Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society.

The article in question is about five silly slogans for tech companies. Check it out.

I especially agree that Google’s slogan of Don’t Be Evil isn’t exactly the slogan of a for-profit company. I don’t see how Google can not be evil, for some values of evil. Check the onion for related content.

Now it’s important to realize that by “best intuition” I mean, “my best guess” or “whichever team has a cooler sounding name” or “I’m feeling perverse so I’m picking Old Dominion over Duke in the Elite Eight”. I have no real knowledge of any of these teams; I’m not a basketball fan. That doesn’t prevent me from doing my bounden duty to waste time during the month of March and contribute to the lack of productity nationwide.

My intuition bracket has Ohio State, Butler, West Virginia, and Villanova in the Final Four with Villanova defeating Ohio State in the championship. Yes, I’m prejudiced against #1 seeds this year.

My coinflip bracket has an amusing set of matchups. Indeed, Old Dominion defeats Duke in the elite eight, as I alluded to above however OD then loses to UTEP in the final. Yes, ladies and gents, UTEP is going all the way!

Coinflip rounded out the rest of the final four with Kansas and Missouri. So I’ve got a twelve seed defeating an eleven seed in the championship after defeating the one seed from the Midwest (Kansas). Missouri is the ten seed from the East. If coinflip gets it right, I’ll be impressed.

We’ve discussed the thing in the bag several times in the last seven years, saying that we really should do something about it. Well, I’m doing something about it. We’re getting the blasted thing cleaned and boxed for preservation.¹

I called around to a few places today to see what the nominal charge would be for a wedding dress cleaning and boxing. Everyone on the phone was very nice to me but ladled lots of caveats over the conversation by saying that wedding dress cleaning cost has a floor but no ceiling depending on the complexity of the dress. This makes sense, however I was just trying to get some idea so if they would give me a ballpark estimate, I would be most grateful.

Here is an almost verbatim conversation from the first place I called:

Me: “So if you could just ballpark the cost for me, I’d really appreciate it.”
Them: “Cleaning and preservation starts at $450″
Me: BOOM!
Them: “Are you ok?”
Me: BOOM!
Them: “Sir?”
Me: “I’m sorry, but my head just exploded.”

Wow. I knew it wasn’t going to be cheap, but $450 is a significant fraction (I think something like 2/3) of the original cost of the dress. Holy SHIT! leaps to mind. Thankfully, the place I called first was apparently the top end. That’s what I get for calling the place in Dunwoody first. Others were more what I sort of had in mind, ranging from $175 up to $300.

The lesson here, for me at least, is that wedding dress cleaning and preservation should be built into the cost of the wedding, if not the dress itself. Bridal shops should make that a value-added service. If nothing else, it would keep their dress from being stuff in a bag for seven years.

We have joked at times that it would almost be more proper for us to be Dr. and Mr. Bowie, but I digress.

Where am I going with this? I was doing an ego-search today and came across the following engagement announcement: Capt. Ruhsam, Fiancee Plan Wedding in China:

A January wedding at the home of Maj. Gen. and Mrs. John P. Lucas, Nanking, China has been planned by Miss June Mewshaw and Capt. Harry Erwin Ruhsam, grandson of Mrs. William Ruhsam, New London, Wis.

The bride-to-be, daughter of Col. and Mrs. Harry C. Mewshaw, Nanking, is a graduate of the University of Arizona, where she affiliated with Kappa Alpha Theta. Capt. Ruhsam is a member of Alpha Sigma Phi and a graduate of Iowa State University.

The couple will honeymoon in Hong Kong and live in Nanking.

In it, there are seven people mentioned: three men and four women. The only woman who receives the benefit of a name is the bride-to-be. Everyone else is Mrs. Husband’s-name.

For contrast, here’s an announcement I just now pulled from the AJC:

Ben and Paula Team of Snellville, Georgia, are proud to announce the engagement of their daughter Stacey Elizabeth Team to Robert Vincent Scott, son of George and Betsy Scott of Alpharetta, Georgia. The couple became engaged on November 28, 2009 at their favorite park in Milledgeville, Georgia where they both attended Georgia College and State University.
Robert is the grandson of Mary and Vincent Bode of Raleigh, North Carolina and the late Robert and Dorothy Scott of West Union, Iowa. Stacey’s grandparents are Ben and Helen Team of Lexington, South Carolina.
The couple will wed in early fall in the company of family and friends.

This is progress. Let’s keep it up, people.

By the way, Congratulations to Stacey and Robert!

Last year, I had the privilege of randomly having read three of the five nominated novels. I made up the other two in quick order. This year, I haven’t read much that might get placed on the ballot. The only book I’ve read that I would consider for this year’s Hugo nomination was Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, but we’ll see. I hear that China Miéville’s The City & The City is worthy, but the Library does not have a copy yet (I’ve also been making an effort to cut down on the number of purchased books. I love paperback swap!)

Once the nominations come out, I’ll either hit up my friends around here who might have the novels, or do some more intensive library searching. After all, I believe I have friends and acquaintances who live in every county and city in the Atlanta Metro area. I can probably convince someone to borrow me a copy of the novel I’m looking for.

