Politics and Zombies vs Vampires

Several people on my friendslist have linked to this article, which notes a correspondence between zombie movies and conservative US administrations, and vampire movies and liberal US administrations.

In order to see if this is true, someone would have to do a lot more digging to determine, first, IF this statistically holds true under examination, and then, to try to figure out if it's just a coincidence. But the correlation seems to hold true in my limited memory.

Then, of course, you would want to figure out, if there IS a cause to the correlation, what that cause is.

Well, naturally, this is only fun if we assume that there is a correlation, and that the correlation has a cause.

Having gotten THOSE disclaimers out of the way, I'm now going to go into baseless, irresponsible speculation.
( Read more... )

I got the Tangierino job

I wasn't going to say anything until I filled out the W-4 and I-9 forms. (For non-US folks: the W-4 is the form that you fill out for your employer for tax purposes, so they can set up your paychecks with appropriate amounts of tax withheld; the I-9 certifies that you have the legal right to work in the United States -- i.e., you are a citizen or legal resident alien, and that you've presented appropriate documentation/identification to prove that.) It's not real until you've signed some paperwork of some sort.

Today was the second training class I took, the first being on Sunday.
( Lemme tell you a little about it. . .  )

Also: coolest thing I learned about hookah today:

So, like I said, today, we were trained on hookah, a topic I previously knew nothing about. I smoked one maybe twice.

The most interesting thing I learned is that you can get tobacco for hookahs that contains only minimal amounts of actual tobacco (and, in fact, those mostly-not-tobacco "tobaccos" are the only kind that Tangierino sells.) You CAN get actual-tobacco tobacco, but that's not what people are mostly smoking, at least not in Boston. No, and not cannabis, either, at least not in public. They're mostly smoking mixtures of fruit. The one that we tried was mainly lemon peel and molasses. It contained about five percent tobacco by volume, and some percentage of the nicotine would have been absorbed by the water in the hookah. Oh, you're still breathing smoke, so I certainly wouldn't recommend it for asthmatics, but the nicotine may well be trivial.

Neat, hunh?