Killer alternative

Looking for a candidate who's truly different? How about this guy?

Hat tip to these guys.

Washington v. business

My new employer has a PAC, and recently has been trying to get employes more interested in the political process.

Gosh, what has taken them so long? After all, any good liberal can tell you that businesses are on the offense in Washington, afflicting innocent legislators with their incessant desires for favors.

Shouldn't Wall Street be giving them favorable press? "XCo rose 2 points on knowledge that they'd started a PAC. Amalgamated WTF fell 3% after their chief lobbyist went to work for their chief competitor."

Or could it be that in fact it's the other way around - that businesses have to cover their backs in Washington lest they get their pockets picked or get legislated out of existence?

Jonah Goldberg knows the answer and talks about it here.

Abusable information

My nephew recently had a birthday. It's hard to believe that the varmint is in his 30s now. Or that I'd still call him something like that.

Anyway, I probably taught him most of the obnoxious little tricks every adolescent boy loves to learn. Inadvertantly, of course - I'd always tell him he shouldn't do X, and then explain X in detail. Things like "if you answer the phone and it's a boy asking for your sister, don't tell him 'she's taking a huge dump right now'". Somehow he kept getting the wrong idea.

(It was probably good for him though. I wasn't always around to help him. So, like the boy named Sue, he learned how to fight for his life against older, bigger, dirty fighters, which could serve him well in later life.)

We're both older now, so we wouldn't do things like that any more. We have younger relatives for that.

Anyway, in a few years my nephew might even be in the market for products like Rogaine. So he, and perhaps you, should know that you can't let cats consume Rogaine, because it can cause a fatal drop in blood pressure. And if you get any bright ideas like treating baldness on a cat with Rogaine, you should know that the cat will wind up consuming it as it licks itself.

This and other tidbits on the Hair Loss Blog.

Retailing riddle

Is it fair to say that if a man has a larger waist size, that on average he's taller?

That being so, why do retailers stack the small sizes on top and the larger sizes on the bottom? The short guys are closer to the floor already - why shouldn't they have to bend over or get on their knees to shop instead of the larger ones?

And the fat guys have a harder time bending over - if they weren't so politically incorrect someone would be hollering "Discrimination!"

Credit card security

Among my many past contract jobs was a 2 year stint in the credit card industry. It was interesting to see how the credit card industry really worked.

In particular, I found that according to Federal law, companies such as MasterCard and Visa are not permitted to have information that would permit them to identify the names and addresses of cardholders. Therefore they could not have contacted any customers impacted by security problems.

Banks are the card issuers. They are the ones who could notify cardholders if they chose to, if they knew the numbers of the affected cards. I'm guessing that the banks have that card number information.

Moonbattus rusticus

A relative tells me that her junior high aged daughter learned something interesting in school in downstate IL a while ago. It seems that the hurricanes are God's punishment for our involvement in war in the Gulf.