Since 1903, when Binney & Smith introduced the first Crayola crayon, people have been fascinated with the heritage of our color names. You'll find a summary of Crayola crayon history for now but come back soon and explore a detailed description of how each individual crayon was introduced, how the name was chosen, read interesting stories about each crayon, and more!

Periwinkle, Thistle, Silver, Spring Green. Bittersweet, Apricot, Mahogany, Carnation Pink. Crayola Crayon Chronology

Link from today and the day after that.

Between them, they are wanted for a string of alleged offences including murder, terrorism, drug trafficking and abduction. So elusive are these suspects said to be that Interpol's Secretary-General called last week for the establishment of a "global network of fugitive investigators" to bring them to justice.

Yesterday, however, a lone journalist from The Times succeeded in tracking down half of the British fugitives. He found all four using widely available sources such as electoral registers, internet search engines and commercial records. What is more, he did it in one hour and 22 minutes.

Times Online

Although some women will enjoy a game called The Sims, which requires you to control and manage the bladder of a two-dimensional puppet who speaks in pictograms.

LILEKS (James) The Bleat

I went back and read the rest of the article about bots, then went and looked at my own access logs. I only found one robot that he mentions, the Turnitin bot, but it appeared numerous times. I'm not sure why I should be concerned about whether or not anyone is copying my work and turning it in as their own schoolwork, and I'm not real excited about paying for the bandwith for their robots to hit my site thousands of times a month. So I banned them, using the directions here for modifying my .htaccess file.

And then -- oh, this is priceless -- I went to my own site and typed a URL wrong accidentally, and got the generic 404 message page, not my own customized page. So I've obviously screwed up the .htaccess file. I put it back the way it was. These are professional drivers, don't try this at home.

Among the stupidest of the banner ads are the ones that try to look like error messages from your system, attempting to trick you into clicking them. I just got this one on Yahoo! a few minutes ago:

I'm really glad it detected Windows on my Mac. Otherwise, I would have been worried.

I haven't read all of this yet, but let's just save it for now:

Some will say that the Internet is a public place, and if I don't want something abused, I shouldn't put it on the Internet. Well, that's true. It is also true that if I don't want to get mugged, I shouldn't leave my house, and if I don't want calls from telemarketers, I shouldn't have a phone. But I like leaving my house, I like having a phone, and I like having this web site.

dive into mark

Also: I was all set to say how wonderful this was (as Mark says in this post, hack the end of the URL to correspond to a URL of your choice), but it doesn't seem to work on a/my Mac, i.e., it shows up, but I can't move the words around.

Link from Pop Culture Junk Mail

Diane has a good rant about censorship as it applies to posts on personally-owned message boards. It made me think of the awful Yahoo! message boards which I very occasionally visit--if you go to a page about a news story, there will often (always?) be a link below it to a message board purportedly about that topic.

It almost never is, though. Maybe it starts out that way, but it almost instantaneously degrades into a bunch of people insulting each other. It just makes me wonder who in the world has all this time???

While I do believe that there are bad laws, lots of them, some laws have a legitimate purpose. Like traffic laws. Sure, it's annoying to get a speeding ticket, and I've gotten some myself. But it's hard to rail against the injustice of not being allowed to drive 80 miles an hour in a school zone, or it is for me. And traffic lights--they have a purpose, right? In general, it's to keep people from running into each other, and they work pretty well most of the time. But there are a lot of people who don't believe these particular laws should apply to them, and they are apparently unhappy that new inventions (traffic cameras) are making it more difficult to get around them.

Enter phantom plate.com. They make products designed to thwart the traffic cameras that photograph license plates of speeders and those that run red lights.

"The Reflector reflects photo radar flash, helping prevent a costly ticket!" "Super Shield protects you against all traffic enforcement cameras in use today!"

Because, as we all know, it's our God-given right to drive our cars as fast as possible, and to run every light we see, as long as there isn't an actual policeman in evidence. And if anyone gets in our way, well, too bad for them!

