Pen vs. sword

I was watching A and E, and a commercial for a prescription medicine for Alzheimer’s came up. For the international crowd, yes, in the good ol’ US of A you can market your prescription drugs on television like candy. The catch is, you must state all your major side effects. Of course, you are free to say them really fast and distract the audience with shots of happy people enjoying stuff. The Viagra commercials are actually well done.

Anyway, in the side effects spiel, they mentioned “being tired” and “not feeling hungry”. Wow, such scientific terms. Why not say “fatigue” and “lack of appetite”? Perhaps they are trying to downplay the side effects. After all, who doesn’t feel tired and not hungry every once and a while?

Words are powerful. Use them well.

White (and Dark and Delicate) Trash

Yesterday, I went downstairs to grab my laundry out of the washer, and I find out that some woman has already taken them out and put them in my basket. She was in the middle of heaping her particulars in the machine.

There must have been four empty washers when I came in, so I was too confused and stunned to give her a tongue lashing. Then I noticed her laundry “basket”.

It was a institution-sized garbage pail. You know, the kind that has its own wheels.

It turns out that Ms. Whites/Darks/Delicates Trash used FIVE of the six available washers. Must have been Laundry Month. It appears to have been such a complex, large-scale, pipeline processing operation, she even had Ziploc containers of food with her.

(note: I really wish they could set up a CCTV camera in the laundry. Or maybe a webcam. My dream would be to have all the machines web-enabled, so you can track exactly how much time is left in each machine. I could even write an app to hide in my system tray. God, I’m such a geek.) :lamer: