Todd Stadler's blog

[untitled #505]

Those wacky spammers.

I got two spams at work today that had somewhat peculiar domain names in the From field: www.chineseparafin.com and www.cabbagecups.com. I particularly like the latter.

They appear to be set up to give the appearance of a real business. Maybe they're picking random but real words so as to not look like obvious spam from, say, www.myblahsdfkjkllsjdflks jlksjdflkjsldkfjasdf.com.

But still. Cabbage cups. That makes me chuckle.

[untitled #504]

I learned a new word today: astroendocrinology. I hear it's the science of the future or something.

I just can't wait until they come up with astroendocriminology. Talk about inter-disciplinary!

a dirrrty story

Dear Diary, I'm sorry I haven't written in you lately, but I've been too busy ? too busy not bathing!

Okay, that's not entirely true. I just had to grab your attention after you fell asleep waiting (oh, I know how you hang on my every word, or lack thereof) for the next Cock-a-hoop entry. Let's back up.

The story begins, as most good stories do, in a barbershop.

No, I'm not going to retell the movie Barbershop. This is a different story.

There I was in my ur-hip barbershop getting a not-too-ur-hip haircut and thinking about how I was paying $20 for a haircut.

You see, back in the day (somewhat ironically, the "making far more as an engineer than I do now" day), I used to cut my own hair with clippers, mainly because it was cheap, quick, and easy.

Ironically this former buzzed hairstyle was recently derided as more "forced-hip" than the one I was about to recieve for $20 at a place that calls itself a "rock 'n' roll barbershop". O fickle hipness!

Anyhow, not only was I paying someone to cut my hair, but I was thinking I needed some kind of styling product to, um, make my hair look cool. And, of course, to make my rock 'n' roll career really take off.

The girl cutting my hair had no tips on the rock career, but she suggested I buy a $4 bottle of stuff to make my hair less, you know, stupid.

While explaining to me what this stuff does, she noted that it basically has the same effect on hair as not shampooing it for several days. This struck me as odd.

Here I was about to pay $4 for a rather small bottle of stuff that could be mimicked with a basic lack of hygiene.

Maybe it was my "cheap" aesthetic kicking in, but a revolution began right there in the barbershop.

Fast forward a couple of days. For reasons I couldn't even guess at, someone at work was passing around an article debating the merits of regular bathing with soap. Some people at my work are just like that.

I might have ignored it, had it not been for the aforementioned revolution that had been planted in my brain. You know how revolutions can be.

I thought about the fact that Europeans bathe less than Americans. I thought about the fact that Europeans seem to live fairly normal lives.

I thought about how, of all the bathroom grooming rituals Americans hold dear, only teeth-brushing and hand-washing had any medical value for most people.

I thought about the fact that soaps by nature strip oils from the skin and hair. I thought about the myriad products that are sold to fix the problems created by stripping away those oils, often by the companies that also sell the soaps.

And, of course, I thought about all the rock stars who were rather famous for being dirty and disheveled.

That is, you may observe, an awful lot of thinking.

The whole soap thing started to seem a little silly, and therefore worthy of a scientific investigation of sorts. Because, you know, that's what I do.

I decided to experiment on myself by not using shampoo or soap (except on my hands), and seeing what happened.

Oh, I know, the horror, the horror. You don't want to get e-mails from me anymore, dirty scuzzball that I've become.

Or maybe you haven't been using soap for years, and think I'm just a Johnny-come-lately to the world of unwashed hippies.

But, two months into my experiment (with only a few soapings in the intervening time), my overarching conclusion so far is that the body-cleansing industry is full of hooey.

Every day or two, I hop into the shower and waste as much water as the next guy, scrubbing and all that. I just don't use soap or shampoo.

My friends who are largely ignorant of my anti-surfactant ways, haven't raised much of a stink over this experiment, presumably because I haven't raised much of one, either.

My skin looks and feels the same. My hair may not have that clean, light look and feel that it does after a shampooing, but given that it didn't look like that with the aforementioned styling gunk in it (indeed, that's why I used the stuff in the first place), it's all the same.

That said, I don't believe the claims that some people make that after not using soap for some time, your body's "natural chemistry" kicks in and makes you not stink.

No, I continue to smell like broiled onions after a hard day of exercise, but more naturally so.

Of course, as with the soap-ful, the solution to stinkiness is to shower more frequently and minimize the smelly bacteria. But you still don't need soap.

I'd like to think that there is some paradigm-shifting conclusion to be made from all this. After all, when I began this whole experiment, it seemed so weird to use so little soap.

