Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Blinkers Before Thinkers Read Blinkers Before Thinkers Me: "The car ahead has its blinkers on." I don't know how he does it, but I could hear the eye roll in his response. Son: "It's not even movin—" Me: "—STOP!" Read Blin...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Armed With Culture Shocks Read Armed With Culture Shocks At one point, we're walking past a major central street to head to where the horse guards are. In doing so, we pass Downing Street. Friend's Dad: "Why is that road lo...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com The Family That Beeps Together Read The Family That Beeps Together A trio swoops in: a grandmother, a mother, and a little girl who’s maybe four, all clearly on an Exciting Family Shopping Adventure. Their cart is packed. They p...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Foster Parents Have A Sole Responsibility Read Foster Parents Have A Sole Responsibility Customer: "It ain't buy one get one free?!" Me: "No, ma'am." *I point to the very clear sign.* "It's buy one, get one half off." Customer: "Return thi...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read Today, my family and I went to a local family restaurant we enjoy. Two of us had gotten our meal by now, and we were enjoying it, but the waiter came by to let us know that the third had been ...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read My wife and I were driving home from the hardware store with a bucket full of pink paint with which to paint a room in our house. We had to stop abruptly when a teenager on a skateboard dashed...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read (This happened a couple of years ago. I was in the break room, reading about the Greek War of Independence on my phone. I was interested because I know quite a bit about Greek history and toda...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com At Least They Told The Tooth Read At Least They Told The Tooth Older Woman: "Ma'am, I think I found a piece of tooth in my coleslaw." She is holding out this tiny piece of something. I pick it up and examine it, and lo and beh...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read When I was eight, my mother cheated on my dad. They separated a few months later, and she moved with her lover, which she eventually married after some years. You have now to imagine the worst...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com Untitled Read (Our pastor is giving a sermon and using customer service as an example.) Pastor: “Because ‘The customer is always… right, right?” Me: “Baloney.” (The youth pastor turns around to grin and lau...
Feb 12, 2026 from Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com The Day You Almost Became THAT Customer Read The Day You Almost Became THAT Customer I realize that the woman ahead of us is returning a large number of items. The clerk has to find them on the receipt and then click on the item and do s...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Willie Singletary will you please go now? (Previously: [1] [2]) Welcome to Philadelphia! We have a lot of political corruption here. I recently wrote about the unusually corrupt Philadelphia Traffic Court, where four of the judges went to ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Proof by insufficient information Content warning: rambly Given the coordinates of the three vertices of a triangle, can we find the area? Yes. If by no other method, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the lengths of the ed...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A puzzle about balancing test tubes in a centrifuge Suppose a centrifuge has slots, arranged in a circle around the center, and we have test tubes we wish to place into the slots. If the tubes are not arranged symmetrically around the center, the ce...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Claude and I write a utility program Then I had two problems… A few days ago I got angry at xargs for the hundredth time, because for me xargs is one of those "then he had two problems" technologies. It never does what I want by defau...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A descriptive theory of seasons in the Mid-Atlantic [ I started thinking about this about twenty years ago, and then writing it down in 2019, but it seems to be obsolete. I am publishing it anyway. ] The canonical division of the year into seasons i...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse The fivefold symmetry of the quince The quince is so-named because, like other fruits in the apple family, it has a natural fivefold symmetry: This is because their fruits develop from five-petaled flowers, and the symmetry persists ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Mystery of the quincunx's missing quincunx A quincunx is the X-shaped pattern of pips on the #5 face of a die. It's so-called because the Romans had a common copper coin called an as, and it was divided (monetarily, not physically) into twe...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse My new git utility `what-changed-twice` needs a new name As I have explained in the past, my typical workflow is to go along commiting stuff that might or might not make sense, then clean it all up at the end, doing multiple passes with git-add and git-r...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse An anecdote about backward compatibility A long time ago I worked on a debugger program that our company used to debug software that it sold that ran on IBM System 370. We had IBM 3270 CRT terminals that could display (I think) eight colo...
