Real Kato Blog: Today's Miscellany

Spanking for fun and profit; flash mobbery; bad grammar from Toronto.

Last Friday, a jury awarded $500,000 to a woman in California, Janet Orlando, who was spanked at work. The spanking was apparently part of some kind of weird team-building exercise... sales teams would compete against each other, and the losers would have to humiliate themselves by wearing diapers or eating baby food. Or, by getting spanked.

$500,000 for a spanking, eh? I can think a lot of people who would sign up for that. Heck, I'd only charge you a couple hundred.

People still do the flash mob thing, I guess. Well, this one might have been slightly more organized than your typical flash mob. A comedy group called Improv Everywhere had 80 people dress in khakis and blue polo shirts, and invade a Manhattan Best Buy store. Khakis and blue polos are standard uniform for Best Buy employees, so it must have looked like an employee convention in there.

While none of group claimed to be employees, they did try to answer customer questions when they were asked.

The real store employees got suspicious that this was some sort of scam, and one starting shouting "Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!" I find it funny to think that someone would organize 80 people like just to try to snag a DVD player or something. I mean, the Manhattan Best Buy isn't exactly the Louvre.

Kobe Bryant was ejected from Wednesday's NBA playoff game between the L.A. Lakers and the Phoenix Suns. Actually, I'm not interested in this story at all, but this quote from the article caught my eye: "After the Suns' Raja Bell was ejected from the contest for close lining Bryant midway through the fourth quarter, the Lakers' all-star soon joined him to the locker room exiting the game after receiving his second technical foul with 3:11 left to play." Okay, this is a grammatical nightmare all around, but "close lining"? Really? Was he close enough to put a silk lining under Kobe's jersey? Did he draw a close line around where Kobe was standing?

To the author, Steve Keating in Toronto: the term is clotheslining, like the thing that happens when you walk into a rope on which clothes are drying. Maybe they don't have clotheslines in Toronto or something. But you'd think they'd at least have some freakin' editors.

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