Trust me

I don't know. Something's a little fishy about this one.

That amplifier is so skirt-as-a-shirt!

I take my civic responsibilities very seriously. So when some insensitive installer said in a public forum that a new URC multiroom amplifier "looks gay," I knew I had to speak up.

Thankfully, I received inspiration from Hilary Duff by way of this "Think Before You Speak" public service announcement.



Don't be afraid to tell someone it's not ok to say, "That's so gay."

By the way, do you think the URC DMS-1200 multizone amp is like wearing a skirt as a shirt?

A modern Day O'Connor?

Rosario, O'Connor: Separated at Birth?

I rarely write letters to the St. Paul Pioneer Press editor, but I couldn't resist it this time, when a human-interest columnist compared his plight to that of Sandra Day O'Connor's.

Ruben Rosario empathizes with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (“When a high court justice had to work unpaid,” Sept. 12), who could find no law firm willing to employ a Stanford-educated woman in the 1950s.

She had to work gratis before landing a paid job as an attorney.

Rosario knows her plight all too well because he too “wrote close to 50 newspaper articles unpaid while fetching coffee …. I was passed over a few times in favor of fair-haired boys who had relatives in the newsroom.”

Right. Rosario is a modern Day O’Connor.

Did it ever occur to Rosario that he was passed over not for the color of his skin or his Hispanic surname, but for his sappy writing, which is as banal as the subjects he covers?

Julie Jacobson
Stillwater

Little people welcome here!

I stumbled across this online advertisement recently and thought it was lovely how a store could be so sensitive to little people.

I remember on one of those TV shows a little guy stepped into an A/V shop and requested a low-set television. The salespeople balked. "No way, man. You want us to install a TV, we're going to do it at regulation height!"

So it was refreshing to see the above ad.

There is, of course, a typo. The first "E" should be a "-"

Anyway, the company got it right in the graphic below.

Expose your business. Get it? Expose!

You're not going to believe this. Truly, you're not.

I'm doing this brief blog about an industry Web site that happens to have an amusing "About Us" page. So I search Google Images for something quite the opposite: a boring "About Us" page.

And just look what I found:

Boring? I should say not!

And look at these amusing tag lines:

Contact Ace Infoway today to create a Web site for you! It's complicated, but this is how they work:

Moi? "A really good writer with intelligent mind"

I get such little praise for my work, that I just had to share this old email from Tracy Tsai of Axlon, a company I covered in 1998.

House cleaning is a cool thing:

Subject: Thank you very much for your great story

Dear Julie,

I just want to thank you very much for the great news lines you wrote for PalmPal on the Sep issue of CE pro. When I and my other colleagues including our president, Dr. Shih read the article you wrote on our booth at CEDIA(that's where we get the first copy of the Sep. issue), everyone is very impressed by your fully understanding on PalmPal. I am surprised too myself you could get such thorough and complete understanding on PalmPal by only getting our product information. Our president, Dr. Shih said when he read this, 'She must be a really good writer with intelligent mind and strong technical background that she could write a news like she knows our company and product inside and out.'

You will be happy to note that, after the show, "we're received many inquiries about PalmPal."

Unfortunately, the inquiries couldn't save Axlon, which never quite got off the ground.

PalmPal was a 900 MHz Digital Wireless Key Telephone System and home automation gateway (complete story after the break)

"Yeah, my WIFE's Home Cooking"

Yeah, go ahead and say it Duane. You know you want to: "Yeah, it's hazardous if my wife is cooking." Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

God, save our currency!

To think, it's so simple!

Washington Post, Letters to the Editor:

I have read with interest the letters regarding the paper dollar vs. the dollar coin. The lack of interest in the coin may be due to the fact that the motto "In God We Trust" was relegated to the edge of the presidential coins that were first minted.

I, for one, will never use a one-dollar coin, or any coin for that matter, as long that motto is in an obscure spot on the coin. The motto is something we should be proud of.

Michael Bridges, Silver Spring

 And from a much wiser source:

... As Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds point out in their remarkable book Money, Markets & Sovereignty, "to create a mystique premium on their coins, whose face value significantly exceeded their intrinsic value, rulers typically adopted religious symbols in their stamps.  The less gold, the more God.  In fact, 'In God We Trust' was added to American dollar bills only after their gold backing was dropped in 1862."*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds, Money, Markets & Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 70.