Tag: Happygood Funny Blog

Buy good equipment; take good care of it

Call this Rule #1 for life. Maybe it’s not the most important rule; it’s not the Golden Rule or even the Rule of 72.

Let’s call it the Hard Goods Rule: Buy good equipment and take good care of it.

Nothing provides better affirmation and aids in a better outloook than moving through the details of the day with equipment that works easily, well and with the rarest of failure.

If you need to buy a printer for your office, don’t settle for the $25 model that comes along as a premium with your computer. I’ve learned that lesson too many times. Go out and spend what you it takes to buy a durable, solid printer that runs and runs. Buy the features you need and just pay the price. If you find yourself leaning toward a cheap compromise, imagine yourself being late out the door and suddenly remembering a document you forgot to bring along. You’re in your winter coat and boots, leaning over the computer, the dog is barking because he thinks you’re going to take him for a walk, and you get a paper jam, or a message that the printer is out of magenta. With a cheap printer, this seems to happen 1 out of 2 times (thought it’s probably more like 1-in-5).

Visualize this and you’ll spend the good money.

A corollary to this rule is the Hard Goods Corollary: More power/fewer features.

Here are some tools and equipment to which the Rule of Hard Goods and Corollary apply:

  • Computer printer
  • Power tools (A drill shouldn’t drill just some stuff. For an extra $60 you can get a drill to drill any stuff. That’ll amortize to about $1.50 anytime you need to drill something really hard over the next 10 years).
  • Lawnmower
  • Computer (The reason people pay more for a Mac.)
  • Camera
  • Snowblower (If you want to wrestle with a piece of equipment, you’ll spend less and fare better against a snow shovel.)
  • Winter coat
  • Washer/Dryer (It’s all about power. Features break over time; a powerful machine runs forever.)
  • Stapler (Unless you never plan to staple more than 4 sheets at a time.)
  • Sporting goods (Whatever your passion – golf, tennis, baseball, sailing, jai alai – equipment that doesn’t go all the way just saps the fun. You may as well stay home to figure out what’s wrong with that g-d- Scanner/Copyer/Fax/Printer/Stickintheeye.)

There’s a place in the world for cheap stuff. If you’ve never been camping, never want to go camping, but you absolutely have to go camping just this once for one night with your son and the Cub Scouts, then go to Wal-Mart and buy the $39 two-man tent. You can buy a good tent for the next time you go.

Vuvuzela: The story behind the buzz

Those irritating vuvuzela horns that South Africans (and now everyone else, it seems) like to blow from the first minute to the last of a soccer match seem to have taken much of the world by surprise.

Vuvuzela or stadium horn?
Vuvuzela or stadium horn?

But they are, and always have been, readily available in the United States. They’re sold as school-spirit items (School spirit stadium horn), novelty items, stadium contraband (May be banned in a stadium near you!), and curiously even as magic accessories – with a collapsible option, perhaps for sneaking them into stadiums under your game-day jersey (Madhatter Magic Shop). Nobody seems to wholesale them for much more than $2.35 apiece.

Wikipedia’s history of the vuvuzela traces them from Mexico to Brazil and, only in the last decade, to South Africa.  Not mentioned in that history is their longstanding use, as I heard on a radio call-in show yesterday, in stadiums of the Canadian Football League.

And am I the only person in the United States who remembers being able to buy them at baseball and football games in the United States in the 1970s and, perhaps, early ’80s? At some point, they were regulated out of existence here – apparently for the same reason that many 2010 World Cup spectators want them banned: They’re really loud and really annoying. But I clearly remember my dad buying me a stadium horn one time; I think he shelled out $3.50 for it in the days before the blessedly quiet and equally ridiculous giant foam finger became the must-have for loyal fans in Anywhere USA.

The zazu
The zazu

The manufacturer of the “authentic” vuvuzela (www.vuvuzela.com) offers them in their original form, or sheathed in a removable fabric sock of your favorite World Cup team’s colors (the sockzela). You can get them with a beaded sheath, in a miniature size (for an easy getaway when you blow it in the ear of the wrong football hooligan), or in a curved antelope-horn shape, called the zazu and looking suspeiciously like a shofar.

Vuvuzelas reportedly sell at World Cup venues for about $3, which seems about the right price for creating a worldwide phenomenon capable of driving television sound technicians to an early grave. But if your only exposure to the vuvuzela is what you see and hear during this short blast of World Cup coverage, then you’re missing a little bit of a treat. Perhaps as a gesture of international goodwill, the folks who run the official vuvuzela website have provided us with this intriguing video of a zaza choir.

It’s got that Paul Simon/Rhythm of the Saints feel you expect from South Africa, and it’s good enough to make you take those giant foam fingers out of your ears – if only for a couple minutes.

The zaza as you’ll never hear it at a soccer match

Air travel now closer than ever to a root canal

For a fee, Frontier Airlines is now allowing people to bring their caged pets into the passenger cabin to fly along. In doing so it joins United and Southwest in liberating dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters and small birds from the dark chill of the hold.

It’s all part of a larger strategy. Between narrower seats, reduced legroom, baggage stuffed in every cranny, elimination of in-flight meals and every other nicety, the airlines are getting closer to their end-game.

