"Pig sitter charged with cruelty"

This newspaper headline says it all, but it's not easy to guess how. The story is all over the internet. Imagine a pig ballooning from its normal 50 pounds to 150, so that surgery was needed to remove a collar that had become embedded in her overly fat neck.

Written by a College Student, no less!

There's an orange and blck couch in the hall near the radio station entrance. It has been there for a long time, and I'm not sure it ever gets used. Someone pinned a hand-written note on it, as follows: "Does this couch belong to you? If not, please write here."
I wrote there. I imagine this note will get a lot of responses. But I doubt they will help.

A test for vegetables:

When our daughter was young enough to eat from a highchair, she went through a food-throwing/food-dropping stage. You know what I mean. But I was clever. I figured out what vegetables our dog liked. When she threw food on the floor, the dog cleaned up.

A few years later our son reached the same stage. I could not remember which vegetables our dog had been willing to eat, so I experimented, with absolutely no success. I eventually came to the conclusion that our dog no longer liked vegetables.

Toilet Flush Handles can be Interesting:

During our vacation in Israel, I had occasion to use many toilet flush handles. It seems to me that Israel (and perhaps all of Europe as well) has hit upon the precise sweet spot in its bureaucratic regulations of these handles. First, you must understand that almost every toilet has two handles. One of these produces a much more prodigious flush than the other. Second, it appears that anyone who knows about the two-handle system can figure out which handle will produce the larger flush.

Now you may find my second point puzzling, unless you already know the truth: there is an unbelievable variety in the design of these handles. Artists and designers have been given free-reign by the bureaucrats to make the handles look any way they want, as long as they are there, and their separate functions can be inferred. Let art reign! At least, when it comes to clever functional design.

The drama of the keys:

When I take a business trip, I rent a car from an Avis place that is three-tenths of a mile from the parking lot where I work. I leave my own car in the company lot, and walk to the Avis to get the car. I take the rental car key-ring and attach it to my regular keyring, so that I have one ring, ensuring that no key will be lost. Please bear these things in mind.

When I returned the car to Avis, I took my keys off its ring and handed the car keys to the Avis rental agent. "What's the car mileage?" she asked. I had not thought to check, because usually the rental company uses an electronic thingy to get the mileage.

"I'll go check," I said.

"You'll need these." She handed back the key ring, and I saw, with horror, that the key for my own car was still attached. I might not have been able to drive my own car anywhere. I extracted my own key, gave her the mileage, and walked to work.

I did about two hours of work and then walked to my car. I tried to open the locked door with:

Oh hell! With the Avis car keys, which were still in my pocket. I drove at once to Avis, wondering why they had not called, and whether they would charge me an extra day for keeping the keys.

I walked into the Avis place. The same agent was on the phone. I quietly handed the keys to her. Her eyes widened, we nodded to each other, and I left. Phhewwwww.

A cascade of alarms:

I worked in Virginia this week, waking up at 6 a.m. each day. Hotel rooms usually have one abstruse alarm clock-radio, and it's usually risky to assume that you how to make it work. So I often ask the desk clerk for a wakeup call. Most hotels now automate "personal" wakeup calls. I trust their computer to call me on time, more than a hotel clerk. Unless the computer is down, of course.

But in this case, I was able to set a cascade of alarms. My cell phone has three alarms. I had brought an alarm clock. I also used two alarms on my watch, and that hotel clock-radio. I set them up as I do at home when I need to wake at 4:20 a.m. (to turn on the radio station at 6): starting with the quietest alarm, working, in intervals of two minutes, to the loudest. Then I thought: I'm being silly!

At home, my goal is to wake up early without waking my wife. Alone in a hotel room, my goal should just be to wake up. So I set all the alarms for 6, 6:01 and 6:02, and their avalanche of sound woke me very nicely, thank you.

Duplicitous Salesmen, Double Salaries:

In the early '80s, I wrote software for Exxon Office Systems (EOS), one of the more disastrous ventures in the history of computing. Exxon tried to make EOS into a worldwide presence with sales in dozens of countries. They paid well – otherwise who would work for them? – but their sales force presented a special problem, one that's probably well-known in many industries.

