December 14, 2021
HR weighs in: can we butter cats to keep them out of our printers?
Yesterday on Reddit's popular "Am I the Asshole" sub, someone asked 'AITA for ‘enforcing an ethnic stereotype’ by joking that orange cats are often dumb?' about a work conflict between the poster and another (human) employee over potential unfair treatment of new [feline] employee Jorts vis a vis existing [feline] employee Jean. HR stepped in and a recent update shares the resolved situation: mediation has ended with all parties happy with the outcome. Jorts will receive an apology, a new photo of himself to accompany his official staff bio rather than a photo of a sweet potato, and all employees will vow to refrain from buttering other employees in the future, no matter how good their intentions.
Natalie Sideserf's made a DIE HARD Christmas cake
Sooner or later, it had to be done
Are you a good person?
There’s an easy way to tell, according to the internet at least, and it’s based on what you do with a shopping cart when you are done with it. If you put it in the designated shopping cart collection area in the parking lot, you’re good. If you leave it to drift off into parking spots, you’re bad. ... for a date you need to take them to a restaurant and do the waiter test & then later go to the store with them & do the shopping cart test.
JEANS ARE MADE OF LIES!
"Hello, my name is Virginia, and in the past five weeks I have purchased 50 pairs of jeans. I have returned 48 pairs...American jeans brands are failing American consumers across the board. And they are especially failing fat consumers who want to buy women’s clothing. There are many complicated reasons for this, and quite a few of them are rooted in fatphobia. And yet: we keep buying, and hoping, and returning, and buying more. Because we can’t stop believing in a myth that is ostensibly about the “perfect jean,” but also about the bodies we think we should have." Virginia Sole-Smith: That Time I Bought 50 Pairs of Jeans. For Science (Substack; Part 1, more essays to follow).
RIP Bob Jervis
Bob Jervis (1940-2021). Jervis was the preeminent scholar of International Relations. His contributions revolutionized how scholars and practitioners think about nuclear weapons, perception, and complexity in the international sphere. [more inside]
From my country, they will only take me out feet first
Vicente Fernández, arguably the most famous ranchera/mariachi singer in the last fifty years, died last weekend. His life was not without controversy, and his politics were never inspiring. But, he sure could
sing.
A24 Version of the Multiverse
"Everything Everywhere All at Once", the trailer. Starring Michelle Yeoh! (SLYT)
"BarrowBoy marked this as a stretch"
"Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown reason—I keep writing to the Lyricsplainer mods to get someone to delete it or include it as a separate entry, but nobody responds, and all they’ve done is put brackets around it. Sometimes I hate this site.)" "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" by Sarah Pinsker, published this year, is a short fantasy story in the form of a lyrics website page about a folksong, and the accompanying discussion thread. Plus a recording of the song.
History will talk about you: An army of volunteers inocculated Ontario
It required both a lottery winner’s luck and a project manager’s organizational skills to figure out where and when you could get a shot. The province’s befuddling, temperamental online booking system often resembled a choose-your-own-adventure game where every choice seemed to be a dead end. The excitement and hope generated by the arrival of the vaccines gave way to anger around their deployment. Into this, stepped Andrew Young, creating VaccineHuntersCanada, the network of volunteers responsible for getting 1.2 million Canadians -- more than 3% of all Canadians -- vaccinated. [more inside]
Yeah, actually I know a joke about this
A study finds that brain surgeons and rocket scientists are not necessarily more intelligent than the general population. [more inside]
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