The world, explained

In case you were wondering how the world works, this short video is as good an explanation as any.

All you have to do to get ahead is . . . the utterly impossible. Just, in this case, repeal the laws of mathematics and physics and give the customer seven red lines, each perpendicular to all the others. Some should be made with green ink, others with transparent ink.

By the way, could you make at least one line in the form of a kitten?

Don't forget the kitten. Market research shows that people love kittens.

Meow.


HAT TIP:  CNET.

Iowa don't know my rights!

A guest post by Molly the Dog

They have neber been a mor biger threat to our charish Amerikan ideels then thiss.

It am not souprizeing thet it's comms from Iowa, where peeples is commerniss. And meen.

I wil not go to Iowa no more, bekuz the commerniss thayr wil put me in jayl for being all abowt free x-presshun and thee rite to re-dres greevances kommitd aginst you. I do not like the Iowa kops, bekuz thay are agunts of a repressiv regeeme.

THEE PRUFE of Iowas commernisum is hear in this artikl from thee Asocciated Paws. Uh, Press:

A man accused of urinating on the office chairs of fellow office workers in West Des Moines has surrendered to police.

Raymond Foley, 59, turned himself in Saturday to face a charge of second-degree criminal mischief.

Foley declined to comment Tuesday, other than to acknowledge that he no longer works at the Farm Bureau office in West Des Moines.

Police say some co-workers had complained about stains on their chairs. A security system was installed, and police say it caught Foley in the act.

ME HOPE the Iowas free x-pressur gets a gud lawyer whoo don't like cats. I rekommenn Sadie. She forgets stuf sumtimez, but she can still bite gud.

Tell her the Iowas commerniss kops is skwrruls. Totaliterryun oppressurs is whut thay reely is.

In othur wurds -- skwrruls. Maybe cats, to.

Xerox machine's 50th-anniversary (paper) jam

In 1960 -- 50 years ago this month -- a Space Age early adopter opened his checkbook, and the Haloid Xerox Co., sealed the deal for its first sale of a plain-paper copier.

"The contraption was the size of two washing machines, weighed 648 pounds and had to be turned on its side to fit through doorways," says a story on CNN.com. "It also occasionally caught on fire."

But it revolutionized the workplace as we know it.

"It's hard to imagine now, because we take it so much for granted. But it took human communication forward a huge step," said David Owen, author of "Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine."

"It was a product no one knew they needed until they had it."

It was also a product that many loved to hate. The earliest models were so unreliable that Haloid Xerox's repair crews got emergency calls almost daily. In the cult hit movie "Office Space," three oppressed cubicle drones take a balky machine -- some say it's not a copier but a fax machine or a printer -- into a field and smash it to pieces.

In today's digital age, a machine that copies paper feels like a quaint mechanical relic. And in most offices, the traditional copier has been eclipsed by the Internet-connected, multipurpose printer.

SHORTLY AFTER that first delivery of the Xerox 914, an office jokester made the world's first photocopy of the human posterior. (Not the actual first butt-cheek xerographic reproduction.)

Neither the American office, nor the life of the average American college student, would be the same.

Nor, several decades later, would this guy's gluteus maximus.