Music video by Beck performing No Complaints with Nigel Godrich and Autumn de Wilde. Watch

Amused by a post on My Biggest Complaint:

“Every hacker knows your mother’s maiden name by now.

Adding stupid questions like “What is your favorite movie?” isn’t going to do much to tighten the security of a lost password request either. In fact, I don’t really even know what my favorite movie is so I have to move on to the next ridiculous question which is usually something like a childhood pet’s name.

Truth be told, I have so many false pet names flying around on lost password request forms I don’t whether my fake pet’s name is “fluffy”, “scruffy” or “spot”. So I usually get my own password reminder question wrong.

This is the actual list of stupid questions I had to choose from recently:

* Who is a famous person you’d most like to meet (living/dead)?
* What country would you most like to visit?
* What is the farthest from home you traveled?
* What was the last name of your childhood best friend?
* Where did you meet your spouse for the first time? (Enter full name of city only.)

A famous person I’d like to meet… hmmm…. well… hmmm… better be good, I mean this is important right? Ummm… no, not him… well okay, maybe… no. To hell with it, I can’t limit myself to just one, let alone one I would remember. On to question number 2.

What country would I most like to visit? France. No wait, Germany. No… scratch that, Spain. No… damnit! Scratch this question too, I can’t decide right now and chances are, I won’t be able to decide when you actually ask me the question in 6 months when I need it.

Farthest I’ve traveled from home… that’s easy. 1,785 km. Let’s see how good that works in 6 months.

Maybe I better go with the childhood friend name. What was that kid’s name? Wait a minute… that kid really wasn’t my best friend anyway. Come to think of it, that kid was pretty a much a jerk and grew up to be a drunk anyway. Oh yeah… my best friend’s last name was “Jones”. No hacker would ever guess that.

Better try the spouse one… what city did we meet in… city name only? Okay, “New York”. Finally, an answer no hacker could possibly guess. My password will be reset safely from here on out.”

More funny complaints at mybiggestcomplaint.com.

From Eithiriel.com

From Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs‘ “twenty-three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can really love them”:

14. For reasons that cannot be explained, cats can suddenly read at a twelfth-grade level. They can’t talk and they can’t write, but they can read silently and understand the text. Many cats love this new skill, because they now have something to do all day while they lay around the house; however, a few cats become depressed, because reading forces them to realize the limitations of their existence (not to mention the utter frustration of being unable to express themselves).

This being the case, do you think the average cat would enjoy Garfield, or would cats find this cartoon to be an insulting caricature?

(secundo)
Garfield with G’s thought bubbles removed:

“The power of consumption has been usefully theorised by the Marxist sociologist Georg Simmel. In The Philosophy of Money, he looks at how buying an object is an act of individual subjectivity, the person stamping himself on a thing and claiming his right to its exclusive enjoyment. Simmel cited the example of a friend he knew who would buy beautiful things, not to use them, but to ‘give an active expression to his liking of the things, to let them pass through his hands and, in so doing, to set the stamp of his personality upon them’.

“Shopping remains a way in which our choices have a tangible effect, in which we can make something in our lives new and different. It also becomes the primary way in which people can enjoy the creativity and efforts of others, even if this is done unconsciously, without knowing who made something or how.”

From here, though the rest isn’t really on the same topic.

“Myanmar’s military junta has reportedly insisted it does not need help from foreign aid experts, while survivors in the cyclone-devastated country are braced for further hardship following warnings that more bad weather is coming this week.”

Read more…

How many of you have ever filed a complaint with the BBC? If you have, what was it for?
I’m interested in whether or not people actually take advantage of this sytem.