At the end of each season it’s time to clear out the old stock and bring in the new. This is especially annoying at this time of year when stores feel compelled to clear out the winter boots, which are only just becoming useful, to make room for racks of bathing suits and other summer accoutrements that won’t be needed by most of us for at least another five months. Herewith is my contribution to the year-end clearance sale.
1. Today I turned exactly 511,209 hours old. Of the useless things you can learn from the internet, this ranks right up there with what Kim Kardashian wore to the basketball game. Except of course learning how old you are in minutes (30,673,023 in case you were interested). Far too many of those minutes were spent doing things that definitely did not get me closer to enlightenment, earn me any money, or add any other tangible value to my life. Airport security lines, I’m talking to you.
2. I have seen various non-congruent data points with respect to the amount of the internet that is dominated by cats – 15% of content, 15% of searches, 15% of waking hours etc. The fact that the ‘15%’ number recurs frequently makes me rather dubious that anyone really knows how much internet real estate cats are (literally) sitting on and even more importantly, why cats and not dogs or some other animal. The answer is of course that dogs try too hard.
3. Somebody (or a bunch of somebodies) was able to land a space vehicle on a moving comet earlier this year. This indeed would qualify as rocket science. Given the amount of things that are not considered rocket science that didn’t get done, like deciding what kind of transit a ‘world class’ city should have, there are many people out there not pulling their share of the weight. Sign me up for a spot when they colonize that comet. It’s got to be more civilized than this place.
4. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt now wants to be called John (I assume the Jolie-Pitt part still stands). I think this falls into the category of uber-1st world problems. Maybe even the most ‘soggy baguette-cold latte (no it wasn’t meant to be an iced cappuccino)-scratched my new iPhone’ of all first world problems. This one takes a bit of analysis to fully dissect though. First, I think any jury of my peers (but perhaps not a jury of Angelina’s peers – and does she even have a full jury of peers even available on this planet? We may need to go to the comet for that one) would consider ‘Shiloh’ to already be a gender neutral name, if gender identification is your concern. Second, in the Jolie-Pitt universe, I would think that John is also a non-gender specific name. So it is very unclear what objective the child-previously-known as Shiloh is trying to achieve. No doubt all will be revealed in next month’s National Enquirer.