What would happen if.... (8/29 edition)

....private delivery companies (such as DHL, FedEx, or UPS) got sued by the United States Postal Service for their perhaps "unauthorized" use of ZIP codes for routing packages? Doesn't the USPS have some sort of intellectual property claim to the numbers as used to mark regions of cities?

There was a very funny sketch on the old Laugh-In show back in the 60's making fun of ZIP codes when they first came out. They went digit-by-digit showing how it allowed the post office to find exactly where the letter was supposed to go, starting on a countrywide basis and slowly zeroing in until the last digit -- Cincinnati, Ohio. And of course, they pointed out that the city and state were written pretty clearly in large letters on the envelope itself, so why was this fancy number system needed?

[On a side Laugh-In note, they would do "news of the future" bits where Dan Rowan would read the news from 20 years in the future....1988...and he starts "President Ronald Reagan...blah blah blah" The audience is hysterical, but I was watching it on a Nick at Nite rerun IN 1988....so I was totally floored by it.]

One thing we have here at work in the kitchen is an instant-hot water dispenser. Good for tea, I suppose, but I use it also for hot cocoa. You know, for those days where they run the air conditioning even though it's only 61 degrees out. And, not only is it good for making the cocoa, the hot water is the only thing that can dissolve the dried-on sediment from the previous mugful. It can be a couple of weeks in between servings, so the bottom of the mug (which I keep at my desk, a 24-ounce Scooby-Doo "mystery brew" model) gets brown and gunky.

I'm so bugged. I got tickets for Van Halen in Boston for 10/30. I don't mind the drive up, but sure enough, yesterday I get an email that they've added a show here in Connecticut on the fifth of that month. So it would have saved an hour on the ride to the show. The CT show is a Friday, so being out late isn't a big deal...it's a weekend my kids are with their mom....and finally, as my friend has mentioned, who knows if Eddie and Dave will have a big fight and cancel the rest of the tour at some point -- the sooner you can seem them live, the better.

One of my favorite things to do when a spell-checker is turned on is to right-click and view suggestions from the program. For instance, Scooby in the paragraph above is underlined and I'm given four alternatives: Booby, Booby's, Jacoby, or Jacoby's. I can just imagine the porn possibilities of a character named Booby-Doo. Oh, and the alternatives for "Doo" are Dew, Du, Doro, too, or coo. Hey Blogger, wouldn't "Do" be a legitimate word one might *accidentally* type for Doo? Assuming, of course, that I didn't actually mean Scooby-Doo.

Speaking of porn possibilities, one evening a few years ago my ex-boss and I were waiting to start a poker night at the office. Instead of going home, we had a couple of hours to kill....so I suggested a sort of "Internet Mad Libs" -- where you take turns picking a word and going to the site "www.that word.com" and seeing what comes up. Kinda like, first one to end up at a porn site loses. He lost with "gentleman" as apparently www.gentleman.com is a porn site. But you can go on for a while with random words. www.orange.com www.dishwasher.com www.bandana.com....let me know what you can find.

We had our fantasy football draft last night. I actually got first pick. So that means LaDanian Tomlinson is destined to rip up his knees very soon in order to curse me, I suppose. Yahoo's site ranks players, and a very futile exercise while waiting for my turn was to go to the bottom of the rankings and work my way UP the list until I found a name I recognized. Believe me, the fourth- and fifth-best players on really bad teams aren't exactly "household names."

My job requires me to review companies' census data -- names, dates of birth and hire, etc. It's always interesting to see some names....especially when they're obviously ethnic names which, when read in English....well....there was a guy, perhaps Vietnamese, whose last name I'll leave off, but had the first/middle name combo of "Fuk Yue". This perhaps can never be topped.