One of my multitude of peeves is the phrase “special characters.”
Somehow,
our lexicon has been corrupted by semiliterate middle-schoolers,
who have never learned that the name for ,.;: and so on is punctuation and/or symbol. Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond
was a special character. Period ain’t.
This week, Robert F. had the misfortunate to step into it, and observed
“What boggles my mind is that someone had to actively
choose to create a validation rule specifically for this.”
Saver Stewart was frustrated by Fido’s failure to refresh a field in their messages app.
“It isn’t reassuring when a major financial corporation can not count to zero correctly,” he fretted.
I figure they just reached zero and didn’t update every element on-screen immediately.
In an echo of earlier error’ds, an anonymous member of our Helvetian contigent reminds
us that Swiss Railway’s apps
(not to be confused with SwissRail’s Zoppas) sind immer noch schlecht. Sagt mann
“Ah, perfect! The Swiss Railways’ app is telling me that I’ll be there in NULL time 👌” Super!
“Even in the best families…” laments
Lucio Crusca , shaking his head sadly.
“This is WhatsApp Web since yesterday on my PC.”
Finally,
“I didn’t think my age would be a problem…” stammered junior Jake. The cutoff age must be 34.5. Patience, grasshopper.
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Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution received two amazing honors in 2006, winning both a Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. This was the second Pulitzer for Luckovich; his first was awarded in 1995. He had previously received the Reuben award for Editorial Cartooning in 2001, but this was his first time to be named the overall outstanding cartoonist by a group of his peers. The Reuben awards are distributed each year by the National Cartoonists Society and are considered professional cartooning’s highest honor.
Impressive as these achievements are, they are only the latest in a long line of awards for Luckovich. He was a runner-up for the Pulitzer in 1987 before garnering the 1995 win. In 1989, he won the Overseas Press Club’s award for the “Best Cartoons on Foreign Affairs for 1989,” and in 1991, he was awarded the National Headliners award for editorial cartoonists. In 1994, a Luckovich cartoon was selected by voters in a Newsweek magazine poll as one of the four best editorial cartoons of the year.
After freelancing and selling life insurance to make ends meet following his graduation from the University of Washington in 1982, Luckovich landed his first cartooning job at the Greenville News in South Carolina. After nine months at the News, Luckovich was hired by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where he stayed for four years before moving on to Atlanta.
Luckovich’s cartoons, syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate, appear in more than 350 daily publications, including The Washington Post,The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Denver Post, Newsday, New York Post, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Nashville Tennessean and the Houston Chronicle, and are reprinted regularly in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times.
Luckovich and his wife, Margo, have four children. His hobbies include exercising and collecting unique ties.
John Deering is chief editorial cartoonist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper. Five times a week, his cartoon comments entertain (or sometimes enrage) readers throughout Arkansas, in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
Winner of the National Press Foundation’s 1997 Berryman Award, Deering also gained top honors in the 1994 national John Fischetti Cartoon Competition and was the seven-time winner of the Arkansas Press Association’s Best Editorial Cartoonist award.
Deering’s work is collected in two books: Deering’s State of Mind (1990) and We Knew Bill Clinton … Bill Clinton Was a Friend of Ours (1993, with Vic Harville). He is a 14-year member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists.
Born in 1956 in Little Rock, Deering has been drawing since his childhood fascination with science fiction and dinosaurs — subjects he made into comic books. After studying art with Truman Alston, Deering focused on commercial and fine art at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Along the way, he found his strength in interlocking art with comment.
At the Democrat-Gazette, Deering advanced from layout artist to editorial cartoonist in 1981-82. His promotion to chief editorial cartoonist in 1988 made his cartoons the state’s best-known. Deering also creates the comic panel Too Much Coffee.
He and his wife, Kathy, have a daughter and two sons, and live in Little Rock. He still draws dinosaurs.
Check out his comic strips, Zack Hill and Strange Brew.
