“The band’s called Dogstar … because we’re Sirius.”

Seriously, what’s next? We’re going to talk about the keyboardist?

If I hadn’t promised mother on her deathbed that I wouldn’t kill you … I’d kill you.

It’s more likely that in the developed world we’ve eliminated most of the critters that look like this so we’re just not used to seeing them. People in Papua New Guinea aren’t skeeved out by this kind of bug - they snatch them up and eat them when they see them.

Your point was completely obvious but Tom Clancy was a very poor choice to illustrate that point. Of course some artists produce works that have an essence of truth despite being fiction; perhaps Taylor Swift is such an artist, but Tom Clancy definitely isn’t.

Do people like Tom Clancy novels because “they feel like they’re true”?

I think people love her songs because they feel like they’re true

Her very first hit was about being a farmer’s daughter.

A real keyboard

One thing I always liked about Blackberries aside from the physical keyboard was the scroll wheel. People joke about them but they worked really well and smoothly (before the actual ball got replaced with a bullshit push sensor round about 2009 or so) and you could dial in on a specific pixel easily - something you just can’t do with a touchscreen - which made the tiny screens a lot more practical than they otherwise would have been.

It almost made up for the 16-bit color lol.

the steering wheel buttons

I’m a school bus driver and some modern buses have the switches for operating the doors and the 8-ways (the amber and red flashers at the top corners) on the steering wheel and they drive me up the fucking wall. The problem is that you often have to stop for kids after making a sharp turn one way or the other, so the wheel is not in its normal position and you have no idea where the switches are and have to look down to see them. If they’re on the left fixed panel (their “normal” location) you can reach for them without having to look.

blinking your emergency lights

In the US, truck drivers sometimes do this as a “thank you” if you flash your brights to them to let them know they can safely change lanes to the right after they’ve passed you (which is a nice thing to do for them since they can’t really see shit behind on their right).

Very cool, thanks.

Not really relevant, but as a kid I though the “II” part of ASCII was roman numerals. I was all the way to graduate school before my prof literally on the floor laughing because I had said “asskey two” set me straight.

The company was run by morons so “Xerox” deserves being synonymous with “company run by morons”. But the actual Xerox employees who invented the basic GUI deserve credit for being the great inventors they were. Unfortunately I have no fucking idea who those actual people were.

Fun fact: HMS Victory was actually bombed by the Nazis during WWII, which means she technically saw combat over a span of 144 164 years (1778-1941).

Edit: math are hard.

When people say “no pun intended”, I like to say “none taken”.

Teddy Roosevelt gets all the glory for his “a man, a plan, a canal: panama” palindrome, but everybody forgets “Taft: fat”.

I have no idea why they were fired or who fired them - I just know that they were fired.

Bombast had a lot of helplessly incompetent (and sometimes clinically insane) executives running things, but they never lasted that long. There seemed to be some sort of Avenging Angel of Death wandering the Bombast Center and culling the more useless examples of management. My bowtie-wearing boss was one of these and certainly deserved the axe, but I don’t know if this was true of the other members of the bowtie brigade.

I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word “infinity”. Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you’re a Bombast customer, you’re helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.

Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.