Finger-lickin' Fun

So I've been wondering lately. Why do some people lick their fingers before turning the pages of a book, or counting money? I've never done this, and I've never understood why people do this. I've heard some say the saliva makes it easier to turn the paper, but seriously, is it that hard to turn the page? Think about it. What's hard about turning the page. Tell me. You are turning a page of paper. Does this require any extra ritual or mechanical effort. In my book, the answer is no. So stop it. It's not that hard to turn a page of paper. I really can't emphasize how easy it is to do this. Why.

I wonder, however, if licking your finger decreases the possibility of a papercut, or maybe increases it. That could potentially make it worthwhile. Or not.



Another thing I've been wondering about is the phrase, "In my book..."
For example, "In my book, Fear of Music is the best Talking Heads album," or likewise, "Remain in Light is better than Fear of Music, in my book."

Right now, the phrase is obviously metaphorical; very few people have written books where they delineate their opinions on the Talking Heads canon. The cited book is completely metaphorical. I wonder, however, if that was always the case. I wonder if there were pretentious scholars somewhere stuffy like in Victorian England who were all like, "Well, in my book, Haydn's 101st symphony is far more substantive than his 79th," and they literally had that in their book on Haydn and other composers, and cited this book as such. That would be so bad-ass, being able to cite your own book on matters that come up in conversation.

"Well, in my book, Marth is definitely a far superior character to Pikachu in Super Smash Brothers Melee."
"Baja Fresh offers better tasting burritos than Chipotle, in my book."
"In my book, your face is ugly" (Shaw 379).
"Well, UNC will actually beat Duke next week, according to my book. See the footnote on page 198."

The possiblities are completely endless. Or has the term always been metaphorical like it is today? If that's the case, my day has been ruined.


Hopefully these links won't ruin your day though:

• For his historic run on Jeopardy!, the wizard Ken Jennings managed to get free ice cream from Baskin Robbins for an entire year, or at least something close.
• What policies can economists across the spectrum generally agree on?
• A sobering report on the state of Afghanistan's police force.
  
• The New York Times lists the 10 Best Books of 2006.
• So wait, how exactly does one drill a square hole? Using a Reuleaux Triangle, of course. More info can be found here as well.
• The Simple Dollar lists 30 essential pieces of Windows software that are free, and also open-source. Great list in my opinion. I'm getting a new laptop very soon, so this will be very crucial to its setup.
• And finally, I really like this photo of Michael Strahan chewing out some reporters, in an aesthetic sense. It's very well composed, and incredibly provocative. Despite the good effort last night, it was still abundantly clear that there is no discipline in the Giants locker room, and the team is on the verge of collapse.

By the way, let me address one more thing about the Zune. I feel like I'm playing devil's advocate with this thing, but I promise I'm not, this is my honest belief.

Some people have complained about how the Zune's navigation control looks like the iPod's touch-sensitive scroll wheel, but it's not. It's more like a directional pad like on a video game controller, so it's not touch-sensitive at all. And apparently that's confusing for some people.

I don't understand. If you press up, it scrolls up. Down is down. And so on with right and left. What's difficult about this. If anything, the iPod's scrolling is less intuitive than the Zune's. If you picked up an iPod for the very first time, how the hell are you supposed to know that rotating your thumb clockwise around a wheel will move things down? It really doesn't make any sense at all. If I want to scroll down, I'd rather just push down than keep rotating my thumb around this pad. I'll admit, the first day I had my Zune, I accidentally rotated my thumb maybe twice, but caught myself immediately. If you're having consistent issues with this, maybe you should consider taking logic courses at your local university. Also, destroy your iPod. But put Rockbox on it first.