Some Brisbane Guy

I hate 4×4s (and SUVs) in suburbia and the city. If you actually need one and you’re really going to use it, fine. But if you buy one to feel safe or any other bullshit reason and you don’t actually go off-road, then when you park or drive near me I hope you feel my disdain through your truck’s doors.

If you don’t get what that Teflon reference is, you probably haven’t heard that Teflon makes people sick.

So, assuming you haven’t died of cancer from breathing in the fumes from your cooking utensils, you might wanna get a safer car. I don’t need to go on about this, the article at that link has plenty of arguments about the dumbness of SUV ownership, and rising oil prices will punish you justly via your wallet.

But if you drive like an arrogant asshole on the road, I’ll just assume that the dumbness that caused you to drive a shiny, stupid four wheel drive is what’s making you be a moron and sit blocking the overtaking lane, or fill my rear-view mirror with your ugly grille, or anything else that makes it clear you can’t comprehend that you’re still unimportant, no matter how much metal and plastic you’ve bought to surround yourself with.

By the way, here’s a sample of a fast-lane hogging fool in a truck:

I started out looking for something that automatically puts text through Babelfish multiple times to get half-English back out. Why? It’s funny. Here’s this paragraph, Babelised:

I began something, the one that insiemi if to transform automati into the text of or until the periods relaunched of Babelfish, the aids before the interior observe ignited Metade-Ingl�s. Why? It is allegro.

Haha! See? And, yes, the title of this post is Babelised.

But the guy who built it is named Carl Tashian, and if you read his site you’ll find out that Teflon is harmful. It kills birds.

Christian also found out that Teflon makes you sick, despite DuPont studying “…the telong-term effects from the sickness, or the extent to which Teflon exposures lead to human illnesses believed erroneously to be the common flu.” (Report)

But worse than just making you sick if it gets too hot, Teflon causes cancer and pollutes drinking water, and it never breaks down. DuPont was actually fined $16.5m USD in December 2005 for covering up unfavourable studies over the last twenty years.

So get rid of that Teflon, stop cooking with it and don’t buy any more of it or you’ll get sick, kill canaries and polar birds and give generations to come cancer and birth defects.

But you should have already found this out thanks to the mass media. Or should you? My new best mate Carl links to a great series of posts about the USA’s media propaganda model.

Let’s see if I can blog this by email before my computer restarts automatically.

After you install some Windows Updates, Windows earnestly insists that you have to restart your computer as a matter of urgency. Apparently urgently enough to popup a dialog box that takes the focus from any other windows you may have open and sets the default focus to “Restart Now” so that if you press Enter (like say, if you’re typing and the dialog pops up and you press Enter for a new line), your computer restarts.

30sec left.

So yeah I could press Restart Later now, but then this would just annoy me some other time.

Edit:

In all the excitement (the floor in our office was being vacuumed and I had to move my chair with only 1 minute to go!) I forgot to attach the screenshot:

As a grammar nazi I notice trivial minutiae like this. Lately I’ve started using GMail to store and archive all my mail so that I can always get to my email no matter what computer I’m on. Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I’m obsessive.

Anyway, since GMail started a couple of years ago, the main benefit of GMail is listed on the homepage as, “Search, don’t sort.” But now it’s “Search, do not sort.” Weird. Check out these screenshots.
Now go read something interesting.

Update: That was this morning. I tried to post via email but it didn’t work. The computer I’m using now shows “Search, don’t sort” and not the clunky “do not sort”. My other computer seems to use google.co.uk instead of google.com or google.com.au, so maybe the chaps at GMail think that the Poms aren’t hip enough for apostrophied abbreviations. Interesting…

Tonight I called a local Indian restaurant named Dawat to see if they have any tight-arse Tuesday specials.  I will paraphrase the conversation:

Her: Good evening, Dawat.
Me: Oh yeah hi, I’m just wondering if you have any specials tonight.
Her: I’m sorry?
Me: Do you guys have any specials on Tuesday nights?
Her: Um, the wrap, is that what you mean…we have a wrap?
Me: Uhh, no, do you have cheaper prices on Tuesdays or…
Her: Oh no no no we do not.  Thankyou…*click*

She didn’t say click, it was the sound of the phone hanging up.  Haha lol.

I know for a fact thanks to my incredible depth of local knowledge and my previous perusal of Dawat’s online presence that Dawat has an all-you-can-shovel buffet on Sunday nights for only $13.50.  I don’t know how much you pay for meals normally though, and I didn’t get time to ask on the phone.

If this lady was a bit more on the ball she could have turned this situation around and perhaps caused me to purchase some morsel of subcontinental delight had she not panicked when I asked her about specials.  But no, she freaked out and I was gone.

It’s disappointing…they don’t get a customer and I don’t get to eat any Indian food.