Safety Fork, the

I saw Juno with a few friends tonight; I liked it. After we had left the theater, it was pointed out that every character spoke a witty line at some point. I hadn’t noticed. I replied that those of us who appreciate good wit secretly believe that everyone is witty. Or at least, that’s true of me.

From Ars Technica:

Balancing national security with the public’s fundamental right to know what the government is doing in its name is a difficult challenge, but no challenge should necessitate abdication of essential checks and balances.

Ryan Paul (the author of the article) is wrong. Balancing national security with the public’s right to know what the government is doing is easy. There is no legitimate business of the republic that cannot be conducted in full view of the public. For example, if the FBI needs to use quiet, possibly questionable methods so as not to spook a suspect before he can be arrested, fine. But once he’s arrested, all the methods and all the reasons for their use must be published. It’s the only way we can ensure that positions of personal power are also positions of personal responsibility. If actions made in the people’s name can be kept secret at will, then “national security” is just a clever euphemism for job security.

I took my brother out for breakfast this morning. The parking lot is shaded, so when we got back to my car, we had to wait for the insides of the windows to defrost. After a few minutes, I wished aloud that the window would finish defrosting at eye level.

John replied, “You need to not be so high.”

I eat lunch at work each day, and sometimes that lunch includes french fries. I like to eat my french fries with ketchup. Normally, I get my ketchup from a pump dispenser. Sometimes, however, the pump dispenser is empty—or worse, the ketchup it dispenses is runny. (At first I thought they were watering the ketchup when they ran low, but then I found out the dispenser takes sealed bags of ketchup. Why is there such a quality variation between one sealed bag of ketchup and the next, presumably from the same supplier?) When one of these conditions is true, I grab a handful of ketchup packets instead.

I need a handful of ketchup packets to substitute for two or three pumps from the dispenser because the packets are so small. Obviously someone at Heinz, having decided that customers wanted a less-messy way to grab a handful of ketchup, had to decide at what volume to quantize it. But why is an individual ketchup so small? Ketchup is not so expensive that I (or anyone else of whom I can think) shepherd it by the milliliter. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked for or been given quantized ketchup by any measurement more precise than the aforementioned handful. I certainly have never eaten a meal for which I wanted more than zero ketchup, but fewer than three.

So is there a market I’m missing for small amounts of ketchup? A ketchup underground? I’m baffled because increasing the size of one packet by even fifty percent would reduce the number of packets by a third, which would lower packaging overhead for producers (but not the price; I’m paying for the ketchup, not the little plastic envelopes), and be less annoying for me since I’d be able to spend less time opening my food and more time enjoying it.