Smile Police? I’m A Hardened Criminal Frowner

If they ever introduce face-to-face webcam/phone interfaces at work, my career in travel is so over. I’m what you might call a… hard-featured woman. When in repose, I always look like I’m frowning slightly. Gravity has taken its toll on my face somewhat, and it takes extra effort to lift it into a smile, so most of the time, WHY BOTHER?? unless I actually have something to smile about. As you might have guessed, I’m not a natural smiler, don’t have a particularly attractive smile anyway, and can’t stand people who walk around with big smiles on their faces all the time, when there is nobody else around even. What are they smiling at?? What drugs are they on?.

When talking to a complete idiot who wants me to do the impossible 15 minutes before closing time on a Friday, I sometimes have to put the caller on hold to roll my eyes, grimace, grumble, and vent to my neighbor before going live with a silky-warm sounding “Thank you so much for holding, I was able to make that change for you…”

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Rail staff face ‘smile police’

A Japanese rail firm has introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough at all times.

Computerised scanners around 15 Tokyo stations will measure the smile’s curvature to ensure it is broad enough.

Oh, good LORD, I hope this is a crock.

A few years back, the Safeway grocery chain instituted a “look them in the eye, smile, and call them by name” policy, which eventually had to be scuttled because too many male customers became Beavis and Butt-Head when a female checker followed company policy.

Pat Bagley, SL Tribune Cartoonist Extraordinaire

Yes, Virginia, there IS satire in Utah. Don’t miss the “GOP Values Party!” cartoon…. or the “Senator Orrin McClownshoes” one… or the “Digitally Enhanced Pixelated Basin” one … oh, just keep clicking the little seagull.
The Salt Lake Tribune — Pat Bagley

Here’s a few selections of Bagley’s cartoons just in July and June:

gopvalues

We Republicans are the Values… PARTY!!

kodachrome

Digitally Enhanced Pixelated Basin

and my personal favorite, now that Al Franken has finally taken his Senate seat:

frankenbagley

I think that’s Harry Reid on the left (naturally), and it’s definitely Borin’ Orrin on the far right, of course.

Internet Declares Socks-Found-Safe Thanksgiving Day 2009

@Pennycat denies involvement in disappearance of Twitteratti @Sockington
Sockington is Missing (Update: FOUND) — HUZZAH SOCKS ARMY

UPDATE: SOCKS HAS BEEN FOUND. He was underneath a shelf in my office, wrapped in a curtain, completely spooked and terrified. For the first time in years, he spent hours completely silent, not even reacting to hands, flashlights and food being waved inches from where he was. We’ve got him resting in a bedroom and letting whatever freaked him out get out of his system.

As I posted on Jason’s blog post and Flickr page showing a very subdued Sockington, it’s a huge relief when a missing cat is found safe after all.

When we first got Riley, he hid behind the green couch the morning after we brought him home, and I was almost late for work as I looked for him all over the house. Finally, frantically, I called David to ask if he remembered leaving the garage door open for any length of time… but he’d seen Riley earlier (he leaves for work before I do). I had looked behind the couch at least twice, but the third time I noticed a suspicious bump in the dust ruffle at the back. When I lifted it up, there was Riley, bein’ all cute and sleepy, with a little “what??” meow and everything. The sense that I was about to drown in panic drained away like a wave off a steep beach, “whoosh-shush-shush.”

However, we’ve come home to find Riley’s collar pulled off, and it’s obvious he’d gotten it caught in something. We’ve been careful since then to always buy the “Safe Cat” breakaway collars, and we try to be careful about not letting the long cords for the Venetian blinds drag on the floor. Also, we had to take care of a little matter with the box spring, similar to that depicted on I Can Has Cheezburger? earlier:

funny pictures of cats with captions

Riley had exploited some holes in the bottom liner of the box spring (perhaps originally made by Stuey back in the day) and had become fond of climbing up in there in the early morning to bump around beneath us, rather in the manner of the annoying Ghost in Hamlet. As in “You hear this fellow in the cellarage?” Sometimes we felt him bumping the mattress as he moved around, which I think was part of his early morning “Feed meh!” strategery.

Our fix was to deconstruct the bed, remove the liner, and replace it with…. screening! Yes, we tucked all the raw cut metal edges under before staple-gunning… pretty sure of it… I hope. But Riley can’t get into the box spring anymore, so now he just gets up on the bed and walks on my head for a while.

He is now safely installed in his Upstairs Basket, which is lined with my old Blue Blannie. All is well.

Giving It A Shot (In The Eye)

Had 2 successful insertions and extractions today, boo ya! Have not joined the Special Forces; just trying out soft contact lenses for the weekend. @fallingrock swears by them, I swore *at* them earlier. Seems OK now.

Prescription Contact Lenses – CooperVision USA – Patient Homepage – CooperVision

If you’re considering prescription contact lenses, consider that CooperVision is the contact lens of choice for thousands of leading eye care professionals nationwide. In fact, the trust they and their patients have placed in us has helped CooperVision become America’s second largest maker of prescription contact lenses. They know that no matter what your age or vision condition, there’s likely a CooperVision contact lens that’s right for you–a lens that will let you enjoy the best in vision, health, and comfort.

I do like the opthalmologist that David found – Dr. Vile in Arlington Heights. He was very patient and sympathetic to my frustration when first trying to insert and then extract the lenses, and pointed out that those of us with small eye openings (see his picture on his website) will struggle more at first with the larger diameter lenses. And advised me to literally walk away the first time I attempted to get the contacts out by myself, relax, look at things, and come back. It wasn’t quite “snicker-snack GLEE” when I came back, but they did come out on the first or second attempt. Put them back in easily, took them back out… eventually, and put them back in one more time for the drive home. I’m set up for monovision at the moment, with distance vision for the right eye (which is apparently the dominant eye… very bossy) and close vision for the left eye. I’ve had this with my last two hard contacts prescriptions and so I’m already mostly adapted to the phenomenon of one eye or the other taking precedence. It’s a bit odd driving, at first, but quickly became much more normal feeling as I went.

One nice thing: I’ll have to find my sunglasses, I get to wear them again!

We’re supposed to see a show with the rest of David’s family later today at the Drury Lane Oakbrook – a show we’ve seen elsewhere, unfortunately. I’m sure it’ll be very enjoyable, but it’s not a show I’d have chosen to see in a different setting. Now, if it was “Nunsense” or something where there’s a lot of of comedy and “business” that can change with different productions, that’d be another matter. But this is “Pump Boys and Dinettes,” one of those 50’s pastiche shows that frankly is really popular with the demographic at suburban musical theaters like DLO or the Marriott Lincolnshire. Dinner tonight with the family; this is our annual “transferred Hanukkah” outing, like when we went to see “Tommy Guns Garage” in May 2004. I’ll be interested to see if I can see… maybe I’d better take a bag with my glasses and the contact stuff in case I have to do an emergency extraction at intermission.

My vision has always been poor, and as I’ve gotten older, I have a “squint wrinkle” right between my eyes, on the right side. This is probably due to the fact that my right eye, though dominant, is quite a bit worse than my left eye. In school, both were bad enough that even sitting in the front row in grade school, I had to squint to make out stuff written on the chalkboard. After getting glasses, I sat in the back where I was less likely to be called on (since I was generally daydreaming most of the time anyway).

So: we’ll see. If I get better at insertions and extractions over the weekend, I’ll fix it up with Dr. Vile to get the whole “disposable soft lenses” deal with the packs of lenses, each of which is worn for 2 weeks, then pitched. The true test will also be at work, because if I can’t see to work, I’d have to justify just wearing them on the weekends and on vacation.