Nobrainer’s Think Tank

“You know they’re not gonna saw your hands off here, alright? The worst they would ever do is they would put you for a couple of months into a white-collar, minimum-security resort! Shit, we should be so lucky! Do you know, they have conjugal visits there?”

That of course is part of the conversation from Office Space where they talk about stealing a whole boatload of money.

It turns out that things may be even better in real life:

A U.S. appeals court will allow ex-Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling to stay out of prison while it considers granting him bail…

Skilling attorney Daniel Petrocelli told the paper he found out Monday evening the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would allow Skilling to remain under house arrest while it considers granting him bail during his appeals of fraud and conspiracy convictions.

A Houston jury convicted Skilling in May.

Since being sentenced in October, Skilling has been under house arrest in Houston and required to wear an electronic monitoring device on his ankle.

I bet his pad is a real dump, too.

I always try to impress upon my students the importance of learning and properly using units with all their calculations. Otherwise, they might just end up looking like idiots. Or working for a Verizon help-center.

Verizon customer service, some of them anyway, have very little concept of the difference between cents and dollars.

1 cent is different from one dollar. Right.
1/2 cent is different from 1/2 dollar. Right.
0.002 cents is different form 0.002 dollars. Not so fast.

If you’ve got 22 minutes to kill, listen to the mind-numbing ineptitude of Verizon.

I remember this episode from my youth. Thanks, YouTube!

…just like real life.

Hey! Let’s ban trans fat!

Why?

Because we’re overzealous, all-knowing politicians and more imortantly because we can!

It is becoming the first city in the country to ban all restaurants from using artificial trans fats, while requiring hundreds of eateries to post food calorie counts right on their menus…

The city’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, said the changes will help fight the twin epidemics of obesity and heart disease.

Frieden seems to have not noticed that Americans have only gotten fatter since they started putting “nutrition facts” on our food.

Here’s my hypothesis of why government paternalism, in this case at least, won’t help. First, trans fat will probably be replaced with other shit that’s just as bad (or maybe worse). Second, most people don’t understand nutrition labels, and/or they can’t do the math to do anything with the numbers. But they will understand that when they’re hungry and eat a 2000 calorie cinnamon roll that they enjoyed it. And they can understand enough math to know that if they can enjoy 1 2000 calories cinnamon roll, they can enjoy 10 (TEN!) 200 calorie snacks.

Hooray unintended consequences!

Our first newsmaker, from Anderson, deserves some kind of an award for going an extra mile. Actually he went an extra three miles. While drunk. While pulling a trailer. That was full of kids who were in a parade.

David Allen Rodgers, 42, of 410 Devon Way was charged with 18 counts of assault high and aggravated nature, 18 counts of kidnapping, and one count each of unlawful conduct toward a child, assaulting an officer and DUI, according to warrants and citations…

The truck pulling a flatbed trailer carrying the children and adults was in the parade traveling down Main Street when it pulled out into the oncoming lane and passed a tractor pulling a float, according to warrants and a police report.

The truck continued on Main Street at a high rate of speed through two red lights and a stop sign and over some railroad tracks, according to warrants.

Bravo David Allen Rogers. BRAVO! The South could use more men with your kind of go get ‘em attitude!

In other news, a Rock Hill woman had her problem child son arrested for playing with his Christmas presents. Here’s the scoop, despite being an out of control 12 year-old shit-head, his great-grandmother “‘went out of her way to lay away a [Game Boy] and paid on this thing for months,’ said the boy’s mother, Brandi Ervin.”

Great-grandmother? Lay away? There’s a Jeff Foxworthy joke waiting to happen. (I bet these fine people are really spacing out the generations, too.)

“It was only to teach my son a lesson. He’s been going through life doing things…and getting away with it.”

A child who gets away with things? I think someone needs some parenting lessons.

Because of his age, the 12 year-old has not been identified.

If you’ve ever searched for pictures on Google, you know that part of their search engine is pretty horrible. It had occurred to me that the properly connected and motivated person could make a short-term killing by taking advantage of the Google flaw.

As best I can tell, Google has no way to really look at a picture and determine what it is. Thus it has to use context. And quite simply, images that exist in galleries have no context, especially since most owners, myself included, don’t bother to — or can’t — add in title or alt tags.

So, someone who took the time to build a big, well labeled image library (of dubious legality I’m sure) could probably drive a lot of trafic to their site by taking advantage of Google’s shortcomings.

For example I get a lot of hits, especially from foreigners, on this page, who are apparently searching for a certain part of the female anatomy, but find a picture of Mr. Slave, a gay South Park character.

It looks like Google is now trying to rectify the situation by adding Image Labeler (Beta). Basically they ask you to label pictures for them.

I hope it works, because I hate it when I’m looking for a picture to complete a pop-culture reference and have my efforts stymied.

(Thanks to BookOfJoe)