Best Reads of 2007

1. Where's My Money - Play, John Patrick Shanley
2. A Study in Scarlett - Novella/Mystery, Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Troilus and Cressida - Play, Shakespeare
4. Joe Egg - Play, Peter Nichols
5. The Search for Justice - Play, Bertolt Brecht
6. Guts - Short Story, Chuck Palahniuk
7. No Exit - Play, Jean-Paul Sartre
8. Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders - Novel/mystery, John Mortimer
9. Action Will Be Taken - Short Story, Heinrich Boll
10. Rack's Rules - Short Story, Jeremy Larner

Boycott Circuit City.

Circuit City has a policy of laying off employees after they've been there a few years and replacing them with lower paid new employees. This strikes me as a fucked up system. If you've been a good employee for them, put in your overtime without bitching, cheerfully helped out customers, etc, after a few years here's your reward - Take a Hike.

Nice place.

Interestingly, this scheme doesn't seem to be helping them out, according to this article in the Washington Post. Their stocks are 'tumbling' and their sales gap is 'widening'. Maybe because the experienced help they used to have isn't around, and no one who's hired under a 3 year and out policy is going to be a well motivated employee, and that rewarding the executives who thought up this policy with million dollar bonuses isn't a good business move? Just a hypothesis.

I don't like this business's labor policies. I am boycotting the place until they stop firing people for having seniority. Go Amazon!

Nifty Wikipedia link.

Figures of speech

Random things I learned from flipping through the channels this weekend.

1. Rick Steves is a twat. Who wants to watch this dork eat food in Europe? This is a good use of your time? Good gig for him though.
2. If it's a made for tv movie, on the Hallmark channel, and you see Mary Steenburgen dressed up in some period, salt of the earth costume, I'll just assume it sucks.
3. I liked Tom Hanks more when he did comedy, before he became Mr Serious Actor.
4. Paula Deen needs to drop that hillbilly accent. (I think it's probably fake anyway.)
5. One of the guys on Friends had a pet monkey at one point. How could something so dumb be such a big hit? Oh well, Jennifer Aniston's hot. I'm sure that helped.

Phone number entry.

Whenever I am filling out an online registration and the system asks for my phone number, I always put my phone number but with the last digit off by one. So instead of xxx-xxx-xxx9, I put xxx-xxx-xxx8. I do this all the time. When I signed up for AAA, for example, I used this trick.

I don't want to be on any fucking phone list and get telemarketed.

That said, I get still junk phone calls all the time and since I am on call some of the time, I can't always just turn my phone off.

Xmas commercials.

Caught a few Xmas commercials this past weekend. Looks like some people are going to be getting cheap perfume as a present.

That's cold.

Sometime in the past week was the first time I have turned on the heat in my apartment for real this season. The lows have been in the single digits. When I went to work today I wore a double strength hat, and a long sleeve tshirt, plus a flannel shirt over that.

Totally digging it.

2gether

Browsing through youtube recently, I dug up a favorite 'band' of mine from, I think the late 90's, early 00's. The one and only: 2gether.

Sweet.

Michael Vick gets his just desserts: Vick Gets 23 Months in Dogfighting Case.