NEW YORK—Having scoffed in astonishment as they picked up the produce and examined it, Italian immigrants shopping in U.S. grocery stores issued a statement Thursday claiming these tomatoes, they no good. “A tomato supposed to be red—what this supposed to be?” said Gianfranco Padovani, who arrived in the United States this month and spoke on behalf of all Italian immigrants who were still accustomed to fresh San Marzano tomatoes harvested at the peak of ripeness and not yet familiar with the pale, bland American variety bred solely to increase its shelf life. “I eat this, I die by poison. This the trash section, no? You can take me to real grocery store in your car? My nonna, if I show her this tomato, she fall over dead. I send my mother picture, it make her weep.” At press time, the Italian immigrants were overheard asking what you supposed to do with mozzarella that look like this.
Gun Owner Explains Why He Needs Weapon To Protect Self From Gun He Currently Holding Against Own Head
“Trapped,” “toilet,” and “plane” are three words that, when put together in the same sentence, would make anyone with experience flying flinch with apprehension, and with good reason.
One passenger experienced the combination of those three words in real life during what could only be described as the crappiest flying experience ever after being trapped in the toilet of his plane for almost the entire journey.
“A passenger unfortunately got stuck inside the lavatory for about an hour,” SpiceJet, the airline responsible for the incident, said in a statement addressing the unintentional seat downgrade.
A passenger got trapped in a SpiceJet lavatory during a 1-hour-and-45-minute night flight from Mumbai to Bengaluru
The unnamed flyer reportedly went to use the lavatory shortly after takeoff on a 1-hour-and-45-minute night flight from Mumbai to Bengaluru on Tuesday (January 16), Indian Express reported.
However, when he tried to leave after doing his business, the door wouldn’t open due to a lock malfunction, effectively trapping the passenger inside the bathroom, as per the New York Post.
The crew and other passengers tried to help open the door from the outside but failed in their attempts, Indian Express reported.
The trapped traveler was subsequently condemned to the Indian low-cost airline’s John for the entirety of the flight. Quite the demotion from his 14D seat.
With the passenger reportedly panicking, the crew slid a note under the door, which read: “Sir, we tried our best to open the door; however, we could not. Do not panic.
“We are landing in a few minutes, so please close the commode lid and sit on it and secure yourself. As soon as the main door is open, an engineer will come.”
When the plane finally landed in Bengaluru, at around 3.42 am local time, the long-awaited engineers boarded the engine and broke open the door, rescuing the passenger from his smelly predicament.
The crew and other passengers tried to help open the door from the outside but failed in their attempts
Something’s in the air, as in the past month, other toilet-related incidents on planes have been occurring. Just last month, a New Zealand couple suffered a less-than-pleasant flight after sitting in a passenger’s urine during a 10-hour international flight from Bangkok to Sydney.
The Indian low-cost airline apologized and refunded the passenger for the inconvenience
The two Kiwis had flown from Bangkok, Thailand, to Sydney, Australia, en route to their motherland.
One of the passengers claimed to have used a soiled neck pillow for several hours “under the assumption that it was just a bit wet from water,” when the entire time, the pillow had been covered in human pee.
Before RESTful web services and JSON as a serialization format, XML was going to conquer the world. Circa 2001, I remember going to user's groups only to hear about how XML was going to allow legacy mainframes to be connected to modern applications (without discussing the fact that the legacy mainframe still needed maintenance and code support). These days, XML is (nearly) dead, and lighter-weight markup languages have replaced it, including JSON.
It's a delightful mix of stringly typed data (XML and JSON, I think we can agree, are different types), legacy code not being fully modernized, and fields being re-used. The exact kind of code you see in a codebase you inherit, you groan and grumble about, and then you pinch your nose and get back to work, because you know there are things that are much more urgent than fixing this.
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Ariana Grande’s new song addressing rumored controversies about her relationship with Ethan Slater has stirred mixed reactions and criticism, resulting in a significant loss of Instagram followers for the singer.
