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This was a couple of years ago but I think the numbers are still the same: sending a shipping container from Hong Kong to Newark cost about $3000 while sending the same container in the opposite direction cost about $500. This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make (the same situation that led Great Britain to force China to accept opium at gunpoint almost two hundred years ago). Sending a container to China is so cheap that for a stretch we were actually filling them with our garbage because it was less expensive to dispose of it there.

Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.

Bah, that graph needs antimatter.

My favorite horseshoe crab fact is that they have like nine different types of eyes. Even that tail is basically one big eye, covered in photoreceptive cells. We love to call them “primitive” but in fact those fuckers are highly developed pieces of biotechnology, able to survive 400 million years finding food in mud.

I have a coworker who insists that global warming is a hoax because plants give off oxygen, not carbon dioxide. Can’t even get a foothold in that kind of stupid.

Or better yet, get someone to help you quit.

My favorite quote from this movie was “first rule of leadership, princess: everything is your fault!”

That’s crazy talk. Your teeth aren’t part of your body or anything!

I would want “lump of star shit” in my obit.

Imagine being proudly offed by Pluto and then they make it not a planet any more.

Our ancestors’ brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.

Galluspetat

I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancient statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds better than “porn”.

Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).

A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I’ve never eaten there but I want to).

I wish I could remember what product this was, but many years ago there was some bullshit new age supplement that had “Guaranteed Placebo Effect” on the packaging.

I’m a school bus driver and I had to ban the singing of Christmas songs on my bus before Thanksgiving. Naturally the little bastards ignore this, just like they ignore my injunction against singing Taylor Swift songs. Thank god T-Swiffer has never done a Christmas album.

Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.

Undergrads: I get dumber, they stay the same age.

I’m a school bus driver and I regularly get infuriated by people who drive past me when I have my red flashers on and stop sign out, wishing there was a cop around. Only once so far have I gotten my wish … and unfortunately it was the cop driving past me at 40 mph just as some of my kids were about to cross the road. I looked down and saw him with his phone in his right hand and his left hand on the wheel, not paying the slightest attention to what was in front of him.

I’m lucky he didn’t run over any kids, because I probably would have gotten shot.

And many of them were feet long and weighed pounds!