Memos: Still not really paying attention to the news edition

• Memo to CNN: I'm sorry that a majority of every discernable political demographic is against your editorial position on the Terry Shiavo case and thinks the poor woman should be put out of her misery. Unfortunately, having a guest on Larry King to accuse the majority of your audience of being Nazis won't exactly sway any opinions. And here's a big secret you might not have realized yet: no matter how right-wing you become, you will never win any audience among the Fox News crowd, because you have been painted as the evil liberal media. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't matter, no matter how hard you fight for right-wing street cred you will always be their most convenient enemy. And an enemy that won't actually fight back is absolutely perfect. Shiavo, incidentally, is the Republicans' idea of a perfect woman: white, fertile and completely passive.
  
• The Maple Grille that just opened up on University Ave. in downtown Charlottetown (where the Taj Mahal was, sadly.) Among the people at work that was some concern about the pretentiousness of a place that would stick a superfluous 'e' at the end of their name, but given that we've pretty much exhausted the menus of every downtown restaurant, me and an office-mate went there yesterday, and I was impressed in every way. I had the soup and sandwich lunch special which was a chicken sandwich with slices of mango and cashews, and cream of spinnach soup. The kind of lunch that takes forever ot finish because you want to take tiny bites and savour it all. The rest of the lunch menu was under $10, and the desserts were pretty cheap as well, but all looked wonderful, and thankfully not the same pre-bought cheesecakes et. al. that most of the restaurants in town all seem to get from the same place. The taramasu cheesecake that I got was nice and rich, and my current plan is to try one of everything each time I go there. Also the service was friendly and it was nice and quiet when we went there.
• I had some fun today at work, running the IM messages of the same co-worker through an AliceBot. It took him a good while to figure out what was going on. Which is especially funny because I had just previously mentioned the idea of doing just that to keep a particularly talkative remote contract worker at bay. I always say, the best way to trick someone is to make them think they're doing the tricking.
• I'm in the middle of watching my DVD set of the complete "The Office" series. I think it's one of the funniest TV shows I've ever seen. But every 5 minutes I have to pause the DVD just to compose myself, or relieve the complete social awkwardness that the actors create so well.