Ariana released her first solo song last year after a three-year hiatus. “Yes, and?” immediately topped the Global Spotify Chart with over 11 million streams on the day of its release, but it also amassed a significant amount of backlash.
The chart-topping song apparently refers to the controversy surrounding the singer’s romance with her Wicked costar, Ethan Slater.
Ariana Grande’s new song stirred mixed reactions and criticism, resulting in a significant loss of Instagram followers for the singer
Amongst the most controversial lyrics, one verse states: “Your business is yours and mine is mine.
“Why do you care so much whose d**k I ride?”
Online music encyclopedia, Genius, has explained that the lyrics were likely a response to the negative reactions Ariana has received since she was first linked with Ethan last July.
While Ariana and Ethan were first rumored to be dating, the 30-year-old singer had just split with her now ex-husband, Dalton Gomez, while Ethan had also recently separated from his wife, Lilly Jay, who had just given birth to their first child.
In a March 2023 piece by the Daily Mail, an anonymous source mentioned that Ariana and Ethan were “all over each other” at Michelle Yeoh’s Oscars Party.
In July of the same year, People confirmed the castmates had begun a relationship, at which point, there was no confirmation that Ethan had divorced his then-wife.
As per Page Six, sources close to Ariana and the 31-year-old SpongeBob SquarePants musical star firmly denied speculation that they had cheated on their respective former partners and instead claimed that they only began seeing each other romantically once they were both single.
Her new song “Yes, and?” is likely a response to the negative reactions Ariana has received since she was first linked with Ethan Slater
Nevertheless, the timing of their newly found romance has continuously been questioned, especially since Ethan and Ariana have been filming the musical adaptation of Wicked for the past three years.
Moreover, Lilly Jay publicly denounced Ariana, telling Page Six that she felt the singer was “not a girl’s girl.” She additionally told the Daily Mail, “I am focused on rebuilding a life for our son… This is what I am trying to do, and this is my only focus.”
Following a separate Page Six report that Ethan’s wife was “blindsided” by the actor’s relationship with Ariana, people online started labeling the 7 Rings hitmaker as a “homewrecker” and making fun of Ethan for his looks and past roles, particularly noting his physical resemblance to Ariana’s brother, Frankie Grande.
While Ariana and Ethan were first rumored to be dating, the singer had just split with her now ex-husband, while Ethan had also recently separated from his wife
Ariana and Ethan’s romance has seemingly continued to grow, sparking further backlash from several internet users.
There is no confirmation of who Ariana is referring to in “Yes, and?”, but many people have been speculating that she was making a jab at all the adverse reactions around her romance with Ethan.
While some fans have argued that Ariana had done nothing wrong, the former Nickelodeon star was also met with disappointment for her controversial lyric choices.
On X (formerly known as Twitter), people’s reactions were divided as a person wrote: “Can we just cancel #ArianaGrande for being a homewrecker.”
“Your business is yours and mine is mine,” Ariana sings
Another individual commented: “It’s truly disgusting how people defend Ariana Grande.
“She wasn’t lied to by Ethan about being single. She knew about the wife and child, she spent time with them.
“You don’t blame the woman if she didn’t know. Ariana chose to be a piece of sh*t. They’re both rotten and selfish.”
Ariana subsequently lost hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers this month. According to the analytics site SocialBlade, the singer has lost a total of 369,630 followers on Instagram since the start of January.
As a result of the controversy, the singer has lost a total of 369,630 followers on Instagram since the start of January
The data suggests that the vast majority of people who unfollowed Ariana did so after her song “Yes, and?” was announced on January 7.
In the past, the songstress had already been accused of “ruining” relationships in favor of herself.
Back in 2014, Ariana and rapper Big Sean went public with their relationship just months after his engagement to the late Glee star, Naya Rivera, ended.
You can watch the music video for “Yes, and?” below:
Ariana had also been accused of “stealing” Mac Miller, who had been in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart, Nomi Leasure.
