I could use a nice, non-political fun day today.
Not that fun can’t be thought-provoking, of course, which makes Joy of Tech ironically named. Stupid pop-ups have taken a lot of the joy out of tech, or, at least, out of the Internet part.
I’ve long resisted pop-up blockers because I understand that content needs to generate revenue, but the overuse of interruptions has become so absurd that they needed two panels to list the abuses of reader patience.
“When Will I See You Again?” pop-ups annoy me more than the ads (or even that song) because they’re so desperately pathetic and needy and unnecessary.
Which brings me back to the question of whether anybody in charge of these sites ever bothers to visit them, my answer being based on having sat in meetings where it was clear that nobody above the rank of hey-you had the slightest idea of how the Intertubes work.
I’ve listened to them ooh and ahh, for instance, over the clicks a newsroom blogger was getting when (A) they had no idea how outrageously inappropriate her content was and (B) it was clear that she was simply clicking over and over on the blog herself.
And they’d talk about the revenue from those blocks of ads placed by outside providers, which meant that, if one of their writers did an impassioned piece about women’s dignity, it would appear on the page surrounded by “Look at the tits on this one!” clickbait.
So, yeah, I’m thinking about a blocker and I’m not sure who I hate more: Incompetent website owners for making it necessary or myself for giving in.
But, in the words of David Letterman,
Wait. These funnies don’t seem to be cheering me up.
Juxtaposition of the Good Old Days
(Alex)
Speaking of things I’m old enough to remember, I remember my days in TV advertising, when I’d be sitting at my desk feeling bored, so I’d choose an agency rep at random to take to lunch. We’d have a drink before we ordered, a drink while we waited for our lunch to appear and a drink when we were done. Maybe one more.
Whether or not we were wearing pants when we got back to our offices would be the least thing that might have been criticized about our productivity the rest of the day.
And Pajama Diaries reminds me of something else from the Good Old Days, because, while I question whether Live Shooter Drills need to be as traumatizing as they seem to be, I don’t have a problem with needing to be buzzed in at the front door.
Back before shooting up schools became a fad, Eldest Son had a fellow wander into his science class and ask the students to pray for his ears.
They didn’t quite know what he meant, but one of the boys started the Our Father and the rest of the class joined in, the teacher having suddenly remembered a need to be elsewhere.
I suppose the teacher went down to the office, where they not only didn’t have a buzzer on the door but didn’t have a plan for when people showed up in need of ear prayers.
I forget how it ended, but nobody whipped out a gun and maybe the guy’s ears were better for having received the prayers of children.
This, BTW, was the same science teacher who not only believed in flying saucers but saw them.
During class.
Nice thing about private schools being that you don’t have all that “certification” bureaucracy to deal with.
And perhaps the kid in today’s Arctic Circle goes to a school where the science teacher is not fully trained, because Younger Son never had to pray for anyone’s ears but now teaches in a school in the upper Midwest that has plumb run out of snow days and may not be done with them yet.
OTOH, I doubt his fifth graders mistake “climate change” for “universal warming” anyway, given that they did an energy audit of the school and found that they could upgrade all the interior and exterior lighting and not only be environmentally more sound but pay for the swap-out through the savings in utility costs.
So they went to the board and made it happen.
Which makes me wonder how many other schools could do the same thing, but, then again, makes me suspect that, after they put together their findings, the kids would have to pray for the school board’s ears.
On accounta I’ve sat in on those meetings, too.
Dadgum Spoiled Young’uns
Knight Life reminds me of a conversation I had in which I discovered that you have to be really old to know that Battleship didn’t start out as something plastic that you bought from Hasbro, much less that you watched in a movie theater.
You’d simply get some graph paper and run numbers across the top and letters down the side and shade in your ships …
… the big argument being whether they had to be in a straight line or simply adjacent. But not tangent. No sensible people ever allowed that.
No batteries and much more portable. In fact, I remember being home sick with a sibling and playing this in our respective beds, which were in the same room but wouldn’t have had to be, as long as whatever we were sick with didn’t preclude yelling room-to-room.
Meanwhile, though we never played with more than one battleship, that punchline does feature an admirable pun.
A serious note, but with perspective
Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart has been thrown back in jail, and Guy Badeaux (Bado) has a link to the Cartooning for Peace information. Africartoons also provides a link to the Cartoonists Rights Network International coverage, together with an invitation for cartoonists to submit work championing his freedom.
Any assault on press freedom is discouraging news, but this video is evidence of a man who faces adversity with the kind of cheerful bravery a good warrior needs:
Because true fighters don’t waste time listing what else they should have done with their lives.
Your four-drink lunch tale reminded me of a story I heard when on the staff of a major New York newspaper.
A few editors were reminiscing about the time four of their associates went for a liquid lunch and somehow wound up in Paris.
The way it was told and discussed made me believe it.