Captain Aggravated

“word sound like number” that is made funny via understanding of 20+ year old TV shows and a functioning understanding of the inner workings of the United States Postal Service, yes.

Come with me on a journey though old TV shows, communist and/or child.

For almost the entire 90’s there was a teen drama series on FOX called Beverly Hills 90210. It follows a group of teens as they come of age, among the alleged glitz and glamor of the affluent town of Beverly Hills, California, effectively a suburb of Los Angeles, not far from Hollywood. 90210, pronounced “nine-oh-two-one-oh”, is one of several ZIP codes of the town.

ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, it’s the post code scheme implemented in the mid-20th century by the United States Post Office, appended to a street address. ZIP codes really refer to the structure of the post office itself and indicate what exact region down to the individaul post office a piece of mail must be routed to, but the general public (incorrectly) treats them as geographic regions, in larger cities down to the neighborhood level. Because of the TV show, 90210 is the best-known ZIP code worldwide.

That is all of the relevance of Beverly Hills, the fact the TV show had a ZIP code in its title.

There was another teen drama TV show that ran from the late 90s to the early 2000s called Dawson’s Creek, set in a fictional town of Capeside, Massachusetts, filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. This show used Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want To Wait” as a theme tune over the opening credits.

The phrase “I Don’t Want To Wait”, as sung by Paula Cole in an indistinct slightly slurred manner, sounds similar to how an American would pronounce the ZIP code 90108. “Nine Oh One Oh Eight”. The next line of the song is “For our lives to be over” again not pronounced very distinctly, similarly sounds like '4092304" “Four oh nine two three oh four”. Look up the song on Youtube read the numbers as you listen, you’ll hear it.

90108 IS a real ZIP code, one of many belonging to Los Angeles, apparently for PO Boxes used by the military, per my googling.

Further nerd snipe bullshit, 409-2304 is a valid (partial) US telephone number. In fact it’s several hundred of them; there could be :one of those per area code. Assuming that Capeside is near Cape Cod, the likely area code for that region would have been 508, though around that time the 744 overlay area code was being introduced.

So (508) 409-2304 might have been a valid phone number for a house/character on Dawson’s Creek. It’s also very likely someone’s real phone number in Attleboro, MA. Please don’t bother them.

If I were to assign the fictional town of Capeside a ZIP code, there are a few to choose from given there are unused gaps in the ZIP codes assigned to MA. I might go for 02605.

</nerdsnipe>

The song in question isn’t annunciated clearly. It sounds like “annawannaoway! fo’ow lieeeee tobe ova”

Found the communist.

I don’t want to spend time with my kids. That’s why I didn’t have any.

Follow for more top gear top tips.

I mean, for most people, we hit the level of “does more than you could ever want” in the DDR2 era. For the average Instagram normie, what do they need from a Windows 11 PC that a Windows 7 machine couldn’t do?

Who cares? Nintendo is as backwards as the rest of Japan. If you buy their products, you have no one to blame but yourself.

It is my understanding that the Guinness Book Of World Records was started because of a discussion/argument in a pub that had no resolution, a couple of blimey blokes fussing about what’s the longest bridge in the world or something, so publishing a book of world records would allow that kind of thing to be settled. It then became a marketing gimmick; people start mentioning Guinness in contexts they never would otherwise. The book itself has been a sales phenomenon, and then they started selling the records themselves.

So…Guinness sells the service of awarding a world record, sometimes at exorbitant prices, and often to brutal dictators. The likes of North Korea, Qatar etc. are fond of these. Kim Sick Fuck will order 90,000 people to dance at gunpoint and Guinness will send a white chick in a stuffy blue skirt suit with a framed certificate, for tens of thousands of euro, to certify it as World’s Largest Interpretive Dance.

I wonder if they make more money doing that or selling Bud Dark?

Edit to add, off the top of my head I can think of the Guinness World Record book being mentioned offhand in media as diverse as Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, House and The Abyss, among others.

Kinda similar to how an Irish beer brewery became the arbiter of world records. Yeah, the Guinness Book Of World Records is that Guinness.

My dentist has way too many posters that say “smile” and not enough that say “chew”.

If you find an old phone with a physical keypad, you’ll find that the numbers 2 through 9 have letters on them as well. 2 can be an A, B or C. It means you can choose a phone number that is easier to remember because you’ll dial it if you spell a short phrase. 1800-392-6753 feels random, but 1800-EXAMPLE doesn’t. There’s a whole bunch of us who have fond memories of 1800-465-3847. Better known as 1800-GOLF-TIP.

I think the British area code system involved this at some point, like the area code for Aberdeen was 22 for AB, though they deprecated that ages ago.

Yeah, cast your mind back to the analog days, you’re in your car listening to the radio, you hear an ad for something you want. You can’t Google it when you get home because it’s 1988. Are you going to remember 1800-225-5669 or 1800-CALL-NOW?

calling it an e-CVT is almost certainly a marketing mistake, because of how bad CVTs are in automotive service.

I tried to look into the music Cicada published, and it’s a bigger task than me.

Someone put more thought into The Instar Emergence than I put into my entire goddamn life. It’s played in a weird tuning that I’ve never seen used for anything else, mostly to put almost all notes on prime numbered frets. The song runs for precisely 167 seconds, a prime number, and it’s a reverse of the original file name, 761.mp3, which is also a prime number. The melody is laid out in phrases with prime numbers of notes…

It’s the detail that has latched the 3301 mystery into my brain, someone thought this piece of music all the way through, and it’s an absolute banger at that.

My favorite is it says I “might” live in the town in my shipping address. They’re not sure.

This is probably going to be unpopular on Lemmy, The Nuanceless Platform, but IF the data collection is confined to what they show me here, I’m okay. Because I bought some solder, a pair of calipers, and some computer parts from Amazon, they think I “build electronics.” Amazon has a reason to know this about me as a customer, especially if I can see and even manually delete/change it. As humorous as it may be that they apparently think a customer has a flat ass, that’s relevant information if you buy clothing from them, they’ll steer you away from the bubble butt shorts that you’ll almost certainly return.

The problem is when they want to start installing apps on my phone, new devices in my house, with microphones and radars that are always collecting data about what I do, what I say, where I am. THAT’S the part we need to be dismembering executives over.

Mine is pretty straightforward, “builds electronics” “has precision tools” “likely has a french press” (I do, I bought it on Amazon), “prioritizes high-speed data transfer”, “Probably has a computer system with internal expansion” (I bought an NVMe SSD from Amazon once), “Likely lives in (the town in my saved shipping address)”

So surveillance. Much sleuthing.

One ten millionth of a quarter of the circumference of some random ass planet somewhere isn’t either.

I’ve had women actually gasp when told I used to shop at Wal-Mart at 2AM so I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.

I was about to say “I know! That’s the beauty of it!” but didn’t they integrate Copilot into Notepad?

use Vim.