Pledge pain

It's been an all-over-the-map week, what with Todd Akin's version of human reproductive science, Phyllis Diller passing and Prince Harry showing us he has nothing to hide in Vegas.

So I'll close it out by crabbing about KQED, the local public television station, which is having at least its third two-week pledge drive of the year. The last one (which actually lasted three weeks) was...last month.

They haul out the same tired, old war horses of [insert field of expertise here] [insert guru here] standing on a carpeted stage before a small studio audience, yakking about one topic or another that's supposed to make your skin look younger, fix your financial future, heal traumatic experiences and maybe make a concert pianist out of you.

Although if those talks didn't have the desired effects last month I don't know why they'd work this time.

There are also concerts of doo-wop, folk, big band and pre-pubescent singers.

The one common denominator is that every one of them is extended ten minutes in every half-hour with those bleeding pledge breaks.

I just wonder how successful they can be at raising money if they're hitting up their supporters on average every six weeks? Plus, the more time they devote to pledge drive, the less programming they actually have to pay for, so I wonder where all the dosh is going?

The full Harry

Apparently the third-in-line to the British throne lost his shirt in Vegas.

Also his trousers and his pants and his socks.

The good news is that Prince Harry still has his health. Obviously.

Funny lady

We lost another pioneering giant-in-her-field this week. Phyllis Diller died Monday at age 95. Like Julia Child, Diller was a woman who found her calling somewhat late, but once discovered she jumped in all the way. And we were the better for it.

Diller succeeded in a field that was not just dominated by men, it was exclusively inhabited by them. Her comedy routines were the 1950s showbiz equivalent of a woman wearing the eye-popping green jacket of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Oh, wait…

Actually, since she made a point of covering up her good looks with seriously ugly clothes and fright-wig platinum, teased hair, that green jacket might have been a good prop for her.

She also cracked masses of one-liners deprecating her domestic abilities (she was actually quite the gourmet cook), her fashion sense (“I used to work as a lampshade at a whorehouse. I couldn’t get one of the good jobs"), her husband (okay—that one was deserved) and everything she encountered. She refused to be out-cracked by any male comic, and she prevailed.

Because of her relentless resilience, women are now able to stride the boards pretty much at parity with the funny men.

Without wearing a butt-ugly green jacket.

I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite dillerisms:

“I was the world’s ugliest baby. When I was born, the doctor slapped everybody.”

“The only thing domestic about me is I was born in this country.”

“They say housework can’t kill you, but why take the chance?”

A woman's place

In light of the recent pronouncement by Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin (currently a Congressmoron from Missouri serving on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, although he seems to believe that the sun revolves around the flat earth) on how the human female reproductive system works, it occurred to me that I need to consider places in comparison to which the United States doesn’t come out looking like the worst collection on the planet of utter nincompoops WRT women’s issues.

So I turned to Foreign Policy’s maps of the Worst Places to Be a Woman.

Didn’t make me feel any better to consider the condition of women around the world, but it did take my mind off the jaw-dropping posturing of one scumbag who represents the medieval mentality that is only slowly being chipped away—in some places more than others.

Sunnyvale sights, Part 3

So, last month I shared a photo of a produce delivery truck and pointed out that the company didn’t seem to have grasped the whole URL thing.

Literally—they didn’t have an entire URL, which is really odd in this particular area, because you are what you Web, and if you don’t have an online presence, you’re not really real.

Well, the other day I encountered another of the company’s trucks and was pleased to note that they finally have got the full web address:

 

I’ve got to say that they’ve certainly got their money’s worth out of that domain name.