Measuring things with abstract concepts

You’ve heard it before. Someone will say something like the measure of a man’s worth is not his net, or actual, worth but is instead his capacity for love. Or that it is the thought that counts when clearly thoughts do not have the requisite mathematical skills to do any counting. If asked why, the speaker will probably say that some things just cant be measured without missing something essential and that to assign a number to something like love would negate it.

However this misses the point. The reason for measuring things is not to answer the question truly, so that it rings in harmony with the spheres, but to answer the question definitively so we can all get on with our lives. To put it another way, we measure not for accuracy, but for precision. If you are confused as to the difference between the two, think back to seventh grade science and remember the words of your teacher, whose lack of affect and general incompetence came--not from a lack of conscientiousness as you originally supposed--but from an experiment with 8 moles of C₁₃H₁₆CINO-HCL that never made the lesson plan. So while you scratched your head and stared as he botched a darts-and-target simile, you should have been learning from his example. He may have only been wrong some of the time, but he was always an asshole.

Qualitative Quantification: Infinite thumbs

Dr. Red Stag's Patent Cure for Modernity

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24, Seasons 8-14

The makers of 24, who first revolutionized television by combining an overly literal reading of Aristotle and a main character whose name rhymes with Power, follow up the success of the previous daylight savings themed season, 25: Spring Forward, Fall Apart, with an even lengthier longest day in Jack Bauer's life. The next six seasons will take place on Pluto, where the days are 153 hours long. The cast and crew are pretty tight lipped about the plot, but they have said that this season will find Jack, who was crucified in the last season by swarthy Aramaic-speakers, resurrected within the first four episodes in order to thwart a potential terrorist attack on Pluto. This time the terrorists are attempting to refine a plutonium bomb on Pluto in order to subject the English Speaking Peoples to the worst pun the language has ever seen. It is unclear at this point whether the terrorists will be motivated by hatred of our way of life or a desire to avenge Pluto's loss of planet status. What is clear is that the plot will not be clear! As Jack Bauer does things to terrorists that the ASPCA wont let us do to our food, Sutherland's performance will once again show a man balancing on the razor's edge between patriotism and sociopathy. The next six seasons once again promise us confront us with the moral compromises that must be made by men like Jack Bauer so that civilians like us have the freedom to safely watch shows in which someone almost inevitably gets stabbed in the throat.

Gift Guide: Christmas 2007

Famous and controversial once and future CEO E. Morgan Sprague is expected to dominate the non-fiction lists with Then Make Them Clean It Up With Paper Towels They Bought Themselves From A Store You Own. This follow up to his 2002 managerial-biography Come On All Their Faces should continue the lessons of that wildly popular tome by explaining how to subtract in increments of 10,000 and add in 1/8 and by instilling a contempt for people-who-stand-in-your-way-by-not-doing-what-you-want-quickly-enough in babe and adult alike – the perfect gift for reptilian middle managers and delusional white collar proletarians alike!

For those insatiable little gift-vacuums constantly mewling in your ear for the latest adventures of a magical nerd, try Harry Potter and the Turkish Bath. This delightful little fairy-tail has more of everything a little wizard craves - from giant hairy men riding bareback with monsters between their legs to elegant British sorcerers using their wands to shoot magic all over each other willy-nilly. Including twice as many stupid little made up words! Those precious kids of yours will be holed up in their rooms playing with their little wands in no time! Maybe now they’ll finally shut up - don’t get your hopes up though!

Elvis Costello releases his newest back catalog rerelease with newly remastered Bucktoothed Douchebag in Glasses. This almost forgotten gem from the early eighties or late seventies was ignored as just another mediocre folk-rock album (except without fingerpicking). But then diligent record executives with an inflated sense of their own aesthetic integrity and an inability to seek out new music decided to comb their label’s back catalogs for albums by established artists that nobody bought the first time. Luckily for us they found this one mouldering next to the ark of the covenant. This lovingly remastered disc comes with 20 pages of full color dental x-rays and liner notes written by a balding man with a ponytail from Rolling Stone. These notes are jam-packed with fanboy trivia and anecdotes that explain, among many other things nobody should care about, the answer to “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?” Turns out its “understanding” – it comes last, so it’s the punchline! Besides, “peace” is deadly serious and “love” is for pussies. As an addition for the fans, there are bonus tracks with even shittier production, so you can really hear how chords sound.

Speed 3 or 4

Word on the street is that Sandra Bullock is ready to reprise her star-making turn in Speed in a more literal fashion than usual. Once again she is on board to play Annie Porter (Bullock), a woman whose penchant for moving violations is matched only by her incredibly paradoxical ability to be simultaneously lucky and unlucky in love. Keanu Reeves? Jason Patric? Both are pretty hot. Exploding buses? Out of control cruise lines? Filthy abortion clinics? Terrible romantic nights out! Sources say that, once again, Annie's newest nascent relationship--this time with Robocop (Peter Weller)--will be tested as they are caught in the maelstrom of a seemingly unavoidable disaster. The story takes off as they are in the middle of watching TV, possibly cuddling, when they learn that they are caught in the middle of a booby-trapped universe. If it expands too slowly the gravitational mass of the entire system will be pulled back into itself, crushing everything into a single point in space! If it expands too fast all celestial bodies will eventually disperse themselves so far apart that everything in the Universe will freeze in the absolute cold of deep space! What are they to do? As of press time, sources close to the studio are saying that the script, tentatively titled Speed 3 or 4: The Biggest or Smallest Bang is on page 8 trillion, with filming set to begin in about 300 years

Vampire Lifeguard

Chelsea Von D'Monde-Rodrigueski, beautiful and charismatic, with a perfect body and brilliant mind, was born over 300 months ago to a peasant family in what is now France, on the border of what is now Germany, but was, at the time, called West Germany. She has not aged a day since that fateful night she met Jonas. Darkly handsome, the mysterious German nobleman was at once menacing and magnetic. After a night of passionate melancholy, he revealed to her his terrible secret; he was probably gay.  After convincing her to become his eternal beard, he brought her over. Once they were in Germany he turned her into a vampire. For the last 2,100 days she has faced peril and passion with equal disinterest, but all this pales in comparison to the challenge she is about to face...

...the day shift.

In this sequel to her wildly successful Vampire Publisher, authoress Alina Reilly continues her chronicle of the war between two vampire factions. The evil vampires who wish to hunt and kill humans indiscriminately for sport are opposed by the good vampires who only kill humans for very good reasons, such as sport. In this sequel Reilly artfully creates a new protagonist, whose compelling perfection is complemented perfectly by the kind of incongruous yet charming insecurity of every female protagonist ever.  Although the lion's share of the novel is taken up by the Chelsea's backstory, this is appropriate in light the improbable chain of events that would lead an immortal creature of the night to take a job as a lifeguard at a public beach. The portion of the story set in the present is just as compelling, as Chelsea's really bad sunburn leads to a frantic quest to find a store that sells aloe and is open after dark while being followed by a mysterious figure who appears to be a villain but is actually Jonas.