Why does everything have to be a competition? I understand that it's nice to have a guide that tells you whether you're going to be eating (or staying) in a dump or in a nice place, but when careers and fortunes and lives are based on someone else's rating of you, it's very sad.

Yahoo! News - Top Chef in Apparent Suicide After Rating Lowered

And every so often - say, when you're standing in the aisle of Target, woolgathering, recalling something you heard on the radio on the way over, or read on the web that morning, and you see headlines: Israel retaliates; Syrian forces push south or Smallpox appears contained, for now and you wonder whether this simple trivial moment will seem unutterably precious in six months, or three - and then you shake it off, and buy Tupperware. Another normal February day.

LILEKS (James) The Bleat

That just seemed apropos after my journal entry tonight.

My father Michael wanted to protect us, to give us inauspicious, normal lives free of the media spotlight. He accomplished this: by allowing documentary filmmakers to record our childhoods, by dressing us in feathered Mardi Gras masks and gauze when we left the ranch, and by dangling me out of a window with a towel on my head. In retrospect, the logic of his parenting was ambiguous at best. Nonetheless, I had my own giraffe.

Ftrain: Selections from My Name is Blanket, © 2046 Blanket Jackson

What if you got an all gold bag of Special Olympics M&M's and you were so hungry that you just ate them without thinking? Or what if you got it in the dark, like, say, a movie theater? I suppose as long as you ate them all, you'd never know.

Oh, never mind. It says that if you get a bag that is "COMPLETELY FILLED with GOLD M&M's® Chocolate Candies along with a winning game piece," you win $50,000, so I guess you have to get the game piece, too.

So I guess as long as you don't eat that, you're safe.

It's like watching a train wreck, or at least that's the analogy that comes to mind. I looked up the Princess Diana book on Amazon, and started reading the reviews of those, and could have picked up quotes out of all of them, but I suppose that's mean-spirited. Obviously, these people mean well and believe what they're saying, but to read this book and then say that you now know and understand what happens after we die is like saying that "Defending Your Life" is the definitive documentary on Heaven.

It'll be a long time before I read fiction again. Btw, if like me, you picked up this book because you're curious about what people do in heaven, you'd be better off reading "In Her Own Words: The After-Death Journal of Princess Diana" by Christine Toomey. That's the real stuff.

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Lovely Bones: A Novel

From an Amazon review of The Lovely Bones: A Novel

I admit that I have never read this book, but I read the excerpt and reviews etc.

I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV

(When no one is looking, it's OK to curl up and cry.)

Nuclear Blast - Visual Guide

(Real guide is here.)

Link from Nobody's Doll.

Automated checkout hasn't made it to my grocery store yet. There are stores in the area that use it--my brother uses it at his store on the other side of town--but I haven't seen it yet. If this is a good example, and I have no reason to believe it's not, I won't be using one any time soon.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is that the machine is paranoid and will accuse you of theft at the slightest opportunity. The white platforms where you are supposed to stand your bags rigged to be weight-sensitive. After you scan each item, you have to drop it in to the bag on the platform, so the machine knows you haven't surreptitiously pocketed it ("But if I already scanned it, why can't I just..." No! No item for you!).

Idle Words

Certainly, mistakes happen all the time, and hospital workers aren't immune to them, but a mistake of this magnitude--a patient given a heart and lungs from a donor of the wrong blood type--is just staggering.

Duke University Hospital earlier this week took responsibility for the error in the original transplant. Officials said although the organs were clearly labeled type-A organs at their origin, the blood type was not double-checked before the surgery.

Yahoo! News - Botched Transplant Victim Gets New Heart, Lungs

How weird would you have to be to want this as your computer wallpaper??

