The Happy Moron

Nifty article from the BBC on a Portugese winemaker trying to balance the old school tradition of port-drinking with the need to rebrand it and market it to youth.
But what caught my eye was this:
“We have to adapt our markets. We absolutely have to get more young people drinking port.”
He paused to sweep his hand [...]

“Ramsey’s method looks like something new to me: not a marginal change of behavioral preferences, but a monster-sized one. Adherents are converted, financially, in the same way that some convert religiously.”
Chris Blattman talking about financial conversion.
Conversion’s a funny word. You’d almost think it was supposed to represent some kind of real life change.

Think of all the things that we forget over the course of 1000 years.
Then think of the fidelity and consistency of orthodox Christian doctrine over that same period of time.
It’s quite remarkable.
At the very least, it is most obviously not a cultural phenomenon. Because those get discarded quite quickly.
God is not a Ninja Turtle.

At Save on Foods, the clerks carry knives. They carry them on their belts, hung in little pouches, nestled in among the pens and little notepads.
Knives.
I saw one clerk there who had a dark green apron fastened beneath a broad black belt. The cloth hung like a tunic; he looked like a retail Robin Hood, [...]

Q)What do you call the fat French Aardvark?
A)L’ardvark
Q)What do you call a quarter-pound French Aardvark?
A)A Royale.
Q)What do you call a quarter-pound French Aardvark that you make bad jokes about?
A)A Royale with cheese.
Q)What do you say to a six fingered Aardvark?
A)”Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my ant. Prepare to die.”

AmbaSewa wrote:
“I currently post comments on a fairly regular basis on four blogs.
Two are the blogs of total strangers. Mind you, the totality of their strangeness is reducing- one particularly blogs prolifically.”
There’s a weirdness that comes from reading other people’s deep expressions on a blog.
You become engaged and drawn in and you *feel* a connection. [...]

They both exist in measurable quantities.
They also both exist with varying qualities.
Energy has a quality. It can be organized or disorganized, and it can degrade from organization to disorganization without requiring more energy. But it canot increase its quality without the input of external energy. We call this tendancy to degrade “entropy”.
Does money also have [...]

Let me tell you a story. I have called it an internet story, and while it is a story that takes place on the internet, it is really a story about people.
It’s a story about a man who built a tool – a tool for Twitter. Now, if twitter is a bazaar, his tool was [...]

Seth is brilliantly right today.
Ask any software developer, though, and they will tell you that Seth’s postulated 2 percent is invariably much greater.
2 percent is the minimum. The baseline. It only goes up from there.
Generally, however,  programmers don’t believe that they’re in the business of building relationships and connections and so the umpteen percent are [...]

The first vehicle I pushed out of a snowbank was a hybrid.
The driver seemed embarassed. He said, “I’m sorry, I only have one gear”.
To be fair, it would be reasonable to ask what the snowbank was doing in the middle of the road (answer – blocking traffic) but I admit, my inner redneck was doing [...]