I don’t love it when a frozen dinner requires you to remove the film from two different portions prior to cooking. One’s OK, but two is somewhat difficult to do without disturbing the other(s).

But lemme tell ya, that’s nothing compared to those stupid ones with the, I think, Betty Crocker brownies. Last time I checked, you were supposed to cook the dish for a while, _remove and set aside_ the gooey brownie, then cook it some more. I refuse to buy those, which unfortunately restricts my choices quite a bit these days, because they’re all the rage right now. Hopefully they’ll get over those or figure out a better way to balance the microwave energy or something…

In case you were wondering, my refusal to buy the latter category of dinners is probably the reason you’ve been hearing that the top 3 frozen dinner makers have fallen bankrupt. I guess I should have warned them about my vast consumer power. Ha ha, hahaha!

I get mildly annoyed when I hear people say “I’ll have the…” or (worse) “Gimme the…” when they’re ordering something at a restaurant. Seems like it fails to address the actual human who is taking the order. If they tended to have the word ‘please’ in there, it would significantly lessen my annoyance, because ‘please’ brings the other into it (not quite as well as “s’il vous plaît” does, though).

Though I have to say that “I would like…”, which is the phrase I most commonly use, doesn’t really address this issue either. I can’t recall if I tend to add ‘please’ or not. Anyway, I’ll have to watch myself and work on that a bit.

For your consideration,
Steven

(fun word. Do a web search on it to see all the different ways it’s used…)

I wonder how many of the ills of the world (ya know, the things that I declare to be ills) are a result of entitization, of the human tendency to spontaneously create entities. Entities want to survive, to grow, to reproduce, whether they are biological entities or the sort of virtual entities that people create, like companies, governments, jobs, committees, subdivisions, etc. We create a company to do a this or a that, but then it grows, morphs, spawns, and we find we are no longer happy with what it has become… but now we can’t easily stop it.

Whence virtual entities get their power to do these things is not completely clear, but that they do, and that it can go astray, is clear. I suspect that the power comes simply from the human act of naming the entity as such, i.e. it’s really a quirk of psychology and/or language. If that’s the case, then we can mitigate the ills by simply taking care to not create entities needlessly.

So, ya know, go do that.