You Barcelona birds don’t know how good you have it.
You give your city two stars
because once a tourist left you a crust that had some mustard on it —
Don’t eat the yellow bread, is that so hard to remember? —
and last February a pigeon bullied you aside.
You ought to come to my city some February.
Is there even a word in Spanish for slush?
Yeah, Boston would grow you a pair,
and then would shrivel them up until they make a high-pitched ting.
How you like them tiny frozen apples?
So why don’t you go back to TripAdvisor and fix your ratings
even if you have to make up a new login.
Try “A_Little_Perspective23”
or “WuzWrongDaFirstTime.”
Stoopid Barcelona birds.

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I’m at the Gartner conference in Barcelona, giving a talk sponsored by Telefonica. And there is no doubt I’m not at an American industry event:

• Wine at lunch.

• Snacks at the break have multiple parts, none of which are chocolate, caramel, or creamy nougat.

• They expect you to have a favorite “football” team.

• The corporate dinner at an opera house begins with a tour of a stage set that consists of a giant statue of a woman’s hindquarters with her anatomically-correct vagina lit up in red.

• If you translate “euros” as “dollars,” everything is quite reasonably priced!

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Just for fun:

Profile Photo

JonJGman has updated his profile photo.

JonJGman thinks his profile photo makes him look boring.

JonJGman has put a yellow background in his profile photo.

JonJGman thinks the yellow background makes his skin look waxy, almost cadaverous.

JonJGman has superimposed “Madame Toussault’s” on his background photo so maybe you’ll think he looks waxy because they’ve made a statue of him.

JonJGman has run the spell checker on “Madam Toussault’s.”

JonJGman has changed the background so he’s now standing in front of the Grand Canyon.

JonJGman can’t figure out how to get “Madam Tossaud’s” erased from the sky over the Grand Canyon.

JonJGman has run the spellchecker on “Madam Tossaud’s” and definitely thinks he’s getting closer.

JonJGman has never been to the Grand Canyon and besides it looks like’s standing in front of a photo of the Grand Canyon with the words “Madam Tussauds” mysteriously in the sky, so he’s thinking about going back to his original photo.

JonJGman can’t find his original profile photo.

JonJGman has accidentally deleted his Trash folder.

JonJGman has downloaded a copy of his Waxy Dead Person Standing in Front of a Picture of the Grand Canyon with “Madame Tussault’s” Still Misspelled in the Skies photo.

JonJGman has decided to brighten his teeth in his profile photo.

JonJGman now has a bright pink, waxy nose in his profile photo.

JonJGman wishes to inform his friends that it’s only due to an incompetent attempt to darken the bright tip of his waxy nose that he now looks like suffers from stage 3 leprosy.

JonJGman has accidentally uploaded a photo of Anthony Weiner’s tumescent underpants that he honestly didn’t even know that he had, as his profile photo.

JonJGman’s new profile photo is Default Avatar #23.

JonJGman randomly chose Default Avatar #23 without realizing that it depicts a pink kitty that is at best age-inappropriate and, as a replacement for the Weiner Party in His Pants photo, is actually pretty creepy.

JonJGman wishes to apologize to his friends for not realizing that they were being notified about every step in this personal odyssey.

JonJGman has now changed his name to JakeTheBear325 and hopes to begin again fresh.

JakeTheBear325 has changed his profile photo.

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“Your debutante just knows what you need But I know what you want”	Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
“You can’t always get what you want And if you try sometime you find You get what you need”	Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Therefore:

Sometimes you get debutantes

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In what is certainly the coolest proof that philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences, and also the Duke and all of the in-laws, xefer shows the relation of any Wikipedia topic to its “Philosophy” article. (Hat tip to Hal Roberts.)

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Here for your comparative purposes are the routines by Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinners of 2011 and 2006 respectively. (By the way, you will be comparing not just the comedians, but also the presidents.)

And then, just to show how upset they were with Colbert’s display of gigantic cojones, here’s who they brought in the following year:

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Brilliant. (Via Ethanz)

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Watson’s Final Jeopardy answer has created a need for a new word:

Schadenrobot: The joy humans feel watching robots fail.

