Obama's Plastic Surgery

Even prior to his inauguration, Obama has managed to implement a successful economic stimulus program for our nation's plastic surgeons. The botox biz is up between 200 and 300 percent driven by folks getting ready for the festivities in DC. All the frozen smiles you see at the swearing in ceremony won't be from the cold weather. Don't believe me? Read it yourself.

• • •

My wife and I moved last summer and when we arrived at our new place, we had to get busy finding new jobs. I registered with a bunch of the online job banks and placement websites. One of these was Beyond.com which makes the following claims:

The right people. The right skills.
The right location. Right now.

My background is in teaching, writing, editing and quality assurance. I was thrilled last week when I got an email "instant job alert" from Beyond.com:

Dear Raymond,
We wanted to notify you immediately about a new job posting that may fit your interest and skill set. Please review the information below. You can easily access the job description by clicking on the link provided.

The job they so breathlessly needed to call my attention to? Pool boy. Well, actually pool manager. It seems Beyond.com hasn't seen me in a bathing suit, nor read my resume.

• • •

Tell a lie enough times and people will believe it. It worked for the Nazis. It's working for the global warming doomsayers. A NASA scientist is warning that we have less than four years to reverse this so-called man made climate change.

NASA scientist Jim Hansen is warning about rising oceans etc. I'm not even going to call him on the facts that ice packs are growing and the earth is cooling. Let's assume, for a moment that the oceans do rise. They won't rise overnight, it will take considerable time. People will move out of the low lying areas. Maybe people will get out of Bangladesh where about every other year thousands die due to flooding. There have been plenty of human migrations in this history of mankind. There will be more.

• • •

When high schoolers read Orwell's 1984, is it seen as tragic irony? Is it possible to write books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 anymore? With security cameras on nearly every corner of our major cities and politicians employing armies of spin doctors. It doesn't seem like disturbing fiction about our future is disturbing anymore.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Apologies to Herb Caen

ROUX CONFESSIONS: I'll admit reading the comments made on Internet news stories. So witty and enlightening. Regular Oscar Wildes most of them. Found one guy making comments whose screen name was "your an idiot." Ah, public schools... Completely hooked on honkey-jocks Rick and Bubba in the morning and, truth be told, I only understand about every third word.

MICHELIN (MAN) GUIDE: How's this for culture: Tuesday, Ben Stein's "Expelled"; Wednesday, the Met's HD broadcast of Massenet's "Thais"; and Friday the high school's staging of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" in the gym/multi-use room. Mix up the lead characters from these three productions and you've got the makings of a memorable nightmare... Of course, prior to the Twain, I had to take my lovely wife out to a little Italian place I know, The Olive Garden.

PHIL HER UP: Bought gas at Kroeger's. Twenty-five cents a gallon higher than a week ago. A bit later I saw a picture of the Saudis parachuting $3 million dollars onto a hijacked oil freighter to pay off Solmali pirates. I'd like to see a pie chart showing where our gas dollar goes. I'm thinking a pretty good slice is going to feed swashbuckling Somalis at this point. Another question: who polls better, the Somali pirates of the Saudi sheiks? To me it's a toss up.

NAME PHREAK: The New York Times ran an op-ed essay making the point that cocaine use among white teenagers is some four times higher than among black teens. The author? Charles M. Blow.

I SAID I'M SORRY: OK, I took a swipe at The Olive Garden a couple of paragraphs ago. (Or was I taking a swipe at myself? Not important.) But today I had the leftover lasagna for lunch and it was tops. So, Olive Garden, if you're reading this, please accept my apologies.

Google from "a" to "z"

I'm not sure exactly what I was doing, but the other day I did a Google search for the letter "D." What came up as the first hit? The wikipedia entry for the Democratic Party.

Hmmmm.

I decided to do a Google search for the letter "R." No Republican Party. I scrolled through the first few pages of "R" results. No entry for the Republican Party. Don't believe me? Here are the results:

...and we've always been lead to believe that there's a huge right wing conspiracy. Hah!

This little exercise piqued my curiosity just a smidgen so I did Google searches for every lower case letter of the English alphabet. The results were at times quirky, unexpected, totally expected, and just so-so. Here they are:

• A HTML links. Obama speech. Don't have much use for either.
• B Wikipedia, second letter in the Latin alphabet.
• C Speed of light and lots of Citigroup stuff. Interesting fact: Citigroup is burning through taxpayer money at the speed of light.
• D Democratic party.
• E Natural log and E! Online.
• F Ford Motor Company. The only automaker not on the dole. I will remember this next time I go new car shopping. (Cue laugh track)
  
• G Surprise! Gmail scores the coveted first spot. Second goes to Wikipedia on the Latin letter G. Seems like they missed the spot on this one.
  
• H Planck's constant and Wikipedia Hydrogen. I'm thinking Planck's constant doesn't get a lot of hits.
• I Apple's iPod and iTunes at the top then Wikipedia Latin...
• J Wikipedia Latin J
• K Boltzmann constant and Wikipedia K. BTW the unknown (to me) label of K Records ranked above K Mart by one spot on the list.
• L LaTeX project. Where's Wikipedia's Latin L for crying out loud?!
• M The movie "M" (1931) which starred Peter Lorre. I have no gripe here. Also, Wikipedia is back with the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet.
• N Nitrogen, the Wikipedia entry. OK that makes sense. We also learn from Wikipedia that, "N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet." Don't know how I've made it this far in life without that pearl of wisdom.
• O O, The Oprah Magazine. Anyone surprised? Beats out number two—and one of my favorite gasses—oxygen, and another name from the theatrical world, who I hope and pray outlasts Oprah: Othello.
• P Wikipedia Latin alphabet.
• Q Wikipedia, Semitic sound value.
• R R-project website. Something to do with statistical programming. Wikipedia runs a distant third here.
• S Craigslist. Yeah, that's right, Craigslist. You explain it to me. Also on the first page of search results: Victoria's Secret. I guess it just takes two S's to rank highly here...or maybe not. With that logic Guess Jeans should have beat them both.
• T The website for public transit in Boston. Wha?
• U After a long hiatus, Wikipedia is back with an alphabet listing.
• V Is for Visa. No Mastercard. No American Express. No Discover. Are people really sitting down at the computers and saying themselves, "Gee, I wonder how I can get a Visa card?" Hello, go look in your mailbox, moron.
• W Interesting. Our second movie. Oliver Stone's "W" (2008). Do you think it will still be listed first in another 78 years like the Peter Lorre movie "M"? And let's face it, shouldn't President Bush get the number one spot here?
• X Hmmm. What would you expect to find here? You'd be wrong. "X The Band" scored the top spot. The kind of scoring that gets XXX ratings didn't show on the first page at all. You know Google is messing with this search big time.
• Y Huge surprise here: Yahoo! And Yahoo! mail took the number two spot. If Yahoo! and Microsoft ever pull off the merger, it'll be, "Hello page 47 of search results!"
  
• Z And to end this pointless list, Wikipedia's back on top, beating out the much faster and sexier 2008 Nissan Z.