A blog about stuff. Mostly.
In a recent post I raised the question “How is an economic policy ‘business friendly’ when it leads you a massive stock market crash and hundreds of thousands of layoffs?”
Here’s a Newsweek article with more detail about the stock performances of companies (retailers particularly) under “business friendly” and “non-business-friendly” presidents.
Congratulations on your World Series victory. Now cheer up, willya.
If you think about it, the fact that the consumer confidence index drives the economy is sorta one of the reasons we’re buggered to begin with.
For my money it’s Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC. Hilarious and poignant. In each episode he visits a failing and dysfunctional restaurant, berates the owner, embarrasses the chef, derides the host, throws a hundred f-bombs. Strangely, the end result is most often a working unit.
I think I’ve seen enough of this and Top Chef to know I don’t want to work in the restaurant business. I just like visiting for dinner.
That’s what they nicknamed the first mechanical cash register (circa 1870). It wasn’t created to automate sales or do addition or any such thing – it was created to stop employees from skimming from the till.
A quirky store owner named John Patterson took the idea and ran with it, turning National Cash Register into a the number one employer in Dayton, Ohio. You remember NCR perhaps?
A ‘zapper’ is a modern day piece of software that removes transactions from a register’s memory so the operator won’t have to pay sales tax.
(I’m working with my friend Michael Fitzgerald on an article on point-of-sale security. Yet another little corner of the world that sounds mundane but actually has all these fascinating little wrinkles and historical oddities.)
What would happen if we scrapped it? Funny you (or I) should ask…
That’s the process smashing two words (or morphemes) together to coin a new term, usually in American English a cute one that has marketing potential.
Lately we’ve had a rash of them pertaining to men and man. A terrible one: Mancation – essentially an extended boys’ night out. Stupid, not catchy, ham-handed. A good one: Bromance – a film about two guys doing stupid guys stuff resulting in some form of nonromantic comedic partnerly affection. More properly applied to Pineapple Express than to Brokeback Mountain. Also heard Manorexia on TV the other day – pretty sure they were kidding.
Since these mashup man-words are all the rage, let’s give a shout-out to the visionaries at Hunt’s, who created the Manwich all the way back in 1967.
(Ironic: French word for the output of compound bastardization, more or less: portmanteau.)
are hilarious. We have two.
They love sunflower seeds and will take them from your hand; they could power a small city with their frantic nighttime wheel-running; and both of these fine young gentlemen, um, “have a large scrotal sac” [says avidpet.com in an amazing understatement], so large in fact as to appear to be about 25% of their total body size.
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