You’re looking at it backwards. Look at it the ultra-wealthy way: you are the dependent your dog claims on his taxes, but you do all the work and pay the bills. The money just passes through you to accomplish these things, but it’s not your fault your dog can’t read the tax code.

They are warning the kibble in Sto-bowl-kor that a great meal is about to arrive. The food in the bowl is only an empty shell now; the humans should treat it as such and dispose of it.

“Subscribe and save” is a scam.

They advertise that you will save 5% by using subscribe and save, but then the price of the item you are buying just happens to go up by 30% on the day they decide to use as the basis for your order, which is not the day you ordered it or the day they pulled it off the shelf. It will occasionally go back down to a normal-ish price, but there will also be random months where it goes up 50% or 100%. I’ve seen $15 case of paper towels go up to $45 some months.

Then they keep prodding you to add more items to get 10% off your entire subscribe and save. I added some items a few weeks ago, got the extra discount percentage, but when they priced my order a few weeks later, the cat food I’ve been getting from them at a pretty stable price suddenly went up in price by the exact amount the extra discount was saving me.

Amazon essentially took the “four square” concept that car dealers use to shift higher costs to an area of the transaction where you are less likely to notice it.

If one was from France and the other was from Portugal, they missed an opportunity to meet in the middle and speak Andorian/Andorran. He could still read her poetry but without all the ducking involved in Klingon courtship.

Those Dubliner jokes are awfully cheesy, unlike the munster comedygold coming out of Kerry.

It seems to me that we need some software that intercepts the data being sent to Google, replaces all proper nouns with “Sundar Pichai,” all numbers with a 10 followed by 100 zeroes, and randomizes everything else before sending. The data they receive would look like it was smuggled out of a Being John Malkovich parallel universe.

Or we could just use Firefox. Or Lynx.

And you don’t want to do the chainsaw dance of contrition after failing to pay your host the courtesy of synchronizing your chronometers with their planet’s capital city.

I somehow read this comment in the voice of the cleric performing the “mawwiage” ceremony in Princess Bride.

Cleric: “Sunwise…” long, uncomfortable pause. “And for the exact same weason.” Pause. “Clocks go clockwise because their pwedecessors did… and what were their pwedecessors?”

Humperdink: “Look, can we hurry this up?”

Cleric: “Sundials.”

Humperdink: “Just skip to the end!”

Cleric: “Countewclockwise… as said in another comment… would be… widdershins.”

The Washington Post talked to the studio and the city this week and established some important key points.

NBCUniversal acknowledged they trimmed the trees, but they claim they trim these trees annually and it just happened to coincide with the strike:

A spokesperson for NBCUniversal confirmed to The Post that the company had pruned the trees. Universal’s confirmation was first reported by Deadline.

“We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “That was not our intention.”

NBCUniversal is working to offer picketers shade coverage, pop-up tents and water, according to the spokesperson. The company has maintained the trees for years and prunes them annually in partnership with arborists for safety ahead of the “high-wind season,” the spokesperson said.

The city confirmed the trees are supposed to be managed by the city, the studio did not have a permit to trim them for the city, and that no permits had been issued to trim those trees in the last three years:

L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a tweet Tuesday evening that his office is investigating the trimmings. The pruned trees are managed by the city, though businesses can obtain permits to trim trees from the city’s Bureau of Street Services, Mejia said. He added that they should be trimmed every five years.

On Wednesday morning, Mejia said the city had not issued permits for the ficus trees to be trimmed and had not issued any tree trimming permits for the location over the last three years.

The NBCUniversal spokesperson declined to comment on the controller’s statement.