Author: Aaron Weber

Any Food Nation

You thought Fast Food Nation was a stinging indictment of US food practice, and it was. It also had information about how to improve food safety, worker health, and general quality of life.

Against the Grain author Richard Manning is apparently opposed to agriculture. Not even agriculture as practiced in the US by giant combines with tons of pesticides and petroleum fertilizers, mind you. He’s more or less opposed to agriculture, which despite the various problems he describes with it, is still the foundation of global society.

Yes, the particular fertilizers used by US agribusiness are ruining our waterways, and yes, the US agricultural subsidy system is screwed up beyond belief. Let’s reform them. Let’s eat organic. Let’s eat low on the food chain, low on the processing scale, be aware of the petroleum in our breakfast cereal. But come on– you’re attacking agriculture and describing it as the bane of global existence? Gimme a break. You can tell he’s on thin ice when he begins romanticizing the hunter-gatherers and talks about how important it is to hunt your own elk. Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that.

Brainshare? Gimme the Toy Expo!

I’m going to BrainShare, I’ve been to LinuxWorld, but I’d really like to go to the American International Toy Fair. I mean, the strange toys, the toys that get good press from psychologists and educators, the violent or dangerous or stupid toys. I guess it’s more interesting when you’re not actually in the business. If I were a toy manufacturer, I bet the toy expo would be incredibly boring, and I’d want to see what weird gadgets those software people were coming up with next. Mmmm, gadgets.

Serious Post about Software

Apparently I’ve been picked up by a website internal to Novell that aggregates any blog by any Novell employee. How embarrassing: my outside-the-office venting is now an inside-the-office hot air supply. To balance my usual content of snarky fluff, here’s something somewhat serious: a genuinely insightful article about Novell and the risks it faces going forward.

The author points out both the advantages that we have and the risks, including our execution track record. I like to think one can learn from the past, and that we’ll be able to integrate our wide-spread resources quickly and efficiently. Novell has a better cross-platform story than anyone else and can really move ahead with that.

As the rowing teams ’round here say, “Our wake, your funeral.”

Plan, eh?

I was kinda hoping that Straight Plan for the Queer Man would turn out to be well-dressed straight men helping gay slobs dress like sophisticated adults. But no, it’s about teaching femme boys to act all tough and slovenly.

Hate to surprise anyone here, but most gay men, and in fact most straight men who are in any way different from the masculine ideal represented in the show (stubbly, barbequing, workbooted, messy-homed, sweatshirt-loving) know how to do this. It’s called “surviving high school.”

I’m always amazed at the way that discourse in this country is dumbed down. People don’t understand the difference between sex and gender, and they don’t understand the difference between sociocultural affiliation and race. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is fun because you get to see people make snarky comments about men with poor grooming habits, and then at the end they get lots of pretty things and you get to imagine how your life would be if you had ten grand to blow on a new living room set and a year’s worth of back waxing. The gayness isn’t really the appeal– it’s the word people attach to the appeal, I guess. But “What Not to Wear” started the whole thing, and they’re not explicitly gay.

A special hello to my readers in Provo– apparently you’re almost 10% of my traffic this month.

Quickies

Best Week Ever is a weekly (haha, get it?) show on VH1 that covers the week’s pop-culture ephemeral non-news. And it has a blog. Lurvely waste of time.

Tech support work is often described as hellish. It’s not all as bad as this guy describes it, of course. If you’re one of the premium customers, you get premium support, and that means real answers and real time spent helping you. At least, a little. Not like we’re going to kill ourselves for you or anything, as some particular customers seem to think (you know who you are, mister– calling the support manager at home does NOT endear you to the other two members of the support team.)

In the grand tradition of What Badgers Eat comes Badger Badger Badger, a flash-heavy song about badgers, mushrooms, and snakes. But mostly badgers.

Declension

So, in Vegas this weekend, will I see Elvis? How many people dressed like Elvis will I see? What’s the plural of Elvis? A lot of people use “Elvii” but according to Bookdwarf and Straight Dope that would be assuming a spelling of Elvus. That’s the same as thinking the plural of penis is penii.

The -is ending is usually for third declension nouns, which are pluralized to -ites, so if we wanted to go the Latin route, really, we’d have Elvites. Of course, Elvis isn’t actually a Latin word, so the real plural is just Elvises, same as pelvises and penises.

The next question, then, is how many people are going to find this site looking for pornography and find ridiculous grammar instead? And is it going to be (shudder) Elvis porn? Possibly featuring the aliens who abducted him? I hope not.