When 45 Marin County, California women were photographed on November 12, 2002, forming the word PEACE with their naked bodies, it struck a deep chord around the world. Our exposure of the vulnerable human flesh we all share has created a powerful statement against the naked aggression of our country's policies.

Baring Witness

Link from Soap Box Girls

So I'm continuing to read the MT stuff, and I'm probably wrong--I guess it doesn't actually install on your computer, it installs on the server, but I'm reading the installation instructions, and I'd rather, I don't know, hit my head against a wall or something . . .

I just had a horrible thought relating to the Google buyout of Blogger. The thought process went like this--I visited a journal that was created in Movable Type. I don't particularly like most of the Movable Type journals I see, mostly because I don't like the way they generally give you the opening paragraph of an entry, then a link to "more," or something like that, then you have to click to the entry page and you get the entry and a bunch of comments (that I am almost never interested in) at the bottom, then you have to go back to the entry page for another entry.

I'm guessing that all that is probably configurable, but that's how most of them I've seen are set up.

So anyway, it got me thinking, and I went to the Movable Type website and started looking around, and was very impressed by the interface--very classy and it looks like it would be fun to use, and most of the websites that use it do look very elegant. I don't, however, want to install a software program to maintain my blogs, I like being able to do it online and not be tied to one particular computer, since there are three that I use at various times (Mac at home, Mac at work, PC laptop for travel).

But anyway, I was considering downloading it just to play around with.

And then I had this horrible thought. Will Blogger users (or whatever we'll be called once Google takes over) become the lower class blogging citizens? Will we be like Geocities or Tripod website users? Maybe it's snobbery, but anytime I see a website hosted on Tripod, I don't even bother to follow the link, mostly because I know it's going to spawn at least four pop-up windows. Will I have to use Movable Type just to maintain my self-respect?

But there's a strange and wonderful beauty that happened to the city this morning. It was quiet, and white, and amazing. People walked down the middle of Park Avenue, trudging forward, laughing with each other as they tried to navigate through each other's paths. I saw more than one snowball thrown by men who were dressed more for running a meeting then building a fort.

Musings

Since the Mercedes M class is manufactured in the United States, not Germany, and Godiva chocolates made for American distribution are produced in Pennsylvania, not Belgium, these products are exempt from the boycott.

Thank God!

News - Wilmette Life

Link from Nobody's Doll

Whenever I got too close to the mouse, the cat would snatch it up and flee to the front door alcove, and deposit the mouse in one of the mister's shoes for temporary safekeeping while she warded me off.

Nobody's Doll

This is the story of two small, plastic, adhesive plaques and all that came forth and multiplied after them: the Jesus fish and the Darwin fish. Unexpected Evolution of a Fish Out of Water

Link from Riba Rambles

After I posted the blurb about meta tags, I went upstairs and took a shower, and since I always do my best thinking in the shower, I realized that the two sets of robot tags aren't necessary together, i.e., if you don't want the robot to index your page, then it obviously won't cache it since it didn't index it.

So if you use the "noindex, nofollow" tag, then the "nocache, noarchive" is redundant. You might, however, want to have your page indexed, but not cached, in which case you would only use the "nocache, noarchive" set. I'm not a very good teacher and don't always explain things well, so if this is confusing and anyone wants to discuss it further, please don't hesitate to write.

And I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted blog personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Knowledge is Power

Someone wrote and asked me how to use meta tags to control how robots index your site. Here's a good explanation: Technical Tips & Hints for the Web.

Basically, meta tags go in the header portion of your webpage (anywhere between the <head> and </head> tags). If you don't want a robot (search engine) to index your page at all, use:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

To keep robots from archiving a page, you use:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nocache,noarchive">

I'm not sure whether you can combine the two tags, i.e., <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nocache,noarchive,noindex,nofollow">, but you can certainly use both of them, just stack them up one after the other.

