Topical Depression

Got a few end of the week topics to cover…

Topic # 1: I’ve recently read about something that might be the most brilliant and twisted marketing campaign ever. If you go to mymms.com you’ll see that M&M’s has set up a website where you can create messages that they will place on M&M’s. The idea is that you’ll come up with some sweet saying, probably for Valentine’s Day, and it will make a great gift. Personally, I view this as the possibility for some of the cruelest jokes ever.

Want to encourage someone to lose weight? Give them the M&M’s labeled “Have a Carrot” or “Lard Ass”. For that special someone on the 14th how about “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I’m married to the sea” or even “I’m dating your sister”. I don’t even want to think what middle school kids would do with these. Somehow this feels like it was thought up by someone wearing bad idea jeans.

Topic # 2: Saw a personalized license plate the other day that read “Linux”. It’s always nice to know that I’m not the biggest geek in the metro area. I’ve been inspired to do a lot of bizarre things in my life, getting a personalized license plate that declares my preference for an operating system is not one of them. Now, “Jedi”, that is one I could go for.

Topic # 3: Another driving story. KC has these big overhead electronic signs on the highway that are never used except for Amber alerts and telling you that the reason that you are stuck in traffic is because of an accident right ahead of you. Vaguely useful information but nothing that changes your world. Well now they’ve started to show travel times on the board, which would be really useful except for a couple of factors. 1) Traffic is pretty constant in KC so everything is basically ten minutes away, 2) People slow down in order to read the signs and 3) Hence, traffic is actually moving slower because people are trying to do math and drive at the same time. Seriously, I wonder how many accidents there were the first day they tried this as motorists looked up and went, “Oh wow, words.”

Topic # 4: The Yale glee club was assaulted in San Francisco for their singing of the Star Spangled Banner. Now I don’t know any more about the story than that sentence but I have to say, if there is anyone in the world who probably deserves a beating it’s likely the members of the Yale glee club. Not exactly a challenging target, though. I mean, I could probably take them all on by myself and win. I’m not sure you could hold your head high afterwards and go, “Man, did you see how I kicked that baritone’s ass? That’s what you get for trying to sing four part harmony in our house!”

Topic # 5: There was a news story this week about the possibility that in the course of its experiments the Viking lander on Mars may have actually killed life instead of finding it. The idea is that the radiation used in a test would have killed a theoretical lifeform that the lander was not able to recognize. I think that pretty much sums up the human race in a nutshell. Not only are we rapidly trying to eliminate every form of life on Earth, we’re now deciding to get rid of it on other planets as well. As I said before, sometimes I wonder if the creationists are right only because there is no way in the world that monkeys would be this stupid.