Category: Things

Chindogu, or useless inventions, are only the beginning. Now there are Unnovations as well.

Might I also direct you to The Economist’s recent article on body hair, which begins:

AT THE back of a hairdresser’s shop, just off Piccadilly in London, an Irish beautician called Genevieve is explaining what a “Brazilian” is as she practises her art on your correspondent. A Brazilian strip, some are surprised to learn, is nothing to do with Latin American football. Between each excruciating rip, she explains that she is going to remove nearly all my pubic hair, except for a narrow vertical strip of hairs the width of a couple of fingers. This is known colloquially as the “landing strip”.

In only a few years, this form of waxing has gone from the esoteric to the everyday and is starting to rival the ordinary bikini wax in popularity. At the same time the bikini wax is becoming a normal procedure for women of all ages: the youngest person Genevieve has waxed is a 12-year-old girl. Women are styling their pubic hair into hearts, stars and arrows. It is one of the more notable developments in hairdressing since the permanent wave.

Your correspondent also notes that “The average American man spends about 33 days of his life removing facial hair.” I am SO getting permanent facial hair removal.

What really gets me about this story is that people pay $85 bucks each for obese rats. That’s quite a premium over the regular price.

I have a lot of opinions about mental health issues, and I’m pretty sure that my opinions are backed up by sound fact rather than arbitrary nonsense.

On Saturday, I swiffered the cats. I have the Swiffer jingle to the tune of “Whip It” stuck in my head. That evening all we did was watch TLC. I’m turning into a domestic drone.

Sometimes that scares me, but not much. I mean, this particular phase of my life seems to be focused on setting up and settling in– a lot of people my age are doing that sort of thing. Buying, saving, working, acquiring, cleaning, organizing.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just a consumer whore. Or maybe my fear of becoming a consumer whore is due to being a cheapskate. I can never tell– I’m definitely neurotic about money, more so than the rest of my family. I mean, I’m aware of it, and when I hesitate about things I have to remind myself “money is for using, not hoarding. Do nice things for people.” When I remember that, when I remember that I have a good savings rate and few expenses, then it’s much easier to buy dinner or drinks for friends, to give to charities, buy presents, etc.

Hoarders . Professional organizers. It’s like TLC’s Clean Sweep, only court-ordered!

Insanity and jurisprudence

Over-analyzing depression and emotion, yet one more extension of the ‘medicalization of everything.’ c.f. Freud’s statement that analysis turns neurotic unhappiness into regular unhappiness, but it won’t actually make you happy. Happiness you have to find for yourself.

Gullibility and psychics. Having read an instructional manual for phone sex operators, I’m pretty sure that the phone psychics have the same deal.

and pointers to pointers, which is to say, content about blogs.

Rumors don’t often make a lot of sense. Nor do the professional women dedicated to encouraging women to get out of the workplace and back into the kitchen. Or the paychecks of the rich, or the AIDS policies of most of the world’s governments– particularly China.

More voting machine trouble. People wonder why the liberals won’t give up about the 2000 election, but there’s plenty of people who still want to study, say, World War II, or the Roman empire, and you don’t say to them “Why don’t you give up trying to figure it out? It’s over!”

Nor is there a well-organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to thwarting you, like there is for, say, the holocaust or basic science and the evolutionary theory.

Maybe people can take consolation in the fact that the FCC is now going to permit the F word, as long as it doesn’t have to do anything with fucking– you can use it as an adjective, for example, insulting a customer service representative. Although, really, if you’re mean to the CSRs, they won’t be nice and escalate your issue to where it can get fixed.

Yes, my XML feed is broken. I don’t know why. I put in the default one from the MT web page. I think this may be some sort of version issue. Once we upgrade to a new MT then things should work. Until then, well, you’ve got bad XML, I guess. It used to work inconsistently but now seems to work not at all.

And the category is “Things you don’t want to find while remodeling your home.“