+/-

[mrissa]

+ Tiny dusting of snow!!! I will take it. It's better than no snow.

+ Concert last night: good good good. Antje Duvekot opened, and WPA was the main act. Definitely worth my time and energy and money to see. Also it was a grown-up concert at the Cedar, which means chairs to sit in and a concert that starts on time. Hurrah. Duvekot said it was her worst set ever. If this is the case, she is a candidate for best worst set ever.

+ Pepparkakor dough in a minute. Cookie Day tomorrow. Yay! First Cookie Day with Grandma in town to share it! Yay!

- People. Nobody is tone death. Some people are tone deaf. Tone death would be some kind of superpower; I'm pretty sure you only wish that the person in your office who cannot sing but does so anyway would die a tone death. One problem with teaching children to spell phonetically is that some of them do not enunciate for sour owl crap, and spend their time around other people who do not enunciate for sour owl crap.

- Online clothing retailers, seriously: size first, color second. When does anybody ever say, "Well, I totally want the purple one, but I don't care which of the six sizes is available?" This is an instance where size very much matters. You do not buy your 2XL aunt or your XS aunt an M sweater because M is what the retailer has and you like that sweater. If you do, you are being stupid and should stop.

- DVD manufacturers: stop putting an infinite repeat sound loop on the menu screen. It makes perfect sense to put the DVD in and go somewhere else to do laundry, put something in the oven, etc. while the warnings and disclaimers are playing. Nobody who is up to their elbows in clean, dry towels finds the experience enhanced by the same thirty seconds of your theme song over and over again. Just stop.

Comments

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I'm in the mood for a really good snow right now. Winter hasn't quite arrived yet, here.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nor here, but it's sort of trying.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

The pick a color before we tell you if your size is available thing was driving me batshit yesterday as I was attempting to find a pair of black pants. Another bad thing to do is to not tell the customer that the item is on backorder and won't be back in stock until FEBRUARY until the item is in their cart (for the sites I'm dealing with, a backorder time of that length means they're actually not going to get any more in stock and I shouldn't waste my time). I ended up buying pants elsewhere.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

re: infinite sound loops: Criminal Minds? Because that was driving me absolutely batshit last Friday while I was trying to do laundry, house-cleaning, etc. with the DVDs in all day as background. Lordy GOD I can hear that little bit over and over and over even now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, worse, Numb3rs. So it's electronickier.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

From your LJ to their ears (and maybe brains--esp. DVD makers).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Huh, that's weird. It does seem that I never care about more than one size, and sometimes care about more than one color, so size ought to be first.

On most web forms, the left-to-right order doesn't constrain how you actually select them, that I've noticed.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's why I actually check to make sure they're doing it the stupid way before complaining.

[clarentine]

Fewmets! Get your tone death fewmets here!

[columbina.livejournal.com]

It is sixty-five-and-possibly-then-some degrees here. In DECEMBER. It's not that I mind this per se, it's that it makes me worry what will happen in January.

I think I would rather have a tiny dusting of snow, please.

Also: Is tone death related to heat death? (And women don't get wooly, they get weary.)

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I thought we got woolly from all the stress...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I sure am woolly from all the stress. I might have thought I was weary, but I'm wearing shorts and a T-shirt (will put on jeans and a sweater but was working out), not the same old shabby dress, so that can't be it.

Also, I suspect that tone death precedes heat death by quite a bit, but I could be wrong. The amount of vibration required to produce an audible sound is a lot higher than to produce heat.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Snow actually sounds kinda nice- I went to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving, and no snow! Boooooo.

On the cooking note, we are holding a housewarming party and making 4 types of pie, bourbon balls, and also fondue for dinner. Cooking in our kitchen is nice- the kitchen is big enough to take away most of the annoyances of tripping over your own dirty dishes!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You can tell who's been cooking in our kitchen by how much mess there is after: I tend to put things in the dishwasher or away in the pantry as I use them, and the guys don't so much.