Many of the sales people worked on their own, covering some large geographic region. They set their own hours and planned their own campaigns to make sales. Occasionally they reported to regional meetings or came to the home office for new information and training, but their real challenge was to sell enough to support themselves well, and they could use their time as they wished to accomplish that. (To raise their gross, some salesmen, when visiting the home office, would steal copies of new software applications not even ready for alpha testing and sell them, but that's important now.)

The problem was that sales were dismal. EOS sold some expensive, poor products. They also sold some very expensive good products. Prospective customers were wary of a gasoline company in the office business; so every sale was hard to make. In fact, most sales people could not live on their commissions. To keep sales people, EOS paid them decent salaries. Therefore most of their sales staff had little incentive to bust their chops to make a few more sales.

Remember how I described the life of the sales force above? Well with all that independence, it was understood that some sales people had two fulltime jobs. They sold just enough EOS products to keep getting their salary, and they also worked on commission, maybe even for for one of our competitors.

In September 1984, it became obvious that Exxon planned to shut down its Office Systems division. But they did not wield the axe until the following January, giving us all four more months of salary. In the interim, the documentation people set up a little shop to polish resumes for everybody. Marketing played trivial pursuit; the software people played computer games; the hardware designers worked on inventions that they could use to start up their own companies; and we suspected that many, many sales people took that second fulltime job.

"Port delays damaging fruit imports."

The title of his entry is a news headline that I read while on vacation. I like it for its ambiguity. For a wonderful few moments, I wondered why the port hadn't started damaging the fruit imports already.

Not at all!

Pity the poor fruits, just waiting there in the port, getting damaged.

A tool is broken:

You know how easily it is to break a fingernail? I grabbed something wrong and cracked a piece off my right thumbnail. (I used to think that nails got brittle when you didn't eat enough calcium or protein, but we had been on vacation, eating an avalanche of Ca and Me, so forget that.) I filed the nail smooth, and it's not bothersome now. But the white part of the nail's profile dips low in the middle. And that's very important now.

My music player has a peculiar set of controls. When I first bought it, I thought I would hate it, but with use I discovered that the controls were brilliantly designed. There's a tiny touchpad on the device, and the plastic ring around the pad is actually four pushbuttons. You press the right edge, for example, to fast-forward. With your thumbnail. If you happen to have an ordinary sort of thumbnail, that is.

What group are you in?

During our vacation, most of the guests in our large Israeli hotel were on religious (Christian) tours. We talked to a few of them and they seemed quite sincere. One morning I was talking to two Sapanish-extraction fellows from L.A., and I asked them which tour they were on. They both said the exact same thing:

Um . . .

Suddenly it occurred to me that a religious trip to the holyland might be an inexpensive way to vacation in Israel, even for Christians.

Microsoft, IBM, and the seven dwarfs:

Well, I'm writing abut Microsoft's Zune again. Microsoft has released new Zune models. Unlike the original ones, these music players are not a joke. Microsoft is trying to crack the music player market, starting at a great disadvantage, and it is fascinating to watch them and see what they can do.

The music player market is itself quite peculiar. Apple owns the overwhelming share with its iTunes products, and then a whole bunch of manufacturers come in second and third with less than (or much less than) 10% of the market. Microsoft claimed to be the second strongest manufacturer based on their original Zune products, but their sales numbers are suspect, because they announce how many players they send to stores, not how many are actually purchased by actual users.

It occurred to me that this player market looks a lot like the computer mainframe market of the 60's and 70's. That market was overwhelmingly dominated by IBM. There were a few also-rans, which we called the "seven dwarfs." Over time, the dwarfs disappeared, one by one. (Actually I believe two of these companies still exist, but they are not in mainframe competition as their old selves; they have evolved into different markets.) The history of the dwarfs suggests that in the player market, Microsoft has simply positioned itself to gradually fail. It just might sell players longer than, say Creative Zen, Moby or Sansa.

But of course Microsoft has a few other sources of revenue. They can weather storms that would have destroyed the seven dwarfs as long as they care to. Can they stay the course and gradually catch up? One opinion I've heard is that Microsoft has established itself in the player market as a great catcher-upper, while Apple is the established innovator. That's not good enough for old MSFT. We'll see.

