Drunken Pumpkin

SHEEHAN: In general terms, in a war, if military forces are attacking each other, it’s not terrorism. But if an armed terrorist organization attacks civilian targets, that’s terrorism…it’s also…a terrorist attack if you attack military people in barracks, such as the Khobar bombings or the Marine barracks in 1982….

REPORTER: So, for example, if you were to drop a –what do you call them– cruise missile on people who were in barracks or tents, would that be terrorism?

SHEEHAN: No.

State Department Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Michael Sheehan, May 1, 2000

Excerpt from an article by Aaron Sakulich, the entirety of which can be found here.

Apparently, to all of the kooks and nutjobs in the world, this means “New York City: Killing Jews is okay.” This font has been the subject of rumor and conspiracy theory since around 1992, when a number of newspapers discovered this diabolical code.

Since it was, apparently, the slowest news day in the history of mankind, articles began appearing about the anti-Semitic codes hidden in Microsoft’s software. It got so much press that the people who created the font had to take time out from their busy day to defend themselves. My understanding is that they’re nice people, don’t even remotely hate Jews and claim that this whole NYC business is a coincidence.

But is it? There are 255 characters in the Wingdings font. If you’re going to have these three characters in that set, what are the chances that they will appear in this order? Well, according to the chapter in a statistics book that I read in the twenty minutes between writing that last sentence and this one, the odds are one in 16,581,375.

Odds are actually 1:16,386,810, but not much difference.

The Cat Herders commercial can be found here.

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year. ~ Victor Borge

Jeff was quite disheartened when he read the blurb about the office worker being dead at his desk for a week before anyone noticed. Even though it was a fraud, the fact that such a thing could get printed in real newspapers says something about the state of our office environments. And so it was that Jeff went out to find some sort of evidence that he was not just a cog in the wheel. Something had to establish his uniqueness.

With this in mind Jeff went out and found a search engine that would tell him just how common his name is in the United States. I wonder just what it is that program is searching. Apparently there are 34 Jeffs floating around the country, but what if there search algorithm is wrong? Maybe a few of those Jeffs are really our Jeff, and the number is really only 32 or maybe just a handful. Or, maybe, there is just the one Jeff and all the rest are just a fiction of some computer. Then I remember that Jeff is named after his father and that theory just collapses. But it does make you think a little. And it is usually better to sit and think than just sit.

Tune in tomorrow for more existential fun and games with Jeff and Pyrophage.