plasticwrap

Acronymious

There are so many aggressively unexplained acronyms in use today. It’s kind of like using shorthand without checking that everyone else is using the same system. I blame the technology revolution. Tech companies invented so many new words and phrases so quickly that we became inundated with acronyms that we don’t know the “real words” for. And they’re not all in the dictionary, for obvious reasons. My main objection to the proliferation of undecipherable language is that aliens would find it difficult to work out what was going on if they read any Earth publications, even if they had an Earth dictionary. And I don’t think we want to annoy the alien dudes, or even make them too curious.

I just saw an ad for Glade “car fresh”. The guy in the ad is apparently in the middle of smoking a cigar while driving with the windows closed. Has anyone ever tried to smoke a cigar while driving? I should imagine it is quite a feat. You have to hold a cigar differently, particularly a corona like that, and the clouds of smoke that cigars produce would be extremely difficult to see through. Cigars are very smoky things. So maybe it’s a pet cigar that never gets lit, because the air is crystal clear.

It’s actually quite unusual for an ad to have smoking references like that in it, nowadays. I don’t recall seeing it anywhere else recently. Are there rules governing it, or just social pressure?

Apropos of nothing, I officially met one of my New Year’s goals – I quit smoking. It’s been 2 months now so I figure that counts as quit. It was surprisingly easy to do. I thought I would be really addicted, because I smoked about 30-40 a day for 18 months, and I have tried to give up before and went back to it. But it was strange – I just ran out of tobacco and didn’t buy any more, almost without realising it. I’ve had a few cigarettes with friends over the last few weeks, but none of my own and never more than one in a week. If I could work out what made it such a non-event to quit this time, I could market it to people and make millions.

The other day I finally read something to explain the whole carbonated-drink-fizzing-over phenomenon. Apparently there are tiny little tubes in the surface of glass (the same reason that flies and other insects can walk up windows) and these little holes are filled with air. When the carbonated drink is poured into the glass, the dissolved carbon dioxide reacts vigorously with these gases and fizzes violently. So if you pour a whole glass of champagne at once, the reaction is so energetic that the glass bubbles over. So the solution is to evacuate the air in the pores in the glass before pouring the body of the drink – pour a little bit in, swish it around, and then fill the glass. I always kind of wondered about that, and now I know :)