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I have to do a short notice call in San Francisco next week, which was only confirmed yesterday and which the customer needs done on a specific day, and is prepared to accept the extra travel expenses caused by this not being able to wait until I'm back in that neck of the woods in a few weeks' time. As the call time is 7a, it's not possible as a day trip, so I'm having to fly up the previous night. Trying to find a hotel room, this caught my eye on the search results page:
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Well that destination fee really is a deal breaker, isn't it?
Needless to say, I was able to find somewhere a lot more reasonable, but it boggles the mind that anyone would be willing to pay that much for a hotel night under any circumstances. My only guess as to how that number can be anything other than a bug in the website's back end is that the hotel is fully booked for that night, but for that money would be willing to bump someone (presumably some poor sucker who does not belong to their loyalty program, booked through a third party site and at a discount rate, etc.).Comment
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My son's school subjects its students to a program called Accelerated Reading (AR). Each kid is given a points goal for each quarter. They read books from the library (or anywhere else, as long as the book is registered in the AR system), then take a quiz on them on the app: if they pass it, they then get the number of points the book is worth. These vary according to the grade they're in when they read the book: for example, a fourth grader who passes the quiz on War and Peace would get hundreds of points, but if he reads something intended for a second grader, maybe a fraction of a point.
My son is not the bookish type: in fact, it's a struggle to persuade him to read anything that is unrelated to basketball or football. He's behind on his AR target for this quarter. In a desperate attempt to fix this, my wife scoured the house for any books we had that he could get AR points for, and found a series of children's detective stories in the garage that she had at his age, and enjoyed. We handed him this one:
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My son's immediate reaction, without skipping a beat: "Brown Gets His Man? That sounds a bit gay to me!"
At this point I could not restrain myself from bursting out in giggles, which was not the reaction he was expecting. It turns out that in school yard slang these days, "gay" means stupid or undesirable, in a way that attracts attention and/or causes embarrassment. I'm 99% sure that the didn't know the actual meaning of the word, hence not understanding why I found his remark funny.Comment
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Earlier today, I was looking up a patent online, and I mis-typed the patent
number, and instead of the patent I was looking for, I got the original
patent for toilet paper! Or, more specifically, for toilet paper ROLLS.
Some quick research discovered that prior to this, TP was sold in
sheets that came in flat packs, like dinner napkins or Kleenex™️.
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But, more importantly, does this patent diagram finally solve the
long standing debate over which way the toilet paper should hang?
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It looks to me like there is no cardboard tube in the middle of the roll. I wonder if another patent was filed when someone came up with that?Comment
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One would hope that it I were to push the "verify eligibility" link, the first step in that process would be to ask a rather obvious question! If not, it would seem that obtaining a license to practice law in California does not require even the most basic knowledge of human biology.Comment
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As with the Lego ayatollah, she seems rather more cheerful than she should be under the circumstances (the photo shows Dubai Airport shortly after being hit by an Iranian missile):
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