Datsun's New Writeups

temp agency (thing)

2001-07-07T22:16:09Z

Temp Agency - (also Temporary Employment Agency, Employment Agency, Job Factory, Pimp.)

A temp agency is a business that subcontracts workers to other companies for short term work. Tasks can vary from unskilled manual labor to highly specialized computer programming. Occasionally temps are hired as full time employees. This usually requires some sort of payment by the hiring company to the temp agency.

Blue collar temps often work as unskilled labor: clearing debris from construction or demolition, moving boxes, light assembly and factory work, or as warehouse staff. White collar or office temps may fill in for absent employees or be assigned to jobs that no one else in an office wants to do, such as stuffing envelopes, folding flyers, data entry, photocopying documents, large quantity filing, or answering phones.

Temps generally occupy the lowest station in the workplace heirarchy. They have the least senority…

surburban sprawl (thing)

2000-12-19T10:40:43Z

Suburban Sprawl is what happens when a town decides that urban planning, or even a modicum of forethought, isn't as important as the potential revenue from new development.

These days, new development tends to include some of, but is not limited to the following:

Auto dealerships
tech manufacturing
Superstores
Malls
Those soulless family restaurant chains with ridiculous crap on the walls, like Bennigan's, Chili's, Applebee's, Fuddrucker's, T.G.I.Friday's, and Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag

Since everyone in America is supposed to be happy about driving their cars everywhere all the time, there's naturally a need for huge amounts of parking, and convenient freeway access.

And don't forget, new development is a valuable commodity. You gotta get those buildings put up fast, no time for new designs or original layouts. Besides, if it was good enough for Levittown, it's good enough for…

pawn shop (place)

2000-12-10T02:35:58Z

Also Hock shop. A business where things ("personal, movable property") can be left as collateral on loans. Items not reclaimed by former clients are later resold. Sometimes people try to sell stolen goods there.

Not a bad way to quickly change goods into cash if you can't get on eBay or Yahoo auctions or something. You can often find excellent deals there. Can be a sad place to shop if you look at it from the perspective that the items wound up there because someone needed quick cash more than the item in question.

Janitor in a drum (idea)

2000-12-10T02:24:23Z

When I was nine my mother insisted I take saxophone lessons. We found a decent, used saxophone at a pawn shop, got a lead on a teacher and scheduled a lesson.

At the end of my very first saxophone lesson my mother was asking about how to keep the instrument clean. The instructor told her that you could just use a product (which was appearantly more popular back east at some point in the past) called "Janitor in a Drum." I had only heard "Janitor in a drum" once before, and found the image of the custodian of my elementary school sealed in a barrel so funny that I immediately repeated the entire quote in which I first heard "Janitor in a Drum," by George Carlin:

"If Janitor in a drum made a douche no one would buy it, man."

Not having any idea what a douche was, I was entirely impressed by the afrementioned mental image. The higher humor was completly lost on me at the time. I think the instructor would have been amused if he hadn't been so…

giant robot (idea)

2000-12-10T01:21:55Z

The giant robot in Japanese comics first appeared some time around 1943. World War II was beginning to take its toll on Japan as a nation. The rationing was becoming tighter, more and more men were being pressed into service, and bombing raids became a drain on morale to which the average civilian had no response.

It is possible that out of this frustration came the first giant robot cartoons. Examples can be found in magazines and newspapers of the era. A cartoon from a 1943 edition of the magazine Manga depicts an enormous mechanical man, bristling with guns, kicking over buildings with the spiked soles of its feet. The caption read "The science warrior appears in New York."

There's a lot in that caption. It's not just a dream about the divine wind of the gods, or some sort of iron deus ex machina, but an idealized tool of a modern industrialized nation to strike back actively at it's enemies.

It sorta makes sense, you know?…

bat (idea)

2000-12-08T10:15:17Z

The bone structure of a bat wing, which still strongly shows signs of its origins as a more normal weight-bearing limb, poses an interesting problem:

If bats did, as is theorized by evolution, develop their unique characteristics as a species over a long period of time, there would have to have been some intermediate stages. You couldn't go from foreleg to fully functional wing in one generation. But the idea of survival of the fittest would hold that those new forms had to have some sort of advantage to survive and reproduce.

So what could those in-between proto-bats have done with their new limbs that weren't quite legs and weren't quite wings?