But no. It just turns out that one really doesn't need to use much soap to live a rather normal life.

So I save a few bucks a month or something.

Um, take that Proctor & Gamble?!

[untitled #503]

Cock-a-hoop employment tip #7:

Don't begin the e-mail in which you've attached your resume with, "Call me crazy, but ..."

This is all the more true when you send your resume to the e-mail address of an easily-amused webmaster.

help desk humor

It's well-known that working in the IT department has its advantages beyond simply being able to read everyone's e-mail.

Oh sure, there's the fame, the women, the fast living, the bread crumbs in the keyboards.

But there's more than that. Like supporting an operating system whose name references a year almost a decade in the past.

One of the best-kept secrets, however, is the humor that is so abundant in the IT world.

Accordingly, these are the things at work this past week that made me laugh. Or cry. Whatever.

• Nobody seems to know what to call that big box that you plug the monitor into.

  One person worried about having her CPU up on a shelf like that, while another informed me that she had put the C: drive by my desk. Had I taken them literally, I might have worried about why everyone was taking apart their equipment.

  Why not just call it a computer?

• In talking to an elder horticulturist about perhaps printing a revised edition one of our books, one of our editors received a question from him about the paperwork we had sent him. He wanted to know what "disks" were.

  "That means computer disks," said the editor. The horticulturist said he wouldn't be needing those. "Why not?" asked the editor. Because, said the horticulturist, he'd be typing the whole book on his typewriter.

  Ha ha. It's people like him that put IT folks like me out of work, so of course I'm plotting to destroy him.

• I got an e-mail from someone at work asking if I could open a zipped file for her. She couldn't open it, she explained, because she didn't have a Zip drive.

  This is the sort of stuff that makes IT folks guffaw mightily, but I imagine quite a few of you reading it will say, "What? I don't get it."

  Frankly, you people keep less-knowledgeable IT people like me employed, so keep it up. Good work.

• A different author, apparently also old and none too comfortable with handling manuscripts on a computer (where have all the young flower-growers gone?), had sent in a newspaper clipping in which somebody claimed that "a big secret in the publishing business is that most publishers do not use the original disks from writers who type on computers. They tried, but it was a conversion nightmare," and so hired people to retype the manuscripts into a computer.

  In response, one editor wrote back that "perhaps at one time, at the advent of word processing, an inexperienced publisher or two may have found it more economical to retype a manuscript than to handle an author's files on diskette (or floppies, as it was then)," but nowadays, word processing is rather indispensible.

  The only problem with the response was that it attempted to contrast floppies with diskettes, when they are the same thing.

  True, the old 5.25" floppy disks were floppier than the slightly-less-old 3.5" floppy disks. But this is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.

• Finally, can I just say how spam is changing the way I do business?

  Not so much because I am making ton$$$ of ca$$$h w*o*r*k*i*n*g from h*o*m*e, no.

  I'm thinking more about the fact that while on a professional phone call with a somewhat frank representative of an anti-spam service, the word "penis" was used without anybody caring very much.

  And isn't that just liberating? Maybe it'll just start turning up in everyday conversation now that we've read it several hundred times over in spam subject lines.

Oh, the heady, heady life of an IT person.

Maybe the Association of Information Technology Professionals can use this entry as part of their recruitment campaign materials.

[untitled #502]

How to tell you have a background in computer engineering:

A friend asks you "what's your physical address" so he can send you a letter, and you have the strong urge to impishly reply, "0x102B9F00".

You know, anyone who understands that likely won't think it's funny. They'll probably write me to tell me why that address wouldn't work. Ah, the dangerous humor world of the ex-engineer.

[untitled #501]

How to tell you're listening to, as my dad might call it, avant-garde music:

You sit there listening for a few minutes, staring at the CD player, trying to figure out if it's skipping or not.

This just happened to me and Manorexia's The Radiolarian Ooze. The funny thing is, it's not the first time I've listened to the album.

[untitled #500]

In a conversation with someone at work today:

Me: "Whoa, whoa, whoa! There's no need to get so upset!"

Her: "I'm not upset, I'm Italian!"

[untitled #499]

A few of the many fun facts about Jenna Bush from allfreecontests.com:

"It has been rumored that she likes [to] win Free Cash at JackPot.com. She has also been described as the "Wild" one of the [twins]. Jenna is said to like saving money on her inkjet cartridges at 00inkjets.com as well as getting paid to take online surveys at GoZing.com."

The funny thing is, I had guessed as much.

a note on meat products

While trolling the Web for articles about potted meat food products, I discovered what many consider to be the durian of processed foods, canned pork brains.