I am not making bourbon balls, but there will be rum balls for matastas.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

None of us is particularly good at putting things away as we use them, but you can always tell when tiger_spot has been cooking, because there's always flour all over. Last time she got some in the fridge.

[carbonel]

I want the real snow to hold off until arkuat finishes raking and bagging the leaves. After that, let the snow day come!

(I don't get a snow day, because I work at home, but I can still appreciate the concept.)

[songwind.livejournal.com]

This morning as I dusted the snow off my driver-side window and door handle, I thought about the fact that you were probably happy. :)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Not sorting by size first has bugged me several times in offline clothing stores, as well. It is particularly bothersome to me when they sort first by manufacturer. I do not care who made my trousers, and I only care whether they are aesthetically pleasing once they have been determined to fit.

[redbird]

Some of us care about the manufacturer because we've found that one manufacturer's size n is another's n+1 and a third's n-2, so we can waste a lot of time trying on stuff from a stack of 16s, and then trying to find the 18 in one style and the 14 in another.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Seems like that would be best addressed by standardizing clothing size numbers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You are not, alas, the first person to have had that notion, and have nothing come of it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me, it's often that the size 4 is the size that fits me if any size fits me, but many manufacturers simply do not make clothes that fit me. So I care about the manufacturer in that I want to dodge the people whose clothes are made for people shaped drastically differently than I am.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Recent annoyance: Roommate left the Finding Nemo DVD on, at the menu screen, in her locked bedroom, while she went away to do something else, and it kept looping the same couple seconds of audio over and over and over.

A lot of these weird spellings ("tone death") come from trying to reinterpret things in the most plausible way --
"Lip sink? Why would it be called lip sink? It's lip sing!"
But I can't come up for a reason anyone would think "tone death" was more plausible than "tone deaf."

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

I knew a couple guys who did this to each other on purpose. I don't know if you're familiar with They Might Be Giants, but one of them won by looping one of the Fingertips mini-songs off of Apollo 18. I think it was the one that simply consists of the one line "What's that Blue Thing Doing Here?". Left it playing on repeat when he left for an 8-hour day at work.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

There is a legend from my college... One of the student DJs at the college radio station had a habit of turning up late for his (late-night) shift, meaning that the DJ on the preceding shift got stuck filling empty air until this guy got his act together. One night, the earlier DJ took revenge by putting a track from "Fingertips" on repeat and leaving on time.

At the time, my SO was in the bowels of the physics building, in the senior lab (gasp!) *alone*, with only the college station on for company as he ran some experiment that he couldn't leave. So he was powerless to defend himself when the radio gave forth: Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please. / Please pass the milk, please.....

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

You are perhaps familiar with the collection of these reinterpretations at the Eggcorn Database (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/)? My favorite is perhaps social leopard (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/1066/leopard/).

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I've known some people with tone death - singing so badly that people around them couldn't keep tune either.

And yes with the damned DVDs. It's also perfectly reasonable to put a movie in as you go to sleep, and it should shut up when the movie's over.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is why I sneak into your room when you go to sleep to This Is Spinal Tap.

Also it is very politic of you not to name my former labling in this comment, even though he is not very googleable and likely does not read this lj.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

When I can't sleep, I put in a West Wing DVD. It's interesting enough to keep me from thinking about whatever was stressing me out and keeping me from sleeping, but I've seen all the episodes enough times that they won't keep me awake. Earlier seasons loop back to the menu and I wake up a couple hours later to the theme music over and over and over again. It's gotten so I kinda hate it. Much better when they go to a menu with no music at the end.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Bah DAAAAAAH dee dah DAHHHHHH, oh yes, I do know that loop well.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Tomorrow is National Cookie Day, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

How nice of the (grateful?) nation to acknowledge our efforts.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

The other one that makes me crazy is when movie DVD start menu animations give away plot points.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Uff da, yes. Not everybody can go to movies in the theater! Not everybody who can chooses to do so with every single movie! DVD != rewatch!