For yet another additional fee you’ll soon be able to buy a seat and meal service for your beloved pet, and forgo the noise and discomfort of the main cabin with your own spot in the cargo bay.

Identity theft pitch of the week

This effort to scare me into giving up the goods got caught in the spam filter this week. Except for removal of the phishing link, it’s published here exactly as it appeared:

Hello Visa Card Client ,
Your Bank Card is suspended, becaus we have noted a problem on your Card.

We have determine that someone has maybe using your card without your permission. For your protection, we have  suspended your credit card. To exercise this suspention, Click Here follow the procedure, and specify for Update your  Credit Card.

Note: If this isn’t complete 15 May 2010, we will be forced to suspend your indfiniment card, because it can be used for fraudulent

Thank you for your cooperation in this folder.

Thank You,
Customer service support.

In praise of the external combustion engine

The Tata Nano is billed as the world’s cheapest car. But not, apparently, when you 24-tatanano-fire200consider the cost per mile to operate it. In the photo at left, a Nano finds a spectacular way to say “Ta-ta” to its owner: bursting into flames on the way home from the dealership where it had just been purchased.

As seen in this article from OneIndia.in, the Indian press is taking it seriously – this being at least the third reported incident of the Tata’s external combustion engine.

Back in the USA, there’s a lot to learn from the issue. For instance, here’s how it could appear in standardized testing:

Tata is to Toyota as:

  1. the Cleveland Browns are to the Cleveland Indians;
  2. Jesse James is to Tiger Woods;
  3. Tiger Woods is to David Letterman;
  4. “Hey look, a blimp” is to “What did you do with my investments, Mr. Madoff?”

Fun with spam, Lesson #113

Content generators – we used to call them writers and reporters – are having a tough couple years. But they can rest easy on this evidence that, of the many indignities they may suffer, offshoring their jobs isn’t likely to be one of them anytime soon:

__________________

Sender: ydasyl@aol.com
Subject:     We transform one dollar into one thousand!
Date:          November 28, 2009 3:10:53 PM EST

Do you dream to have a rest with family this summer, but there is no money for this purpose? We shall prompt you the decision of this problem. Everything, that is required from you, it to register at the site of our online-casino, fill up the balance for ANY sum, which is suitable for you, and to start enjoying the gambling. You needn’t to be the master of board games to win huge money here. It is checked up by time!

Some inside dope on ‘New Moon’

There’s a new movie out today that seems to be of special interest to girls between the ages of 11 and 16. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, but it’s called New Moon. If it doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a short clip that’s been running on TV. (I just can’t see this too many times.)

There haven’t been so many young girls screaming so loud and so long at the same time since the historic day Justin Timberlake went solo.
Am I just grumpy, or has their screaming gotten shriller since the days of The Beatles? I’m anticipating that by the time the third movie of the Twilight series comes out, their youthful larynxes will combine with my aging eardrums to reach the effective pitch of a dog whistle.

And what’s there to say about the 50-year-old women who stand in with them and scream in solidarity for the bare-chested hunky young actors? They have more in common with John Leguizamo in To Wong Foo With Love Julie Newmar than Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie. Other than that, and the fact that I’m glad they aren’t hanging out near my son’s school, I’m pretty much speechless.

The cast has about 9,000 young, attractive people in it. So as the pre-opening hype machine was working, you could tune into any talk show – morning, afternoon, evening or late-night – and be assured of seeing a different cast member with his own, personal shrieking harem. (In fact, if Turkish sultans had elicited this kind of audible reaction from young women, the word ‘harem’ would have a very different meaning today.) With every last cast member apparently booked onto every one of these shows, there hasn’t been a minute of spare airtime in the last two months for other important stuff like John and Kate’s divorce, Afghanistan war policy, or Lindsay Lohan’s VD.

At least the movie has started its run now, bringing the inevitable decline to the 9-and-a-half weeks of hysteria (until the Blu-Ray comes out – I’m guessing just in time for Valentine’s Day).

Finally, something really important that you may not have realized about this unheralded movie: Its release coincided exactly (give or take 36 hours) with the actual new moon in the lunar cycle.

Coincidence? Or proof that President Obama is a disciple of Satan?

So the Yankees won the World Series…

… and the sun came up this morning. (But you couldn’t see it in Cleveland.)

Iran is on, no off, no on again, and off again in negotiations over uranium enrichment. Jon Stewart made me laugh again, and Rush Limbaugh is about to pop an artery over something or another. My son left the lid up; my daughter stepped right over a pile of her clean laundry in the hall for the fourth straight day.

Another bank either raised my credit card interest rate, lowered my credit limit, or both. The bagger at the grocery store would have put the Coke 2-liter on top of the Wonder Bread if I hadn’t stopped him.

Someone from Nigeria just sent me a personal note, addressing me as “Dear Kind Sir” and offering to give me several million dollars if I will help to launder it by providing my bank account number.

The bottom of my feet hurt a little bit when I got out of bed this morning, but I slept like a baby.

For these things, nobody is going to throw a parade on Broadway. So why should they when the most reliable dynasty in sports does the probable?

God how I hate the Yankees. How nice it would be if I could love them instead.

I could more easily stop being left-handed.