“Kitty, here’s what’s wrong with the hyperloop concept …”

Vietnamese and Cambodians are probably liking this decade a bit more.

“We’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time,”

That would be Flight of the Pigs O’Clock.

I bought a house two years ago and had a plumber come out to install a new water heater. He asked me where the water meter was and I had to say “fuck if I know”. He said lots of people just let their water account lapse and then remove the meter and tap directly into the water line in the street and get free water. He assumed that the previous owner of my house had done this; I was pondering whether this was a bad thing or not when he found the actual water meter out in the yard under a metal cover. Good news? Probably not – it turns out my house water is supplied by a very cheap independent local water authority, but they had to go into bankruptcy along with the city and apparently some Saudis are planning to buy it to provide water to grow alfalfa for their racehorses.

You could take artificial diamonds back to the time before there were such things as artificial diamonds.

I don’t want to think about any part of his body whatsoever, but he does generally wear a shirt and jacket so we don’t see his arms or chest. It’s possible that the bruise on his hand did literally spread to the other hand via his arms and torso.

We don’t have that in software engineering. And outside of critical software we don’t need it. When the audio fucks up in Teams and you have to leave and re-enter the meeting, people don’t die.

I had a co-worker who was writing remote control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Not exactly “critical software” but he ended up firing a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head.

Richard Ayoade is a national treasure.

Charles “Deep” Dickens

A Christmas Carol

My favorite scene was when Blackadder kicked Tiny Tim’s crutch out from under him on Christmas morning.

It is excellent for blasting away at a shoreline when you have absolute air and naval control.

Even in the battleship era, they had better ships for shore bombardment called “monitors” (after the Civil War-era ships named after USS Monitor that looked similar even though that wasn’t their purpose). A shallow-draft ship just large enough to hold a single battleship turret was a much more economical solution.

It was fun when conservatives had to bear the stigma of Watergate … for all of six years until a retired B-list actor with literal Alzheimer’s let them goose-step with pride once again.

Republicans label Republicans ‘weak’ and say they function like Trump staffers.

I’m a school bus driver and one time I was chewing out some misbehaving kids. At one point I said “if you guys don’t stop I’m going to report you to the principal and he’s going to, uh, give you a stern talking-to” and I just started laughing because it was so pathetic. The Repubs are like the kids on my bus: they know they can do whatever they like and nobody’s going to be able to do anything about it.

Unimpeachable: Republicans control too many seats to ever allow successful impeachment (even less conviction) of any of their loyal gang members.

I wish to god Visual Basic was still around so Copilot et. al. could get infected with ON ERROR RESUME NEXT statements. Or its under-appreciated but vastly more horrific cousin ON ERROR RESUME.

My favorite thing about the “all comments are bad” crowd is that their first example is almost always something like this:

// Add 1 to x
x = x + 1

Like, nobody that thinks comments are good and important would ever add a useless comment like that. The point of commenting is to add documentation (usually the only form of documentation that a future developer is ever going to read) only to code that would otherwise be inscrutable.

That long-ass horizontal scroll bar reminds me of how I used to put unfindable easter eggs into my Visual Basic apps. I would have amusing little messages pop up from time to time in message boxes. To prevent anyone from just searching for the exact text in the message box, I would reduce it to a series of concatenated Chr() statements and then I would put like 200 characters of whitespace in front of the message box call. The only way anybody would spot it would be if they noticed the horizontal scroll bar this produced and nobody ever did.

At least that’s my theory. It’s also possible that nobody ever used the software that I produced.

“Your daughters won’t even want dolls once I get through with them.”

It’s funny, I also own a used school bus and that gets barely worse mileage than the roadster.