A warning for those that may have their Windows 7 Updates set to automatically install the optional updates: For some reason, Microsoft added “Bing Desktop” to the Windows Update optional updates last week.
In case you’re not familiar with this horrible peice of software, imagine a combination of a search engine bar, Browser Hijacker malware, and a Win98 “Active Desktop” virus.
The concept is that that rather than opening a browser or having a search bar, you get a giant Bing search box right smack dab in the center of your desktop. Dont want it in the center? No problem! You can have it in the top of your screen too!
So what happens when you type a search into the box? Does it search your emails or files like the already built-in windows desktop search? Nope. Does it figure out based on contect wether you need to open a map app or schedule something on your calendar like Apple’s Siri? Nope. It just opens a browser with the search results. Wow. What a time saver! Yep… It opens my browser right up so I can use my google search bar to actually find what I’m looking for.
Now, at least the crappy software comes a feature that I may actually have found useful… the ability to set your desktop image to be the “Bing image of the day”. If I could do that without the damn Bing search box I may not have removed it. Of course, when you remove it… it shows back up in the optional updates.
The only way to prevent this software from prompting you every time is to right-click on the update and select “Hide Update”.
Being a dead controversial figure does not come without unintended consequences. I’ve started to see the following on several news/blog aggregate sites:
Largely due to his reputation, some reporters appeared hesitant to repeat word of his death out of fear that it may have been a hoax.
That really brings up an interesting point. Why haven’t we seen a death certificate? I can not accept that Breitbart is dead until someone shows me a long form death certificate that has been notarized by a caretaker in the Reagan library.
But just in case he is dead… Andrew Breitbart, how should we eulogize thee? Should we treat you with the respect we normally set aside for the dead, honoring the person and temporarily forgetting politics and personal views?
Well, actually yes.
Of course, we cant discount things like this…
Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”
“I’m more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified,” Breitbart wrote. “Sorry, he destroyed lives. And he knew it.”
(From Politico.com, regarding Breitbart after Ted Kennedy’s death)
Huh. Ironic, no? But still, no sense in taking a grade school mentality about this. I can hardly call him names just because he did it first.
Most of the time when I think of sex in the Victorian era (or several generations earlier) I think of stuffy people that only had sex in the dark, or classy prostitutes that had boring sex and gave their change in syphilis.
Of course, logically I know this couldn’t be the case… people are, in addition to being sick and horrible creatures that will always find new and different ways to get off, only human. Plus, anyone who has ever been 12 years old has more imagination about sex than the average Jane Austin novel would lead us to believe.
But I digress. I stayed home from work recently and spent quite a bit of time hopping through the internet in a way I haven’t done in quite some time. While reading about James Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake (which I still have very little desire to read) I happened upon a reference to love letters that the author and his lover had written to each other. Apparently only Joyce’s letters remain, though his lovers letters were apparently even more graphic and descriptive.
While watching TV the other day I caught reference to something called “night soil” that I had never heard of before… so I looked it up.
I found that night soil is the soil recovered from places outhouses used to (or still currently) stand. During the period of time that outhouses were in use, they had to be cleaned frequently (or moved to a new location). Cleaning became more common as the ‘night soil’ was found to be valuable for crops. Even more valuable once they started to compost or treat it before application so that disease and worms stopped spreading through the food
It was supposedly called night soil because the workers collecting it would do so at night. Basically it was a polite reference to a product that may not always have been completely composted when it was collected.
As more and more houses got plumbing through the 1960′s, the pits were sometimes cleaned one last time…and sometimes they weren’t.
So, that led me to find that there is a whole culture in ‘privy digging’. Who knew there were so many young bottle collectors digging up old outhouse pits?
My first though was that its strange what people will do for an off chance at finding some old bottles. My second thought was that they must not find much since I had just read about how valuable ‘night soil’ was for a period in history. My third thought was wondering if they could still find any kernels of corn. Heh. Corn.
Well, it turns out even the emptied privy pits had a lot of bottles… someone picked out the bottles from the (sometimes soupy) mess when they emptied them, and frequently threw them back in. Plus of course, even when there was a market for night soil it doesn’t mean that a family didn’t still just dig a new hole and move the outhouse, particularly if they were in the country and lined their pit with wood rather than stone/brick.
Finally, let me just say for the record: It is crazy how many websites are dedicated to outhouses, pit toilets, and privy digging. Holy Crap (pun intended).
I know that on Wednesday an awful lot of people are going to be lost while sites like Wikipedia and Reddit are down in protest of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). I support their protest completely, as do most members of the PenIsMightier community.
