Seriously, I thought Estelle Getty was like a-hundred and twenty.
I will think of her every time I don’t purchase beef jerky.
Addendum: content controlled food-product packaging is less of a threat to humanity than Rubbaducks, especially ones which ally themselves with antisocial prefabricated mug covers. Yerbofe has spoken.
Apparently this nation is in the midst of a cookie shortage.
Have you seen these things? They put a couple little, air-filled cookies in a bag, put a few bags of that in a box you could fit a pair of shoes in and charge you as if the box was full. There’s probably more weight in shiny plastic in there than anything edible.
This example I really wouldn’t mind so much if it was priced for what it contains and there wasn’t such a plastic-to-cookie ratio. But without that there’d be no money incentive for businesses to claim they had the solution to your cookie issue and pretend to offer it to you. And there’s always plastic. There’s more plastic than ever and people still weigh more weight than ever. Maybe they should try eating plastic.
Again with the 100 Calories (which due to thoughtless terminology creation is equal to 100,000 lowercase calories)! Calories aren’t fat, you know. They are units of energy. While certainly excess energy can be harmful, in itself that is not the problem, and its presence need not indicate lack of nutritive value. Your problem might be soda and cookies. Or maybe I just wanted to show that I know what Calories are because it makes me seem like I know lots of things even though I only know a few things about Calories.
Yes, so, many major soda brands now market half sized cans. There may be occasional situations under which this is called for, but in general what you’re going to end up with is somebody just taking two cans, and then who will adorn our Froot Loops boxes? Alright, marmite, let’s say you’re trying to “cut back” and you don’t want to feel obligated to finish your whole drink (and if that’s the case I invite you into my home to see that many people don’t feel obligated to do that at all, hint hint accidentally knocked over 2/5 full caffiene free diet pepsi why is that here I don’t even drink that broken keyboard wailing tears), why are there half sized water bottles?1
Water has zero calories. No one ever foiled their health as a result of consuming 16 ounces of water every day. The only way to get dead prematurely drinking water is to be specifically allergic to it or to imbibe such a very large amount that you win admission to a fraternity, and I have to think any other liquid would do it just as well.
But some people are always going to be helpless.
1Ehhh, assuming there is reason to buy brand name pre-bottled water in any size in a section of a nation in which sanitary water is available on-tap, which that picture was taken in. How long before oxygen is being sold back to us?
How long before “we” think it’s a good idea, I mean. And that charging 20 dollars for little bottles of an essential basic component of life isn’t scummy, even in the unlikely case there’s reason to assume both that it’s possible to trap pure oxygen in a little can and that they’re doing it. They don’t list the price for the magic ogo water, which suggests to me it’s either laughably ludicrous, even in context, or of indeterminate legality.
Oh, is that why!
Have you considered increasing the oxygen content of its imbibing fluid?
mariella ellaaaaaaaa sez:
They even make beer cans this size now, too.
How are you doing, Brendanstein? I think Ian is throwing a grad party at Jovanna’s house for Sally this Saturday (the 26th). I hope you come! Haven’t seen you in awhile. Plus, its my birthday two days afterword……so maybe you should say hi =D
Heard you had an art show recently too? I wanted to go but I think Ian told me after it was too late. Correct me if I’m wrong though. Also, next time you have one if you remember you should email me.
bye byes
– Ella
Slengof sez:
It wasn’t really my show. Not even one sixth, like last time. It was for all members of the new haven art “council” and each only had one piece displayed. All items will be there until September the somethingth. Although I saw plenty, I did not meet any new people. I suspect a party Ian organizes will go similarly. And yet I must attend. We shall see how that goes. Hopefully I will be able to share Joshua-distracting-responsibilities with someone else. I spent much of the art reception tending to that.
If I have another show, a real one, ideally it will be in some other place nearer to here that doesn’t look like a tiny office because it is a tiny office.
A Peabody Award sez:
I’m actually rather relieved to see the trend toward smaller portions; the steady ballooning portion sizes of the last few decades are without a doubt one of the largest contributing factors to the current obesity epidemic. Now if only we could get restaurants to play along (alas, I fear that portions-no-human-being-could-ever-finish have become too firmly entrenched in consumers’ minds as being synonymous with “Great Value!”)
As for bottled water, despite the continued ravings of various Andy Rooney clones, I can’t really get worked up about that. One is, after all, effectively paying for convenience rather than any great difference in quality (mind, there are many places in the world wherein drinkable tap water is not a given). I can certainly recall a number of situations during long journies and the like wherein such a product has proven a veritable salvation (of course, to conserve Worthless Greater American Dollars, I’ve since taking to simply taking a usually-tap-filled bottle with me just about everywhere in the first place). I have to agree that the canned oxygen is going rather too far, though.
