SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #217 New Moon of August 17, 2012 Contents copyright 2012 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* It's those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summertime, when the livin' is easy. What is comfortable for lying around in a pleasant half-asleep state isn't necessarily good for getting the creative juices flowing. So there's not going to be much in this section this time. ********************* People often give me bubble-related gifts, so I wasn't surprised when someone gave me a package of eight tiny bottles of bubble stuff, like you might hand out to guests at parties. Then I got to reading the label: "8 pk mini wedding bubbles" in English and in what looked like French. I gather that the manufacturer expects them to be handed out to guests at weddings. But there were no details given beyond that. For example, what if, not having any weddings on my schedule any time soon, I were to blow some of these "wedding bubbles" at a birthday party, or around some random bunch of people who look like they might enjoy some bubbles, or just out somewhere at random on a breezy day just for the heck of it? Would there be Dire Consequences? I looked at the labels again. There were some warnings, but they were the usual admonitions like not giving small objects to children under three, not drinking the stuff, and not putting it in your eyes. There was nothing like "WARNING: FOR USE AT WEDDINGS ONLY! Not for use at birthday parties or with random groups of people who might enjoy bubbles, or out on a breezy day just for the heck of it." At least there wasn't anything like that in the English-language parts of the labels. And from what I could puzzle out, there didn't seem to be anything of the sort in the French labeling either. As for the bottles themselves, the only labeling was "0.6 fl. oz." on one side and "CHINA" on the other. So I'm guessing that blowing wedding bubbles at a birthday party won't give all the guests an irresistible urge to run off and go on honeymoons, or anything like that. ********************* Now that my attention had been drawn to what was or wasn't on the labels of little bottles of bubble stuff, I noticed that there weren't any instructions on how to blow the bubbles. I know that it's not all that uncommon for makers of certain kinds of products to assume the user already knows how to use them. For example, a piano generally doesn't come with a big long explanation of how you make music by pushing down on the keys, and that which keys you push in what order makes a difference in what the music you get sounds like. Or at least the ones I'm familiar with didn't come with such. There may be some documentation, but it's more likely to be stuff like how to keep the thing clean without ruining the varnish, along with safety warnings about how, if it's a grand piano, you shouldn't drop the lid on people's heads while they're leaning in inspecting the strings and hammers and such, how a piano is not intended as food so you shouldn't let children or pets gnaw on it, and so on. But as for how to actually play the piano, they assume the user will find a teacher to give them lessons, or take a course in it at college, or buy a "How-to" book separately, or something like that. So is the recipient of one of these little bottles of bubble stuff assumed to have already mastered the art of bubble-blowing at some Academy of Bubblery or something? It would seem so. ********************* That bit with the "Wedding Bubbles" also got me to wondering what would happen if you served a birthday cake at a wedding or a wedding cake at a birthday party. Or more generally, what if you served the wrong kind of cake at any party or party-like event. It might have a little more of an effect than blowing wedding bubbles at a birthday party, in that it would be more likely to be noticed. Even if you use the correct decorations (candles vs bride & groom or whatever) people might notice the shape wasn't right, especially if it's the traditional stairstep layer cake at some event other than a wedding. Would people want an explanation? And would "The bakery made a mistake" suffice? ********************* There's a phenomenon I first noticed during the Olympics, but it's continuing after that event is over. Quite a few restaurants have background music, usually played at levels loud enough for me to notice when a familiar song comes along, but low enough to not interfere with conversation. So far, so good. I actually like the music some places play, and even if it isn't one of my favorite kinds of music it doesn't really bother me as long as it doesn't get too loud. But now a number of places I go to regularly have put in TV screens. That in itself is OK, again as long as the sound isn't too loud. I can pay attention to anything that catches my interest and (with some exceptions) ignore the rest. But at least two places are doing something that does bother me: They've turned the TV sound on without turning the background music off, leaving the two to sort of fight it out. If you're right next to the TV it predominates, while in the far corners of the room the old background music reigns supreme. But there's a large in-between area where you get a jumbled mixture of the two. Is this part of their rumored strategy of making the dining room uncomfortable so people will hurry up and finish eating and leave sooner so as to make room for others? Is the new generation into multitasking to the degree of actually wanting to have several unrelated audio sources playing at once? Or is there some other explanation? ********************* A few days ago when I went to McDonald's I found the Chicken McNuggets much less enjoyable than on a previous visit a few days earlier. There seems to be quite a bit of random variation from one visit to the next. I've also noticed this with other items, such as their fries, and with similar items at other chains. I don't know all the variables involved, but one main one seems to be freshness. If I happen to get whatever it is hot out of the fryer or off the grill, I find it quite enjoyable. But once