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People can have pet peeves.

That implies there are or were wild peeves. And that makes me wonder.

• What was the natural range of the wild peeve?
• When was the peeve domesticated?
• Why was the peeve domesticated?
• Of what use are they, really?
• How did they help further society, like the horse?

Someday I may investigate this further. Any interesting findings could be published in a book with a title such as On the Domestication of the Peeve.

I’d like to present to you today an example of success:

Colin Kaepernick

The critics might disagree, saying that he’s a washed-up quarterback who can’t play in the NFL anymore. But if your definition of success is “currently playing in the NFL”, then over 99.9% of the people in the USA are unsuccessful.

Other critics might contend that he has brought division and conflict to our country with his antics during the national anthem. That might not look like success to you, but your goals are not his goals.

What are his goals? (I haven’t asked him directly, so I’m going off common knowledge and common sense here):

He wanted the country to be aware of (and discuss) the treatment of minorities. He accomplished that, so success.

Before that, as an NFL player he wanted to get his team to the Super Bowl. He accomplished that, so success. Rather, partial success, since he probably wanted to win the game.

Before that, as a college player, he probably wanted to make it to the NFL. Again, success.

I dare say he has accomplished more and been more successful before the age of 30 than many people are in the whole lives. You can say a lot of things about Colin Kaepernick, but unsuccessful should not be one of those things.

With my hobby of tracking NFL scores (or at least wins and losses), I check the results of NFL games to update my data. The easiest way to do that is to get the scores. A lot more places have scores available than a simple W or L for the day.

I figured the best place to get the NFL scores is the NFL website. And a convenient device for me to use is my iPhone. It’s not the latest one, but there are still millions of them in use, so it’s fairly relevant.

I went to the NFL website, clicked on the Scores link at the top, and this is what I saw (yes, it was fully loaded and rendered):

The NFL website was done so poorly that I couldn’t decipher the jumble of letters and numbers. Compare that to Google:

Much better.

You’d think the NFL would check that their website rendered properly in Safari on an iPhone, but apparently they did not. I’m going to blame their website redesign that’s new since last season. There is a lot about it that I don’t like, but rather than go into all the details, I’ll just stick with this one example.

The English language has provided us with a fair amount of modifiers and punctuation in order to make things clear. Confusion and humor come into play when people do not avail themselves of those items.

Exhibit #1: The sign in restaurant bathrooms that says “Employees must wash hands”

In the interest of saving printing costs, or because of laziness, or because of some other reason, the people responsible for the sign usually do not include punctuation or possessives. This leaves it open to the interpretation that the employees of the restaurant are responsible for washing my hands.

My guess is someone who likes to have fun with grammar pointed this out to management. Or perhaps management received a complaint from someone who did not get his hands washed by an employee.

Either way, I saw this sign the other day:

And I couldn’t help but smile and take a picture of it to share with the internet.

It was at a Red Robin, in case you want to support them for acknowledging poorly-worded signs.

As far as vehicles go, there’s the Land Rover. And Toyota has the Land Cruiser. It seems to me that someone else should make an off-roady-type vehicle and name it Land Something-or-other.

Not really “something-or-other” but rather something having to do with mobility such as Cruiser or Rover.

Such as:

• Land Wanderer
• Land Ambler
• Land Meanderer
• Land Traveler
• Land Voyager

I wonder if FCA would object to Land Voyager. And I wonder if Nash would complain that Ambler is too similar. And I didn’t even bother with Land Navigator.

Also out of the running: Land Driver. Too boring.

Honorable mention: throwing Range Rover in there and having a vehicle called the Range Cruiser.

It’s been a while since I saw any of the Teletubbies, so I assume the same is true for many of you. For those of you who do remember watching Teletubbies (regardless of if it was your choice), this may be of interest.

First of all, the still photo:

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Our younger students still bring home flyers for stuff, but our older students don’t. It’s not that they forget the flyers, rather the non-elementary schools don’t hand out papers. We get emails and such. The day before picture day, I asked the boys about picture ordering information since I hadn’t received an email. “I think it’s on the website or something.” was the answer I got.

So I went to the school website. Here’s a snippet of that page.

If you notice the top part of the announcement, it has a link to Order Information. I clicked that link, expecting it to take me to the studio’s website or something.

It took me to a PDF of the flyer.

That PDF, naturally, had the studio’s website address printed on it. But it wasn’t clickable.

So I had to type in the URL that was on the PDF. First-world problems, I know. I just found it amusing that in this day and age, people aren’t thinking of providing links directly to active content. Links have been around for over 20 years now. It should be the first thought of the website person. I don’t know who runs the school website – maybe it’s a teacher or administrative person who got saddled with that task and is doing the best he can. That’s why I didn’t complain to the school. I simply provided it here for the entire internet to see.

I suppose that since it was originally on the school website, the whole internet could have already seen it. In that case, I provide it here to serve as a lesson for all you web developers: if you create a link to a static document or image, and that document or image has a website or other such link printed on it, you can make everyone else’s day a little easier and brighter by providing a clickable link to that content. Allow people to bypass the middleman.