[Minutes later:] I tweeted this, and Alistair Steele [twitter: alistairsteele immediately riposted with the far cleverer term: Schadendroid. Well played, suh!

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Not many years ago ex-Governor Alfred E. Smith complained that his autobiography, Up to Now, was not being promoted vigorously enough. “But, Governor,” remonstrated his publishers, “we planted your book in every bookstore in the country.” “Bookstores,” snorted the Governor, unconsciously summing up every publisher’s grievance for the past five generations. “Who in hell goes to bookstores?”

From Try and Stop Me, by Bennett Cerf, 1944. (Simon & Schuster, p. 107)

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The names of the top bands of the 1960s are so much a part of them that it’s almost impossible to think of the names simply as names. But let’s make the effort in order to evaluate how good their names were.

Of course, names can be good in many ways. They can be descriptive, ironic, memorably eccentric. But, it seems to me that some of the best bands had the worst names.

Here’s an unordered and, of course, utterly subjective list, graded on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is best:

• Jefferson Airplane: Retro + modern + meaningless = psychedelic. 8

• Supremes : Cocky, but lived up to it. 8

• Rolling Stones: Great name for itinerant minstrels. Terrible name for a rock band. 4

• Fairport Convention: Appropriately rustic and archaic. If it didn’t sound like the name of an obscure British peace treaty or forgotten dart rules, it’d be close to perfect. 8

• Grateful Dead: Good hyperbolic name for a metal group. Totally inappropriate for a group as sunny as this. Points added because they were clearly tripping when they came up with it. 6

• Mamas and Papas: Terrific name for a kiddy band. Meh name for a pop group of young, non-parental units. 5

• Gladys Knight and the Pips: Pips? Really? Is this a British vaudeville group that comes out in boaters? All of this band’s points go to the first half of its name: 3

• The Beach Boys: Beach music sung by boys. Sounds frivolous, but then they sing. Frivolously. And then they record Pet Sounds. 9

• Four Tops: There are four of them. They are the tops. The naming convention flags their genre. Well done, lads! 9

• The Doors: An incredibly prosaic name that works ironically for their druggy music. Plus, it’s an appropriate literary reference — which would be better if their worst songs weren’t the ones that opened the doors of perception the widest. They shouldn’t have asked The Lizard King’s opinion. 9

• The Four Seasons: They have nothing to do with the seasons. They have nothing to do with Vivaldi. It’s a bland, generic, misleading, slightly pretentious, placeholder of a name. Point added for the correct counting of band members. 2

• Gerry and the Pacemakers: You know immediately what sort of band they are, unless you hear “pacemaker” as a medical device and think that they’re going to show up in walkers and plaid pants buckled beneath their pot bellies. Gotta split the difference on this one: 4

• Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: The Mothers were men, plus you have the swear-word implication, plus they were actually inventive. All of which doesn’t even matter. You had me at “Zappa.” 10

• The Byrds: Did they misspell it because “birds.com” was already taken? Oh, wait. They misspelled it to be cool.
  genericName + misspelling = genericName – 2. Final score: 1

• Creem: Ironically refined food-based name. Sexual connotation. Bold statement that they were a super-group composed of the filtered extract of great other groups. The lack of a definite article makes it even cockier. 10

• Sly and the Family Stone: You’ve got the slyness of “Sly” and the family-ness of “Family,” but together with a straight-on drug reference. A totally wtf name for a wtf group. 9

• Steppenwolf: Sounds vaguely and appropriately threatening and aggressive, despite the totally inappropriate literary reference. 7

• Credence Clearwater Revival: The length of the name has a throwback quality, and the three words each independently says that this is a group about something simple and pure. It would have been a terribly pretentious name for a folk group, but it works better for a rock group. 5

• Led Zeppelin: The winner in a contentious argument about what to name a psychedelicious band, if the band members were all 14 years old. For an adult band, it’s just embarrassing. 3

• The Beatles: See Led Zeppelin, but drop the band’s age to 12. “Oooh, and we can spell it B-E-AT instead of B-E-E-T.” Is it an accident that as far as I know, the Beatles never once used a beetle in their iconography? Terrible terrible name. Point added because they were the FREAKING BEATLES OMG OMG. 2

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