LAst CAll

If everyone thinks Google is "being evil" for partnering with the Chinese, what does that make Catholics?

Dear Career Ladies

Dear Career Ladies,

The line worked for a long time, but it's over: saying "When a man is tough, they say he's assertive.  When a woman is tough, they say she's a bitch" is the equivalent of announcing to everyone in a sixty office radius that you are, without question, an enormous bitch on wheels, a "C-U-Next-Tuesday" non pareil.  And that no one likes you.  At all.  So stop using it to treat everyone around you like captives of a corporate concentration camp, or we'll staple your ass to your Aeron and wheel it into the elevator shaft.

And I'd be very careful about leaving an open can of Diet Coke around if I were you.

Dear Yahoo

Dear Yahoo!,

Here's the thing: I want to like you.  I really, really do.  We've been together for a long time -- remember, you were even my homepage?  And my email account, for -- well, years!  I still check my Yahoo! mail, only now it's mostly to confirm registration for sites I'm afraid are immediately going to add my address to a list they turn around and sell out of the back of a truck parked along the side of the information superhighway.  But that's minor.  Really, you shouldn't take it so personally.

But, um, here's the thing -- and I hate to even mention it, but we're friends, right?  And you'd want your friend to tell you if you put on, like, 75 pounds and were still trying to squeeze into the same clothes and wherever you went, people were pointing and laughing, except for small children, who run to their mothers and clutch their legs -- right?  Okay!  So.  Well, you're kind of like that person.

I try to hang out with you, but whenever I do, you're -- well, so down all the time.  Like this morning.  I saw something about NBC's fall schedule, and considering there are people NBC will take out onto the backlot and shoot if viewers aren't interested, I thought I'd save a life and watch a clip.  That's when things began to go south.

You see, I don't typically watch clips on your site, because you're so Windows-centric, but I recently got the Flip4Mac WMV plug-in, and it works pretty well.  So I thought I'd give it a whirl.  Selected "30 Rock," the SNL-type show with -- nutty casting here! -- Tina Fey.  Window came up.  Video loading.  Everything good so far.

And then I waited.  And waited.  And then I went outside and cleared the underbrush from around the fence in the backyard, trimmed the Japanese elm, washed the exterior windows, re-tilled the soil in the flower beds, and counted the leaves of grass -- which takes quite awhile when you lose count three times -- and came back in.  And you were still supposedly loading my video.  Which I assume is a clip of "30 Rock," and not the entire season, but the networks are desperate, who knows what they might try?

I'm sure that's not it, though.  I'm sure it's just that there are too many people and not enough servers or there's a DRM issue or -- well, whatever.  It always seems to be something, and that's what is so disappointing, Yahoo.  You used to be so good at things.  You used to provide the best information, the best new services, the best and cleanest designs that were easy to navigate and that worked.  But times have changed.  Hey, we've both changed.  So, maybe it's just better if we don't hang out so much anymore.

Oh, her?  The G-url in the G-string?  Oh, she's nobody.  Just a friend.

Um, by the way, you probably shouldn't be wearing those pants anymore.  Just so you know.