It's all over the web by now, I'm sure. I first saw it at Boing Boing. Picture me stomping around with my hands in fists saying, "Damn it, damn it, damn it." I love Blogger. It makes publishing incredibly easy. Not foolproof, it has it's problems, but easy. I would never sit down ten times a day and open up BBEdit (okay, it's always open, so I wouldn't actually have to open it, but still), write a paragraph, format it, ftp it to the server, check it . . . Witness how infrequent my journal entries are now--a couple of times a week.

My concern, of course, is that just like every other service that started out free, they will set a price for it (well, why wouldn't they, it's a business after all) that I won't be willing to pay. I am already paying for Blogger Pro because I valued it enough, and valued the work of Pyra enough, to feel it was worth a contribution. But would I pay Google for it? Dunno. I guess it will depend on how much. I really can't justify spending any more money on my websites, no matter how much it is.

I hope they prove me wrong. The other thing, of course, is concern about who owns copyright. I don't know enough about it to argue about it, but I'm glad that all of my blogs are resident on servers that I "own" (i.e., they live at domains that I own, not on BlogSpot). In any event, one of the first things I did was to go to Blogger and go into each of my blogs and copy and save the template. You know, just in case I have to recreate it somewhere else . . .

Damn it.

Oh, well, you know, yeah, yay for Pyra. I've just been through this whole buy out thing too many things not to be bummed by it.

I was, of course, tempted by the T-Mobile Sidekick, which is currently free at Amazon after rebates, and spent quite a while this afternoon reading all the customer reviews. They seemed to be about half positive and half negative, with not too many in between.

I wasn't going to get one, because although it looks like a cool gadget, it looks WAY too clunky to use for a phone, and the monthly service charge is a fairly significant committment, but then I noticed that I can't have one, even if I DID want it ("Sorry! This product is not available for Shawnee Mission, KS").

At least now I can quite worrying about passing up such a great deal.

I seldom look at my stats, but for some reason, today I looked at my referrer logs. Those are the stats that show where people are coming from, and they also show when people are accessing images from my server. I discovered two instances. Someone was using an image to illustrate an eBay auction, and someone else was using one of my images as their icon on a message board. I replaced both of the images on my server with this one:

It gave me great pleasure to reload both of those pages and see my "stolen" image come up. Is that petty? Maybe. It's not a huge deal, but anyone who's savvy enough to know how to access an image off of someone else's server is undoubtedly also savvy enough to know that it's theft. I started to write emails to both of them, but decided not to. I was going to say, "If you have to steal, just go ahead and steal the image itself, don't steal my bandwidth," but I figured it would be lost energy. It was a lot more fun replacing the image. I think I showed great restraint, actually. I could have replaced them with something a lot worse.

Let us live, dear wife, as we have lived,
And call each other by the names that lingered,
On our lips the first night of our love,
As years add wrinkles to our ageing skin,
I hope to God the day does not arrive,
When I forget you are my sweet young thing,
Or you no longer see me as your suitor,
Though you outlive the prohetess of Cumae,
And I surpass the age of old King Nestor,
This ripe longevity we shall deny,
Instead of ticking off the days of life,
We'll count the joys they bring, my dearest wife.

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Romantic verse

Frank and Joe sat in their Chevy Nova across from the Stagnant Arms Motel. Empty Cheetos bags littered the floor of the car and Frank was tentatively sipping his 44 oz. Super Big Gulp of Mountain Dew trying to figure out whether his bladder could wait until their quarry emerged from Room 262. Joe leaned his head against the passenger-side window and wondered if Frank was ever going to let him drive again.

The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of the Fleabag Motel

This is cool: Sumo wrestlers are patrolling their Tokyo neighborhood at night to deter crime.

I became aware of ComfortQueen.Com when I was doing research for a site that I designed for someone at least two years ago. There was a script at this site that let you send yourself a "love note" that would arrive at a random date within the next week or so so you would be surprised by it.

I tried it out, but it didn't work, or didn't seem to, because I never got my note back. I had completely forgotten about it, until I got my note to myself ("Love you!") this morning. Appropriately enough, on Valentine's Day!

