It's Only A Paper Rose

Recently, I read someone's observation about the inverse relationship between the relative importance of a binary choice and the vitriol with which they would defend it. Which is to say, when someone has two options (toilet paper over/under, HD DVD/Blu-Ray, one/two spaces after a period), the less important their ultimate choice is, the more earnestly and angrily they will defend it.

At the time, I thought it was a cute koan, but a bit simplistic and not likely to apply in most situations.

Now, having read (or started to read, and ended up skimming) a good fifteen pages of people arguing over the superiority of Macs vs. PCs (with the obligatory mention of Linux in there too), I'm starting to believe it...

W00t! My WordPress blog entry about inherited male homosexuality made it to the WordPress front page queue, with the associated boost in hits.

Frankly, I have no idea what the criteria are for a front-page-queue post - apparently it has something to do with the tagging system, as one of my more multi-faceted personal entries was featured there because I'd mentioned a car in it and tagged it "cars". I assume it's an automated system of some sort.

But, hey. Even though I doubt any of them will stick around, when you're a lonely self-absorbed blogger like me it's always cool to get 100+ hits over a couple days. And I even got a couple of positive comments from random people, which does even more to validate my existence. So, hurrah!

For those who don't use Hotmail, a little background: In the corner of your email interface they stick a little "MSN Today" section, with links to various articles on MSN, which seem to be disproportionately concerned with love, celebrities, and cars (which, I guess, are the major concerns of their target demographic). I tend to think of it as more of a women's magazine cover than anything else, since aside from the occasional odd news story there's rarely anything of substance there (though admittedly, there have been some good advice columns and whatnot). However, since the space is limited, the headlines are often truncated with sometimes interesting results. One of my favorite ones a while back was "Tarantino, Coppola a couple", which to my intentionally-non-celebrity-following eye, made it sound like Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola had shacked up together in Massachusetts. Which was probably the point, but was still amusing.

In any case, the relentless fluffiness of the links ("5 ways to tell if he's the one!", "Scoop: Jessica Simpson is dumb!") kind of grates on me at times, so when I saw the truncated "Guys: 10 ways to tell...", I tried to think of some more useful or interesting ends to the headline, as opposed to the actual ending. Here are some of the ones I came up with:

--Guys: 10 ways to tell if you have prostate cancer
--Guys: 10 ways to tell your fianceé about your Severus Snape fetish
--Guys: 10 ways to tell if your wife wants you to wash your socks
--Guys: 10 ways to tell the polishe ociffer that you only had one marshini
--Guys: 10 ways to tell your family that you're as queer as a $3 bill
--Guys: 10 ways to tell your girlfriend that a bouncing plastic dinosaur egg is really a romantic gift
--Guys: 10 ways to tell if your boss is a sadistic bastard
--Guys: 10 ways to tell you're an evolutionary misfit and should remove yourself from the gene pool
--Guys: 10 ways to tell you're about to receive a thorough ass-kicking

Google Video is one of the best sources of amusing pointlessness to hit the web since Flash was invented. First it was "Two Dorks and the Backstreet Boys", then it was the Something*Positive fanfilm...now this.

Ryu and Chun Li go at it...salsa style...