Is this what Easter Bunny looks like?

I don't know why this picture so startled me that I could not stop laughing for 10 minutes.

Oh my god! I completely lost my bearings so that my co-worker needed to tell me to "Get a hold of yourself, lady!"

This goes to prove that NO, you do not want to see Easter Bunny come true, and that my instinct was correct all along,

"Kids, now here is the thing: Easter Bunny is not real. Can you imagine a giant bunny bouncing around in our backyard, and on rainy days, inside our house, hiding candies? What? Are you more stupid than I think? Can you not imagine how gross that would be, a giant bunny?"

Now they can see it with their own eyes. Awesome!

"You people!" is symptomatic of something that none of us want to admit...

(I promise. This is going to be the final rant from me. There is a bit OCD in my personality, and sometimes things just bother me and I cannot let go. Most of the time these are "trivial" by most people's measure. But are they REALLY trivial? Perhaps they are only trivial because you are not affected by it?)

Here is what I have been thinking...

No matter where you are in the world, the advantage of being one of the majority, the mainstream, the dominant society, is that you have the freedom to just be you. No REPRESENT! No speaking for your race, nationality, gender, etc. No "Tell us something about your culture" as if by the nature of being who you are, you automatically are well-versed in the history/culture/geography of where you are supposed to come from. And nobody will ever ever say to you,

"You people..."

Tropic Thunder clip - "You People"

Wonder what Newt would say about this classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit "White Like Me"?

Word Whammer is fun for mommy too!

Actually, my 11 year-old did this, though he denied it. I was laughing so hard when I noticed this I couldn't properly reprimand him. Who knows how long the word has been up on the refrigerator.

SO, this is how you curse *properly* with Word Whammer...

Posted via email from The Absence of Alternatives

Who gives a damn? Certainly not me. Best GIF file, ever!

Click on the file if you don't see what's so funny. I laughed so hard my lunch came out.

TMI? Well, click on the file and see what I say to that...

Happy Valentine's Day. And here is a necklace to remind you of your big fat behind...

Is it just me. or does not the entire jewelry line based on Jane Seymour's Open Heart design remind anybody else of a buttock?

The first time we saw the commercial on TV, either from Jared or Kay Jewelers, purveyors of cheesy jewelries, my boys cried out, at the same time, "It looks like a butt!" And I had to agree with them.

So nobody at those jewelry stores, when they were just looking at the designs, BEFORE they turned the design into actual goods, saw that and said, "Maybe we should look into something else..." ?

So, maybe it is really just me then.

Moment: JetBlue & Southwest tweeting each other...

Saw this on my Twitter homepage. It strikes me as really adorable. I do hope that the actual airlines remain competitors since a collaboration between the two little giants (and they are really not little any more despite the images they are trying to cultivate...) will be the end of low airfares.

The Comcastic Super Bowl Happy Ending. Watch porn and we'll pay you $10!!

This story is too funny to be true. I have to hop over to Snopes.com to make sure that the story itself is not a prank, and verify with The Onion that they did not pen this story. So by now everybody in the US has heard of the surprise given to 85,000 families in Tucson, AZ, home of one of the Super Bowl teams, the Cardinals. They were offered 30 seconds of free porn!

My male friends cried foul, "Why couldn't it happen here?" Well, they would be happy to know that the porn segment that they so sadly have missed actually featured full male nudity. Comcast and the police vowed to get down to the bottom of this. Ha ha. And Comcast is also offering $10 credit to any customer who viewed the clip. (So, even if you did not, just say you did. Or maybe there are people who would rather not discuss this any more... "My eyes! My eyes!")

There is another catch: Apparently, those who watched the Game on high-def TVs were not affected. Only those who received standard-def signals got to watch the free show. I am still trying to decide whether this makes a good argument for finally getting that high-def TV or not...

I just want to say this again,

COMCASTIC!

I love Bacon. But not this much... Bacon Flavored Jelly Beans?!

Now I have seen it all... Prove yourself to be a true bacon lover, get Bacon flavored Jelly Beans for this Valentine's Day!

Thank GOD for the Onion: so the Republicans can have their laughs too...

or anybody who may get a bit tired of all the serious and sentimental coverage on the Presidential Inauguration...

Here is the Election Coverage from the Onion... "Joe Biden Shows Up To Inauguration With Ponytail": great for macho men on the verge of their tears to immediately change the mood and the topic!

With titilating headlines that could potentially be true in an alternative world, such as "Hillary Clinton Mouthing Along To Presidential Oath", "Joe Biden Shows Up To Inauguration With Ponytail" and "Obama Inauguration Speech Ruined By Incessant Jackhammering", The Onion's coverage is almost as entertaining as the real thing!

Hulu - the best kept secert? Best of SNL clips I saw, tonight...

Am I out of the loop? Hulu truly is a much better way to watch TV and movie clips. The quality is a lot higher, never grainy. And you never have to worry about clicking on something that turns out to be not what you expected...

