O Diesel! O Lords of the Highway! O Fickle Imps, who dwelleth in my dash!

What have I done? How can I appease your wrath?

The car worked fine when I bought it. Yesterday, sometime between morning and quittin' time, the turn signal relay died. So here I am this morning, driving along at 65 mph, window rolled down and making absurd uninterpretable arm signals to the traffic, when kerSMACK!!, my back window explodes. Actually it wasn't so much an explosion as a sudden transformation from seamless glass to a mosaic, but it was pretty darn loud and terrifying.

I figured it was a bit of kicked-up highway debris, but no. Nothing hit my car; the window just exploded of its own accord, or more likely the rear defroster's accord. Which shows you what I get for thinking I have a nice touch of luxury in my jalopy! Now I'll need to knock out the pretty translucent mosaic and install some plastic wrap.

On the other hand, my turn signals are working again, hurrah!

I've been listening to KCRW today, and more importantly to their fund drive. The last pitch they delivered was to "take control" of "your station" which entails, of course, giving them money and then not paying attention to what they do with it.
Oh yeah I feel the power of ownership there, baby!

Public radio personalities will say anything and everything during fund drives, so one oughtn't read too much into this... but they've repeated variations on the same argument all morning. KCRW is member-supported, not member-run. I gave them money last year and it most certainly did not bring me the chance to vote for an additional transmitter in Altadena or a statutory limit on the amount of Air that can be played in a week (I like Air, but really!) or even station board members a la the Pacifica model.

I hate seeing people innocently suggest that opening one's wallet is the same thing as being active and creative and in control of the universe. Stupid capitalism.

Your default Microsoft Office toolbar has the "print" and "print preview" buttons located right next to each other. Why d'you suppose this is? I "customize" my toolbar experience by removing the print button, but this is periodically rejiggered to the default configuration by a computer migration or inexplicable Windows event. Whereupon I immediately start printing at least five spurious copies of everything, every time I need to preview the formatting.

Is Microsoft in cahoots with printer-toner manufacturers?

So, desks. My desk at home doesn't have drawers; it's not so much a desk as a repurposed side table.

My desk at work has two columns of drawers. No desk I have ever worked at, that had two columns of drawers, has ever had a sufficiently wide knee cubby. Do the same people design desks who design women's shoes? I'm not unusually fidgety but man am I ever sick of banging my knees.

Ancient Egypt swings in and out of fashion, of course, but why can't I find noodles in the form of hieroglyphics? Capitalism has failed me! Stupid capitalism.

Alternative thinkier question: what language and character set of soup gives you the greatest probability of finding a word in your spoon? I'm tempted to say Chinese, because any realistic Chinese alphabet soup would have a limited, and carefully chosen, set of characters - but is it cheating to use a cherry-picked noodle distribution?

As I previously alluded, I've signed up for the GREs at the end of next month. As soon as I stopped learning things at work it got exceedingly dull, and I expect it will only get duller if my varied managers don't carefully cherry-pick interesting assignments for me - which they don't because they rightfully cherry-pick them all for themselves, as payment for having more stress and rottener work hours.

I snagged the (free) official preparation software and took part of a practice test over lunch; it's just swell, but it's all on computer, as is the test nowadays, and somebody decided that ~20 characters would be an appropriate column width for all the reading comprehension passages. Twenty characters (ish)! At that width, every fourth word is hyphenated and it's impossible to tell where paragraphs start and stop. Slows my reading speed down immensely, and makes it rather difficult to answer questions about things "as described in the third paragraph" since I have to actually scan for breaks in thought.

Everything about that test has been focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well, so what were they thinking? There's certainly some need to have a test program that will run on minimal hardware, so it can be standardized worldwide, but for $120 bucks a pop you'd think ETS could buy a set of new monitors for their third world test centers and run things at better than 640x800. I mean, geez.

To: Customers at the Foothill & Claremont Arco
Cc: SUV owners in the greater Los Angeles area

Peak pumping hours at the gas station (e.g., after work or at lunch) can be stressful - customers must often wait several minutes, fingers tapping on the steering wheel and fuel light flickering, while those ahead in line finish filling their swimming-pool sized gas tanks. We all prefer sitting in traffic on the freeway to sitting in the gas station parking lot, so it is to everybody's benefit if pumps are utilized as efficiently as possible.

Many gas stations are configured with three pumps per row. Effective pump usage requires that all three pumps be occupied at all times, with minimal time losses during maneuvers to and from the pump. This can be most easily accomplished if, when driving up to a row of pumps where both the immediate and middle pumps are open, you drive to the middle pump.

