Eccentric Flower:200909/Three and a Rat

I thought seriously yesterday about writing a long piece about cost/benefit calculations in creativity, until I realized that the cost/benefit calculation of the piece itself did not justify its creation.

In fact - especially since I'm in one of those grim moods about this bundle of topics - the cost/benefit threshold is particularly brutal right now. Anything in the last 24 hours I've thought about putting in this space has gotten the "Why bother? No one especially cares" rejection slip.

I'm sure this means I am desperate for human contact and affirmation or something warm and squishy like that. Screw that.

Here are four items which will probably sink like a stone, but that's okay because I'm not going to invest a lot in putting them here. Three are from The Consumerist. The fourth has a cute picture and is placed here as an antacid.

- When someone is being rude on an airplane, why don't you say something? I submit that of the eighty percent of people who answered "Politely confront the rude person" to the poll question, three-fourths of those people are lying. They are saying what they would like to do but in the actual situation they would sit and seethe like everyone else.

Also, this comment:

with its Bizarro logic riled me up the second most of anything I read this morning. Yes, god forbid we run the risk of becoming taciturn, reserved, and coldly polite. We have our status as the world's assholes to maintain.

- Snuggie fashion show at NY Fashion Week. Since I believe the entire fashion industry should perish by some wasting disease, and keep hoping one day that the handful of people with too much money who are their means of support will one day collectively come to their senses, I am always in favor of anything that tweaks them. However, since the fashion industry has demonstrated many times that it has absolutely no self-awareness, I imagine most people in it won't get the joke or even realize that a joke has been attempted.

- China loves us for our chicken feet. We are obviously underpricing our chicken feet. Still, it's nice to see that our overstuffed, overbred, factory-farmed, flavorless commercial chickens have some usefulness somewhere to somebody.

- Reckless rat raids leopard lunch leftovers. This is supposed to be the cute item, but I'd just like to point out that the rat isn't being brave, it's being young and stupid, and if the leopard hadn't already eaten lunch, this scenario would have played out very differently.

However, none of that in any way diminishes the second photo on that page, which is fabulous.