The world is a mysterious place, isn't it?

I went to the site this morning and they are apparently changing servers, so I'm guessing there may have been a backlog of thousands of love notes going out this morning, or something like that.

I've had an interesting email conversation with someone the past few days about the use of the word "mundane" as a noun. As far as definition, Dictionary.com says:

1. Of, relating to, or typical of this world; secular.
2. Relating to, characteristic of, or concerned with commonplaces; ordinary.

I quite confidently wrote that "mundane" came into common use after the Harry Potter books, but as she corrected me, that word was, of course, "muggles." Same connotation, different word.

When Bob got up this morning, I asked him if he knew where it came from, and he immediately said that his first knowledge of it was from Piers Anthony's Xanth novel, "A Spell for Chameleon," in which the "ordinary" people lived in a land called Mundania and were, naturally, called Mundanes.

So, the ordinary, the clueless, the mundane.

I do sometimes wonder whether I'm just really shallow. I don't worry about it, but I do sometimes wonder. My interests, while far-reaching in scope, are fairly close to home in execution. I have no interest in politics or great literature or international policy. I'm not unintelligent, although, since I only went to college for two years, I would probably be considered uneducated.

The books that I read and the movies that I choose to see are chosen for their entertainment value to me personally, not for their moral lessons or their popularity in the world at large . . . I don't know. I do find it interesting to think about. I know that kitties and candles and mystery books and what I had for dinner aren't of much interest or importance in the world at large, but those are the kinds of things I enjoy reading about when other people write them, and I do write to please myself as well, so I go on.

On another note, this has bothered me ever since I read it:

I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, but mundanes are just weird. I mean, not all of them; and I'm sure most of them are very nice people; but I will never in my life worry about whether my bath towels match. Holiday-theme door pillows, and chair-leg protectors that look like little cows, are like sex toys for a specialized perversion engaged in by individuals belonging to the third of five genders of an alien species resident on some distant planet.

Now, I don't have chair leg protectors, but I definitely do like to have my bath towels match, in fact, they always do match. Always. If that makes me a "mundane" . . . and of course, I do wonder what their definition of "mundane" is. People are aren't as well educated? People who don't own as many books? People who don't like the same things they do? Weird.

I haven't written many personal entries recently. I haven't had much to say about my daily life. I could write about the cute thing the cat did recently. E.g., I woke up in the middle of the night and looked over at David. The cat was stretched out against David's chest, full length. Both were sound asleep. But that sort of personal writing isn't satisfying to either writer or reader.

Ceejbot :: 2003-02-12

I completely disagree (which I suppose should be obvious from the types of things I write about). Personal writing is the only thing that draws me to blogs of any sort. But, you know, different strokes for different folks. Not everyone is like me. Which is as it should be. Except that there should be more personal writing. :)

Drugstore.com periodically offers free shipping for orders of $25 or more, and I usually take advantage of it. Their prices are pretty good, and I order things that I would buy normally, like toothpaste and razor blades, and I also order bulky paper things like toilet paper and paper towels.

The thing about the paper towels is, they've got my brand (Bounty), but you don't have any choice over the design. The roll I got yesterday is printed with little hand-holding angels and comments about friendship: "Thanks for being a good friend." "When you need a friend, I'm here." "Old friends are the best friends."

That just seems so weird to me. "Thanks for being a good friend?" I mean, it's not likely that you're going to gift a friend with a roll of paper towels instead of a greeting card, is it? "Here. I was thinking of you."

One day, I closed the drain on the tub and ran the water long enough to leave about a half an inch in the tub. Hank was transported to labrador-kitty heaven. He stomped around in the water for a full half hour before rejoining the rest of us. I had go back to the bathroom to check up on him every once in a while, just to make sure he was still ok.

Hank, the Amazing Snorkel Cat!

