Scott Adams on everything from airplane security to politics

If you’ve smiled with Heather Armstrong and like that, you better check Scott Adams’ blog, because this guys is as hilarious as noone. Really. Here are a couple of examples.

This post provides an insight on the war in the Middle East. It explains the roots of the problem, as well suggests a solution. A tiny quote:

How would you like to be Condi Rice? It’s your job to stop the fighting in Lebanon. That’s one super-crappy job. Luckily for her, I’m here to help.

It’s a strange little war in the sense that neither side can win, and they both know it. Hizbollah can’t destroy Israel and Israel can’t destroy Hizbollah. And neither side can afford to give up. So in the meantime, since no one can win or lose, they settle for killing as many random civilians as possible because that’s one thing they can do. The thinking, I gather, is that killing random people and never winning is still better than doing nothing and looking weak.

I see this as part of a trend. The U.S. couldn’t kill Osama, so we whacked Saddam instead. Maybe all future wars will be fought by killing whoever does the worst job of hiding and also kind of sucks. That way you appear tough in the eyes of the world. And let’s face it – that’s the whole point. If you can’t defeat your actual enemy, at least kick the crap out of some a-hole that desperately deserves it. It’s better than doing nothing.

If that wasn’t funny enough, here is some heavy artillery from this post, that talks about airplane securty.

On the way home from my Disney cruise with the family, Grandma unwisely packed a toy pistol (Pirates of the Caribbean model) in our 6-year old’s carry-on luggage. As you might imagine, this caused a delay. So even though the toy gun was shaped like a banana and yellow and clearly plastic, the security official explained why we couldn’t take it: “People can take these souvenir guns and modify them on the plane to shoot.”

Did I mention it was plastic? And yellow? And shaped like a banana? It shoots suction darts.

I decided not to apply my world-class powers of sarcasm in this situation because I didn’t want some guy with a hairy neck to stick a gloved hand up my sphincter, grab my heart and turn me inside out.

Go and read it in full. And if you won’t laugh out loud, with tears in your eyes, you have a totally different sense of humor from the normal one (read: the one I have).

I love GMail

I have fully moved to GMail. I have yet to import my existing archives, but I lovin’ it already as it is. My exim+procmail+mutt setup is great, but GMail is better for my current needs. It is, of course, less configurable, but Things That I Really Care About ™ (TTIRCA) do work and need practically no configuration.

Stars, labels and filters are easier to use than my previous configuration. Contact list is better – complete with pictures and total integration. Management of multiple accounts is easier done – by default GMail replies from the correct address. Searching the mailbox is better and faster – after all it is Google we are talking about – nothing can beat that! Attachment handling with image previews and Word document automatic convertions to HTML are beautiful. Multilanguage spellchecking is nice. And there is even that Google Chat thingy too. And, of course, it all works faster off the Google server farm than from my home server.

For the time being, I am really happy about my email. And I couldn’t care less for the Big Brother issue. At least, not right now.

Ok, if you one of those people who need to hear something bad, I’ll give that. If I could change one thing about GMail, it would be with Quick Contacts. Currently, if I specify that I want a person to be included in Quick Contacts, I get as many entries, as the number of this person’s email addresses. That’s just wrong. For the Quick Contact I need only one email. I can be asked to specify which, or the default one can be used, or the most frequently used one – I don’t care. Just make it one, not all of them. That’s it. This is my only complain.

Utah accent

Every time I think that Heather can’t be any funnier, she blogs again and proves me wrong. Here’s the paragraph from one of her recent entries:

She’s a much different teenager than she was a young kid in that now she seems to be an actual human being and not an alien savage placed here by her overlords to see if she could single-handedly destroy the Earth. Leta loves her despite her annoying Utah accent, a speech impairment that prevents her from pronouncing the middle of the word, not because she doesn’t possess the physical capability to do so, but because she’s probably never heard the middle of a word. If you haven’t ever heard a Utah accent all you need to know is that if you had to listen to 30 seconds of a local newscast you’d offer a blow job to the first person who volunteered to stab you in the ears.

I wish I could write like that. Hell, I wish more people could write like that!

My mother flickres

Not only my mother blogs and GMails, but she also flickres (can I say that?). And not only that, but she figured out Flickr all on her own. She just wanted to leave a comment. I told her that she needs to register and helped her a bit through the mad Yahoo registration form (even the URL to that form is insane). Next day all I know, she comments, and she hit the 20 Mb uploading limit. Loads of pictures, complete with titles, and tags, and everything. I was speechless for a second there. Of course, we just had to upgrade her account to Pro.

I’m proud of you, ma!