Ask-Steve.com

Help solve the mystery of the excited ice cube

The mysterious excited ice cube. Click photo for a larger view. Alternate (more explicit) angle.

Sorry for the graphic photo, but I just have to try to find out what's causing random ice cubes in my freezer to behave this way. It doesn't happen every time I fill the tray and, as best I can recall, it only happens to one ice cube at a time.

Any ideas on what might be causing this? My best guess is that it's the combination of traces of Viagra and caffeine in our groundwater making it into our tap water...

Flies are like tiny birds

Her: Flies are gross!

Me: Just think of them as tiny birds.

Her: They're not birds! They're maggots with wings!

It caused me to giggle.

Test post from my BlackBerry

Just a quick test post to check the interface on my BlackBerry Pearl. Pretty great for simple posts!

The view from my table in Toronto

I'm sitting in the very sweet bar at the Renaissance Toronto Hotel Downtown. I'm here for a conference and didn't realize that this is the only hotel in the world that is attached to a stadium. The entire wall of windows in the hotel restaurant and bar run along left field. They have rooms that are above the field, as well. It's like sitting in a huge, air-conditioned luxury box. The Blue Jays are playing the Washington Nationals and they have the audio piped into the bar.

I'm sitting here working on my remarks for the conference while watching the game. Not a bad way to work. This is the view from my table. (Click on it to see a larger view.)

Frank Thomas just hit his 496th home run. The crowd is going nuts.

Well, back to it!

On the realness of blogging

I ran into a friend yesterday and she commented on how I haven't posted anything new to my blog in a while. I'm always a bit stunned when that happens. I see my site visitor statistics so I know that there are many people from all over the world visiting my blog everyday, but for some reason it's easy to lose sight of the fact that there are real people behind those numbers. So it's a little humbling—almost embarrassing—when someone I run into comments on my blog. But more than anything, it's inspiring. It reminds me why I started blogging in the first place and makes me want to post more frequently and write the best stuff I can muster.

Thanks, Miss E, for your comments yesterday. I needed that! :-)

And thanks to everyone who drops by for the occasional read!

[Edited April 19, 2007 @ 10:38 AM to remove bits that made me sound like a blithering dolt. I've reached my quota on that for the current quarter.]

Mommy, what does that mean?

Have fun explaining this one to your kids while you're standing at one of the four busy bus stops on the corner of SE 39th and Hawthorne in Portland. ("Hooked on Phonics be damned!")

I'm a very outspoken advocate of free speech--but good taste has to weigh in somewhere...

[And yes, I'm aware of the irony of this post in light of my "public bathroom mischief" entry of yesterday...]

Rampant gender discrimination in Portland

I love this sign on the bathroom door at Muddy Waters Coffeehouse on SE Belmont and 29th. It is the perfect middle finger in the face of the rampant gender discrimination in most other places.

I've been to a couple of new restaurants lately and both have the same configuration for their restrooms: one for women and one for both men and women. When I walked up to use the restroom at one of them there was a guy waiting. I assumed they were both occupied. A woman walked out of the unisex restroom and he went in. It turns out no one was in the women-only restroom! So I went in. And guess what? The world didn't come to an end!

I'm at a complete loss for why places with restrooms think it's necessary to designate them for one gender or the other. These are single rooms with locking doors! What do they think is going to happen? I could see old-fashioned or prudish types being squeamish about sitting in a stall next to someone of another gender (though there are many countries where that's the norm, and it's happening here in the US, too). But if it's a single room, why would you possibly need to keep someone standing outside doing the Pee Pee Dance when there's a perfectly good room with a fully functioning toilet sitting empty (I'm referring to the room, not the toilet). And then this trend of offering both rooms to women but only one to men... What is that? Chivalry gone terribly wrong?

