TANSTAAFL

So, I got this very elaborate marketing deal in the mail the other day, advertising a pop-up car sale in the parking lot of the local mall.

Nice plastic case, elaborate graphics, real key inside - this was the deluxe package.

The main draw was a sweepstakes with a chance to win a new car.

The key itself actually did nothing besides attract attention, which was a disappointment. There was a number printed on the cardboard under it, and that was the critical element. The fine print said there was a one in ninety thousand chance of my number being the winner. Not that I want a Ford Mustang.

Of course, there was another, smaller contest to entice the reader - the chance to win cheap, expensive, or more expensive headphones.

But look at those odds: a 99.99% chance of winning the expensive headphones! All I had to do was scratch!

Of course, I did. And to no one's surprise, I won!

 

Now, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, and I learned pretty young the taste of bitter disappointment when a prize turned out to be a crappy come-on, so I didn't really give much thought to this - I mean, who even says the retail price of these earbuds was $99, anyway? I don't even need any more earbuds. Not worth the drive to even check it out.

As it happens, our errands for the day happened to take  Coco and I past the parking lot where this even was being held, and my initial suspicions were confirmed by two observations:

1. There was a single, narrow drive-in entrance to the event which allowed for some intense traffic control on the inside: e.g., it looked like once inside, one could have a hard time leaving.
2. There was a group of people with picket signs protesting high-pressure sales tactics.

I was half-tempted to park elsewhere, walk in, and demand my free earbuds just to see what would happen, but only for a second. The day was too beautiful and I have lived long enough to learn that the most successful way to deal with annoyances of this nature is to disengage from them, not try to beat them.

Just drive on by, and go home and blog about it.

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider. 

Lady GIFs - let 'em load

So, I caught some nice funny video of our college president at graduation and I have been meaning to convert it into a GIF so that we could stick it on a web page somewhere for a bit of whimsy. I checked around online and found a couple of sites, one of which was a little better than the others. Since I was in the groove, after I converted the commencement video, I made a few more GIFs from easily accessible clips on my laptop.

Coco in the Rain

 

...flooded Office Dept parking lot

Will it Go Round in Circles

 ...Cowan park?

JK Could Have Danced All Night

 ...Oscars Night!

Sissy Celebrates 
 

...empty middle seat on a flight to Chicago.

Be-Bop-a-Coco, that's my baby...

 ...Ballet Vietnamese restaurant

 
When you read the headline, did it sound like gif or jif?

Signal and noise

I am not often overtly political online, but here goes.

From a Rolling Stone interview with Jane Sanders:

[Tearing up] We did everything we could, but we didn't win. And they were so sad about it. People have been making it sound like they're mad, and they should just get over it. No they shouldn't! They shouldn't just get over it! What do you expect? How do you turn on a dime? We understand that. We understand that we earned their support and their trust. Now Hillary Clinton has to earn their support and their trust. And we will hold [the Clinton campaign] accountable because we are endorsing her. We are that much more committed to making sure [she follows through on her promises], instead of saying, Oh, it's politics as usual, people change. We're not going to let that happen. Not without a big fight, if anything. If the Democratic Party starts backing away from the platform, ever, we will fight like crazy to support the work that all of these millions of people did.

From a Democracy Now interview with Eddie Glaude:

So, part of what we’re saying is that one of the things we have to do—we have to do two things simultaneously. One is keep Donald Trump out of office. And two—right?—announce that business as usual is unacceptable.

From me:

We get it. We need to keep to Trump out of the White House, no doubt. But stop pretending that there was ever a level playing field in the Democratic Party, stop pretending that this is just sour grapes, stop pretending that unity is all that matters now. And stop telling Berners to shut up. This campaign was about business as usual vs. real change and it's not over.

Every four years we complain that our system sucks, that there's too much money in it, that the two-party system we are stuck with eliminates real choice, that voting for the lesser-of-two-evils is just the way things work. We complain, and then we forget, and the system churns on, and then four years later when our choice is once again turned into a charade, we start complaining again.

Not this time.

I want to hear the complaints, I want this fire to keep burning. I want the noise to build and I want to see some real reform forced both in the ways we govern and the ways we chose who will govern. I want us to be constantly reminded that things are not right, that this system is not acceptable. I want disruptive innovation in our political scene. If a revolution came this close with a stacked deck, who knows what can happen with an ongoing movement.

And I don't want anyone to shut up.

Outside Comic Con - The Director's Cut

So, over on He is a Thark we have just presented a series on my trip to the San Diego Comic Con, sans badges, with pal Karmin. This post here on Epicurus is the extended cut of that tale, with scads of never-before-seen images.

First, the old:

• Thursday backstory

• Friday in La Jolla

• Saturday at the Con

• Sunday on the Embarcadero

Now the new: 

Karmin's Wonderful Photo Album of Everthing!

...which contains photos that are so much better than mine.

Viz.:

Il est une perplexité

So, a friend currently in Canada posted a thing on Facebook and, as is often the case, the teaser was in both French and English.

On a whim, I clicked the Translate button that FB has; the English version stayed the same, of course, but the French version was translated slightly differently.

This was mildly interesting, so I cut and pasted the French version into Google Translate, and got yet another version.

Here they are:

Original English:

Facebook translation of original French:

Google Translation of original French:

So, we have

• For / no preposition / To
• have / live with / live with
• check / try / try
• work out / exercise / exercise
• wonderful / really great / super

and so on.

I don't know enough about French to make any comments on the translations, but I do know enough about English to say that the original English version is the worst. "Check this type of work out" is just wrong - it seems to indicate that I am to consider a category of employment. For clarity, the sentence should read "Check out this type of workout" or "Check this type of workout out," neither of which is euphonious. And "A blend of ballet dance and Tai Chi movements" makes me think there's a comma missing - does anyone say "ballet dance" as a thing? It almost seems to me that this is a bad translation of something that was originally written in French.

For my Francophone friends, here's the Original French version. What do you think?

Artifacts

So, while we were getting ready for a day trip today, Coco told me I could check her purse to see if she had slipped my clip-on sunglasses inside when we had come back from our last day trip. She also asked me to check to see if I could get some pens out that had somehow worked their way into the purse lining.

I emptied the purse to look for the sunglasses (which were not there but later turned up under the passenger seat of the car). As I piled the stuff on the table, I was put in mind of those photo essays in which photographers take a picture of every possession a family has, or of all the food that someone eats in a day or a week. In that vein, here's what Coco had in her purse on just an ordinary day:

During this process, I easily found the small tear in a seam of one of the interior zippered pockets. I managed to retrieve all the items that had had worked their way into the lining of the purse:

Future archeologists and anthropologists studying the minutiae of daily life in the early 21st Century: you're welcome.