"We have a saying here: the odds are good, but the goods are odd."

Thus started a hilarious story about an outback mayor seeking "ugly women" to come to his town - where the ratio of men to women is 5:1 - because they would have a good chance of catching a man there. He neglected to mention, as the quote above indicates, that the catch might not be so appealing, even to appeal-challenged ladies.

In other skin-deep news, the story that recently came out about "fat people are healthy!" is driving me nuts, because it's not true. The study that is being quoted to justify this misleading headline found that 50% of fat people had fewer risk factors for heart disease and diabetes than they had expected (ie: only one, not two or three). Fewer DOES NOT equal healthy, it just means not as unhealthy. They also found that 30% of thin people had more risk factors than they had expected (ie one or two, instead of none). Which also doesn't mean that thin people are less healthy than healthy fat people, it means that unfit thin people are less healthy than fit thin people, to which I say "well, duh." All this because, apparently, journalists don't understand statistics, and people who are a few pounds overweight are really touchy about it.

Get some exercise, don't eat a lot of fat and sugar, go on lots of walks, and get lots of veggies. Pay more attention to fitness, rather than weight, but pay some attention to weight too - just don't obsess about it. This is not radical.

In other news, my day started out with my computer refusing to boot into Windows because SP3 had borked my display drivers. An hour later, I get the news that a project that I've been helping with is going to be delayed ("soft-launched"). Fur flies. And because I was in training yesterday, I didn't get to do anything about it until now, even though I sneaked out and attempted to make clandestine phone calls to systems people who were - wisely, because I was pissed - avoiding me.

I've been The Depressed lately. I'm feeling better now. Carry on.

WalMart in Quebec has finally been forced to actually treat their employees like human beings! Thanks to the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, after refusing to contract fairly with unionized members, WalMart found a contract imposed on them by the courts:

A spokesman for Wal-Mart said the company is unhappy with the decision and it is "incompatible" with the company's way of doing business.

Where the company's way of doing business should read the company's strong-arm, worker-exploiting, human-rights-abusing, advantage-taking, rapacious profit-mongering, backs-of-the-working-class-walking, employee terrorizing way of doing business. And yes, a fair contract indeed is incompatible with those things.

My heart, it bleeds. Poor WalMart! Forced to not adhere to their evil business model! Required to rethink their entire "get rich off the pain of others" approach to centralized monopolistic practices! GEE.

Now let's watch the right wing whinge and moan about this. Because the courts imposing contracts is OK when it's a 0% raise for CN Rail workers forced back to their jobs, but not OK when it's a private company finally getting its comeuppance.

h/t pogge.

Hey, I don't know if I'm the first to point this out, but given what happened in Toronto on Sunday what with the fireballs and the failures of multiple safety and backup systems, aren't we all feeling safer about Harper's ordering the restarting of the Chalk River Reactor against the advice of the Nuclear Safety Commission in January, and subsequent firing of Linda Keen, the person who dared implement the recommendations of people slightly more qualified than the Prime Minister in the area of high-energy particle physics?

I know I am.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'm late to the game in discovering Sarah Slean. She's been around for awhile, she's Canadian, and she's wonderful. Her last album was produced by one Hawksley Workman who is himself pretty high on the awesome scale: between one and awesome he's awesome. All in all, awesome.

Sarah has a new album out, The Baroness. She's got a really great, old-fashioned kind of chanteusey voice, and really belts it out. She also really has a knack for the tricky chord change, and it never fails to delight. This song is just a taste, one of my faves off the new album. This one is from her previous album, and it's just darned fun. Go out and buy both, you definitely won't regret it.

(Note, files will disappear in a few days.)

Because I'm effectively doing two jobs, one of which is grant-funded, I downloaded and installed Klok so that I could keep track of my time. It's built on Adobe AIR, which I have to say I'm not crazy about, and the software could use some UI tweaking, but on the whole it's pretty good.

As I was wrapping up my day's work, I checked my stats. I've done 6.5 hours work in total. I was like "Hmm, not so bad, counting a lunch break." Then I realized that I didn't actually install and start using the software until noon.

And on that note, I'm GOING HOME NOW.

Inflatable dog turd sculpture escapes Swiss museum, wreaks havoc.

Here is a map of my del.icio.us links. Neat! This pretty much sums up the last year in one fell swoop.

From Wordle.