The Wiggles are Australia's top-grossing "entertainer". Not only are they teaching American kids to have ridiculous (though provably profitable and entertaining) accents, they also teach them to look for traffic on the wrong side of the road, and to value English cooking.
They must be stopped!
The New York Times asks, "Would the lives of couch potatoes be even easier if they could talk to their television sets?"
Of course not. Don't be preposterous.
The services discussed in the article claim to save TV viewers from the incredibly difficult tasks of dialing the phone to order a pizza and changing the channel by instead having them shout at a microphone installed on a set-top box. I predict an increase in neighbors mistakenly calling in domestic violence suspects, after overhearing shouts of, "Football! Football! I said, 'Football!' Put the d*** football game on!"
Really, speech recognition has its applications, but replacing remote controls is not one of them. Just wait until the cable box and the TV and the VCR are all listening. "Power on! No, not you! The VCR! I didn't say 'volume!' Volume down! Volume down!"
The TV set-top box is not the only effort underway to deprive pizza buyers of their right to talk to a real person. I wonder why these systems take only 20 to 40 percent of orders? If they were so great, wouldn't they be taking 80, 90, or 100 percent of orders? According to the company, "The personality the customer interacts with is non-mechanical, colloquial in manner, and what the customer might 'expect' to be ordering with in a pizza environment." Pizza environment?
"They want to undress the entire nation," Riaz Durrani said.
"It is indecent for women to run in the streets. They want the sisters and sisters-in-law of the nation to wear knickers and T-shirts."
While it's fun to pick on the Pakistanis, the Bush administration is working to roll back Title IX, the 1972 law that required equality of opportunity in athletics and education for girls. So perhaps in a few years, American women can be chased out of sports without ever leaving home!
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is leaving his suit jacket and tie at home this summer so his office can spend less on air conditioning, and he wants other Japanese offices to do the same. This doesn't go far enough! Plus, some skeptics feel he will not convince people to change longstanding habits. What he needs to do is appeal to Japanese patriotism. Suits and ties are not traditional Japanese dress anyway!
As reported earlier, Japanese teenagers who compete in sumo wrestling are unwilling to wear the traditional mawashi, which they feel is immodest. If the Prime Minister really wants to set an example, and really reduce the need for air conditioning, why not encourage traditional sumo attire across society?
For some reason, the BBC article doesn't mention what the Prime Minister suggests for women office workers. As there are no women sumo wrestlers, they couldn't follow his example. I guess it would be inappropriate for the Prime Minister to suggest that professional women should wear less clothing.
Update: There are indeed women sumo wrestlers, and they seem to wear cycling bibs. (Thanks, Todd!) So Koizumi ought to recommend cycling attire, which would make everybody happy. Then Japanese office workers could ride their bikes to work, which would save more energy even than the reduced air conditioning bills. Plus, lycra probably wicks better than whatever mawashi are made out of.
The shearing off of two teeth on the 23T cog of my Klein Attitude reminded me of a useful page about chainring tooth shapes on the Chain Reaction website. There are many pages there which are underrated, in my opinion. (The Attitude's drivetrain is also underspeced with junk from Bontrager and SRAM, but that's another topic. The Klein, Shimano, and Hayes stuff is great.)