My policy is this: If there are two restrooms marked Men and Women, I'll try the one marked Men first. If there are two restrooms marked Either/Both and Women, I'll use whichever one is closer and/or available. If there are two restrooms, both marked Gender Non-Specific Bathroom, I'll find the owner and shake his or her hand.

Technorati Tags: Oregon, politics, Portland, gender discrimination

Stupid use of quotation marks

I'm definitely a grammar queen, but don't claim to use perfect grammar myself. I'm sure the true grammarians among my readers could point out all kinds of infractions by reviewing just a few of my blog entries. But that's okay. I'm not about to let that stop me from bitching about other people's punctuation errors and syntactic shortcomings.

My sore point today is the asinine way in which a lot of people use quotation marks. According to the People's Fountain of All Knowledge and Wisdom (aka Wikipedia):

Quotation marks, also called quotes, speech marks or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, a phrase or a word. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.

Proper usage includes:

1. Quotations and speech - to denote either speech or a quotation
2. Irony - to indicate or call attention to ironic or apologetic words
3. Use-mention distinction - can emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself rather than its associated concept
4. Titles of artistic works - generally used for the titles of shorter works
5. Nicknames and false titles - to offset a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title

Wikipedia lists a sixth usage and this is the one I'm all lathered up about:

6. Emphasis (incorrect)
Quotes are sometimes used incorrectly for emphasis in lieu of underlining or italics, most commonly on signs or placards. This usage can be confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation, sometimes with unintended humor. For example - For sale: “fresh” fish, “fresh” oysters - could be construed to imply that fresh is not used with its everyday meaning, or indeed to indicate that the fish or oysters are anything but fresh. And again - Teller lines open until noon for your "convenience” - might mean that the “convenience” was for the bank employees, not the customers.

The thing that inspired me to finally post on this was a sandwich sign for Equity Builders Realty (check out their website for a trip back to Web design circa 1997—done poorly) that I passed on Southeast Hawthorne today. It has their name and then, immediately below that, it says, "The "gold" standard in real estate service." This would definitely fall under Wikipedia's sixth usage above. Does the quote mean that their service is actually lead painted over with gold? Does it mean that their service sucks and they're just saying it's gold? Does it mean that they know they're using a boring, hackneyed phrase?

I know someone (that I know will never see my blog) who closes every card and letter with:

"Love"
Their_Name

What am I to make of this? Does it mean they really don't love me and are going so far as to rub it in with the ironic quotes? Or am I instead to take it that they're quoting themselves and I'm to suddenly hear their voice in my head intoning the word?

Kristen King has a brilliant example of this on her blog, Inkthinker.

The caption reads: Yes, this is where the transvestites get their hair cut.

This falls right in line with Wikipedia's very amusing entry on scare quotes—which seems like the opposite of what a business or marketer would be trying to achieve...

Scare quotes are quotation marks used for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation, mostly as a flag to provoke in the reader a negative association for the word enclosed in the quotes. The conversational equivalent of scare quotes is a hand gesture known as air quotes or finger quotes which mimics the appearance of quotation marks.

The effect of using scare quotes is often similar to inserting so-called to modify a word. Scare quotes may thus be used to express disagreement with the original speaker's intended meaning without actually establishing grounds for disagreement, or even explicitly acknowledging it. As they essentially constitute an expression of disdain, scare quotes are sometimes called sneer quotes.

Part of me wants to run around correcting all these errors, but when I realize how much fun we can have at the authors' expense, I suppose it's best to just enjoy them.

There are many paths to wit and wisdom

I like to post occasionally on the the words and phrases that people are plugging in to the search engines to arrive at Ask-Steve.com. Here are a few of the phrases that have brought people here in February. Interesting how search works. I can assure you—I've never written a word about cat enemas or a girl exploding from diet coke and mentos.

things to ask your military recruiter
ban smoking in workplace oregon
broken window policing
spamming your friends
mother cigarette breatfeeding
ask steve
iraq friendly fire video clip
fred meyers, 39th and hawthorne
good coffee shops for studying portland, or
statistics how many licensed drivers in usa
cussing satire
cat enemas
oregon ban smoking stats
dominoes right wing
smoking in oregon
coffee shops that serve stumptown
rude neighbors portland
portland, oregon smoking restrictions
mattress + portland
peets coffee internet access
coffee shop owners forum
diet coke and mentos girl explodes

Smile--you're on...YouTube! The shift to shame.

