If, like me, you have dogs in the house and a robot vacuum cleaner, this is a cautionary -- albeit hilarious tale (thanks, Tom, for sending the YouTube video below to me):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWMkOwq2qIU
Cats, on the other hand, seem to have figured out how to take advantage of these robot machines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewdbilSWjaM
So, if dogs are smart, cats are smarter. QED.
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More on... Human "I Queue" Deficit
Angie insists I relate these two incidents.
1) She was next in line at this supermarket checkout counter when a man -- holding a basket of groceries -- slid past and pointing to the woman customer in front, said softly, "I'm with her".
Unfortunately for him, she turned around and growled, "No, you are not!"
It was not his lucky day. Turns out that he was a habitual queue-jumper, for the checkout girl then said, "Please queue up, uncle, you are always doing this." Some days, the god of "I queue" smiles on decent folks.
2) Sadly, cruises where locals are in the majority -- those two/three/four day cruises to regional ports and especially the shorter ones billed as "Cruise to Nowhere" (an excuse to encamp in the casino once the ship is in international waters) -- will find their share of queue-jumpers. This problem becomes acute if ships' crew are uninterested in enforcing proper queueing, particularly during disembarkation procedures.
This is what we once witnessed after the ship had returned to Singapore: This low-life form posing as a human being barged his way to the front, dragging his wife and young son along. The wife, embarrassed, told him quietly they should have queued up. The man, with his young son watching him intently, yelled at her: "Wah lau, why must queue? We go off first, we get taxi first!"
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I'll start an occasional segment on "My Bad" -- words and phrases spotted in articles or ads that reflect sloppiness, or an attempt to be affectedly trendy (I had once blogged about the expression "my bad" as one such example of language usage that should never be allowed to catch on):
Example 1: "Conflicted about..."
Lee Huang spotted this one, in today's Sunday Times. Conflicted about? What's wrong with "undecided about" or "uncertain about"? Here's what one online site says about such usage:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/conflicted
Example 2 (also in The Sunday Times):
I am not sure one can improve cardio fitness that way. But, I would say such an outcome was more likely if the headline had read thus: "Improve cardio fitness with regular running".
After all, this was the original quote extracted from the story:
(If anyone is still puzzled as to what "runs" can mean, ask a gastroenterologist.)
Example 3: Bad ad
Just what is "7 Nature"?
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I have always enjoyed Get Fuzzy. But I think the cartoon strip that appeared today was in very poor taste. Any kind of jingoistic bashing -- be it US-bashing, China-bashing or whatever "bashing" -- is uncalled for:
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Finally, I hope Mr Abe heeds what this wise man says:
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