Specifically, canned pork brains in milk gravy. That such a product was popular enough to warrant mass production is, of itself, mind-boggling.

But my mind goes well beyond boggled (into a state perhaps best labelled "melty") when it hears that a "single serving of pork brains (i.e., one can) provides 1,170 percent of our recommended daily cholesterol intake."

I'm speechless. I had no idea.

Gadzooks.

[untitled #498]

If you haven't seen the new UK Honda ad "Cog", you really should watch it. I don't think it'll be shown in the U.S.

Created by Portland locals Wieden + Kennedy, it's two minutes of apparently unadulterated Rube Goldbergness.

It took 606 takes to get it to all work right.

the jetsam of my life

Only marginally less boring than my last entry are the two sparse pages of notes I took one night on a particularly determined trip to Safeway.

While the notes in red ink would imply that my main goal was to purchase "Soap gel, Milk, Pnt Btr" (secret shopper code for either a pint of bitter or peanut butter) and "Bananas", the contents of the rest of the page make clear that I was hellbent on observing modern packaging design, Andy-Rooney-style.

And because the pervasiveness of blogs now allows one to divulge the most mundane and personal thoughts without guilt, much less justification, I now present to you Observations from a Safeway at Midnight:

First, I think nothing else convinces me of the great leaps we have made as a species so much as the labels on beer bottles.

Consider the fact that Pabst's erstwhile beer won a blue ribbon at some point in the not-too-distant past. A blue ribbon! Today, the tastes of urban hipsters notwithstanding, it wouldn't merit an honorable mention (and I imagine a beer named Pabst's Honorable Mention would be even more attractive to the Irony Set).

Labels on other beers similarly make lofty claims or tell of accolades of yore that are only made less ludicrous by the belief that either in the 1800s bribery was cheap or they are simply making this up and no one can call them on it.

• Heineken boasts of winning the "Diplome D'Honneur Amsterdam 1883", "Hors Concours Membre Du Jury Paris 1900", "Medaille D'Or Paris 1875", and "Grand Prix Paris 1889". As if a beer could drive.
• Beck's tells us of awards from "Bremen 1874" and "Philadelphia 1876 awarded by the U.S. Centennial Commission."
• Steinlager twice won the "Monde Selection, Brusselles" and was deemed "World's Best Lager, Bremen 1985-1987". Maybe they meant "world's best Steinlager"?
• Budweiser's can alerts anyone not yet drunk enough that its makers "know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age", while not having been sued back into the Stone Age for false advertising. Why not also claim that Bud's been known to increase one's sexual stamina by 100%?

Of course, it's not just the beers that strut their honors and awards before consumers, hoping they will overshadow such qualities as taste. Coffee Mate won the 2001 Gold Taste Award from the American Tasting Institute, whoever they are.

I assume that was in the category for Truly Unnatural Nontraditional Product Used By People Who Don't Much Care About Coffee.

So why was I so intent on recording the ribbons, medals, and so forth touted by supermarket products?

I went in remembering (possibly falsely so) that when I was a child, every product seemed to brandish some award or other.

Product packaging was full of all sorts of mysterious language and symbolism back then, from the strange words found in ingredient lists to the copy on a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that claimed it was from a recipe "from a gentleman in the country". Or something like that.

Sadly, I didn't find an overwhelming amount of these awards, except what I've already told you about.

Disappointed, but easily distracted, I wandered over to the pets aisle.

I don't own a pet, so it's possible I just don't "get it", but I have to wonder about pet owners after seeing what they're being sold.