Thanks to Hulu, I can follow SNL again, and just in time for a better, much improved SNL as well. I don't remember when it started, but for a while SNL sucked big time: it was turning into Mad TV. But now, it is actually funny again. To be absolutely honest, and I cannot believe I am admitting this! I never quite got the humor of Will Farrell. I mean, Will Farrell on SNL. I loved him in quite a few movies, Old School being one of them. (A classic in my book!) And the Anchor Man is not bad at all. (Another classic in my book!) But Will Farrell on SNL I didn't quite get. I did laugh like hell, but I didn't know why. More Cowbell being a case in point... (Is this blasphemy?) I felt guilty laughing so hard, worried that any second someone would ask me point blank, "Ok, it is funny, but why?" Worse yet, what if the question were, "It's not funny. Explain to me."

The boys and I did some Youtubing on Hulu tonight. We laughed out loud at the SNL Digital Short, "People Getting Punched Right Before Eating". I laughed till tears came out of my eyes, but somehow I didn't feel guilty. It was funny because it was random. As my 11 year-old said, "It is so totally random. It is awesome!" I guess that is this generation's standard for humor now...



Another great piece is the SNL commercial for Taco Town. It is funny because it has a grain of truth to it, and it sort of makes you look at reality, and go, "Yeah, that's kind of ridiculous what Taco Bells passes for food..." Watch this, it is funny!



p.s. The boys and I thought the 2 SNL clips were so funny that later when we chatted with Dad who's away on business via Gmail Video Chat, we showed him the clips by pointing the webcam at the monitor (because Hulu does not work in China...)

By the way, Video Chat right from inside Gmail is truly awesome, and super easy to set up. Thumbs up!

Got Bacon? Thank goodness for people who have too much time on their hands...

A colleague of mine sent me a cryptic link, when I clicked on it, it showed my company's website with a big piece of fat juicy glistening bacon on top. I haven't laughed so hard since the last time the same colleague sent me the link to "Sad Trombone" (which sadly seems to no longer exist?) 

 

Check out Baconlicious...  or this one...  (ok, the second one is kind of mean, but I cannot help it!)

 

 

 

 

Ah, I love Dilbert! Need to look busy while at work in the economic downturn...

Wally creeps me out, but he does sprout some truth sometimes.



I need one of those coaches...

To Tweet or Not to Tweet...

Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that's your reasoning for using Twitter ("one to many" instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of "friends" (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids' pictures down anybody's throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE's publication), in the current issue: "To Twitter or Not to Twitter" by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot...)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb "Tweet"... But it's the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to...)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker's Tweeting about "waking up in the morning now". Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, "Why would anybody want to know?" And if they want to know, can't you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, "I TXT, therefore I am." The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. "I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am." A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky's article:

"Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I'm a confirmed e-mail user, but that's so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.


It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today's youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They're always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.


So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn't this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I'm missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness."

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 5 July 1993

"I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking." (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005

NOT from the Onion, surprisingly: Russian analyst predicts USA to break up into 5 countries!

When you first read it in the Drudge Report on November 25, 2008, you probably wondered, "Did I click on the wrong URL?  Is this The Onion?"

"RUSSIAN ANALYST PREDICTS DECLINE AND BREAKUP OF USA"

A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily IZVESTIA published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events....

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong....

 

Somehow this piece of entertaining hypothesizing is picking up momentum and has graced the pages of "large" mainstream news outlets such as USA Today, MSNBC, and most notably the WSJ. 

 

According to Panarin:

1. The "California Republic," including the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington, as well as Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Arizona, that Panarin predicts will be part of China or under Chinese influence;
2. "North Central America," including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, that Panarin predicts will be part of Canada or under Canadian influence;
3. The "Atlantic America," including Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, and all of New England, that Panarin predicts may join the EU;
4. The "Texas Republic," including New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, that Panarin predicts will be part of Mexico or under Mexican influence;
5. The "Offshore U.S.," with Alaska going to Russia and Hawaii going to either Japan or China.

Thanks to the WSJ we also have a visual representation of the breakup. 

 

I can see those who have spent so much money and efforts (and even risked their lives!) to come here and become US citizens become quite upset: what? You mean I could have just stayed where I was?  And now you are telling me that I have to go back and be Canadian (or Chinese or Mexican)? 

 

Note to self: consider moving, before the rush begins. 

The Two Bobs: Dilbert on Consultants and HR

Classical Chinese poem turns out to be a strip club ad on the cover of a scientific research journal...

Heard on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which by the way is one of my favorite programs, and had to check it out... Hilarious.

Max Planck Institute, one of Germany's top scientific institutions, wanted a picture of Classical Chinese poem in classical script on the cover of their special China-focused edition, so what did they do? They found apparently an advertisement of a strip club, promoting the special engagement of a pretty young thing, promising to deliver a scintillating performance with her voluptuous figure...

They cannot find Chinese in Germany? No Chinese restaurants in Germany?

A good question indeed...

This is one of those one-liners that make me laugh out loud... Brilliant, great sense of humor. Indeed a good question, and I have to say, no matter where you stand on this divisive issue, this question does make you pause and give the whole thing some more thoughts.

Picture found here