P.S. It would be nice if this comment box wouldn’t keep insisting on expanding out to underneath the side bar.
Slengof sez:
I’ve carried a rechargable glass bottle with me since 2003. Eh, different bottles over time. As I learned in Georgia, however, even the public fountain-things designed specifically for drinking out of can produce intolerable results. I meant to cover that in my footnote, but… well I suppose I didn’t! In Connecticut, though, aside from a few faucets I was warned dispensed an amount of lead, the plastic is generally baffling. Nevermind the waste, how can anyone drink out of it? I should just leave people to their baffling convenience, I suppose. I should be glad it’s water in all those plastic bottles and not vodka or more stupid coke. But I also hate air conditioners (at least around here.). The sensational summer societal-blame series is not through yet!
Portions: I might agree if I didn’t think the reductions only came about as a result of people’s failure to moderate anything for themselves. It’s the same way it takes nothing less than an energy crisis for people to use any less of it, and they still wait for the local government to order them to turn off their [anything.] This isn’t about ludicrous portions of actual food that are too big but must be finished all at once (but do direct me to any places you know which serve these). It’s about tiny little bags of tiny little cookies. Maybe there’s some sense to the little soda cans, but not as much as I think I’m meant to think.
Re: the comment box: I’ve never seen it go under the side thing. Has this always been happening to you? What do you browse internet with? I must investigate this.
Mr. Peabody sez:
A desire for convenience is perhaps not so difficult to understand; that is, after all, largely the point of the also referenced restaurants.
Obscene portions are common among local restaurants in order to call attention to themselves, and also of a few chains that stemmed off of such restaurants in the past few decades and felt the need to retain such a gimmick. It should also be noted that the portion size of any prepared item is directly proportional to how fried said item is.
The comment box starts off at a perfectly reasonable length then expands beneath the sidebar the moment the first character is input (no doubt cackling to itself in the process). Altering the window size (in either a positive or negative direction) will temporarily retract the box to its original size, but it will expand once again the moment another character is input, frustrating one’s efforts. It does not change size when a character (or group thereof) is deleted, however.
The box has always done this. My only few moments of relief occur only when there are sufficient comments on the page (as there are now) that the box is pushed below the bottom of the sidebar, allowing me to read the entirety of my text while typing, expansion-be-damned.
I use Internets Explorer to view this page. Folks constantly tell me that I shouldn’t, but downloading new programs requires far too large an expenditure of effort.
Slengof sez:
If I ever have a restaurant I will try and not impose the standards of my own astounding metabolism on others. But I just love eating entire pizzas.
How recent an internet explorer version are you speaking of, here? Mine, which claims to be the decimalrific 7.0.5730.11, does not do that horrible thing at all. But eh, I was fortunately able to track down the section of styles.css relevant to this and observed that I neglected to enter a width for the area around the comment submission area, perhaps assuming the thing would obey the main entry space above it. Tell me, does the text there ever hide itself? The side-thing is too dratted big anyway. I would love to make it collapsible, but the simple fact is that the extent of my css skills is taking an object from the default template and moving it or changing its values. That anything works is an eventual fortunate surprise. I suppose it could go altogether, but where?
So the width is set at “602px;” Do tell me if this has changed anything. I could also try simply using the 100% I erroneously assumed it was defaulting to previously.
A Peahat sez:
It works fine now.
My version is 6.&C, incidentally; I avoided “up”grading as the newer version is ugly and has a bad layout (as per most interfaces these days). I also have a tendency to click “open link in new tab” instead of “new window” when using it, and I find those wretched things counter-useful.
Slengof sez:
I would still like to try and widen the comment boxes. If it suddenly goes screwy again and I leave it that way do tell me because I probably didn’t notice.
I remember all the “new” browsers were intolerable when I used 800×600. They seemed like they wasted so much space they did not need to, with thing-bars and big icons and such. I don’t remember precisely how or at what point I got over that. I used netscape 4 until maybe 2001ish when it mysteriously would lock up for minutes at a time (while the mythical netscape 5 strangled my system by design), essentially forcing me into the Internet Explorer which Windows had been progressively integrating into all possible points of my windows experience the whole time, despite the fact that I couldn’t use anything without first logging into Compuserve.
Now, the situation is different and I use tabs a great deal, but they’re rather decadent with RAM from what I’ve read/experienced. Still, I haven’t used Internet Explorer regularly since this version installed itself. My separation from it has been so thorough that I forgot both that it bothered me and that it used to be different.