What is the Watercooler?
It's a haven in the middle of a harsh, 9-to-5 world. A place where you can gather with your fellow human beings and bond over a paper cup full of cool refreshment.
All sorts of randomness is welcome here. Post pictures, videos, special Chat information, or just discuss news and current events.
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Revived from the archives of MyOtaku, I bring you... THIS:
1. Grab a calculator. (you won't be able to do this one in your
head)
2. Key in the first three digits of your phone number (NOT the area
code)
3. Multiply by 80
4. Add 1
5. Multiply by 250
6. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number
7. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again.
8. Subtract 250
9. Divide number by 2
Do you recognize the answer?
So, I've been watching a lot of Walker, Texas Ranger lately *waits for the laughing to die down*. There's no doubt that the show is quite cliched and campy, and I began to notice elements that are repeated often:
- Bad guys use machine guns. Good guys use pistols.
- Two Rangers with pistols hanging onto a helicopter will be able to shoot down a group of villains with machine guns, without sustaining any injury or damage to the chopper.
- Ammo clips are infinite.
- A Ranger can avoid being shot by crouching in plain sight, and point-blank shots will always miss them. This is because they have personal force fields.
- "Freeze! Texas Rangers!" translates as "We dare you to shoot us."
- Roundhouse kicks slow down the flow of time, and occaisionally even cause it to loop.
- Anyone who is severly wounded will make a full recovery without any lasting health problems.
- Cars are highly explosive.
- Walker will always arrive in the nick of time. There are two theories for this phenomenon:
1) Any location in Dallas is within easy traveling distance from wherever he happens to be.
2) Walker can perform some kind of Cherokee time/space warping.
- There is no such thing as "police brutality" in Texas.
Its been a while since I abused the Watercooler. So here is some George Carlin.
Do I need to warn about language, its Carlin, so yes-in-f*cking-deed
I opened up the newspaper this morning and saw that there was an interesting article about teenage students, chat-speak and their homework assignments. The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study on Thursday that show that teenagers are letting slang like "lol" and emoticons slip into their schoolwork. Teens who keep things like a MySpace, FaceBook or a blog have greater tendencies to mix their formal and informal writing together. Half of the teenagers surveyed admit to sometimes omitting even capitalization and punctuation, while thirty-eight percent use lol, rofl, plz and the such and a quarter use emoticons.
It has nearly been a year since I graduated high school and this article is one of the most interesting education-related pieces I have read in a while. See, when I write anything, I at least try to spell, use grammar, punctuation and try to write out everything I can. Even when sending instant messages I write full, thought-out sentences. The thing is, I can't understand why the carrying over of text-lingo into other pieces is so wide-spread. I understand that many phone companies charge by the character for text messages, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to understand what everyone else is saying if while on things like blogs and chat rooms we use proper English? It took me the longest time to figure out what many of the chat-speak abbreviations meant and I still don't know them all.
Why do people do this? Seriously, it's much harder to understand someone when all rules of our language seem to disappear once fingertips touch a keyboard. To me, this is the absence of understanding a language rather than the evolution of one. Is there anyone else frustrated/annoyed by this or am I just blowing this out of proportion?
You can find the article here on the internet, but I read it in this morning's edition of The Macomb Daily. Check your local newsprints, since the aticle is an Associated Press article and therefore can run anywhere.
