Every House Episode Ever

House: Alright team, this amoral sick man/woman/child has something wrong with him.
Foreman: Oh darn. let's run a few diagnostics, see what's up.
Chase: Okay Mr. Patient, We're going to do this test
Patient: WHY?!?!
Thirteen: She/He's Evil, i tells ya!
House: Evil, not evil, everyone's messed up. What did you find
Foreman: I think it's kidney failure
House: WRONG
Foreman: You Never listen to me!
House: WRONG
Wilson: You're a Jerk.Chase: it could be Syphillis
House: Maybe.
Patient: Why would i have syphillis?
*nobody says anything*
Thirteen: Why the fuck are you so immoral?
Patient: Everyone has their habits.
CUE CREEPY MUSIC/STAREDOWN
House: So it wasn't syphillis. i knew that.
Foreman: Were you testing us?
House: WRONG
Everybody: what is it?
House: Check that organ we talk about all the time but seem to always forget - THE PANCREAS
Everybody: Oh shit
Wilson: You're a jerk
Foreman: Thirteen, are you hung over again?
Thirteen: ...No.
House: I need your help with something, Cuddy. i need to do an illegal procedure.
Cuddy: No. go back and do your work yourself, the right way.
House: YOURE TERRIBLE AT YOUR JOB
Cuddy: fine, i'll do it.
House: *Swoon*
Wilson: You're a Jerk.
Foreman: So, we saved the patient!
House: I told you so!
Foreman: no, you had the wrong diagnosis!
House: Who cares?
Wilson: You're a Jerk.

McDonald invites Hortons over for a bite; bill argued over for hours

The district court had it right: "It is just a slice of cheese".

"A McDonald's outlet in the Netherlands was wrong to sack an employee for giving a colleague a piece of cheese on a hamburger, a court has ruled. [...] The fast-food chain argued this turned the hamburger into a cheeseburger, and so she should have charged more."

I haven't figured out the exact algebra yet, but I'm pretty sure an extra slice of cheese--with the employee-discount and all--plus the euro conversion--comes out to even less than seventeen Canadian cents in 2008.

Now, I know the recession's a pain. Corporate morals need to be upheld, regardless of circumstance; without order there is chaos, and all that.

I worked this summer under a number of different retail outlets, all the same company; one of my managers, to summarize, would be the kind of guy who would fire me over giving away a Timbit. He performed obsessively, keeping price tags up to date and managing to push product despite his genuinely awkward personality. The one time I can remember our closing the store together, I asked if we ought to sort the receipts in a certain way. He said no. I asked why. "Because it's not expected of me," he replied.

This is not a profound thought, but when the powers that be value protocol over circumstantial ethics, we should first ask if cultivating the attitude that "yes" never means "it depends" is maybe not the best way to run a business.

Maybe next time that bitch at Sears won't deny me my purchase if I'm short a nickel.

Google pulls out, China not pregnant

HI GUYS.

Little Sino-American business speculation for you today.

No doubt many of you have heard about Google's ultimatum to Beijing--quit asking us to censor our .cn portal results, or we'll pull up and leave the country, period--as a response to cyber-attacks into their private servers, possibly perpetrated by the government, possibly uncovering some moderately sensitive information about the Gmail accounts of some political dissidents. It's been hailed, predictably, as a triumph of ethics over profit, and a welcome return to Google's much-vaunted "Don't Be Evil" strategy; what's more, it's gotten the Western media excited because nobody has dared (so goes the story) to stand up to China before and it's fun to think of this event as a watershed.

I say, feihua [bullshit].

The story of Google in China is simple: compromises were made in order to gain access to a famously large and growing market, for obvious reasons. China has more users online than America has citizens, period. Chinese individuals are getting richer at a little under 10% per year, which means that those who are not the hundreds of millions of poor-ass farmers with no internet are raking in the disposable income like it's--well, it's unprecedented. So you can understand why when Google knocked on the door of the cadre whose job it is to tell giant foreign search engines what they have to do to get in on the pie, they were keen to play ball.

