Broken News

Yahoo has a neat feature called Yahoo Alerts. You can select from a series of alert types (news, stocks, weather, sports, etc.) and receive those alerts via email, IM or SMS.

I loved the idea of getting SMS messages for hot news stories, so I signed up for their Breaking News SMS feed. Within that alert type, I chose to receive Associated Press Bulletins, which has "Fewer alerts. Focus on the biggest news stories."

A couple of weeks later, I get my first news message from Yahoo. The breaking news? Kobe Bryant wants to be traded from the Lakers. Wants to be.

I weep for the future.

Mortgage rates fall... let's startle a dancing woman!

Someone, please: what is the point of these "startled dancing woman" advertisements? I've seen three of these ads, and they are the same:

• Young AA woman dancing in front of a computer, her back to the camera.
• The camera moves up rapidly behind her.
• She quickly turns, putting her hands up to her mouth in surprise.

Am I missing something here? Sure, I get the silhouette dancing guy ads that grab your attention in that annoying, teeth-grinding way. But here we have (at least) three takes of the same, exact sequence. It's a pattern, people, but I don't get the point. Is there something in our monkey brains that, when watching a woman being startled, makes us want to lower our mortgage? Is she dancing for joy because she lowered her mortgage?

Forked

I went out for lunch with the group this afternoon. The choices on the menu looked tasty, but the poorly cleaned silverware? Not so much.

Livin' on a Prayer Rug

I received this "prayer rug" in the mail the other day. I'm supposed to kneel on the rug and pray for a blessing. Examples on the letter include "a new car" and "a money blessing". "Peace in the Middle East" and "an end to starvation" are absent.

The rug tells you to stare into the closed eyes of Jesus and they will open. I immediately noticed the faint circles drawn into the eyelids, but I stared anyway. The result was the appearance of a kind of wide-eyed, zombie-looking Jesus (and, I believe, a sailboat).

After a night of sleep, I'm supposed to mail the rug (which is just a piece of paper) back to the church so that it can be sent to another in need of blessing. Which, if you think about it, is a REAL strange way for a deity to do business.

Oh, shirt

I was in hurry this morning, so I grabbed what I thought to be a black shirt to go with my brown pants. When I got to work and removed my jacket I noticed that my shirt isn't black, but blue. Okay, a little fashion faux pas.

Wait, it gets better.

I'm working away in the afternoon, and for some reason I reach up to my collar. This triggers the "something isn't right" part of my brain, and after a second it hits me: the collar opening and buttons feel, well, wrong.

A few seconds later, the rest of my brain figures it out - I am wearing one of my wife's shirts.

Howdy

A blog. How typical.

This blog is for all the insane, ridiculous, or just plain silly stuff that I see.