• [from steve_portigal] DVRs Can’t Handle New Show’s Title [NYTimes.com] – [A UI edge case that wasn't designed for ends up becoming a mainstream concern. "What are the chances that'll happen?" comes true, and now workarounds must be created] It turns out that the search tools on some DVRs cannot find the new show, “$#*! My Dad Says,” because the symbols cannot be read. (Maybe some DVR developers could not foresee a world where TV shows would have a dollar sign in the titles.) Before the show’s premiere on Thursday, CBS released a viewers’ guide of sorts on Wednesday to help people program their DVRs accordingly.

In one part of the world, Muslim hardliners in Kuwait’s parliament

walked out of the body’s inaugural meeting on Sunday to protest two female Cabinet ministers who were not wearing headscarves.

While here in the US, Dunkin’ Donuts yanks Rachael Ray ad

in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.

Context is everything, isn’t it? Women can piss people off if they don’t use the necessary clothing to display their membership in a group, or if they improperly use clothing that might inadvertently suggest membership in another group.

Careful, ladies. The “what to wear” dilemma just got much heavier!

In Suketu Mehta’s stunning Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is the following passage

I ask him about the rituals of the renunciation. He gives me a parable. A long time ago, a man was conducting a wedding. A cat was running around the marriage hall, disturbing things. So he tied it to a pillar. Afterward generations of the man’s family, whenever they had a wedding, found a cat and tied it to one pillar of the hall, believing it to be a required wedding custom. The goings-on around this diksha, the doctor says, are like that cat tied to the pillar: The original meaning has been lost, and people are just doing it because that it how it has always been done.

Reader’s Digest reports, via the New York Times about the growing presence of fake wedding cakes. Average price for a wedding cake is $543, and

“For as low as $100, you can snag a pretty good replica made out of foam, with a secret compartment tucked in the back for hiding that special first piece,” the article states.

It’s intriguing to play an Idiocracy-esque futurist and imagine how the ritual will decay (or is that evolve?) further. In 50 years will we wave a knife around and toss sugar packets, to symbolize the symbols of the cake and the cutting-of-the-cake?

Anne points out the similarity to the Roast Beef story where successive generations cut the ends of the roast beef because that is how they were taught. When they go all the way back to the origin, it turns out they didn’t have a big enough pan and so that “ritual” was simply a coping mechanism.

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