Compared to a couple of years ago, my condiments and general sauce tray has a number of standard items that have gone bottom-up in sympathy with our straining, changing society: organic tomato sauce, HP, runny honey, various Indian brand chutneys. No mess, no food waste, prolongs product life.

That doesn't alter the fact that our entire food chain has to be reorganized, and that the packaging issue needs a complete rethink.  

You can't be me, I'm taken

I find it hard to justify my interest* in this kind of low-grade humour, because beyond surrealism I don't have a humour category to pop these good ones into.  

(* to deliberately seek out further examples of the genre other than the ones that are naturally encountered in online social networking)

I can laugh out loud for longer than 5 seconds on a good one of these babies. And that's gold dust, my friends. But it's mighty hard to pin down where the laugh comes from - and I suspect it is highly individual, though my daughters and a a couple of good friends tend to have similar reactions.

A common link would be the dynamic of the picture in tension with the caption, which would include the perceptual expectations created by the visual context: kitchen, simple non-gourmet food preparation, active drawer, cooking not yet started - and the figure, or focus. The hat rams the dog into the context, making it a victim more than a star.

But the real art is in the caption. You can't help yourself. You've already perceived the figure/ground ambiguity (as the Gestalters will have it). You've been loaded and cocked. By the time (a handful of milliseconds) that your eye reaches the text you are ready - but the caption has to create that oscillation between landscapes so that you are forced to reassess your judgement of the salient visual facts.

This can make you laugh. The same process can also make you think - where thinking tries to reconcile accepted ways and new ways. And sometimes comes up with better ways.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Cats may kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals in the United States alone each year, a new study has found.

That means predatory felines are likely the leading human-linked cause of death for birds and mammals, surpassing habitat destruction, collisions with structures such as buildings, and pesticide poisoning, reports an article published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Huh. We all know it's windmills.

We are ruled by stupid horrible people.

Last week's appalling jobless data - showing 60% of young Spanish people out of work - even sent alarm bells ringing at Davos last week, with Angela Merkel calling for help from businesses to reverse the trend.

Businesses can't help because people have no money to buy stuff because they have no jobs. by Atrios at<abbr> 09:50

On another topic entirely, I've been reading up on the history of railroading in the US, and the transcontinentals in particular.  Fascinating.  When I finish the book I just started (the second one, but the first was 750 BIG pages, so it does seem like a lot), I may put up a diary here.  A lot of interesting insight onto "modern" phenomenon like PPP's from those early days.