It may be impossible to ensure that the fuel intake of your very large vehicle is directly aligned with the middle pump. Please note, however, that most modern gas pumps are equipped with hoses of adequate length for use with vehicles parked within a reasonable radius of the pump, and you don't have to have it exactly fucking perfect, jackass. If you have questions as to the ultimate limitations of the hoses at your filling station, observe the Geo Metro in front of you, crudely jammed between two SUVs and pumping gas while located several feet from the commonly-used pumping area.

It should also be noted that this is Los Angeles, not San Fransicsco, and drivers here are not particularly well-known for their parallel parking finesse. Cars larger than subcompact class may be prevented from using the pump at all until you have finished; even if they are not, forcing the car behind you to parallel park at the pump wastes others' time and patience, and increases the risk of a minor accident.

Following proper etiquette and taking care to keep the middle pump easily accessible will make the fueling experience better and safer for everyone.

Attn: Kraft Foods

Today I purchased two containers of Philadelphia cream cheese. The foil seal on the strawberry cream cheese invited me to find something that helps me "slip into relaxation" and reminded me to express myself. The seal on the garden vegetable cream cheese said nothing. Is the garden vegetable cream cheese really so indifferent to my mental health and creative fulfillment? I hope not -
I expect a great deal of emotional sensitivity and empathy from all my bagel toppings.

Sincerely yours,
Yami McMoots

Sorry for the politics, we will now return to our regularly scheduled complaints about food packaging copy. My frozen meal was all excited about how the "flavorful sauce" came in its own little tray compartment, enabling me to customize my lunch experience by dipping the vegetables into the sauce, or pouring the sauce over the vegetables, whichever I prefer, and really, how dumb is that? It's like the tomato soup ads (to pick on Campbell's Soup again) urging your children to "express themselves" by sprinkling on some grated cheese, setting the bar for creativity so low that I finally understand why some people are impressed with my crappy homemade grocery-tote (I'm impressed because it hasn't fallen apart yet, but that's another matter entirely).

Can I decoupage tupperware without destroying its non-toxic, freshness-sealing essence? I'd really like all my lunch containers to have baffling ad copy, not just the ones I get when I'm too lazy to make real food.

There's nothing quite like emailing the Campbell Soup Company to bring a little petty glee into an otherwise grouchy day.

Dear Campbell's Soup people:

I came home today in a lousy mood and hungry to boot, so I reached for a can of Where's Waldo? shaped pasta - hooray for convenient comfort foods! However, I was quite irritated when I turned the can around to find that claims about your product's nutritive benefits (which I do not dispute, as I'm sure you've run them past a sharp legal department with an extraordinarily well-developed understanding of the FDA's technical definition of "vegetables") were specifically - and, I feel, unecessarily - directed to mothers.

There is a social expectation that mothers will be the ones primarily responsible for their children's nutrition (as well as for the lion's share of other domestic duties), and I believe that this expectation contributes to women's continuing difficulties in the upper echelons of the workforce. I certainly don't blame food packaging for the effects of a complex culture, and I don't really want to spread evangelical feminism among the customer service department either (yes I do, but I think it'd be more fun to break in with pamphlets so we can microwave our bras in the break room); I'm just trying to explain why I was annoyed that your label was addressed to just "moms" rather than "moms and dads".

Happily, there are many tasty convenience meals in the supermarket that contain no gratuitous gender stereotypes at all (how do they ever create brand recognition without knee-jerk sexism? Their marketing departments must be geniuses! Or else they have an even better understanding of the FDA's definition of "vegetable" than you guys do, which would be amazing. Frankly I'm in awe of your legal team, because remember what happened when word got out as to how ketchup was counted as a vegetable on school lunch menus? And they only said that the tomato puree counted as one vegetable, not a single serving of multiple "vegetables"! You're not thinking vegetable oil or paprika, are you?) I hope that the Franco-American line of amusingly shaped pastas will join them.

Sincerely,
Yami McMoots
Infinite Crusader for Justice and the Blurred Gender Roles more Appropriate to the Subject of an Andy Warhol Painting, and also the Official Status of Tomatoes as a Legal Fruit to Further the Sophisticated Botanical Discourse of Our Great Nation!

Actually what I sent was shorter. Maybe I should've included more of those parenthetical asides - or maybe they were counting the high fructose corn syrup as one of their vegetables, I think I'd be okay with that.

Update: they wrote back.