A few of my favorite bits:

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

And:

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified”. In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before – drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

I love it.

I have my reasons, though. Why is spelling the first step in becoming a Satanist? Well, I figure if you’re going to be a Satanist, you’ll want to occasionally let people know that Satan lives by tagging things with spraypaint. And you wouldn’t want to do what a fellow in my town did. Observe:

If you’re having trouble reading it due to the poor quality (my apologies – cellphone camera), it reads: Satin Lives. When spelled wrong, it loses something, don’t you think? I believe Johnny’s project next week is to tag the school building with “Polyester Lives.”

As opposed to the vast quantities of unreadable non-fiction they have available… ? Yes, yes, do check out our readable non-fiction, it’s right over there. That stuff way back in the back? Utterly unreadable. Don’t even bother looking at it.

1. In German, they’ve figured out how to avoid saying “handy cellphone.” How? They call a cellphone a “Handy”. “Gib’ mir mein Handy!” [Give me my cellphone!] Awful, isn’t it?

I put the 2 liters of soda, the chips, her total, and tomorrow’s date together, and commented, “Wow, looks like you’re getting ready to have a big party.” The lady just looked at me and smiled slightly. She said nothing. Okay, I thought, so much for small talk…

As she was pushing her cart away, though, I looked at its contents. Only two 2 liters of soda. No bags of chips. She had a lot of different things, including a rather large assortment of household cleaning stuff. I looked at the checkout counter and saw that all of the bags of chips hadn’t belonged to her – I was looking at a display of chips, simply situated next to the checkout counter. D’oh.

No wonder she wouldn’t talk to me. Yeah, lady, looks like you’re getting ready to throw a big party with a cart full of Windex and scrubbing pads.

Ugh.

Well, fast forward to now: my dad is still getting mail from Physicians Mutual. As time has gone on, the slogans have gotten better and better. The latest (and perhaps greatest, pardon the cliché)?

It’s Not Too Late!

Oh yes. I believe it is. If you’ve enough money to toss out, you can get life insurance when you’re direly ill, but when you’re dead? I’m afraid not. Perhaps Joshua was right, though, with his comment on my previous post about this: Physician’s Mutual just wants to be, ahem, prepared in case my dad claws his way out of his coffin and zombie-walks back home. If he does, they’ll be ready to accept him right back into their fold.

It’ll be the next sector that life insurance companies expand into. “Buy life insurance for your dead loved ones! You never know when they might come back!” They could borrow stock photos from old horror movies.

(And to make it abundantly clear: I’m not at all angry about this. I think it’s hilarious. I suppose I could rant and rave about how insulting it is, etc., but – well, I just think it’s funny.)

Caution! Senior citizens!

Fair enough.

I’ve also seen, quite often (always?) this on the back of buses used to transport kids:

Caution! Children!

Alright, so if you’re driving behind a van with really old people, or really young people, you should be cautious. However, does that mean, then, that if I’m behind a van or bus full of middle aged people, or perhaps people in their mid-twenties, I shouldn’t be cautious? Is it okay, then, to ram the back of the vehicle in front of me? Because there aren’t any toddlers or elders on board? Are people who are beyond the chid years, but not quite yet to the elderly years, inherently less valuable or something?

Obviously, I’m being a bit facetious here, but I think they are rather silly, those warnings. If anything, I suppose they should say Caution! Live humans on board! But can’t that be said for practically all vehicles on the road? In which case, is there really any need for signs on the back of such vehicles in the first place?

My father, who had life insurance with you, died in 2005. We received the insurance payment from you after we provided proof that my father was, indeed, dead. Kaputt. No more. Pushing up daisies. He had kicked the bucket. So on and so forth. Deceased. (In fact, he was in a similar condition to the parrot in this video.)

Today, I received a letter from you. It was addressed to my father (see above regarding his current, and everlasting, condition). In this letter, you offered a welcoming back to my father. You offered a new insurance plan for him, with discounts, bells and whistles, and fanfare.

Again. Note what I said above. He’s dead. You paid out the insurance for him. How do you propose you put life insurance on someone who’s deceased? While I’d be all for him coming back for a while, I’m fairly confident (100%, in fact) that he won’t be returning.

I think this is a case of one of your departments not knowing what the other is doing. While I’m certainly not angry or upset over the letter (in fact, I found it to be pretty funny), you might want to look into the left arm / right arm coordination. Something is clearly messed up, unless you all know something about dead people that I don’t.

You recently expanded your store in my area a great deal. You added a Starbucks, a Donatos, a sushi bar, and countless new aisles. For you, this is, I suppose, a good thing. More space, more products, (hopefully) more sales. I’m happy for you.

However, was it really necessary to change the location of so many items? Certainly, with the expansion of the store, things couldn’t be in the exact same place. I get that things had to be moved a bit to deal with the new additions.

But do so many things really need to be moved across the frakking store? Not only have some things been moved to a totally new location, miles away from their original spot, some items that I buy normally weren’t to be found at all. Whether they’re hiding somewhere that I missed, or they disappeared in the move, I don’t know.

Please provide an updated floor plan, set out at the doors, for your customers. We’d really appreciate it. When someone is craving banana-flavored chips, it’s quite frustrating to be not be able to find them.

Thanks.

If you don’t find that hilarious, you probably won’t like the site. (And if you don’t find that hilarious – what’s wrong with you? ) Here, I’ll try one more to sway you to the awesomeness of the site:

If that doesn’t sway you, I give up.

Click for the full size screenshot. I don’t know why – I certainly wouldn’t find a failed space mission funny – but “access to space: catastrophic failure” struck me as hilarious.

* The new feature that I’m thinking of is similar to the Eager Beaver at Jay’s Headspace and the Sunday Roast at Bright Meadow. They’re basically weekly (usually, anyway) posts with links to interesting stuff around the web, along with commentary for the links. I was kind of doing this with the del.icio.us link posts, but I stopped for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t like having link posts appear every single day (and they usually did, if I had the time to browse the web), and two, I didn’t like the irritating 255 character limit on the description area of links. The 255 character limit is okay when I’m just describing a link for my personal use, but it can be frustrating when I’m wanting to babble on and on about the link. Not to imply that I’m, ahem, verbose or anything.

Now all I need to do is come up with a spiffy science / science fiction-y title for the “feature” (as is quite often on my blog, I’m using the term loosely ). Suggestions are welcome if you’d like to drop one (or many) in the comment bucket.