Just in case you’re missing Reddit during their outage I’d like to share a lovely screenshot that came from there thanks to the fine folks at the pen forum. Besides, it kind of fits in with what this site is sometimes known for… dirty old men and incest.
Normally my cats are pooping machines. In fact, over the years I’ve developed a theory that a cats primary purpose in life is to manufacture poop. When it comes right down to it, shedding on my clothes is really just a hobby.
So on Sunday I noticed one of my cats had stopped pooping, and I realized there may be a problem. On Monday it started to produce again, but unfortunately its output dial seemed to be stuck on vomit instead of poop. I gave in, and resigned myself on a visit to the cat mechanic.
Thankfully there was an opening for Monday afternoon, and the mechanic was able to identify the problem after a minor examination.
It turns out that the cat must have had some… digestive problems… that resulted in poop getting stuck in the hair around its anus. This happened enough times in a row to form a strange hair-and-poop plug over its anus, and eventually prevented the cat from pooping.
This is apparently known as an anal cap. I prefer to call it an ass hat.
Suffice it to say I was happy that the poop machine was easy to repair. I’ve grown attached to this one, and this really isn’t the time of year to go shopping for a new one.
20 minutes later I had a very relieved cat and a bill for shaving the ass cap off the cats ass.
Now if (for some reason) you are curious about what could have happened to the cats internal systems during this ordeal, imagine what happens to a car when a banana is shoved in its tailpipe.
On a related note, I present to you, Beverly Hills Cop in one minute:
I recently realized that the behavior I exhibit that doesn’t make me feel guilty about Jehovah’s witnesses, salesmen, and Mormon missionaries does make me feel guilty when it comes to political canvassers.
For example: Last weekend, one of the “Recall Walker” signature-gatherers knocked on my door. I answered the door in my normal Saturday morning outfit: Wearing the scent of booze and my wife’s bathrobe.
In retrospect, I have finally realized that may be crossing a line of decency. Still, the man taking signatures handled everything professionally, and agreed to come back later to get my wife to sign. Thus, I was able to go back to sitting naked in my living room and forgot about the entire event until a few days later.
Why a few days later? Well, I wasn’t expecting another visit so soon and I had worked overnight the night before. When the doorbell rang, as usual I just made sure I wasn’t naked and just went to answer the door. The problem is that I was wearing boxer shorts, black socks and nothing else.
Now, as an aside, I’ve been told that my visage in nothing but boxer shorts frightens children. Its actually a little strange how often that comes up. As for the socks thing… I’ve got no excuse. I was just too lazy to take them off before I passed out at 5am.
So back to the door… It turns out that the same recall worker from Saturday was at the door. It was very obvious that my appearance frightened him. He was quite shaken and barely managed to ask if my wife was home before he said “OK… Um… Don’t worry sir, I wont come back!” and sprinting out of my front yard.
It is because of this that I express my sincere apologies to that recall worker, and to all political canvassers that visit my house in the future. I’ll be frank: I’m not going to change my behavior, but try to take solace in my admission of guilt.
I have to say there is some good advice there. I found myself critiquing their technique at several points, but overall their dedication is admirable.
Our forum also included a quote from another sites review of the article:
To elaborate: the human equivalent would be performing a colon cleanse by cutting yourself open, removing your intestines, turning them inside out, and washing them in the dishwasher. With Drano.
posted by Deathalicious at 12:37 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
From now on I am going to refer to all of my screwdrivers as datachisels. All of them except for the vodka and orange juice screwdrivers of course… That would just be crazy.
I always found the strange, bushy eyebrows old men seem to get creepy.
Then this morning I actually looked in the mirror while shaving and noticed an eyebrow hair out of place. I thought that was strange, since normally they don’t really move at all. So I touched the out of place hair, and it felt different.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the hair was more like the chest, armpit, or pube variety. I quickly tweezered it out.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that my back hair and my chest hair finally met at my shoulders, now its involving my eyebrows.
So then this evening, while brushing my teeth, I looked again… I swear the motherfucker was back! I tweezed it out again, but I’m dead sure that I’m going to wake up tomorrow with a bad case of old man creepy eyebrows.
I just wanted to post something here just in case that happened, because I swear to god I’ll bathe in depilatory cream to make that shit stop and I don’t know if I’ll survive the experience. Still, I figure there is a small chance I’ll become like the Joker in the Michael Keaton Batman movie, and have to start a life of crime.
