But Asian people do not. To us, the thought of refrigerating soy sauce sounds silly.
Additionally, we don’t put soy sauce on white rice. That’s silly too.
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Looking back, I really don’t appreciate the attitude with which elementary school teachers discuss US customary units (or for you Brits, Imperial units). Sure, they’re not as easy to convert as metric, but you don’t have to be such un-American assholes about it.
The fact of the matter is that they were convenient. Take feet and miles for example. When was the last time you really cared how many feet away something really far away was? You didn’t. Why? Because feet, by definition, measure distances that you’d walk, and miles, by definition, measure distances that you’d drive. And when you drive, you go way to fast to care how many feet it is. And when you walk that, you don’t care about miles. That’s really far away. Having an easy-to-remember conversion factor would just discourage you on your long walk.
But Al, so far, everything you said can still be applied to kilometers and meters. Couldn’t you just redefine miles and kilometers to make them easier to convert?
Right, it’s that easy. We should definitely redefine the mile tonight and repost all of our road signs with updated distances so you assholes can multiply and divide by 10 IN THE COMPUTERS YOU’RE USING TO DO THE MATH FOR YOU ANYWAY.
Sure, when Napoleon conquers America and imposes the metric system on us, we’ll embrace it warmly by teaching all kids metric. And while we’re at it, we’ll kill two birds with one stone by teaching it in art class while we’re teaching them how to make white flags of surrender.
But Al, how about Fahrenheit? There’s nothing practical about it! Water freezes at 32 and 212? It seems completely arbitrary.
Yeah, you would think it’s arbitrary, but when was the last time you really cared what exact temperature water froze or boiled at? Really, if freezing and boiling water is what really matters, we should measure temperature based on the time it takes to freeze and boil water when you put it in a freezer or on a hot stove.
But practically speaking, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a scale that would be practical and tell you something? Like, for example, where the average temperature of the atmosphere at the earth’s surface is centered at 50, and 0 and 100 degrees are two standard deviations away from the mean? So when you find that it’s zero outside or it’s 100 outside, you can say, “wow, it’s way f’ing cold” or “wow, it’s way f’ing hot.”
Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, Fahrenheit isn’t like this. But my point was that you didn’t know this. Once you thought about it, you thought that it was perfectly plausible. You were just being an asshole about it by assuming that it didn’t make sense.
(If you’re curious, it was zeroed at the stabilized temperature of a mixture of ammonium chloride and ice, it was 32′ed at the freezing point of water, and it was 96′ed at the human body temperature when measured at the arm pit.)
In any case, in the spirit of staunchly defending all things American by pointing out flaws in all things foreign, I continue this argument by saying that all you metric-o-philes will feel so silly once technology advances. Why?
As technology advances, we will start caring less about water, and we will start caring more about absolute zero. Combining scientific advances with American Fahrenheitism, we will use the Rankine scale, which is essentially the Fahrenheit scale zeroed at absolute zero. I’ve already adopted the Rankine scale. Just the other day, I found myself saying, “damn, it’s like it’s 591 today. It feels like just yesterday, it was only 560.”
But more importantly, the real flaw is that metric is too highly dependent on the base-10 number system. In the future, when base-12 takes over, and 1/3 can be represented in a non-repeating decimal (or as we call it, twelvimal), teachers are going to be equally snooty and unEuropean as they’re saying, “some people that lacked foresight created metric which is so difficult to convert as it involves multiplying and dividing by 6B4 (pronounced six hundred beaty four). How arbitrary!”
There. I hope your eyes have been opened. Stay tuned for my next post in which I invent Kentucky Fried Turkey – the healthy alternative.
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LOS ANGELES – 10 people were injured during MIA’s acoustic performance of the hit single “Paper Planes.” The song involves gun fire from a 9mm pistol and a ringing cash register. 9 members of the audience were injured by pistol rounds reflecting off the ceiling. One member of the band jammed his thumb shutting the cash register’s tray.
In other news, STOP TELLING ME I CAN’T EAT PEANUT BUTTER. I LIKE TO EAT PEANUT BUTTER.
Posted in Our World Today | 1 Comment »
Keenan Thompson continues to get laughs with his “confused bystander” character on SNL. What’s his secret? Is it that his viewers find themselves easily able to identify with his character as many have at some time in their lives been confused bystanders? Is it his trademark “surprised” facial expression?
No. The answer is much more devious. It’s a sign that lights up telling the audience to laugh.
Unfortunately, I did not see the sign, and thus I had no reason to find SNL funny tonight.
…which gave me the opportunity to watch Fab 5: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal on Lifetime: Television for Women.
Fab 5: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal is the prequel to the horror flick The Texas Cheerleader Chainsaw Massacre, in which five cheerleaders with a problem with authority end up becoming cannibals, living in the woods, and wearing leather masks.
The prequel tells the story of a cheerleading coach that overcomes adversity. And by adversity, I mean 5 teenage girls.
So what did the 5 teenage girls do? They went wild. (And in the sequel, they go feral!)
