News You Can Bruise for 2003 March 21

Energy Brands, is looking for hip water drinkers

(From Sumana, who stresses that they must not only be hip, but "faucet free". No robots in bristling, rococo 1930s casings, please!)

Also from Sumana: "Settlers of Canaan" and "Race to the Kabah" (registration required).

We are no longer the "ect" building. We are now the "Wily Technology" building. Any day now, I expect Megaman to come charging through, one floor at a time, blowing up the armies of impractical zooform robots that have started to infest our offices. By the time he reaches the final battle on the roof, he'll have gained the ability to facilitate distance education, collaborate on software development, collaborate on knowledge management, perform some sort of charity work, and manage Java applications for the enterprise.

I was bored waiting for a big compile, so for a while I was a code bandit. "Leonard, how do I get in on this code bandit action?", you ask? You take your handkerchief[0] and roll it up, and wrap it across your face so it covers your mouth. Hold it in place with headphones. Now you're a code bandit. Accost the compiler! "Stand and deliver... bytecode, that is!"

[0] You have a handkerchief because a gentleman should always carry a handkerchief. If you're a woman then you should also always carry a handkerchief.

My mother has a collection of old George Booth cartoons from the New Yorker. I used to read it in the later stages of learning to read. There's one cartoon which is something like the following: a little boy is holding a bowl of oatmeal rather despondently, as his father says something slice-of-lifey like "Oatmeal is oatmeal, son, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it." I'm making it sound more Charles Addams than it is, but it's something like that.

Like any language-learning neural network, I was able to incorporate the unfamiliar aspects of that sentence into my vocabulary without having to know the formal rules of what everything meant and how everything fit together. So a while later, maybe a couple months, I announced to my mother, "There's not a demand thing to eat in this house!"

She thought I learned it from my grandfather. For all I know she still thinks this. Hopefully this entry will clear my grandfather's good name.