Followed a link from Thyme Wise

My library recently redesigned their website. It was awful before, but I have to say that I think it's worse now. For one thing, it's really ugly, but that's subjective, and I'm sure someone likes it. My complaint is with usability.

I don't know why anyone else uses the library's website, but I use it for two things--to search their book holdings and put books on reserve, and to check what books I have checked out and their due dates. Oh, and a third thing, I guess--to renew books that will reach their due date before I have a chance to return them.

On the old site, in order to get to your account information, you clicked a link that said, "My Account." When they redesigned the site, I searched in vain for that link, or for anything that said anything about an account. "Library Services," maybe? Nope. "General Information?" I finally clicked on a link that said, "What's on my library card?" Hm. Actually, I thought that might be a screen that explained what the various numbers on the card meant, but no, that apparently is the new account screen.

So once I figured that out, the next thing I wanted to do was search. The old "Search" link now says, "Search & Research," but when I click on it, I get a screen that asks if I want to "search this site," "search newspaper and magazine databases," "ask us a question," or access "search engines."

I don't want to do any of those things. I want to search the library's database, but there doesn't seem to be a link for that. Under "Search This Site," it says: "Looking for something on ______ Library's web page? Search here!" That's not what I want, I don't care what's on their "web page," I want to know what's in their catalog. I click on it, though, and I get a page with a dropdown list that lets me choose either "Website" or "Library Catalog."

That's what I want--why was it so hard to find it? I'm not knocking the library, I think it's wonderful that they're online, and I think it's great that I can do all these things, but I don't understand how things like this happen. I know that I'm a lot more cognizant of these kinds of things since I do it for a living, but, also, someone had to design and build this site, and one would hope that they also do it for a living. As the designer/programmer, you don't always have control over these kinds of things, but change just for the sake of change is seldom good.

"What's on my card?" Well, okay, maybe someone thought that was better. I don't think so, but maybe someone did. But the search thing still bugs me, particularly when they went to the trouble of writing a non-helpful explanation. Ah well.

I can't imagine ever being able to look at these without crying: editorial cartoons about The Columbia Tragedy collected at Slate. Very moving. I looked at the first page, and had to stop. I'll look at them sometime when I need a good cry. Link from Pop Culture Junk Mail.

"She was really grumpy."

Link from The Veg Blog.

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to stop doing this (blogging). It's why I stopped in the first place--not this specific article, of course, but the whole analyze it to death mentality. Any time anyone does anything, it has to turn into a competition. And then someone has to write a book (many books) about it. Not about the writing, though, of course, but how to be popular, how to get people to link to you, how to become one of the "A list" yourself.

I joined a mailing list recently that was made up of a group of people who wrote weblogs about a certain topic; I thought it would be interesting, and most of people involved were interesting. But I unsubscribed as soon as a thread started up about the "big names." Specifically, there was a discussion about whether or not people should be admitted to the list if they had a weblog name similar to a name that one of the "big names" had already chosen, i.e., if someone who wanted to join the list (or webring, I guess it was) had apparently copied someone else's title, they should be ostracized.

It's the same reason I never participated in the online journal community, why I don't attend the conventions or get-togethers. I suppose it's why, when I asked to be a part of the journalers' NaNoWriMo ring, I was met with a "Gasp! Willa?? Can this be true?" kind of reaction. I did, at first (participate in the community), but in the same kind of situation, I joined a mailing list, and watched in horrid fascination as it turned into a gossiping session about other online journalers. I found myself obsessively searching for my own name, to see if anyone was gossiping about me, and that's when I stopped and unsubscribed.

Maybe they think I think I'm too good for them. It's not that. It's that once you get enmeshed in the competition for hits, in worrying about who does what to whom, it becomes a popularity contest and the writing takes second place. Suddenly, it's not about the writing anymore, or providing information or entertainment, but about the "popular kids." Popularity for popularity's sake. Get other people to link to you, mention the "big names" in your own blog so that they might deign to visit you, and thus link to you, too. The "A list." The "big names." Spare me.

