Saturday Grab Bag for the Long Weekend

From the Vanity Plates Archives: Saw an SUV (booo) the other day with Ohio State (boooooo) tags, by which I mean they were the kind that have the OSU logo over on the left hand side. But by which I also mean that the genius behind the wheel had used the vanity option to select the characters making up the license plate number, and those characters were HIO S8. (The OSU logo is itself a giant O, so that formed the initial character as the plate was intended to be read.) So, ok, first of all, the Department of Redundancy Department called. You paid extra for an Ohio State-style plate so that you could also pay extra to spell out the name of the school? Really? And second ... OHIO SATE? SATE?!?!?! Are you KIDDING me. You fail vanity tags forever.

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Speaking of commuting, right about this time of year there is a noticeable shift because school is out. On the one hand, there are fewer cars on 66 in the morning, which is nice. On the other hand, there are more tourist families on the Metro in the morning. So it's kind of a wash.

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There's an unofficial tradition amongst many bloggers (or at least many of the bloggers I follow) to include little jokes behind the pictures included in each post. The reader can see these jokes if they hover their mouse-pointer above the picture until the yellow box of "alt-text" pops up. I have adopted this practice myself, in case you weren't aware. Anyway, this week one comics blogger was talking about the Batman Beyond cartoon and inlcuded an animated .GIF in his post, showing a looping scene from the cartoon set at a high school dance that was probably supposed to evoke "futuristic rave" (but actually evokes "sanitized primary-colored disco"). The "alt-text" gag for the picture was something along the lines of "I am inordinately proud of the filename I came up with for this picture." Which of course was a blatant provocation to go through the steps necessary to determine the actual filename of an embedded picture, which I know how to do because I am not the biggest computer geek around but I at least can manage that much. And I, in turn, was inordinately proud of myself for that.

(The name of the file was "BatdanceBeyond", which is infinitessimally clever, so the pride was indeed inordinate!)

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I've tossed out the phrase "The Big Gray" before, which is a half-joking term my wife and I use to refer to the physical location of my place of employment, wherever that may be, or any other place of employment of any of our friends who happen to have office-drone desk jobs. It originates from the fact that the world of cubicle farms is so utterly alien to the woman who was driving a truck from horse farm to horse farm when we got together, that it can only occupy space in her mind as a singular colorless monolith, but I've kept it alive because really, from the inside, it's not that far off. And I'm aware of the futher mental effects of this, such that things which happen in the office, at work, seem "outrageous" or "hilarious" or "bizarre" or whatever, but only because they are happening against that big, gray background. Still, scare quotes and all, allow me to provide a recent example.

The DoD intranet that I log into every day requires me to type a username and a password and then answer a trio of security questions, of the kind you usually only have to answer when you forget your password. (I guess this makes the intranet extra-secure?) When I set up my account I created maybe 8 questions, so the 3 I see on any given login are randomly selected from that set, as are the multiple choice dropdown answers. I've been going through these motions for almost a year, but only recently did I satrt reading the other system-provided incorrect answers to the multiple choice instead of scanning to recognize my correct answers. Those incorrect answers are BIZARRELY, HILARIOUSLY OUTRAGEOUS. (See above for adjective disclaimer.) One of the questions is "What was your favorite activity in high school?" and my correct answer is "band." One of the dummy answers in the system is "robotics". Which is strange enough in and of itself from my perspective, but I am on the young side for DoD workers, and I graduated high school in the early 90's. For the people here who graduated college in the 70's, I think it's safe to say none of them would be selecting that answer. Another of the questions is "What was your favorite game growing up?" and one of the dummy answers is "spin the bottle". WHOA. Has there ever been a person anywhere who would single that game out as their childhood favorite? Don't get me wrong, it meant a lot to me when I was a young adolescent ill-prepared to deal with the sudden hormonal curiosities I had about the fairer sex. I can tell some spin the bottle stories. But "favorite game growing up"? That implies so many disturbing things. This has to be yet another example of a computer programmer basically messing with people just to see if anyone would notice. Has to be.