It's not obvious exactly how much ball they agreed to play. We know they censored their search results (which, incidentally, they do here too; check this out), but it's been suggested they also agreed to leave the spare key to a few important Gmail accounts under the mat. It seems to me the latter is not too far-fetched. But what's important is this: a security breach was allowed to occur, and when the PR people found out about it, they realized the optics of headlines like "Gmail Accounts Compromised in China, Yours Could Be Next" are a lot harder to swallow than those of "Chinese Political Dissidents Fucked Over, Chinese Government Still Evil and Has Nothing to Do With You". Given than Google had only managed about 25% of the search engine market share anyway, with 70% held by the established homebrew competition, and given that local servers are expensive and local users didn't generate as much ad revenue as expected, it seems sensible to me that they chose this moment to exit with a grand flourish and a slightly underhanded prestidigitation.

Google has put almost all its eggs in the "cloud computing" basket. I'm supposed to trust that my email, my calendar, my reading and purchasing habits, my documents, my finances, whatever the heck Wave is for, and someday my whole operating system are all safe and sound in Google servers across the world. If something happens to undermine that trust, maybe I switch back to using a more secure email, because I realize my online life is, actually, kinda sensitive. Maybe I don't want to end up like those Chinese dissidents, who trusted Gmail to be secure and are now up shit creek. So they make sure I never think of it that way. We all know the Chinese government does sketchy things, but only to its own people, right? Nothing to worry about out here in Google's home turf.

There's something about this deflection that unsettles me. By making sure we hear the story in terms we already understand and habitually ignore--political repression in China--Google's people have ensured that we don't see it in the terms that are relevant to our lives. Maybe that's the essence of effective misinformation: don't lie, exactly, but tell people the part of the story they already believe.

Anyway, that's it for me. Happy Googling!

Elvis Thrust: A Whimpering Introduction

So for about a month now I've hemmed and hawed. I've met most of you at this point but, whether it was the overwhelming argument about the hipster identity or the raging and torch-wielding sinophobia, I've been too nervous to post here. What if they think I'm lame? What if they think I'm not funny? What if Avatar wins an undeserved Oscar? The answer to all those questions has been the same--the end of the world, two years early.

I decided, then to just do a cop-out post as my first, a bit of stand-up that I did at King's College with some of the Picnicface peeps. To my credit, I came up with much of it in the half an hour before the show; to My Mom Thinks I'm Funny's credit, he punched up a significant number of these jokes. To his detraction, he yelled disparaging things throughout the performance, which he claimed was intentional and for my benefit; at one point, I told him to fall off a large rock onto a series of smaller, sharper rocks.

Hopefully that sets the scene.

--

So I'll start off by getting the race elephant out of the room--yes, I'm Nicaraguan. How do I get my skin to look so darned Asian, you ask? Bits of real Chinese people.

Anyway, I've always been awkward about sex. I think it all started when I was in my grade four computer class and I was trying to look up civil war history and I put in www.slavetrade.com, and out came porn, which was a real shock. It could also have been that I just didn't learn enough when I was young; last month, my friend finally told me what a tampon actually was. Apparently, it doesn't let women pee wherever and whenever they want to. I may or may not have been super jealous.

But all these things considered, the thing that I've always wanted, since I was three, is to be a sex columnist. Yes, so what if I'm a little unadventurous in bed; if a girl asks me to talk dirty to her, I would just say "I am not finding this entirely unpleasant", or "your boobs remind me of a funny story". But that's the point--I would put sex in tiny two-point font, and recommend the most conservative of positions. A sampling from Inter-of-course with Adrian Lee: "the next time your lady would like to apply the sex, consider being on top, or perhaps even the doggie-style.

But it's not for my lack of wanting to learn more, about this "sex". I've picked up every issue of Cosmo, not just because they tell me that I should be wearing boho chic this season, but because they tell me they know "what men want", and being a man, I'd like to know as well. The problem is, it's all really obvious things, like "WHAT TURNS YOUR MAN ON: you, naked!" or "WHAT YOUR MAN IS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR: if you touch his penis!" It's disappointing, really, albeit true.

Well, goodbye forever!

"Avatar" hated by Marines, the Vatican

In what is, for me, the best story of the year, Avatar has garnered criticism from liberals, conservatives, the Marine Corps, the Vatican and its own fans for being too white-washed, too critical, too stereotypical, too sacrilegious and too beautiful for mere humans, respectively.

And here I was thinking the plot was basic--what a fool I was! Turns out it's actually deeply offensive on a number of levels I could have never predicted. Oh well!

"I really have nothing to say, but I want the first post of 2010 all the same"

To quote Federico Garcia Lorca:

"Let's get crunk, 2010."