On another note, my Hugo Novel Reading Project is coming along. I’ve read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin (didn’t like it) and To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer (liked it, but not enough to read the sequels). I also added Gateway (liked it) by Frederick Pohl to the list. Then there was Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. I’ve got no idea why that book won the Hugo. I mean, it was an ok novel, but best novel of 1998? The competition (none of which I’ve read) must be terrible. Then there was Hominids by Robert Sawyer which I just thought was weird (and preachy). I started to read the Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon but couldn’t get into it. I’m very strict nowadays about books that don’t engage me.

I’ve had a good run of past-year’s Hugo novels this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to add this year’s Hugo Nominated books without too much trouble.

We went to see They Might Be Giants last night, opened by Jonathan Coulton. This was both a fun night and an exceptionally long one.

Fun because I got to hang with friends having pizza and beer prior to the concert and enjoying the music during. Long because I was/am sick as the proverbial dog and was having difficulty not just sitting against a wall and listening to the drums in my own head.

Beyond the cold, the concert was a lot of fun. Jonathan Coulton’s music is fun and TMBG’s stuff is also wacky and wild. We were treated to two different sets of music by sock puppets. How often can you say that?

The picture above was taken after TMBG asked everyone to pull out their various video-capable electronic devices and record the song (one of the sock puppet songs). You can see all the various screens lit up.

Therefore, off I went to Macy’s! Macy’s was the store of choice because it’s local and I can walk in and actually look at the china patterns to be sure I’m getting the right thing.

Before you say to me, “Well, Bill. Why didn’t you just order a standard place setting,” I will say to you that when we first set up the china pattern for our wedding registry, we discovered that we liked the standard place setting except for the salad/dessert plate that came with it. That particular plate was (and still is) kind of fugly and we did not want it in the house. So we substituted a different salad plate that was an option. This worked very well for the two or three settings we received as a part of our wedding presents (Thanks, everybody!).

Fast forward to 2010. This easy-order system is apparently no longer in place. As a savvy internet consumer, the first thing I did before trooping off to a brick and mortar Macy’s was to check online for the setting. I discovered that while you can, yes very easily, order a standard place setting of Vintage Jewel for home delivery, they didn’t tell you what actually came inside said setting! We do not want fugly plates, so I figured I’d go to Macy’s when it was convenient and, you know, ask a flesh and blood person.

What I found is that (in defense of the personnel I’m about to rail against) china patterns are complicated, shifty things which change almost daily (the bastards). I also found that the Macy’s staff at my local store didn’t have the first clue about how to help me, a guy who knows what he needs, but not the language in which to communicate it. “No, I don’t know if it’s the bread and butter plate. No, I’m not sure what precise items are in the place setting. I want the non-fugly plate. You know, this one [points]. Is that in the place setting or is it this one [points]?” This was a small sample of my enventually unhelpful conversation. The first time this happened to me was last month when I happened to be at our local mall. The second time was yesterday when I had some time to kill and figured I could check this particular errand off my list at a different store. Both times were unsuccessful in the goal of actually ordering the damn place settings.

The woman who I dealt with yesterday (we’ll get back to her and her cohort in a second) told me that while the place setting wasn’t on sale ($186 current price) it might be on Wednesday. I asked her if it was actually going to be on sale on Wednesday and she told me that she did not know, that it was the price-fixer people who would know. “Ok, can you ask them?”

Apparently not.

At this point, I politely (really!¹) expressed my frustration with two unfruitful trips to Macy’s and the women, to their credit, did jump into some sort of sales-force hyperspace to attempt to appease me. They chased around and determined that the place setting with non-fugly plate was indeed the new “standard” setting. They also determined that no, the settings would not be on sale on wednesday (using some sort of sales-force zen that I wasn’t party to).

I also found that Macy’s stores and Macys.com are two different entities that compete with each other. Or at least, that’s the way it came across to me. Woman #1 told me that if the online Macys.com had a price different from theirs they would match it if I could screenprint the price and bring it in.

Why in the world would I not order it online in that case? I didn’t ask that question.

At this point, I just wanted to leave. These ladies had helped me out and I was not going to buy anything. However, they started pulling sales tactics on me to not let me go. Usually I can excuse myself out of these scenarios with tact but I’ll have to hand it to Woman #1 and Woman #2, they were good at clinging to a potential sale. At last, I had to say (basically), “I’m leaving. Good bye,” and just walk away.

So now I’m the proud owner of two more place settings, ordered online because it was way cheaper (even with shipping, and I’d have “spent” that amount of shipping just to go pick them up at a store) and because I was done dealing with Macy’s² sales staff.

I’m not entirely sure what I learned from this event. A lot of my frustration can be summed up as “shit happens” and/or it was situational depending on my mood and the sales staff’s mood. I found it to be a pain that I couldn’t get a straight answer online as to what came in the standard place setting. If nothing else, I got practice dealing with people in a calm and rational manner¹ which can only help me in the long run.

²: How to make “Macy’s” Possesive. You don’t.

This website, brought to my attention by the Bad Astronomer, is just way too much of a time sink. I can sit and play for hours. It is a solar system simulator which lets you play with the initial conditions with up to four different bodies!

As Phil Plait says, start with one of the default solar systems and tinker with it. It’s fun. I especially liked trying to craft odd slingshot trajectories.