Anne Frank is soooo boring

No to me, because I liked her diary (I actually like reading anybody’s diary), but this Salon article about Amazon.com users giving classic books 1-star reviews cracked me up. I will take a gander myself later on and find some other examples.

I’m old

I’m turning 29 this year, and I feel really old. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it seems amazing to me how fast my 20s went. I feel like my 29 years have gone so fast, and am beginning to understand what genuinely old people (those in their 40s, say) mean when they talk about life going by quickly.

This weekend, I went to Connecticut for my aunt’s 70th birthday party. It was a (gentle) roast, and my cousin, the MC, decided to put the passage of 70 years in perspective. We found a web site that helped us, and she started off her speech to my aunt with the following facts:

What Things Cost in 1940:
Car: $800
Gasoline: 18 cents/gal
House: $6,550
Bread: 8 cents/loaf
Milk: 34 cents/gal
Postage Stamp: 3 cents
Stock Market: 131
Average Annual Salary: $1,900
Minimum Wage: 30 cents per hour

Everybody laughed at the huge difference in price between then and now, and it made think of the changes I’ve seen in many things, just in my own lifetime. A postage stamp cost $.18 when I was born, and I remember watching televised reports of people’s outrage when it went up to $.29 (I just checked, and that happened when I was 9). My undergraduate college now costs about %55 more (!!) per year for tuition, room, and board than it did when I was a student there. I doubt that it’s 55% more awesome than it used to be, but that’s neither here nor there. I remember a forward that the new students sent to each other about knowing that you were a child of the 80s if… It pointed out the differences between the world in which we lived and the one into which we’d been born, and mocked 90s babies for all that they’d missed (I still take this stance, by the way; the 80s > the 90s).

But then I read this piece, and it shocked me. Of course, most American kids today have never used a physical card catalog, unless they’re from a very small library system. That makes sense, but it seems odd that kids today have never experienced something that I enjoyed so much when I was younger. For me, the physical card catalog was interesting because of the “See also” and “See instead” references. I liked it when I thought the way the cataloger had and found what I wanted the the first time. I also liked when I had to look unexpected to find what I wanted. Either way, it was like participating in a scavenger hunt that I always won. Now, people who know what they’re looking for can do the same with an online catalog, search engine, or database in a fraction of the time. The results are the same, although the process is now disappointingly straightforward.

I’m used to people thinking that Google is magically going to spit out the answer to every question they have, and thinking that the Internet is broken if all is not revealed by the first link, but I sometimes forget that there was a time when people regularly had to do more to get information.

It’s funny cause it’s true

I don’t actually watch Lost anymore, because I couldn’t keep up with what was happening (and neither could the writers), but I remember enough of the show to find this funny.

Where’s my minority money???

Or, Why One Should Never Listen to Patrons:

Mr. OldGuy, a curmudgeon if I ever saw one, who is here on nearly a daily basis and passes gas that smells like he is already dead, says that the census exists only to find out where the minorities are. To give them money. Why didn’t I know about this? I’m all for any government conspiracy that actually benefits me, since those are few and far between.

This woman is clearly pregnant

You try to look sexy in maternity undies.

So the only reasonable way she could have lost 10 pounds so quickly would be if she gave birth. Mazel tov, pregnant lady from the ad!

Presented without further comment

Gossip is bad, mmkay?

This is why we shouldn’t spread rumors.

This week’s Onion headline that is probably true

Olympic Athletes Hoping to Exchange Bent-Up Medals for Normal Ones

This week’s real headline that reads like it’s from the Onion

German Luger Chips a Tooth Biting His Medal

I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning

More Olympics silliness. Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer won the gold medal in the Mens’ 5000 meter race. Yippee! That part is pretty awesome. But then he acted like a jerk to a reporter who wanted to interview him afterward.

She asked him to identify himself and his country, and he refused, asking her, “Are you stupid?” Not nice, Sven, not nice, especially since she said it was for tape identification. I understand that he just won a gold medal and is supremely important in his own country, but we don’t really care about that stuff in the US. Sorry. I can identify two speed skaters on sight, and can only tell them apart because they’re both cute. If Sven could find a way to incorporate touchdowns or homeruns into speed skating, he would definitely increase his odds of being recognized by the average American.

Still, I can understand how he’d be frustrated that a reporter covering the event he just won would ask him who he was. So maybe a bit of sarcasm would have been in order, but “Are you stupid?” is never a nice thing to say to somebody. And karma is a bitch. So I smirked a bit when I read that Kramer would have set a record and won gold in the 10,000 meter race, but followed incorrect instructions from his coach and crossed into the wrong lane, resulting in his disqualification. That sucks, and he still had to give interviews afterward.

I wonder if he was nicer to this batch of reporters.