I love to write. I love to create websites that are pretty to look at; I like to collect information and present it in an attractive, interesting way. The fact that I have a certain kind of website doesn't mean that I want to belong to any kind of "community;" other people do, and that's great. But it's why I get fed up with it periodically.

When things are especially stressful at work, one of the guys I work with will occasionally remind us, "We're just making websites, people!"

Link from Boing Boing.

Someone wrote and reminded me that they still used Mood Swings mail, and that I'd taken down the link to it. So here it is. I may or may not put up a permanent link to it, so if you use it, set your bookmarks!

Ooh, very cool! A collection of photographs of workspaces at Somebodydial911. I've got a bunch of photographs of my own workspace, I should dig one out and send it in.

Link from Joanna.org.

First, everybody thinks of what Hollywood actor they think would best play them (that is, if you were playing this, you would cast an actor as you). Then, you go around the room casting everybody else.

We did this in Mexico in February last year during a meal.

Willa: Annette O'Toole or Nicole Kidman
Bob: Harrison Ford
Craig: Dennis Quaid
Kelly: Meg Ryan
John: John Malkovich
Leslie: Charlise Theron

Dantrum: The New "It" Game

Every time you get a new credit card now, that is, a renewed one with a new expiration date, it has a sticker on it saying that "for security reasons" you have to call and "activate" it. Oh, give me a break. It's not for "security reasons." Maybe it started out being for security reasons, so that no one could steal your mail and use your new card, but somewhere along the line, some marketing genius said, "Hey! They have to call us anyway, right? They can't get off the phone until we tell them they can, right? So why not keep them on the phone as long as possible and try to sell them stuff??"

Most of the time it's automated. You call, punch in your credit card number, wait awhile, then they come back on and say, "While you're waiting, how about buying something, like a credit card protection plan or some life insurance?" You punch whatever button means, "No," and they come back and say, "Are you sure? You have to wait anyway, why not?" and you punch in "No" again, and eventually they say, "Okay. Well, your loss. Your card is now activated and you can use it. Loser."

This morning I called American Express to activate my card, and after getting the recording, putting in the number, and waiting, it was a live person instead of a recording. She said she would like to ask me a few questions in order to be sure that I was getting the full value of the card, or something. She asked, "What kinds of purchases do you normally make with your American Express card?"

What kind of purchases?? I buy stuff.

I said I didn't have time to take a survey--I needed to get to work. So she said something about how there were all kinds of benefits that went along with the card, and to check online or something, and then she asked if she could have my email address so they could keep me up to date on stuff, and I said, "No."

So she eventually let me go.

I know you have to put up with some stuff in order to get credit, but it's so annoying.

There are only six grown-up countries in the world. Two of them are Britain and the United States. You can probably throw in Canada and Australia. And that leaves you with France. Well, you know, France reserves the right to sit on the fence and either come in or not come in and usually not come in. They say, "Oh, we would be there but unfortunately we are having lunch and we have the omelets on already and we cannot go to war." So you don't want to wait around for the French to come and help you. Or the Italians. Lovely as their country might be. You need your grown-up friends. And you can't really rely on Switzerland. It's well-meaning, but really dull.

Salon.com Books | English for Americans

An interesting email interview with George Saunders, one of my favorite writers, at Reinventing the World.

is back writing columns at Salon. I think this page is accessible; Salon still has its Premium service, and some of the pages say they're only available to Premium subscribers, but now they've also got this thing where if you watch an ad, you get a "free pass," which is what I did this morning.

A Swiss Army watch probably needs to be able to withstand the rigors of vigorous café debates about the qualities of various chocolates. It could also be scraped against a stone counter top while filling out a Swiss bank account deposit slip, but that's about the worst action it would see.

tiny pineapple