In 2018, the singer embarked on a very high-profile but short-lived romance (and engagement) with Pete Davidson not long after he ended his two-year relationship with Cazzie David, according to SheKnows, growing speculations that Ariana had “stolen,” once again, another man from their girlfriend.
Some readers said Ariana’s “behavior” left a “bad taste in their mouths”
Our friend Argle has shared a great many stories with us. Today’s story is one that Argle relates secondhand, about one of Argle’s former students: Marie.
Marie was a prized student, and kept in touch with Argle after classes. At various points, they were co-workers at other companies, or when Argle founded his startup, Marie was one of the first hires. In between those points where their career paths converged, they kept in touch, even visiting each other at work.
For a few years, Marie ended up in Initech’s telecom division. Her office was not in the traditional cube farm, but a small room (with a door and everything!) buried in the basement, far from windows. It may have been a bit of a dank, ugly, cave, but Marie, like all of her fellow Morlocks, did what she could to make it more homey.
Given the era, and the specific computer-nerd subculture, that meant a lot of the ThinkGeek-style desk toys and posters. A Netwon’s cradle over there, a fossilized shark’s tooth there, and on the wall a Firefly poster sandwiched between a “Reunite Gondwonaland” poster and a “Pangean Liberation Front” poster. It wasn’t much, but it was a home away from home.
For months, everything was happy, or as happy as one can be in a basement cave in at Initech. At some point, a new manager was hired, took a tour of the basement, introduced himself, and shook everybody’s hand. Well, everybody’s hand but Marie’s.
Later that day, when she popped out of the Underdark to forage for lunch at the taco place down the street, she saw the new manager huddled up with the older managers, whispering to themselves around the coffee maker. When she passed by, they clammed up until she was back out of ear shot.
When Marie returned to her desk, there was an email waiting for her- she was to report to the office of her Two Levels Up boss immediately. That couldn’t be good. She dutifully trudged to that office. That triggered a call for all the other implicated managers on the team, and before long a half dozen people were crammed into this single office with stern looks on their faces.
“It’s come to our attention that you’ve been displaying… inappropriate items in your office.” “Flagrantly!” “Potentially offensive!” “Inappropriate for work, certainly, but also inappropriate for anywhere else!” “Blatantly political items are inappropriate for company owned spaces.”
The managers, in chorus, explained to her letter and verse exactly which sections of the employee manual she had violated, and exactly what those consequences were going to be. What they didn’t explain was how exactly she had violated them.
“I’m confused, what items am I displaying that are blatantly political?”
“Why, those posters!” New Manager said. “Not just blatantly political, but also offensive to many of your co-workers.”
Marie was aware that Firefly’s cancellation had been cause for much outcry amongst its fans, but didn’t see how that was political- and then she realized that it was the other two posters: “Reunite Gondwonaland” and “Pangean Liberation Front” that had drawn their ire.
Marie could have, at that point, defended herself. She could have explained the joke (which always makes it funnier), and attempted to explain geology and continental drift to a horde of managers that had already worked themselves into a frenzy over things they didn’t understand. And while she would have been right, it certainly wouldn’t have won her anything, and would likely have made the situation worse.
So instead, she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I’ll take them down.” After a little more scolding, she was released to go back to her cave, where she did what she promised, packing the posters neatly into the original packing tubes they’d come in. And after that, she touched up her resume- it wasn’t going to be hard to find a place where she could express herself “politically”.
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Being from a small-ish town in Michigan, I feel like my high school senior prank of stealing the local Big Boy statue and putting it on top of the commentator’s booth at the football field qualifies as a “small town” thing.
Small towns have their quirks, and that’s for better and worse (but mostly better):
In cities all across America, private enterprise is driving poor and middle-class families out of their own towns.
In cities all across America, an infiltration of private enterprise wealthy investors, developers and bankers is driving poor and middle-class families out of their own towns.