A slice of bread:

As I think I've mentioned, the hotel where we stayed on holiday offered a stupendous breakfast smörgåsbord. One feature was a great collection of breadloaves of every size and shape, with a wicked long knife to slice them. I used that knife to cut fine, thin slices, or to snip off just the top of a bagel encrusted with poppy seeds.

One morning I noticed a woman cut the largest slice I'd ever seen. She brought it back to her table with the usual plate full of foods. The slice was almost two inches thick, cut from a loaf about 5” by 5”. It was not quite as big as her head. Of course I wondered what she was going to do with it, so I kept a subtle eye peeled on her table.

From time to time, she tugged off a small bit of the “slice” and ate it straight, gradually reducing the noble slice to a jumble of crust.

My father never caught a fish.

My father never caught a fish. Oh, he might have caught the occasional trout or a tiny sunfish, but that's not why he fished.

When I was fourteen, someone gave me a Milton Bradley jigsaw puzzle called “Trout Fishing”. It was a 1000 piece puzzle, all of them dark mottled brown, blue and green. It took us six weeks to put it together, and the faint form of a fisherman emerged amidst a jumble of leaves, twigs and water. I imagine my father as that fisher, wading into a good trout stream, dangling a lure, lost in thought. No fish would keep him company, but his ideal companions were there: twittering birds, rushing streamlets, wind-tossed greenery – to help him relax and think.

We never knew what he thought about while fishing, but he had so many interests – science experiments, amateur math, his law cases, classical music, patterns to work into ceramic designs, and so on, and so on – it seemed he could easily keep occupied if the fish left him alone.

The best part for him came afterwards: arriving home, opening his empty creel, and proclaiming himself the unluckiest fisherman of all.

How to eat a Smorgasboard:

Our Israeli hotel laid out fine breakfasts, with more than a dozen different vegetables, many kinds of yoghurt, many cheeses, many salads, and rolls, croissants, breadloaves, several kinds of fish and halvah. And dry and hot cereals. And shakshuka, potatoes au gratin, omelettes made to order, hot cheesecake, lots to drink and many other items I'm too lazy to mention.

In my limited experience, Israelis attack a grand breakfast layout differently than Americans. Most Americans tend to make multiple trips, sampling, deciding what they like, and going back for seconds and thirds. Israelis like to load up several plates full of tempting foods and array these plates on their table. Then they sit down and work away at their own grand meal.

How to remove the yolk from a hard-cooked egg:

I'm now on a low cholesterol diet. A single egg yolk has almost three times as much cholesterol as I want to eat in a day, so I can only eat egg whites. This is a pity, because all the good taste is in the yolk. But whites have a terrific ratio of protein to calories, so I manage. (Egg whites are pretty good with maple syrup.)

I used to cut hard-cooked eggs in half lengthwise and scrape the yolks out, then eat the white. The yolks stick to the knife and make a bit of a mess. Fortunately, I found a better way. I make a shallow slit in the egg white and then strip it off the yolk. The yolk comes out as a perfect, uncut round ball, and it's easy to dispose of.

Specially Reserved:

While on vacation, we ate breakfast at our hotel, in an immense room with a fine smörgåsbord of tasty foods. The hotel has over 400 rooms, and while we were there it hosted many large touring groups. Breakfast tables were often reserved for specific groups. I liked the wording on the placards that reserved tables, for example:

Specially Reserved for Noseworthy Group.

It would be enough to say “reserved.” But “specially reserved” sounds particularly friendly and respectful.

The people who managed the breakfast room often wanted to keep us all one side of the room, to simplify cleaning and table-setting. They kept us away from other tables by using the same “Specially Reserved” signs, naming groups that had already left the hotel. This is a good recycling strategy, as there's really nothing else useful to do with a sign naming the Noseworthy tour, after those people have departed.

Colllld...:

We're back from a lovely vacation, and I shall resume daily blogging.

As we prepared to leave home for two weeks, I agonized over whether to turn the heat on. It had been so summery all October, but now the forecast was for fall. As I saw it, I had to decide between two alternatives, each with its own risk:

• Turn the heat on. But we have not used the furnace for months; something goes wrong, house burns down.
• Leave the heat off. Pipes freeze.

After much thought, I decided that since our pipes have never frozen, the safe choice was to leave the heat off. We returned to a forty-four degree house! We turned the heat on at once, and after a while the temperature began to creep up about one degree per hour.

