Unstructured Sniglets

Long, long before The Daily Show there was Not Necessarily the News, which was a kind of sketch comedy take on the news. Overall, it was a medium funny show but it did have one segment which achieved a popularity all its own: I speak of sniglets.

A sniglet is defined as a word that is not in the dictionary but which ought to be. Viewers would send in their suggestions and host Rich Hall would read the best entries on the air. My personal favorite is flopcorn, defined as "The unpopped kernels at the bottom of the cooker".

Bert Christensen's Truth & Humour Collection has a nicely representative sample of sniglets. Enjoy.

Getting Bugged

Once upon a time when you watched a TV show all you saw was the show. A number of years ago that changed with the introduction of bugs. Bugs are those little station icons that are typically displayed in the lower right-hand corner of the screen when a show is on. Television stations claim that they are a necessity in this modern world of a hundren-plus channels to watch.

Personally, I don't mind bugs, so much, as long as they don't obscure any text that's being shown. When they get in the way of subtitles it's annoying but, in generally, they are small enough and far enough to the right that that doesn't tend to happen. It also helps when they are semi-transparent.

Several years ago, however, some stations decided that bug technology was ideal for advertising upcomming shows. These new bugs were programmed to pop up in the middle of a show. Unlike the logo bugs, which just function as station identifiers, these new bugs were intended to attract attention. As such, they tended to be large, opaque, and animated. The worst of the lot actually make noises. They remind me of nothing so much as the pop-up ads that as the scourge of the web.

I have, over time, grudgingly accustomed myself to those bugs but, last night, I saw a new breed of bug. It happened while I was watching a history channel show on the technology of the old west. The show's host mentioned something about headaches or sore muscles (I don't recall quite what) and a bug appeared on the screen with an advertisement for Advil. Later that night, while watching American Idol (sorry, it's a deservedly guilty pleasure) one of the contestants was making a cell phone call and a bug popped up advertising Cingular's cellular service.

Yes, folks, we've entered the age of the product placement bug. I suspect that this is a direct reaction to TiVO and other DVR technologies that allow people to zip past commercials. If advertisers can't grab your attentions during breaks in the show, they're clearly going to do it during the show. I doubt that there's anything that can be done about it so, once again, we're just going to have to grit our teeth and put up with the addition of yet another small nuisance in our lives. I suppose that there are more important things in this world to worry about but it does, never the less, bug me. I suppose that's the point.

Five Small Essays on Random Subjects

There's a site out there called Blog Ideas. It's sort of an artificial muse. You go to the site and it gives you subject ideas for blog postings. Many of the ideas of fairly banal, such as "How long have you been bloggin'?". Never the less, I thought that it might be an interesting thing to take five random suggestions to see what I could do with them. So, without further preamble, here I go.

Alcohol: My Thoughts

My view on alcohol is pretty much the same view I have with regards to any other intoxicant. If you find yourself in a position where your consumption of it poses harm to others, you are irresponsible. If you find yourself in a position where you can't moderate your own consumption, you have a problem and should seek help. If you find that you use it as a means to escape from reality, you need to find something better. If your consumption is purely a matter of personal enjoyment, then it is not my place to tell you otherwise.

As for myself, I will drink on occasion, but only rarely. This isn't because I have any high scruples that I am trying to live up to. The simple fact is that, most of the time, it simply doesn't appeal to me. Honestly, I don't much like the taste of alcohol, itself. When I do drink, I tend to select wines, beers, and liquors that have a very mild dryness. I also don't much enjoy the sensation of being drunk, so a lot of the recreational aspects of alcohol are lost on me. This isn't to say that I'm never in the mood but it is not a typical thing.

I want to be clear that I am not much of a Puritan. If it were legal, my drug of choice would be marijuana (a drug that I have more than merely indulged in the past). I'll make no attempt to disguise the fact that I enjoy the sensation of being high. I find there to be a qualitative difference between getting a little high and getting a little drunk and that I much prefer the former to the latter. Given this, I am hardly in a position where I could even conceive of criticizing someone who enjoys a few beers, now and again, even if I were so inclined. Be that as it may, I'll usually settle for a soda.

Vanity Searches on Google: Does My Site Come Up?

As topics go, this strikes me as a rather flimsy foundation. The answer is either yes or no. As it happens, it's yes. Google, as usual, is all-seeing. I half-expect it to achieve sentience within my lifetime.

I suppose that I could talk about the phenomenon of vanity searches in general. Like most people who've had any amount of interaction with the internet, I do like to do the occasional search on my name. Since the advent of Google, it's very hard to resist the temptation.

Most of my searches return a signature file that I used to use. Here it is:

"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life"

I came up with this quote back in the days when I was very active on alt.atheism. I'm happy to say that a lot of people seemed to like it. For awhile, I even had a signature FAQ up to address the emails that I got that were addressed to it.

