Pun Salad

… that ditch out in the valley that they're digging just for me?

• I've long harbored a sneaking suspicion that the secrets of life, the universe, and everything were concealed within the lyrics of Steely Dan songs. Protein Wisdom tries out that theory with Obamacare, and it works out pretty well.

• Planet Moron turns its attention to the FCC report "Broadband Adoption and Use in America".

  If you are like most Americans, three questions probably pop into your mind:

  1. Am I paying for this?

  2. Seriously, am I paying for this?

  3. Because if I'm paying for this, I'm going to be really ticked off.

  Via the Technology Liberation Front.

• One of the day-job things I do is a daily scan of Freshmeat, a site devoted to keeping track of new releases of software packages of interest to (mostly) the Linux/Open Source community. Most package blurbs tell you what vitally important niche the software admirably fills. So the description of the latest release of the programming language Txr kind of stood out:

  Txr is a baroque and painfully hard to use language inspired by, among others, the idea of reversing "here document" generation into "here template" extraction. Since its inception in September 2009, it has grown hair, such as functions that aren't really like normal functions, and try/catch/finally exception handling. If a complicated Txr query fails on your sample input, just give up. Don't even think about trying to understand the debug trace output, and the mailing list is likely to be of little help, since pretty much only the author reads it. It is recommended for those who are faced with some simple, boring little problem that is dire need of compounding.

  The Txr home page is here.

• The A. V. Club explores personal pop-culture rules:

  What are your pop-culture rules? That is, the up-front guidelines that will prevent you from seeing/reading/listening to something, or that will guarantee that you'll see/read/listen to it even if reviews or word of mouth or past experience with the creators have been negative?

  Various answers at the link. I have some rules of thumb for movies:

  AVOID: Nicholas Sparks; Woody Allen, unless he starts being funny again; Steve Martin "family" movies; any movie where it looks as if the trailer has every single funny bit in it.

  MUSTS: Anything with Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, or Batman in the title. Bill Murray. Bruce Willis. Needless to say, any involvement whatsoever by Mr. Clint Eastwood.

  How about you?