News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 9

What's the point of dog shows? It seems like a worship of the Platonic form, made ridiculous by the fact that the Platonic forms were artificially created by selective breeding. It's not like people are still coming up with new avant-garde breeds of dog.

I can understand county fairs where people show off their enormous pumpkins, because at least you can eat pumpkins.

One of the advantages of having a digital camera that fits in your pocket is that you can take a picture whenever your arms are not paralyzed. I kind of had this when I had the Hiptop (That reminds me: I got rid of the Hiptop because it never worked for me. I now use a cheap old reliable cell phone with no features beyond Tele-Talk^TM), but my time trials indicate that it takes about ten seconds for me to take my camera out of my pocket, turn it on, take a picture, turn the camera off, and put it back into my pocket. I don't think I could have taken a picture with the Hiptop in 10 seconds. Plus you can actually see details in the camera pictures.

All that was seemingly a big lead-up to the fact that I've had to start putting up "misc" directories to contain pictures that don't correspond to a "big event, better take the camera" thing. Here they are for February and March. These sets include hilarious moments like At least they didn't park in the handicapped space.

Bonus for Joe: this Ad campaign for New Zealand found near the Apple store which opens up new fields in tautological advertising. "Don't even come," it says. "We won't let you in."

Bonus bonus for everone: for some reason they're ripping up all the greenery around the building where I work. I assume they know what they're doing. Anyway, I call this picture set The Scouring of the Shire, and it should satisfy those of you who were hoping Return of the King would be even longer.

Sumana's story of her visit to a call center in Bangalore is up on Salon. Forget The New Pentagon Papers, this is the real stuff! Sumana doesn't like the Magic Marker-ish drawing that adorns the story, but I do. I should write my sci-fi story about outsourcing, along with all the other sci-fi stories I'll never actually write.