On the cutting edge of pointless information

I am in awe of sites like BoingBoing that have the ability to constantly find interesting stuff from around the world. If my monkey-training experiment grant money ever comes through, I might have the technical capability to run a blog like that some day. Frequently I get excited about finding something interesting that I want to share with everyone, only to find out (like with Alexyss K. Tylor) that I'm about two weeks behind the rest of the interwebs.

Sometimes, though, I do get satisfaction from being ahead of the curve. That happened twice in one day yesterday. Yesterday was a great day--I dragged my ass out of bed and made it to the Saturday morning training run with the Alpine Runners in Lake Zurich. Later on in the day we attended a combination Cinco de Mayo and birthday party for Splotchy's youngest son, and finished by stopping by the Sand Bar Tiki Lounge in Brookfield.

Anyway, I'm driving home from my run, listening to NPR. Weekend Edition ran an interview with Daniel Wilson, author of a new book titled Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived. I see that Mr. Wilson's book was published on April 17 2007, so I'll graciously assume that he had the majority of it written before I posted this, or this, or finally, this piece about the Bell Rocket Belt. And another thing--I think "future that never arrived" sounds suspiciously close to "future the way it used to be." But like I said, I'm gracious, and I wish Mr. Wilson success with his book.

Here's the second incident: after making a run to Costco, I put on CNN hoping to catch up on some news before leaving for the birthday party. The news wasn't on, but I did catch a segment called "In the Money"; during this segment they talked with author Robert Sutton about his book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

Here's what the hosts said in the lead-in to the interview:

ROMANS: The title of a new book by Robert Sutton includes a seven-letter word --

VELSHI: Which I taped over.

ROMANS: That management won't let us say on TV and we probably shouldn't say. We don't want to say it anyway.

VELSHI: Right as long as we don't want to say it while the TV's rolling, but the word starts with an a and ends with somebody wanting to put their fist through the wall.

ROMANS: It is causing a buzz; nonetheless, author Robert Sutton joins us. Welcome to the program. ...

"Causing a buzz" CNN? Causing a buzz?!? The book was published in February 2007, but if anyone at CNN had done proper research by reading this blog they would have learned about Mr. Sutton's important work back in November 2006. I even followed up the initial post with a Monday Morning Asshole Update.

There you have it folks. Enjoy your day!