Thursday miscellanea #43

• I love Independence Day for all it symbolizes.  That having a trunk full of explosives and beer is reasonable and customary rocks, too.
• Sometimes when I go to Wikipedia, I find the page locked for edits.  There’ll be a little padlock icon in the upper right corner, and frequently there is also a note.  If you use Wikipedia, you’ve seen these too, I’m sure.  It always gives me a chuckle that (at least) two competing factions of somebodies, somewhere, are all pissed off about Vietnamese cuisine or the War of the Roses.
• To all offenders:  please stop adding adjectives like critical and dire to emergency.  Emergency is a splendid word and needs no intensifier.  If you think it does, then perhaps you’re overusing it.
• I thought Gran Torino was just okay.  I enjoyed some of the performances, but Eastwood’s lunged toward hammy a time or two.  Also, it was one of the more off-the-shelf plots I’ve seen in quite some time.
• You know how on some gas station signs, the 3s and 8s are a bit stylized, such that the bottom half of the numeral is a little larger than the top half?  Doesn’t it drive you nuts when someone sticks ‘em in the sign wrong side out and upside down, such that the big half is on the top?  Can’t they see that?
• A Corner reader had an interesting exploration in the online Roget’s Thesaurus this week.  Given “synonyms” for liberal include enlightened, humanitarian, intelligent, rational, unbiased, unprejudiced, and unbigoted.  “Antonyms”?  Try conservative and narrow-minded.  Nice, eh?  To be sure, the political spectrum is broadly populated with the insufficiently mentally engaged.  But some of the most rigid, closed-minded, unthinking, unyielding, intolerant “thinkers” I know are raging leftists.  This list of “synonyms” is absurd.
• “We’re not gonna just give ya $750,000, Jerry.” RIP.

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