When I was deciding whether to leave the heat off, why didn't I think about returning to a cold house? Brrrrr.

Where did I put that spectroscope...

An article in the NY times today, by George Johnson, quotes Martin Rees about what scientists can do as thy grow old: Become an administrator; content yourself with doing science that will probably be mediocre; or strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory, and quickly get in over your head. Rees says that “in contrast to composers, there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.”

Um ... why? Could there be something wrong with the way science is conducted, that prevents old and wise scientists from making wise contributions to their beloved fields? Science moves fast enough, perhaps, that the techniques of a particular field, even its terminology and paradigms, will be unfamiliar to the elderly, making it hard for them to apply their wisdom to anything that is current. In contrast, the classical composer, throughout his life, develops his own technique and builds upon it, at his own pace.

But I'm not persuaded by this argument. In the last twenty years there have been breakthroughs in fields that had stagnated for many years. Often, these breakthroughs required someone to examine what had been taken for granted, to apply thoughtful ideas from other disciplines, or to find a new way to do experiments. It ought to be possible for some of these breakthroughs to come from older scientists who have had a long time to think about their field. So I ask again:

Has the world managed to structure scientific investigation in such a way as to prevent elderly, deep scientific thinkers from making thoughtful contributions?

I will blog just a few times in the next few weeks. See you all, regularly, in mid-november!

So ... What's with the Yankees?

I followed the Joe Torre story with great relish. He's gone now, but the Yankee baseball team promises to be a melodramatic tear-jerker for years to come. I'm an ex-Yankee-hater. I got used to the Yankees during the few years that the Mets baseball team was actually repellent, and I sometimes even root for the Yanks. Now I just want to see what will happen.

All my career in software development, I've been fascinated by how hard it is to MANAGE anything. The Yanks will give me a treat in studying management problems. Every bit of the saga will be played out in my favorite daily papers. Oh, the humanity!

The bottom line is that the Yankees have to have a year or two of "rebuilding." I'm amazed that the sports columnists haven't focused on the rebuilding issue. The Yanks are losing free agents and aging stars. They have some great young talent, but not enough, and their young players are YOUNG. Any sane management would realize this and give the new talent time to develop. It's SO unlikely that the Yanks will do that!

The Yanks are controlled in an unusual way. It's quite normal to have an ownership that is not skilled in baseball. The owners give the GM, the general manager, a budget to work with. The GM, an experienced baseball person with some ability to control an organization, makes the personnel decisions, and leaves player development to the field manager. The Yanks used to be controlled by one highly competitive, rich martinet owner. Right now, that aging martinet wants decisions to be made with both his sons -- who know little of baseball -- in agreement. They could leave the GM, Brian Cashman, in charge, but they won't. And they obviously feel that their feeble Yanks are almost as good as the powerhouse Red Sox.

So we have a recipe for disaster here. Will they luck out? Will they come to appreciate how lucky they were to have Joe Torre run the club in past seasons?

Oh I almost forgot to mention, they have to hire a new manager, and they may in fact hire a Newbie Manager. Suppose the team does badly next year and the owners decide it's the manager's fault. They probably won't fire him, but neither will they realize -- still -- that the team isn't that good, and has to rebuild.

While writing this item, I corrected a misspelling, but in the future I may continue to use it. The team we're talking about here is: The Ynaks.

The Library of all Possible Books:

Jose Luis Borges wrote a story about the Library of all Possible Books, and this concept has fascinated many authors. When young, I read an essay about this library that intended to help me better understand large numbers and infinities. Imagine a library that contains every possible book. (Don't think about the niceties of placing a limit on the size of these books, to make this an exercise in finite numbers; it'll make your head spin.) You can imagine that somewhere in this library there is an index to all the books in it. But if you think you've found that book - maybe you've actually found a book that is an index to all the books in the library except for one tiny mistake, or ten big mistakes; or maybe it just LOOKS like an index to this library, but every book it names doesn't exist. (Is that possible?)

When I was young, the "library of all possible books" was an interesting, if impractical meme. But today: we have the internet! As the internet's collection of web pages grows, it resembles, more and more, and with all its warts, the Library of all Possible Books.

When to hog a handicapped parking space:

Our car has a handicapped parking sticker right now. Some friends say that a handicapped parking sticker is merely the entrance fee to a parking game: whether my wife's in the car or not, how good a parking space can I get?