These days, it seems just a little too glib. A little too… confrontational, I suppose. I think that the point of the quote – that fundamentalists too often seem to imply that their god has a rather petty sort of focus – is a fair point but saying it this way seems to deny the very real sense of meaning that their beliefs are invested with. Ultimately, it seems to be the sort of thing that a clever young punk might say to provoke someone. In that, at least, it is an accurate reflection of the person who wrote it.

Excepting my little would-be contributions to Barlett's, there's a random scattering of preserved posts to sci.nanotech, alt.atheism, and rec.arts.tv.babylon5, a collection of letters to the editor of Science Fiction Weekly, some professional posts to various SQL Server forums, a critique of a Weird Al Yankovich album, a Darwin Awards submission (that actually made it, in edited form, into the second published compendium of Darwin Awards), several references to other people named Andrew Lias, and various errata.

It is odd to suppose that, once I pass away, this sort of thing may well be all of the public record that survives me, assuming, of course, that these continue to be archived. I don't plan on having children and the memories of friends and family can only endure until the ends of their own lives. I fully realize that one of the reasons that I'm keeping this blog is precisely because I want to add something to my legacy but, in the end, I don't expect that many historians are going to be culling my small observations out of the mass of records that will be preserved on the internet. History, ultimately, will swallow my life just as it does to most people. It offends our dignity to think in these terms but it is hard to deny the truth of it.

Perhaps my impudent little sig file will, after all, be my legacy.

How Big is My Bed: Big Enough?

If I were to list the five great pleasures in life, they would be reading, eating, thinking, sleeping and sex. The nice thing about beds is that all five activities can be enjoyed without having the leave the comfort of the sheets. When I think about the things I particularly dislike, such as having to go to work, getting haircuts, paying bills, and taking the dog out, perhaps it is not a coincidence that all of these things require me to, first of all, get out of bed.

My current bed is a queen sized bed which is reasonably large. I am sharing it with my girlfriend and our dog. Although I am happy to have their company, I will admit that I do begrudge the space that I have to sacrifice. When I sleep, I like to sprawl. I like the freedom to twist and turn. I like being able to grab up all of the sheets when I'm cold and the latitude to toss them all off when I'm hot.

When you share a bed with someone, you have to make adjustments. It is not so much that my queen sized bed is too small, it is that there is no bed quite large enough for me unless I'm alone in it. Such are the compromises we make.

TV Shows I Never Miss

As much as I'd like to claim to not watch TV, I am just as prone to its distractive maw as anyone. I hate it, though. I hate realizing that I've just wasted two or three hours of irretrievable time watching something banal. I hate the fact that I can be enthralled by flickering lights and the gaudy sounds that come out of that damned box.

I tend to read when I'm watching it. I read during the commercials. I read when I'm watching reruns. I'll sometimes read even when I'm watching something that I haven't seen before. It's not much of a show of defiance so much as a perfectly effective way to diminish my enjoyment of whatever I'm reading.

We recently got a 50" projection TV. It's overwhelming. It is not at all an exaggeration to say that it absolutely dominates the living room. It's a great thing to have when we're using it to watch DVDs but it's hard not to feel self-conscious when you have a two foot high Spongebob Squarepants cavorting in front of you. It's even worse when you find yourself watching something like American Idol, especially when you realize that your sense of ironic detachment has somehow eroded to the point where you actually care about the results of the damned show.

Do I Want to Have Children?

I am thirty-five years old, now, and my girlfriend is thirty-six. It would not be too late for us to have children but it's impossible to deny that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. I have friends with children and I have friends who have firmly decided not to have children.

We've the matter a great deal of thought and have concluded that children wouldn't be right for us. I think that this was an easier choice for her than it is for me given that she really seems to have a profound sense of distaste for the entire notion. My own stance is a bit more conflicted.

Children are a great responsibility and, honestly, I don't think that I have the temperament to be a good parent. I didn't have a great role model in my own father and, although I don't think that I'm as bad as he is, I realize that I do have a temper. When I am thinking or when I am reading, I don't like to suffer distraction and, if there is one thing that I do know about parenthood, it is that it is one long period of nothing else but distraction.

Be that as it may, there is one thing that I do regret. I have learned a lot of things in my life (and, hopefully, am continuing to do so). I have accrued a certain stock of knowledge and "wisdom", for lack of a better word. It would be a marvelous thing to have someone that I could, at least, try to pass some of that along to. It would be even better if I could pass that to someone who could take that store of information and use it as a foundation whereby they could exceed my own.

It is a thought that makes me wistful. I try to bear in mind that children are not clones of their parents. They develop their own interests and ideas. There is no guarantee that any children of my own would have the least interest in the things that capture my own imagination. Given Finagle's Law, which states that the universe tends towards maximum perversity, I would probably have a child that would be extremely interested in sports and cars, so it is, perhaps, for the best.

Still.