• Along the lines of products that boast of their own awards, there is Kong, the curiously article-lacking, um, thing that claims to be the world's best dog toy since 1976. Kong's Web site features important questions like "What can I use to stuff my bird's Kong?" that don't seem like they would be so frequently asked, as well as information on related products like the "large dental Kong" and "bird Kong with fun clip".
• I think I'd be hard pressed to distinguish between some of the items found in the pet toy section and those I imagine are found in a store of a more prurient nature. I just wanted to say that.
• Hartz markets a series of toys under the trademark Mad Maddogs. Who thought that was a good idea? One imagines the suggested names that were shot down like Rabid Psychodogs or Bat-Freaking-Insane BloodlustCujo. Anyhow, among my favorite in the Mad Maddogs line:
  • Hartz® Mad-Maddogs® E-Z Grab™ Dog Toy: "Hey, Honey, the dog depicted in this toy has clearly lost his mind; let's get it for Rover! He won't care what it looks like!"
  • Hartz® Mad-Maddogs® Mr. and Ms. Dog Toy: Hartz tells us that "this lambswool toy is a soft and cuddly toy that cries out to be touched and brought home," whereupon it will be slobbered upon mercilessly until it is ripped into hundreds of tiny pieces, five minutes after you brought it home. I mean, did you think the dog cared about how cuddly it was?
  • Hartz® Mad-Maddogs® Big Time Fun™ Dog Toy: Little dogs may play with toys that look like real objects, but when your big dog is ready for Big Time Fun™, he's ready for this toy that fails to remind one exactly of a red hamburger, and yet probably isn't a strawberry. Grow up and admit that your dog doesn't care what it looks like.
• Booda makes a toy apparently called "Velvet Bimples" that looks every bit as pleasing as it sounds. Thankfully, it comes in all the flavors your dog has been repeatedly asking you for: BBQ beef, cheeseburger, salmon, peanut butter and, yes Santa Fe chicken. Because your dog won't eat just any chicken flavor.
• But maybe I just don't understand dog tastes. Many "bones" come in flavors such as cheese or carrot. Carrot-flavored bones? For the vegetarian owner who'd rather pretend Fluffy doesn't want to eat the flesh of that which he has killed with his own teeth?
• I also had to shudder at Cesar's "Lamb in Meaty Juices Food for Dogs". Meaty juices?
• By far my favorite chew toy of all time is the "Daily Growl" chew toy, also by Hartz. Presumably, dogs will love this treat because they enjoy chewing on the real newspaper. Therefore, an extremely small rubber facsimile thereof that squeaks must be the next best thing! I also enjoy the rabidly stupid copy on this toy, such as "Editor: Man's Best Friend" and the weather report (wait for it): "Raining Cats and Dogs". Not exactly the doggie "New York Times".

At 12:11am, while wandering through the pet supplies aisle, Britney's "Oops, I Did it Again" came on over a previously dead PA system. I found myself momentarily confused, doing the Cabbage Patch near the Milk Bones.

Wandering over to the paper products aisle, I pondered the implications of the phrase "Lee Ann Womack, Country Music Star, Sparkle User", emblazoned on several packages of paper towels. I now know more about Ms. Womack's paper towel preferences than I do about her music. That has significance.

After some further wandering, I discovered that there is a QueenOfClean.com, and the titular highness is apparently fond of borax and products with a Z in the name.

At 12:22am, Britney's cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" comes on. Rather than feel the urge to dance, I am made to ponder the decision to keep the original line about "I can't get no girly action," or so it sounded at the time. Subsequent Googling brings into question what it is that she says.

Finally, my journey into grocery didacticism ended in what must be called the strange meats aisle, which has always intrigued me because I never see anybody buy any of the products found there! And yet I feel drawn there, to study the products and their packaging. Why? Why?

• Pacific Friend smoked baby clams. While the phrase "smoked baby" somewhat gives me the willies, all is mollified by the brand name "Pacific Friend". I have a friend in the Pacific, and he found some clams for me. That's nice. I bet my friend's name is Jim.
• Reese Maurice precooked French helix snails. I find it telling that these are nowhere to be found on the Internet. They're just not for the modern fellow. As far as I can tell, they're for nobody. Surely, any true gourmand wouldn't stand anything precooked, and any non-gourmand wouldn't try to impress anybody by eating snails. Still, I like to imagine some guy preparing a nice meal at home for his date when suddenly he realizes — he forgot the helix snails! He rushes off to Safeway, and thankfully, they have a couple of boxes. Phew! Yeah, I don't see it happening, either.
• Did you know that Hormel's pigs feet are "semi-boneless"? At least to the optimist, that is. The pessimist sees them as "semi-bony", or maybe "gross".
• I love King Oscar's "Tiny Tots Finest Norwegian sardines" (replete with picture of said tots dancing on the packaging). I like to imagine that the fish inside are actually the titular tiny tots. Dance! Dance! Or maybe I just wanted to type the phrase "titular tiny tots".
• Finally, there is possibly the bestest grocery store item of all, Libby's "Potted Meat Food Product", long a favorite of my friend Hermann (not for eating, of course). And he is not alone in his predilections. Indeed, who could not fail to drink in (figuratively, of course) the minimalist — positively generic — packaging, as well as an ingredient list sporting such entries as "partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue"? A miracle of the modern age and a metaphor of some sort, I'm sure. Wow.

Yes, there sure is a lot to learn in a grocery store. I'm sure someday I'll figure out what it is, if I can get myself to stop reading all those stupid labels.