I just bought these Quaker Breakfast Cookies because they have "breakfast" in the product name, which dictates when I'm allowed to eat them.  They're actually pretty good, but my suspicions were accurate:  They're really just straight-up cookies in a package that suggests they can be eaten for breakfast.  Maybe they might have a little more fiber than normal cookies, but other than that, it doesn't change the fact that you're eating cookies for breakfast. 

I was criticized recently for reading things by J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown because they're not "good literature."  This criticism came from a literature major, who believed the plots created by authors like this are too simple and contrived.  I fully agree, which is exactly why I read books like this.  When I read, I'm not looking for a challenge.  I don't judge the story arc or character development.  I don't give a crap about that stuff.  I read for the same reason I do many things:  For entertainment.  Books with simple, contrived plot lines fill that need with surprising ease.  Screw good literature.  Give me entertainment. 

The cave crickets that live in my crawl space and jump onto my head each time I enter or exit have this giant pointy thing on their tail end that looks like a stinger.  It frightens me, to say the least.  After some research, it turns out it's called an ovipositor, which is a body part certain insects use to place their eggs in the ground.  On crickets, it's a non-violent appendage.  On other insects, like bees and wasps, it's a stinger. 

I was driving around a small city recently, and I realized I crossed the tracks into the bad part of town when I saw the following businesses:  Cash for gold, payday loans, and bail bonds.  I wonder which came first, the bad part of town, or the businesses in the bad part of town.

Related:  5 businesses that rip off the poor

A non-trivial percentage of my day is spent waiting for computers to do things.  And I'm not talking about complicated calculations or processor-intensive graphical simulations.  I'm talking about renaming a file, minimizing a window, or clicking a link.  Some days these simple tasks seem to take forever.  It's like my computer gets sidetracked and is like, "Oh hey, can you just wait a minute while I update some stuff and maintain your security?  Because that's my primary job.  Security over usability."  I have two computers at my desk at work.  One of them was thinking about something instead of performing a simple task, so I turned to the other computer, and it decided to act stupid and become unusable.  Thus, this post was born. 

In the past few weeks, I've heard two different intelligent people say the phrase "mute point" instead of "moot point".  At first, it annoyed me that anyone would fail to meet the unattainably high grammar goals I secretly set for myself and others.  But then a link pointed out that these people might think the phrase refers to mute as in "if something doesn't matter, it's not saying anything. It's 'mute.'"  I have to say I hadn't considered that, and it kind of makes sense. 

Let's all be honest for a moment and admit a simple fact:  Human children are disgusting.  It seems that everything that typically remains inside a normal human being has the tendency to leak out of a baby, whether it's snot, partially chewed food, partially digested food (i.e. puke), or fully digested food (i.e. poop).  Here are some rebuttals I can imagine hearing from parents: 

• You did the same thing when you were a baby.  Irrelevant.
• It's different when it's your own kid.  Even if I had a kid, 99.9% of kids would still be gross.
• Everything a baby does is beautiful and innocent.  Wrong.

As a non-parent, I legitimately have a difficult time controlling my gag reflex in the presence of a child who's eating.  Quite possibly the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my entire life was when my nephew scooped the half-chewed and mushy food bits out of his around-the-neck Baby Bjorn thing and put a big ol' handful in his mouth.  That was years ago, and it still gives me chills.  A more recent episode involved a new father lovingly spooning the excess mashed potatoes off his baby's face and putting the contents into his own mouth.  Granted, some of the blame in this case lies on the disgusting parent. 

I've been using Google Reader for about 5 years now, and I had been using their "shared items" feature not to actually share items, but to essentially save them.  If I came across something interesting or noteworthy in my RSS feeds, I'd "share" it, but since my shared items were kept private, they were essentially saved items.  Google pushed out an update to Reader recently to make things look nicer and integrate with their latest Facebook knock-off, and in doing so they got rid of the old shared items system.  They "conveniently" offered the opportunity to download old shared items in JSON format, which for all intents and purposes is completely useless to anyone who doesn't currently write software that utilizes JSON.  Needless to say, I disagree with Google's decision to do away with this feature, I'm annoyed by their attempt at softening the blow, and I have yet another reason why I hate depending on web technologies instead of writing my own software. 

Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, once stated somewhat sarcastically, "The chancellor's job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni."  (via NPR)

The Broad Breasted White breed of turkeys is the most common commercially-raised turkey in the US.  But there's a problem: 

These birds have shorter breast bones, exceedingly large breasts, are often very fat, and have shorter legs than "standard" turkeys, rendering them unable to breed without human assistance (typically via in vitro fertilisation).

Unless you intentionally buy a heritage breed for three times the price, this is the turkey you eat at Thanksgiving.  (via Freakonomics)

Slightly related:  Corn sex, grape sex