WPIUSH*, the Continuing Story

I got a link to this video from The Onion from a fellow blogger, Peter Quily of Adult ADD Strengths, and just had to share it:

I particularly loved (and identified with) the line about some citizens evacuating safely to Canada. Thanks so much, Pete.

*WPIUSH, for those not familiar with the acronym that I often use, stands for Worst President in US History.

Am I Really a Sports Jinx?

Back when I was working at RIPE, I used to joke to my co-workers that I’m bad luck to any team that I root for. When the BC Lions were in the Grey Cup, some of them either discouraged me (or encouraged me, depending on their preference) from watching the game on TV, because somehow they would always win when I missed the game and lose whenever I watched. It was almost uncanny how the act of observing the game, like some sort of twisted Heisenberg Principle, made the team lose.

This year, I didn’t watch a single game that the New England Patriots played in, except for one: The SuperBowl.

After winning every other game they played during the whole year, they lost this one game I watched in the last 35 seconds. It was probably one of the biggest Super Bowl upsets in history. In fact, ESPN.com is now having people rank and vote what they think are the biggest upsets in history, and tonight’s Super Bowl XLII (42) is listed among the candidates: (here’s a screen capture for posterity:)

Oh, and by the way, after missing their regular season, I also saw that ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox lost to the New York Yankees, which is, naturally, in the list.

Note to self: If your team is playing, and you’ve not seen them play in any other game, and they’ve won every other game, be sure to watch them, and bet against them, big time, particularly if it’s any team from New England vs. New York. At least you can profit from the misfortune you seem to emanate.

The IKEA Code

I always wondered how they came up with the names for products at IKEA. I found out today that apparently they had ‘cracked the code’ , or at least found the pattern(s) for the names. So the next time you see a JERKER or JONKOPING named product, check your cheat sheet with the naming standards, now in Wikipedia:

IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are either Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Norwegian in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.^[2]

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men’s names
• Materials, curtains: women’s names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling
• Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

For example, DUKTIG (meaning: good, well-behaved) is a line of children’s toys, OSLO is a name of a bed, JERKER (a Swedish masculine name) is a popular desk, DINERA (meaning: dine) for tableware, KASSETT (meaning: cassette) for media storage. One range of office furniture is named EFFEKTIV (meaning: efficient), SKÄRPT (meaning: sharp or clever) is a line of kitchen knives.

A notable exception is the IVAR shelving system, which dates back to the early 1970s. This item is named after the item’s designer.

Because IKEA is a world-wide company working in several countries with several different languages, sometimes the Nordic naming leads to problems where the word means something completely different to the product. A well known example was the bed frame GUTVIK. As the word can be pronounced Gootfick it invites German-speaking people to understand it like gut fick which is somewhat close to “good fuck” in German.

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember

How about that! Well, now I can go to an IKEA without scratching my head so much.

What Americans Know About Canada

Last night, I couldn’t help missing all of the swipes that the Republican’s took at Canada’s Health Care system during their televised debate. I remember either John McCain or Rudolph Giuliani making a stupid joke that if the US decided to adopt Socialized Medicine, Canadians wouldn’t have anywhere to go for health care. Yeah, right; Believe what you want to believe, Mr. McCain and Giuliani. It was amazing how many times that all of the Republican candidates all repeated the phrase: ‘The US Health Care System is the best in the world.”, as if saying so would make it true.

When I mentioned to my parents, back in Baltimore, the distinct possibility of a President Huckabee, my mother said “If that happens, then we’ll be joining you.” Really? If I were them, I’d be more serious about that, considering this classic clip from the CBC’s This Hour has 22 Minutes in 2001, where Rick Mercer shows just how gullible they (including Governor Huckabee) can be in Arkansas:

I’ve written before about the staggering lack of knowledge about the rest of the world on the part of Americans, but I would hope that any potential future President would know more about Canada than this. Perhaps I should be worried if there will there be enough room for the Americans fleeing north to join us if Mike Huckabee, a man who might be just as uninformed as George W. WPIUSH, becomes President.

A follow-up on this, thanks to West End Bound: An Article in today’s Vancouver Sun:
Canadian health care better and cheaper than U.S., says research If you think that this source might be not entirely neutral, bear in mind that they are reporting on a British study, not a Canadian one.

Smart Dogs in North Vancouver

Apparently, (at least according to the people who make the signs for the parks), dogs in North Vancouver can read: