The World
It’s Beardfacé!
I just rewatched “My Number One Doctor” – the Scrubs episode where Kelso signs up the hospital to use rateyourdoc.org
It turns out: it’s a real site! Not where you can rate real doctors, just where you can rate your favorite Scrubs characters.
“Colonel Doctor’s treatment can only be described as delicious and crispy.”
Dr. Kevin Casey still gets a 5 rating from me.
Update: There’s even a scene where Turk has the site open on his laptop. While blurry, it looks to me like the very same site.
Congratulations! You’ve Shown Basic Human Intelligence!
“American Airlines, bowing to pressure yesterday from some of its lowest-paid workers, agreed to drop a $2-per-bag fee for curbside check-in service at airports throughout the country and to lift a ban on tips for skycaps at Logan International Airport.” – Boston Globe, 30 May 2008
I wrote about this issue a few weeks ago, when American retaliated against the skycaps (nine of whom won back $325,000 in lost tips in a lawsuit last month) by prohibiting all tipping at Logan. Now, in exchange for the skycaps dropping their charge of retaliation, the airline will allow tipping and get rid of the fee.
Of course, in just two weeks American will begin charging $15 to check even a single bag, so the old $2 fee to check a bag at the curb rather pales in comparison to the $15 it will cost to check one at all. This too will surely cut into the tips of skycaps, since fewer people will check bags at all (as is surely the intent) and those who do will again feel they’ve spent enough on the luxury already without giving their money away in gratuities. Since this fee isn’t levied directly against curbside check-in, I expect skycaps’ only choices will be to accept their new burden or defect to one of the few airlines that still allows checked luggage.
We should be glad American has backed off its ludicrous stance on tipping at Logan, but let’s not throw them a party. They’ve just done what they should have from the beginning. When a toddler finally concedes he can’t eat dessert before dinner we don’t offer a reward of extra cookies, we just announce our approval of his being a good little boy.
I Promise Not to Notice an Extra Paycheck
I’m not sure which is stranger:
- The OCR board accidentally printed up GCSE music exams for 12,000 students with the answers on the back
- When they figured it out, they basically shrugged and said, ‘Probably nobody noticed anyway.’
(According to Reuters)
Ratte-phoey
Last week, NPR ran a brief story about Christopher Ratte. This father ordered a lemonade for his son (age 7) at a baseball game, and was given a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Some suggest this isn’t a realistic mistake, though as a non-drinker myself I can confirm that I didn’t know Mike’s Hard Lemonade was alcoholic until somebody tole me. I doubt I would have thought it unusual to give it to a child.
As reporter Scott Simon reflects, even the $7 price was no clue, since “the price of everything in a ballpark is ludicrous, from a bag of peanuts to the pay of a first baseman.”
No, Seriously – Do Not Reply
The next time you receive a piece of e-mail with a reply address of, say, donotreply@donotreply.com consider that if you respond anyway, that domain’s owner gets to read it anyway.
Can I Press Your Buttons?
“In [a traditional elevator] you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.” – The New Yorker, 21 April 2008
In my own recently remodeled elevator, the button for my floor doesn’t light up anymore. It still works; it just doesn’t light up.
This is completely unimportant in my daily routine, but it’s problematic when someone gets on after I’ve pressed it. When one of the many college girls in the building follows me into the elevator and presses, say, 4, on an otherwise unlit and apparently untouched panel, it must be creepy to see me standing there motionless, grinning passively as if to say, “I know exactly where I’m getting off tonight, baby.”
Even when she’s rushed out at the fourth floor and sees that I’ve stayed behind, I still look like a lunatic who’s just standing in an elevator not doing anything, like a homeless guy riding back and forth on the S train in Manhattan all day.
Basically what I’m saying is: “Maybe the next time you guys remodel the elevators, you should check to make sure all the buttons on the new control panel light up.”
Remind Your Lungs How Much They Like the Taste of Air
“She is gonna call me ‘Point B’ because that way she knows that no matter what happens she can always find her way to me. And I’m gonna paint the solar system on the backs of her hands, so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, ‘Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.'”
This poet, Sarah Kay, is absolutely, completely, and in all other ways amazing.
Some of those are very hard to hear, so either get headphones or just be ready to turn the volume way up.
I honestly don’t think I’ve heard words that powerful since Sorkin’s West Wing.
Gary, Indiana, Let Me Say it Once Again
At first the trailer for American Teen looks like a cliché flick about life in high school. Then it becomes clear it’s a documentary about genuine cliché teens – who are cliché for a reason. It reminds me a lot of This American Life, though there’s no real connection.
You must watch the trailer, if only to hear an actual real-life high school guy say aloud in the presence of a girl, “There’s a lot of grease on the table now. Because I put my face on it.”
Sorry, I Didn’t Catch Your Name
It’s surprisingly enthralling watching Amy Walker introduce herself twenty-one times.
The trick is she does it each time with a different accent – London, Dublin, Belfast, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Prague, Moscow, Paris, Sydney, Wellington, Australia, Texas, California, Seattle, Toronto, Brooklyn, Charleston…
I like Dublin and Charleston best.
This reminds me of the Speech Accent Archive from George Mason University, which currently has 866 samples of people from around the world reading the same sample of text. (They even have a category for American Sign Language, though it’s empty. I’m not sure how they think that’s gonna work.)