Ah, yes, I remember it well

• Him: We met at nine
• Her: We met at eight
• Him: I was on time
• Her: No, you were late
• Him: Ah, yes, I remember it well

(If you’ve never seen the movie, you can watch the clip here).

Has this ever happened to you?

You know you were with the Johnsons when you got food poisoning.

Your spouse knows you were with the Macintyres, and in fact you’ve never even had Chinese food with the Johnsons.

Fear not. According to Dr. Steve Dewhurst from Lancaster University, memories, it turns out, are not faithfully recorded in our minds as we like to think, but are “updated each time we bring them to mind to fit our current knowledge and beliefs.” Yep, that's right. Memory is mutable.

The book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us — the title comes from the famous, and infamous, Gorilla Experiment (I won't tell you any more, you can try it for yourself here... it only takes a minute) — explores these “everyday illusions of perception and thought, including the beliefs that:

• we pay attention more than we do,
  
• our memories are more detailed than they are,
  
• confident people are competent people,
  
• we know more than we actually do,
  
• and our brains have reserves of power that are easy to unlock.”

One of the authors puts it this way:

“we assume that when we recall a personal experience vividly; that the richness of our memory means it must be accurate. The idea that we can remember our experiences as if our brain were a camcorder is fundamentally wrong.”

So the next time you remember a different when, what, where or who than your husband, wife, father, sister, or son — try remembering this: you could both be wrong!

Because I don't have enough ways to waste time

You know the expression "herding cats?" Well go ahead, give it a try.

Not as easy as it looks, ay?

Oh look, there went 3 hours.

I rest my case

I've been known to be a bit of a stickler when it comes to grammar, typos, punctuation, etc.

No, really, it's true.

So imagine my glee when I stumbled across the story of the $2.1mm comma. Yep, one superfluous comma cost a company over two million dollars.

This is how it went down:
A Canadian communications company made a renewable deal with a strategic partner; the key clause in the deal stated that the agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Lo and behold, not even three years after signing the deal, the partner gave written notice it was terminating the agreement. Communciations company cried foul—we've locked in our rate for five years from the signing date! But no... eighteen months of sentence parsing later and the judge ruled: that second (do you see it?) comma clearly allows for the agreement to be terminated at any point with one year's written notice. Ah, if only...

Never underestimate the importance of grammar (or a good editor, for that matter).

Chitty Chitty Bang BANG!

So Henry Ford transformed manufacturing as we know it with that whole assembly line thing. So what? You should see what Mazda's got going on.

In the summer of 2006, 4700 (or so) Mazda vehicles spent a few weeks longer at sea than they were supposed to, at an angle they were definitely not supposed to (60° to be exact), and by the time they were brought to shore, Mazda faced the challenge of how to dispose of self-same vehicles. No amount of entreaties to sell them cheap, donate them to needy causes, or provide them to studious students could sway the stalwart automobile maker. Each of those avenues was deemed a potential, eventual threat to the Mazda reputation.

And therein lay the rub. Destroying o'er $100 million of automobiles is not such an easy task. Who knew? Engineers were brought in. Minds were bent. Plans were drawn. Gadgets were developed that would blow six air-bags simultaneously (saving oodles of hours, days, weeks, of work). Math problems abounded - if one airbag takes a half hour to blow up individually, and each car has six air bags, and there are 4700 cars, and the set up of each car requires 15 minutes, how many cups of Starbucks will the workers drink before all the bags are blown? Indeed. You know, someone should have told Mazda about the Dr. Goodspeed method of airbag destruction.

There's a pretty cool video here, by the way

Didn't we learn in school that destruction is easier than construction - or something like that? Inertia vs ertia (there's another one of those non-words that should be a word... can anyone tell me why "ertia" isn't a word?). Evidently, sometimes it is easier to build than to blow up. And isn't that special?

Process of elimination

For the irretrievably moronic, there exist the Darwin Awards.

And for the irrevocably bored, there exists the Darwin Awards website, where you can be stupefied by accounts of some of the most imbecilic acts reported. I say reported, not imaginable, because until you read them, I defy you to imagine them.

Don't believe me? Read on, MacDuff, read on...

3 February 1990, Washington

The following mind-boggling attempt at a crime spree appeared to be the robber's first, due to his lack of a previous record of violence, and his terminally stupid choices:

1. His target was H&J Leather & Firearms. A gun shop.

2. The shop was full of customers - firearms customers.

3. To enter the shop, the robber had to step around a marked police patrol car parked at the front door.

4. A uniformed officer was standing at the counter, having coffee before work.

Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced a holdup, and fired a few wild shots. The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire, covered by several customers who also drew their guns, thereby removing the confused criminal from the gene pool.

No one else was hurt.

All I'm saying is - when you're feeling a little less than brilliant, a quick stop at darwinawards.com and you're back feeling like Einstein. It's that easy.

Who did what?

The headline in today's New York Times: "Surprising Few, Italy’s Government Collapses"

And the picture that went with it:














I know what you're thinking.

Oops - did they really?

As I was writing up my non-review of "I am Legend," I stumbled upon, in that way of happy accidents for which there is no better place than the wonderful world wide web (why stop at three ws?), a site showing the series of remarkable print ads for Blackglama fur.







I remember these ads vividly from my childhood. And they worked, at least on me. I thought a Blackglama was the epitome of glamour.
But what stopped me in my tracks was the caption on this one - how could they? Or worse, do you think they really didn't know any better?