The Ubiquitous Grammar Cop

With all the hoopla and buzz surrounding leading up to President Obama's "SOTU Light" last night, very few media outlets failed to mention Karl Rove skipped his third House issued subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. The only major news that had anything to say, not to impugn other newspapers and blogs, was the Chicago Tribune with no mention of what Rove should have been doing instead. Representative John Conyers (D-MI), do the duty the Constitution and House rules say you have the power to do. Arrest Karl Rove for contempt of Congress.

The word for today is Asinine . Asinine (adj): Extremely stupid. The policy for a certain cellular company's prepaid minutes is asinine. Apparently, AT&T's policy of "prepaid" cell phone minutes, for those who choose not to have a contract, means that they have a contract whether they want to or not. You can purchase minutes for a prepaid cell phone account in $50, $75, or $100 increments. However, they have expiration dates: thirty days, ninety days, and one year respectively. Any unused balance at the end of that time period is lost (not really lost, but pure profit for AT&T). That, to me, is contrary to the notion of "prepaid".

In the face of unseasonably warm weather here in Chicago (59F and sunny at noon CST) I have one observation to make: If you are wearing shorts, a down jacket, and Ugg boots, it's probably still too cold for the shorts.

It's refreshing to see the President of the United States take questions from unscreened people.

One of the websites I frequent on a daily basis is Fark.com, a news aggregation site where people submit links to news stories. While getting my morning fix last Sunday, I came across this little gem . Ed Lasky asserts that Amazon's better than expected performance during the recent holiday season is a direct result of people's preference to stay at home to shop and to skirt oppressive sales taxes. Lasky openly wonders if high sales taxes (like in Cook County, Illinois - 10.25%) contributed to Amazon's success (comparatively speaking). I'd say it's possible, but highly unlikely. For example, there are some states, since sales tax is a locally generated revenue stream, that do not impose a sales tax. Oregon is a good example. Lasky admits he would like to see which regions contributed the most to Amazon's sales. Since he does not know for certain, he cannot make the claim that high sales taxes in places like Chicago, New York City, and other large cities contribu...

It looks like Tyler Durden is alive and well in Tuscon and works for Comcast.