This newspaper clip made the internet rounds about six months ago, but it’s new to me:

I look forward every day to working the jumble, unscrambling jumbles to make “ordinary” words, which then provide an answer to the picture drawn.

On Thanksgiving Day, R U S U Y was one of the jumbled words. My 9-year-old grandson and my sister worked for hours. He became so frustrated because he could not figure it out.

The next day the answer was “usury” – no ordinary word, not even in the dictionary.

I think you should stick to using “ordinary” words.

Patsy Lyon
Loretto KY 40037

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one reminded of the episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa gets a pony. There’s a scene in which Homer applies for a loan from Mr. Burns to buy it:

Mr. Burns: …By the way, are you acquainted with our state’s stringent usury laws?

Homer: Yoo-shoo-ree?

Mr. Burns: Oh, silly me! I must have just made up a word that doesn’t exist!

(Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.)

Snakes on a Plane, even when you take into account that it’s supposed to be a big dumb action movie aiming to be a cult film, wasn’t all that good. Apparently it’s been made worse through its bowdlerization for TV, where Samuel Jackson’s famous line has the profanity (and personality) drained from it:

“I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane?”

That’s painful.

This article originally appeared in Global Nerdy.

There’s a small TV set in my home office that I sometime turn on – usually to one of the cable news channels — as “background noise”, which I sometimes find helpful when I’m trying to get work done.

Today, I’m on the road in London, Ontario with Microsoft’s EnergizeIT tour. I’m hanging out in the hotel room with my coworker Rodney with the TV on as background noise and here’s what’s on right now:

When I tell people that I often work from my home office, they ask if I ever get the temptation to plunk myself in front of the TV instead of getting work done. The answer is no, and part of the reason is that there’s nothing but this junk on during the day.

Millvina Dean, last living survivor of the Titanic.

Millvina Dean, age 96, hopes to raise 3,000 pounds to help cover the costs of living in a nursing home. She’s doing this by selling her mementoes from the aftermath of the Titanic, which include a hundred-year-old suitcase full of clothes given to her family after they arrived in New York. Her family took the Titanic to emigrate from the U.K. to Kansas; her mother and brother also survived, but her father did not.