That’s really the entire movie. Al out.
Posted in Cut to the Chase | 1 Comment »
You know those “science” people that are all like, “there are tiny particles a billionth the diameter of a human hair,” or “you can fit a million earths in the sun”? Do you ever get the sense that they’re exaggerating just a bit?
Yeah, atoms are small, and Jupiter’s big, but please, a billionth? That’s a really small fraction. I bet the atom’s really only about a fifth of the size of a human hair. I almost saw one when I squinted really hard.
And a million earths? Okay, I made the number up, but a million is pretty big. I bet it’s more like… 20. And when you finally get to Jupiter, you don’t even notice the difference. You’re like, “this is kind of like earth. Oh, there’s a couple more ice bergs.”
“Science.”
Posted in Al Observes Things | Leave a Comment »
its country pop starr taylor swift!!!!
ZOMG
taylor at the country music awwards
taylor wihtout ne makeup!
taylor on TRL omg
taylor in front of a brown car
taylor breathes and sleeps on music lol
taylor again!
more taylor!
shoes are for losers.
hello!
This blog post was written while listening to Taylor Swift’s songs “Tell Me Why,” “Breathe,” and the first minute and eighteen seconds of “You’re Not Sorry.” The author is a 23 year old software engineer that enjoys weight lifting and mixed martial arts.
Posted in Al Observes Things | 1 Comment »
I watched La Doublure (English Title: The Valet) yesterday, and it’s wonderfully written French comedy starring Gad Elmaleh. Once again, Elmaleh plays a poor man with a crappy job (as he did in Hors de prix). Typecast alert?
Maybe. But it’s hard to say. Looking at IMDB, he’s in 31 films, and I’ve only see 2 of them. However, I can say that it’s the shape of his head and the characteristics of his face that say, “nice, charming, poor.” I’m guessing that Gad Elmaleh will continue to play this roll in the near future and continue doing it wonderfully!
Also great in the film was Alice Taglioni. Do you believe in love at first sight? Repeatedly? With the same person? It’s hard not to fall in love with her and continually re-fall in love with her in every scene in she’s in.
So that’s that. Stay tuned for some Cut to the Chase. I have Vantage Point queued up, and the bar is high for all William Hurt films after A History of Violence as any film that he does not steal will be a disappointment to me.
Posted in Movies | 1 Comment »
Today, Miss Indiana Katie Stam was crowned Miss America. And you know what?
I CALLED IT!
And I don’t mean, “I saw all of the contestants at the beginning of the show and predicted that Miss Indiana would win.” No. I called this WEEKS AGO. Really. Anyone that follows the Miss America competition would have seen that Katie Stam was the far stronger contestant.
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Today, instead of showing the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, the Sci Fi network just decided to show the HD version of the music video for REM’s “Everybody Hurts.”
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This is the exciting beginning of a new season of television shows. Three that I have been following are “True Beauty,” “24,” and “The City.”
Let’s start with “True Beauty.” This show is a reality TV competition in which 3 judges deceive a group of people into believing they are in a beauty competition even though they are really being judged based on an arbitrary definition of inner beauty.
Moving on: “24.” Jack Bauer returns for another season of fighting terrorists and other stuff. I do like this show a lot, and I am definitely hooked. My one complaint: I’m really tired of these visions of the future where computer user interfaces are really nice but are built with HUGE FLAWS. For example, in this season of 24, the United States is protected by a firewall that protects a system that somehow controls air traffic control around the entire country, water treatment, and other important entities. This firewall can also be undermined if the designer of the firewall is given a soldering iron and a bunch of fancy looking circuits. And the firewall can be rebuilt in 6 days (but that’s not soon enough!)
So my questions are:
- Who decided to link all of these systems together so that if the firewall were compromised, terrorists would have controls to… everything?
- Who decided that it was okay to have a single “firewall” that could be undermined by a single person?
- Who decided to network the mechanism that would release toxic water into the nation’s water supply so that it could be controlled remotely?
- Who decided to implement a mechanism that would release toxic water into the nation’s water supply at the water treatment plant?
And this isn’t just in 24. Every other episode of Star Treks “The Next Generation” and “Voyager” are about the computer being compromised somehow and the ship being put in lots of risk.
Oh yeah, and Brannon Braga, producer of Star Trek TNG and Voyager, is ALSO executive producer of this season of 24. HMMMMMM.
Finally, let’s revisit “The City.” Last time, I talked about how I was happy that there’s finally a show that speaks to the issues faced by wealthy, attractive people. Well, while I still like the show, I’ve just got one problem with it: everyone in the show seems to be spending way more money than they could possibly afford. That’s right. I guess a bunch of them are rich, which is fine (good for them!), but it just bothers me that they have these seemingly low paying jobs but keep going to these chic New York restaurants where entrees cost at least $20. Okay, so maybe $20 doesn’t sound so high, but you KNOW they’re ordering appetizers and wine. And when they go out, you KNOW they’re getting the $10 drinks.
HRMPH.
Posted in Cut to the Chase | Leave a Comment »
