Ever feel like “happy birthday” is overused and cliché and just plain not creative? Feel lost when handed a birthday card to sign and don’t want to be the 30th person to write a bland “happy birthday”? Then the list below is for you. Cut and paste onto the walls of Facebook friends you hardly speak or even work up the courage to say some of the more off-color examples to their face. You might lose some friends, but at least you had the gall to go out in a blaze of awkwardness.

No wonder kids in this country won’t eat their veggies. Most grocery stores in America sell vegetables that are simply not tasty. I’m getting sick and tired of western¹ vegetables like collard greens, kale, and Swiss chard that taste like the fibrous end of a nasty stalk of celery. They’re tough not tender, bitter not sweet, dry not juicy. Eating vegetables I buy at my local Fairway (with the exception of broccolini) is like receiving an enema if you’ve got fecal impaction. It’s not pleasant, but you have to do it. Asian vegetables, on the other hand, are yummier, sweeter, and tenderer.

Being John Malkovich is one of the most bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the story of a couple who compete over traveling into John Malkovich’s head in order to use his body for sex with a callous woman with whom they’re both irrationally in love. Craig Schwartz starts out as an unemployed  pupeteer who’s married to pet store owner Lotte. At the nadir of this unhealthy love triangle is Craig and Lotte’s love, Maxine, Craig’s female colleague at his new job.

Follow-up post: “Debunking Organic Food Myths.”

Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” program on National Public Radio several nights ago discussed the current nation-wide effort to recall half a billion eggs suspected of being tainted with salmonella. I’m usually skeptical of Ashbrook’s Chicken Little routine (grab attention by making a situation sound like the sky’s falling) but this time I agreed. The US industrial food system is in serious need of reform.

I hate stuff, and by “stuff” I mean material objects. I hate lugging stuff around, packing stuff up every time I move, storing stuff, cleaning stuff, searching for stuff when I misplace them. My dislike of physical items might be a reaction to my father’s pack-rat habits. Our garage is filled from floor to rafters with never-used gardening tools, dilapidated sports equipment, unfashionable bookshelves and chairs, and all sorts of tchotchkes. My father brings home this ever-growing collection from the local recycling facility, aka the dump. Wellesley’s dump has a reusables section where someone who doesn’t want his ugly-looking garden gnomes can drop them there and rest assured that some crazy, old lady with a penchant for jolly, ceramic creatures will give it a nice home.

I recently read an article published in the Atlantic Monthly about how Google is trying to save the news industry. I was a bit skeptical when I first read in the book Losing the News that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a magazine publishing trade conference that he wants to save the business. Tech people typically don’t have much respect for content-creators. But apparently Google, a company built on the idea of making money from organizing the wild web’s seas of information, sees high-quality content as a vested interest. Sucky content = no readers = no money.

Follow-up post to this whole blogosphere hullabaloo. And the follow-up to the follow-up.

[update] Commenter Jessica writes below that

As a female employee at Citi, I have one of these on my desk. They were NOT handed out by the HR department, but rather by the Head of Diversity, Patricia David, who is no longer with the firm. (Currently at JP Morgan I believe.) They are handed out at workshops geared towards women, often hosted by “Women’s Councils” that exist in various Citi locations.

While interviewing at Citibank, my friend stole something from their office. He doesn’t know why he did it. He just did. When he showed what he filched to friends, some were outraged at Citi, others just found it strange and funny. Post your reactions below.

[update] My rationale and defense for posting the photo rests on the fact that this card is not confidential information and it’s…thought-provoking. Releasing something like this on the web, the wild, wild west of all mediums, however, has the danger of distortion and exaggeration. Just imagine a game of telephone with thousands of people, some don’t listen carefully while others are just mildly retarded. So I clarified some things with my source who passed me the photo.

Citi had these cards lying on every desk in the HR department, a department dominated by women in many firms. According to my friend, this card was on some of the desks on a floor he suspects was the human resources department. It is unclear how these cards fit in with official company training material, how widely and to which employees Citibank distributed them, or the financial institution’s broader policy towards women in the workplace. I personally don’t doubt that Citibank takes its treatment of female employees very seriously and that this card was handed out with the best of intentions.

11. Grow Testicles

Dave Chappelle once cracked a joke about how he tested whether someone was a real Native American:

I didn’t know the background behind Chappelle’s joke until recently. It’s from the 1971 Earth Day public service announcement showing a Native American named Iron Eyes Cody who seeing the pollution around him, sheds a tear. Apparently, this PSA was such watershed moment we are still laughing about it today.

Here’s a hilarious fake news article titled “Last Newspaper Reporter Fired.” Here’s an excerpt to convince you to click the link and read the whole thing:

A DAY IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE — In what Wall Street cheered as a long overdue and welcome cost-cutting measure, the very last newspaper reporter in America was fired yesterday, capping years of newsroom cuts and officially eliminating basic newsgathering as a journalistic function.