My fiancée (now wife) expressed an opinion nearly 20 years ago that diamonds are simply ugly, and she didn't want one. Her engagement ring's major stone is an emerald.

Having gone to a rival school (hint: Go Green!), I find that moderately amusing. :)

Just a couple.

Ah, Flying Dog.

If you live near an active rail line and complain about the horns, you are a... now what is that word... oh, yeah - dumbass. You're a dumbass. (For what it's worth, I've lived about 100m away from a railroad *intersection* for almost 15 years. You get used to it. I don't even wake up anymore when the trains go through during the summer and we've got the windows open.)

Two jobs ago, one of the bathrooms had one of these things that was dispensing so much air freshener that it made me gag. I routinely turned it off if nobody else was in the bathroom.

What's that in Imperial arseloads? (...and yep, looks like quite a few of them, indeed. Of course, because of Google's tendency to think it knows what you're looking for better than you do, you have to filter out irrelevant stuff...)

I didn't know Norway even had a Ministry of Silly Walks. :)

I've always been fond of this particular version, altered slightly from the Jargon File: "F*** Walmart with a piledriver and 16 feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence _and no lubricants!_"

According to my parents, at one point I had a diet consisting of a significant amount of Lake Huron beach sand. ...and now I'm a software developer. Silicon FTW!

Towne Club used to have pineapple flavor (just checked - they have something labeled "Pineapple Passion"), but I'm not sure how far they distribute outside the Detroit area.

...however, you can reserve the gazebo for human sacrifices starting at 9 p.m.

@ShutterBug: I already knew that, but if your part of Michigan is the part I think it is, I grew up there, so that's not really surprising.

Having had pizza beer (yes, such a thing actually exists), I'm going with fast mark down. :)

My (German) father-in-law has the Blinkenlights thing in his office. I'm told that there exists a version written by Germans in deliberately-poorly-translated English. :)

I had a friend who did something similar when we were attending university, only instead of pictures of himself, it was little 1"x1" pictures of Richard Nixon. Note to self: Elmwood Hall, back staircase, third floor, in the door hinge. Must remember to check. :)

On the flipside, one of my wife's cousins got married last weekend. If you looked at the seating arrangements, my brother-in-law (whose real name is, in fact, Chris), was listed as "Mr. Christ [last name]." My wife and I were at the same table... and I was *so* tempted to ask Chris if he'd seen that he'd received a promotion to Savior. :)

...as it should.

That looks like a mains plug at the end. Too bad you can see the other end of it, or I'd wonder if someone had made the Etherkiller from Hell. :)

Hell, the AARP says you're eligible for membership at 50, IIRC.

Not terribly surprising to anyone who works with technology - in the Eastern District of Texas, they've got a friendly judge in Rodney Gilstrap, so the patent trolls establish an office there to allow them access to the venue.

Saw those in at least two different states (Missouri and Indiana) on my way back from my brother's wedding.

I'd have said amishrakefight.org/gfy That might be a bit overboard, though. (Oh, note that if you visit that site, it's NSFW, and watch the volume on your speakers.)

We've had a couple of run-ins with ransomware where I work (CryptoLocker and Locky). They've largely been mitigated by the fact that the machinists save all their work to the server anyway, and that we have comprehensive backups. It was the first one that really ticked me off, though. We'd purchased some software to automate quoting of jobs. It was written in VB6. (This was in 2014 - VB6 dates back to the era of Windows 98.) It was incredibly fragile, required administrative privileges, and was exceedingly picky about which AV packages it would work with. At some point, our estimator (the person using the software - I'll call her K) was the victim of a drive-by download of CryptoLocker. While I was dealing with the fallout from that (wiping and reinstalling her computer, plus some cleanup on the server shares she had access to), it came out that, at the behest of the tech support for the quoting software, K had uninstalled her AV software. Supposedly, their tech support had a list of AV packages that would work. Did they provide that list? F**k no. Yeah, we were just a wee bit angry at that point...