What’s at work here is the relentless financial shove of high-dollar gentrification. House by house, block by block, moneyed interests suddenly (and often secretly) buy up properties, bulldozing modest family homes to erect sprawling edifices for the rich. It’s a profiteering money grab that intentionally prices out regular homebuyers. Worse, it also artificially skyrockets property taxes for the area’s longtime homeowners, forcing them to sell out and leave town.
This financial whirligig is enormously destructive to a community’s crucial sense of fairness and… well, community. For one glaring example, look at who likely does NOT live in your city: schoolteachers, fire fighters, police, nurses, utility crews and others who’re essential to making any city work.
If the so-called “free market” can’t (or won’t) provide affordable spaces so these families can “come home,” where they belong, then the community itself must step up to meet the need with creative public initiatives.
The good news is that many cities are doing just that, including where I live. Fed up with losing teachers who endure spirit-sucking, hourlong commutes from distant suburbs, Austin’s school board recently created its own affordable housing arm. It’s starting to build hundreds of rental homes affordable to teachers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and other school employees. In addition, the district has formed a “public facility corporation” that partners with local developers and groups like Habitat for Humanity to build and sell family homes at prices within reach of the city’s school employees.
Housing is not only a basic human need but also a community essential that can’t be left to the whims and greed of developers.
Martin Luther King Jr. Didn’t Just Dream, He Organized!
It’s time once again for America’s annual sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” in celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. As even schoolchildren know, he famously had a dream. His dream was that over the long arc of history, America will someday achieve racial harmony — if Black people will stop being pushy about racial injustice.
Oh, wait — that’s the right wing’s current whitewashed version of King’s dream, scrubbing out his condemnation of brutally racist white leaders and institutions (which still repress Black progress and foment racial hatred). And far from meekly waiting on “the arc of history,” King rallied people to take immediate action, calling it “the fierce urgency of now.”
He sought “a grand alliance of Negro and White (to) eradicate social evils (that) oppress both White and Negro.” At the time of his assassination, he was actively forging that populist coalition to battle plutocratic wealth.
Indeed, King knew the history he sought to revive. The post-Civil War Populist Movement, he said, “began awakening the poor White masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that (both) were being fleeced by (Southern aristocrat interests).” That movement, he noted, intended to write a black-white voting bloc “to build a great society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away.”
But the unifying, democratic promise of Populism, King rightly explained, so terrified the aristocracy of wealth that its leaders made it “a crime for Negroes and Whites to come together as equals at any level.” Thus moneyed elites effectively killed the people’s Populist party in the 1890s — but not the people’s Populist spirit.
So rather than merely celebrating a birthday, let’s recommit to King’s real dream of a multiracial, democratic Populism.
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, “Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow,” Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots.
He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations and on the web.
Extreme ironing is not your average daily chore; it’s a thrilling, heart-pounding, and wrinkle-defying sport that takes the mundane act of ironing to the absolute maximum. In extreme ironing, daring individuals take their ironing boards and irons to the most unexpected and adrenaline-pumping locations imaginable and make photos to share online. The best of the best get the honor to call themselves extreme ironing champions. Scroll down to see the best examples and check out Extreme Ironing 101 book if you want to lear the art of this weird sport!
If you would like to participate in extreme ironing yourself, but don’t know where to begin, check out Extreme Ironing 101 book on Amazon for tips and tricks! Please note that this site is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate affiliate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Andy found this simple function in a C project he’s working on.
voidclearVal(int x) {
x = 0;
}
This is a thing of beauty, right here. From the very first premise, the function is useless: set an integer to zero. It’s not even clearer about its intent than the original one liner- arguably it’s less clear.
But it also has the benefit of not doing anything. Whoever wrote this function perhaps intended it to take a pointer. But as written, this just creates a local variable called x, which starts with whatever value the caller passed in, and sets the value of the local variable to zero. Nothing outside the scope of this function gets changed.
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