• It’s January 1. Oscar Grant was unarmed when he was killed by police on Jan. 1, 2009.
• Some 3.1 million Americans are celebrating the new year with a pay raise.
It’s really weird that so many corporate types read that and automatically think “Egad! Pay raises for workers are bad for profits!” rather than thinking “Awesome! More than 3 million of my potential customers have more money to spend!” How could that not be good for business?
• Did you know that most cars have a little arrow on the fuel gauge that tells you which side of the car the gas tank is on? I did not know this before. Cool.
• “Weird Florida 2014,” a roundup by the Associated Press, could’ve been much, much longer.
• Christopher Rodkey offers a fun list — or, really, the start of a list — of the “Strangest and weirdest stories in the Bible.” (How does that not include the Nephilim? That’s my go-to Bible story for sheer WTF-ery.) Less playfully, perfectnumber628 discusses “The Worst Bible Story,” which is horrific enough on several levels that it’s a strong contender for that title.
It’s really odd that we don’t just allow, but encourage children to read the Bible.
• Back when we were still young enough to be the subject of old people’s perfunctory columns fretting about kids these days, my friend Dwight Ozard and I coined a word to get our revenge at Vice Principal Strickland and all the other oldsters dismissing us as good-for-nothing “slackers.”
The oldsters have since gotten their revenge by mindlessly typing up an endless series of repetitive columns co-opting that term in service of Strickland’s Lament and the same-old kids-these-days whine. Dana Milbank’s recent variation isn’t quite as annoying as most iterations of this identical column, but it retains the grating qualities of: 1) Seeming unaware of its own lack of originality as the 10,000th rendition of the same damn column; and 2) Seeming unaware of the self-refuting irony of lazily echoing such lazy generalities in service of condemning others for their alleged laziness. Oldsters these days.
• I haven’t seen The Imitation Game because it’s still in theaters and I’m not made of money, but if you’re interested in that setting and that story, The Bletchley Circle is now streaming on Netflix and it’s pretty terrific.
• Here’s another of those new-to-me artists I learned about in 2014. This is Phox, the pride of Baraboo, Wisconsin:
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