do not want to work today. I need to go get a new phone (old pay as go plan is almost at $0 and I am switching to a family plan with my parents which means switching carriers), fax some paperwork to insurance company, call some Drs., and go through a pile of papers. None of that is even more enjoyable than work, but I'd rather get it done than do invoices and deal with people who will not respond to my requests.

Does anyone want to call the local Girl Scout office for me and ask why they haven't called me back these 10 days later? No?

How about orienting some new Anthro grad students to the library this afternoon?

With real anchovies? Isn't there some kind of Italian market that would have them? You just have to smush up two anchovies to make a proper Caeser.

Not within an 80 mile drive. I'm in a Bible Belt college town, not a coastal metropolis. The fact that the local Kroger has an organic section is pretty remarkable for the area.

On the other hand, farm fresh peaches and tomatoes for everyone!

I don't actually make Caesar dressing myself (the local Outback and Colton's have great salads), but I do like eating the paste on wheat crackers as a snack.

Hooray baby girl!

And I'm like, Fuck You and oh, Fuck her too.

must not sing all day in front of mother and then son. so catchy, not sure I can resist.

How to tell when your boss is lying

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

Why is this document an Excel spreadsheet? I have a Word doc's worth of info that needs to be inserted into it. This is frustrating. Cut and paste is so not working, and the screenshot inserts are beyond clunky.

I hate when some people become infatuated with a file format.

How to you make a tornado cooler? Just like anything else, make it out of fire.

Rare ‘fire tornado’ filmed in Brazil

Oh, I love it when even though I skip I manage to poke my head *just* in the right place (after you-don't-wanna-know-how-many-posts, too).

Jessica, what wonderful news to get on your anniversary! And, yup, that's totally a Buffista Calendar post, so happy anniversary to you and Fone Bone and your current and future kids!

And belated wishes to Franny, whose birthday was yesterday, too!

(In meMeME stuff, after the double blow-a-contract-in-our-faces-on-the-last-minute fun, we still don't have a place - I mean, we found a short-term place, which is quite an achievement here, since there are very few places like that for rent, and a brilliant idea courtesy of H, but it's only short-term, so many things are missing, for example, no internet. We asked the neighbor's permission to use his wireless and share costs, but he wouldn't let us pay, so we use it as little as possible. But, hey, connection to the outside world!)

Oh, Nilly - lots of "long-term home finding`ma" to you and your DH.