Last month, Eva Burgess was eating breakfast at the Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., when she remembered she needed to make an appointment with her eye doctor. So the New York theater director got on her cellphone and booked a date.

Almost immediately, she started receiving "weird and creepy" calls directing her to a blog. There, under the posting "Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!" her name, cellphone number and other details mentioned in her call to the doctor's office were posted, along with the admonition, "next time, you might take your business outside." The offended blogger had been sitting next to Ms. Burgess in the cafe.

This is taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal today entitled, The Snoop Next Door. Stories like the one above are sprouting up all over the Web. They've become so popular that there are an increasing number of sites dedicated to them, along with dedicated groups showing up on such sites as Flickr (photos) and YouTube (video). More specialized sites featured in the article include PlateWire.com for shaming bad drivers and HollaBackNYC.com for reporting incidents of men leering, whistling at or otherwise harassing women.

My first thought on this was to feel that it's definitely not a good idea. Our society is becoming ever more permissive of the seemingly ubiquitous surveillance by government, law agencies, private security companies, corporations and so forth. The last thing we need to do is turn the Internet into one big network of tattletales. But then I started visiting some of these sites and was forced to rethink my initial reaction.

This is especially interesting to me in light of the recent stir caused by my Portland Hall of Shame series of posts wherein I call out local businesses who are being bad neighbors by not keeping their storefronts and sidewalks clean and in good repair. I feel that this is a completely innocuous thing to do and, indeed, it is already producing positive results and generating expressions of gratitude from neighbors who have suffered from the effects of these bad-neighbor businesses over the years.

But taking it to a personal level is another matter entirely. When you publish a person's photo, phone number, license plate number or other 'unique identifier' for the world to see, you're potentially putting them in harm's way. At the very least, you're setting them up for some embarrassment—if not harassment. Is that ever a good thing? I would say that in some cases it is, but determining where to draw the line is something so subjective that it may be impossible to define what those cases are.

The photo at the top of this article shows a huge pickup truck spanning two compact car parking spaces. And the California license plate number is visible for all to see. Few people would argue that this guy is being a complete jerk, but does that mean this photo should be posted in the Jerks photo group on Flickr? I'm guessing that if all my readers were to weigh in, there would be a fifty-fifty split in opinion.

But what about the photo of this guy on a NYC bus? It appears on Holla Back New York City where the tagline reads, If you can't slap 'em, snap 'em! The site gives women a place to post photos and reports of guys who harass them. This photo is accompanied by this story:

This guy kept his leg wide open the whole time on the Q14 bus tonight. He kept putting his hand between his legs and massaged the area like he's in a porn movie. He kept eyeballing me and staring at me until I took out my camera phone and snapped this nasty pervert's face. As soon as he got off the bus, he just stared right at me through the window and I just flipped him my middle finger. Dirty pervert.

Other posts on the site tell of women receiving threats, being followed by men, etc. Many, if not most, of these incidents wouldn't be touched by the police. Even if they had the resources to do anything about it, they typically can't until a crime has been committed. So aren't sites like this a viable way for victims of harassment to defend themselves and warn others of the threat? Of course, you have to take into consideration the potential for lies, slander and blackmail. Say an angry ex lover or employee trying to exact revenge by posting a photo along with a fabricated story...

I'm still looking into this, but thought it worth sharing.

Check out the full article here:

The Snoop Next Door - The Wall Street Journal - January 12, 2007
Bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online. Our reporter on new Web sites for outing fellow citizens.