Germans, arguably the most industrious people in the civilized world, Europe's own tireless ants, to put tailfins and new, uh,
rubber, on the oldest profession.

I give you the drive-through whorehouse.

The Ministry's favoritest Oldsmoblogger, Ken, considers some finer points of constitutional interpretation and originalism. In so doing, he takes the LA Times' Mark Kurlansky apart for being not simply naive, but outright stupid. Ken's far too diplomatic to use that phrasing, but I'm not. So I did.

Ken is alot smarter than me and I'm glad he uses his powers for good.

Most people wouldn't think to make fun of Hawaii. It seems like a nice place. The Japs bombed it. It is the home of hula girls, surfing and Charles A. Lindbergh's grave. Who could possibly make fun of the Pineapple State? Well, us:

• Aloha means "get lost, punk!"
• We're the furthest from New Jersey!
• Sure, we've got Interstates... drive right on over
• Book 'em Danno
• We define middle of nowhere
• Hula girls are easy
• Weather is here, wish you were beautiful
• Why Does Everybody Think Putting Ham and Pineapple on Something Makes it "Hawaiian"?
• You can't get here from there
• Gateway to a shitload of water
• Tom Selleck, Jack Lord, Don Ho - Paradise!
• Eat Lava, Jerks!
• Halfway to Guam
• A whole language with only three sounds
• The Last State, until Puerto Rico makes up its fucking mind
• We're not fat, we're Samoan