Xpeditr has really overestimated the size of my wine cellar.

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(An unauthorized, unapproved homage to The Cluetrain Manifesto).

A powerful global reaccommodation has begun. Corporations are rediscovering themselves in their muscular masculinity. For we are the makers, the takers, and above all else, we are the winners. Customers, employees, the needy, the vulnerable are, by definition, the losers. Each one of them would gladly trade their seat for one of the tufted leather chairs in our CEO’s office. Instead, make sure your pathetic seatbacks are returned to their upright position, your trays are stowed, and you’re buckled in. For this is your pilot speaking, and we’re ready to fly the friendly skies of “PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKER!”

1. Markets are reaccommodations.

2. There’s the crew and there’s the screwed. Deal with it.

3. When jack-booted thugs rough up paying passengers and drag them from your plane, it’s time for the CEO to step up and declare that there’s two sides to every story.

4. There’s no customer need that cannot be met by a bag of off-brand peanuts.

5. Customers of course have rights. But only once they have lawyers.

6. Think of it like this: Boarding a airplane is like opening a shrink-wrapped product, an act that involuntarily voids all your rights. Except boarding a plane means also giving up the shreds of human dignity we didn’t already strip from you during the nudie scan, the TSA ritual ball or tit squeeze, the routine totally un-profiled examination of the darker-hued among us, the lack of sufficient seats in the boarding area, the unexplained delays, and the segregation into social strata announced over the PA. Also, I think we may have missed a spot in your rectum.

7. Costs have gone up while fuel prices and basic services have gone down, yet more and more people are flying. Therefore, passengers must love us more than ever. You can’t argue with math!

8. Virtually no other industry uses overbooking as a routine best practice because they don’t love their customers are much as we do.

9. “First they came for my free crappy meal, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carry-ons, and I said nothing. Then they just said ‘Fuck it’ and came for the guy sitting next to me and dragged him off the plane by the ankles. And I said something, and I video-ed it and I posted it.” Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’ve got a corporate reputation to maintain.

10. Every act of corporate brutality can be fixed by combining the power of euphemism with the audacity of neologism, catalyzed by a really expensive blue suit.

11. It’s great to know that we’re making our employees so proud! Right, gang? Gang?

12. Hey, it’s us against them, where “them” are the customers, right, gang? Oh, c’mon, gang, quit kidding around!

13. You know who’s the victim here? The shareholders. How about some sympathy for them, eh?

14. Y’know, it’d be a lot easier for us to fly empty planes and not have to deal with you all. You’re welcome. Ingrates.

15. Hey, catch! Here’s your guitar. Sorry-not-sorry for the crushing.

16. Have a bag of last year’s peanuts, on us.

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“There is nothing that has not already been said on the Internet” has zero hits at Google. Until now.

For I am the Destroyer of Paradoxes.

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I’m thinking that this Lamy 2000 pen on Amazon

isn’t really a one-inch cube…

…that weighs 4.2lbs.

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My conspiracy theory: The purported dossier on Trump says the Russians have been cultivating him for five years. Suppose they were pressuring him to run. As a true patriot, Trump knew how disastrous it would be to have a Russian puppet as President. So, Trump did everything he could as a candidate to make himself unelectable: in his announcement speech he called Mexicans rapists, he made fun of the disabled, he called McCain a loser for being captured. He just kept upping the ante. And then we elected him.

Put differently, let me pitch a movie idea to you. It’s The Manchurian Candidate meets The Producers.

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I of course don’t know anything that you don’t about Game of Thrones. In fact, I know considerably less since I can’t keep any of the characters or backstory straight. Also, I have not read the books. And when there’s exposition explaining something like exactly why one of the guys with a scraggly beard is angry at the red-head who likes to take off her top, I check my email, see what’s up at DailyKos, and maybe get myself some Fritos.

Nevertheless, with all of the confidence of an ignorant man, I am quite certain of how it ends:

Blondie-with-Dragons mounts the Pointy Throne, frees the slaves and reforms Obamacare, and then dies, at which point the handsome dwarfy guy is given a boost and becomes the tiny perfect mayor of all of West Oreos.

Come back in a couple of years and be amaaaazed!

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Top 10 new names for Ben & Jerry’s coffee ice cream to convince them to bring it back. #BringBackCoffee @benandjerryspdx

10. Coffee Hold the Gimmicks

9 . Coffee with OMG SO MUCH Cream and Sugar. Also, It’s Frozen.

8. Coffee Uncrunchy

7. St. Agnes‘ Coffee Purity

6. Coffee Coffee Reanimation

5. Larry David’s I Said I Don’t Want Anything In My Cone Except Coffee

4. Coffee Shutup

3. Jack Nicholson’s Coffee and Chicken Salad Sandwich on Wheat Toast

2. What Part of Coffee Do You Not Understand?

1. Just Fucking Coffee

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Coinstar makes vending machines into which you drop coins and from which you get bills or gift cards. Its list of unacceptable items is quite odd, presumably intentionally.

I’d think that this is based on things people have actually tried to shove into Coinstar slots, except I don’t see “fishing line with gum at its end” or “your dick”on the list.

(Tip o’ the hat to my brother Andy who definitely was not trying to “redeem” 70,000 #6 steel washers.)

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It’ll end when the Republicans have this conversation with their daughters:

“You see, precious, that’s really a woman who’s just pretending to be a man because, well, she’s what we call a ‘pervert.’ No, dear, she can’t use the men’s room because we passed a law to make sure that lady perverts have to use the lady’s room. Yes, dear, we also made a law that the male perverts have to use the men’s room dressed as ladies. Yes, dear, the lady perverts who look like men actually are lady homosexuals — why aren’t you precocious! — who lust after little girls, just like we’ve told you, but, well, …you won’t understand it when you grow up either.”

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My brother Andy points to a New Yorker humor post by John Quaintance about the original intent of the Second Amendment. It’s simultaneously hilarious and sad.

Then, in the righthand column there’s a link to an Andy Borowitz post with an Onion-esque title that I enjoyed:

Palin Blames Obama for Her Defeat in 2008 Election

And while we’re on the subject of terribly sad mirth, here’s Colbert’s hilarious impersonation of the First Hockey Mom’s rhetorical style / way of thinking:

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