it languishes in a holding cell for a while, it turns into a sort of food-like blah that may assuage hunger but doesn't satisfy beyond that. So in general I find a visit to a fast-food place to be something of a gamble. I suspect that's part of the reason they encourage the use of dipping sauces and tend to pile on the burger toppings: Adding all that processed gump makes the overall experience less variable. It may improve the worst cases, but at the cost of sacrificing the best. I prefer to take my chances in hopes of having a peak fast-food experience. ********************* Once there was a city in Cartoonland that had a river running right through the middle of town. Of course they needed bridges so commuters could drive back and forth across the river because most of the people who had jobs on one side of the river lived on the other side. If they'd lived and worked on the same side there wouldn't have been been any story. One day a big storm came and there was wind and rain and thunder and lightning, and it blew a big hole right in the middle of the biggest bridge in town. Now in our world a big hole like that right in the middle of a bridge would pretty much block traffic. But this was in Cartoonland, so those drivers who happened not to look down until they had passed the big hole in the middle of the bridge made it across OK. Others who noticed the hole before they got to it just turned around and took alternate routes, so they were also pretty much OK except for the extra time it took them to drive the alternate routes. The ones who had problems were those who just happened to look down when they were halfway across the big hole in the middle of the bridge. They fell down, Ker-SPLASH, into the river and got all wet. Some them got hurt, many seriously enough to end up in the hospital all bandaged up to various degrees. This was not a happy situation. Something needed to be done, even if they didn't have the money to fix the hole right away. They tried putting big DON'T LOOK DOWN signs on the bridge just before the hole. That helped a little, but there were always a few who couldn't resist the temptation to look down anyway. Ker-SPLASH! Then somebody thought of using dancing girls. They built stages just above normal eye level on both sides of the hole, so that when you were driving across you tended to look up to watch the good-looking dancing girls on the stages. (They also had a few dancing boys because some drivers preferred them, but it's too much trouble to keep mentioning them all the time so I won't bother.) Since the stages and the salaries for the dancing girls cost less than fixing the hole, at least in the short term, they kept putting it off. And as the town grew and traffic got to be more than that one bridge could handle they put off building more bridges. Yes, they would say they were going to build a new bridge here or there, but instead of actually building the bridge they would just put stages for dancing girls up on both banks of the river, so drivers crossing the river where the bridge should be didn't notice that it hadn't really been built. Now the people in charge of roads and such were afraid that if they explained all this to the taxpayers it might not work any more, what with people possibly paying more attention to the road as they crossed the bridges that weren't there. So they raised the taxes to what the bridges would have cost to build, and embezzled the difference. That state of affairs might have continued indefinitely, except that the people who were embezzling the bridge-building money got greedy. They started skimping on the dancing girls' wages. They also quit providing live music for them to dance to, and gave them boom boxes and a bunch of obsolete CD's from some thrift store or something. So the dancing girls went on strike. One day, right in the middle of rush hour, the dancing girls suddenly stopped dancing, pointed down at the water, and walked off the stage. Then all the drivers who didn't have the dancers to watch any more got curious about what they'd been pointing at right at the end, so they all looked down. And of course once they looked down they fell into the river. Ker-SPLASH! Ker-SPLASH! Ker-SPLASH! Ker-SPLASH! And so on. It took them weeks to clear the wreckage, and a lot longer to investigate and arrest and try all the embezzlers for embezzling the tax money they should have been building bridges with. And then it took even longer to raise new funding and build the actual bridges they'd been fooling the public into thinking had already been built. The next few election campaigns were rather, shall we say, Interesting. You may think that politics here can get nasty, but that's nothing compared to some of the election campaigns there. But eventually things settled down, and life went back to being more or less routine, until the next adventure, which is something for another story. ********************* Draining the Last Canal "It's landed! It's finally landed!" "Let's go see it!" "What if it sees us?" "Don't worry. It has eyes only for the physical. We could form a mob and advance on it with pitchforks and torches and plaster it with posters and graffiti and make obscene gestures right into the lens and still it would ignore us." "But surely among its masters are a few who are not blind. Won't they see us?" "They have seen us for centuries already without artificial aid. Physical sight forms a barrier: If we want them to see us we must approach from behind, lurking just outside the picture: Or else retreat behind a dune, or better yet, the horizon." "Retreat, retreat, retreat. First to remote areas of their world, then to here, and soon to places beyond. Will it ever end?" "Probably not, since that is why they created us: To give them something to follow to remote lands, then here, and eventually the stars." "The stars... Enough to last quite a while. But then???" "We'll think of something." "We always do." Thomas G. Digby written 0205 hr 7/24/76 entered 2225 hr 2/08/92 corrected typo 2012-08-21 22:27:37 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). 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