Frankly, I'm slightly more ethical than that. Really! When I enter a parking lot without my wife, I think hard about whether to preempt a handicapped space. Here's the truly moral and ethical issue: Suppose there are hardly any regular spaces left, but plenty of handicapped ones? Then the kindly thing to do is to grab one of those handicapped spaces, to make it a bit easier for "normal" people - some of whom have trouble walking, by the way - to get better regular spaces. Okay? I hope you understand now.

Where are the hot guys?

I visit my new health club at many different times of the day and week. I can't help noticing that there are always women there -- of all ages -- who have excellent physiques. Some of these women might be sculpting their bodies to attract men, others are probably just working to get better at the sports or outdoor activities that they like.

But where are the corresponding guys?
I often see a few handsome men, especially after work hours. But it's not the same thing. Without question, young and early middle-aged women have a much greater desire to improve themselves at this club than the corresponding guys.

I've thought of two reasons for this dichotomy, and I suspect they are both true:

• There are no sports at our club. The guys who play racquetball, tennis, basketball, etc., go elsewhere.
• It's a culture thing. In our sick society, it's much more important for women to work on their figures.

Which law would you rather break?

Late one night, I was waiting for the light to turn green so that I could turn onto US Route One. A sports car came down the highway and hot-pinked the light. He was doing at least 85 on a 55 mph road. Had he driven any slower, he would have run the red light as well.

Now that set me thinking: maybe he SHOULD have dropped his speed to 55 and just gone right through the red light. Late at night there's little traffic, and he would have hit the light at the beginning of the cycle. My car would hardly be in motion, I could see him and brake for him. Now please think about this:

Q.: Would you rather blow though an intersection, 30 mph over the speed limit, or just run a red light without speeding?

When you look at it that way, the answer to this question is obvious:

A.: I won't get a ticket, will I?


Well you could get a ticket. And surely you'd be in A LOT MORE TROUBLE for speeding 30 mph over the limit! But we all know human nature, don't we? Nobody's going to slow down so that they can run a red light without speeding, for gosh sakes.

Picky, picky, picky:

I've listened to many different podcasts, and I've learned from them that podcasters are different from most humans. They worry about the tiniest audio problems. They apologize for sounds we cannot hear. They fret about inaudible refrigerator noise. They rejoice in equipment changes that – so they tell us – have improved their audio quality. Exposure to all these worriers helped to convince me not to try to podcast, for the simple reason that I was, obviously, not one of them.

But there's been a change. I'm trying to learn how to make an audio recording of my novel, which I plan to post on the web for free downloads. I got the (FREE!) program Audacity, which makes editing audio fun. I recorded a few simple tracks, loaded them into the editor, and listened to them. At once I was apologizing to myself for nearly inaudible noise sounds, worrying about how to remove every possible sound blemish, and in fact, I think that in less than a minute, I became one of THEM.

You know that old saying that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well if you can edit audio, every sound looks like a work in progress.

Toy Store Nostalgia:

I love to go to toy stores, and, with young grandchildren, I have an excellent excuse these days. But why the nostalgia? Hardly anything that I associate with toy stores can still be found in them. Sixty years of imagination, and the evolution of plastics and computers, have utterly changed the landscape.

One of my last landmarks is rapidly disappearing. I used to find the Monopoly game in every toy and game store. Today we find Monopoly variants: New York City Monopoly, Louisiana State LSUopoly, Bible-opoly, Dino-opoly, Texas Hold-em monopoly, Popeye Monopoly, Al Qaeda Terrorist Monopoly, NSA Surveillance Monopoly, Chinese Poisonous Imports Monopoly, Cable TV Monopoly, Bermuda Triangle Monopoly, Hollywood Oscars Monopoly, Drug Rehab Monopoly, Hedge Fund Monopoly, Subprime Lending Monopoly . . .

I'm not upset to find all these variants. I congratulate the various game companies that have owned Monopoly rights over the years, for resisting this temptation for so long.

The Windbelt:

Last year I blogged about how wind turbine farms -- an excellent sourvce of electricity in some places -- are incredibly ugly, even though wind turbines seem to be photogenic. If you've seen photos of them, but haven't seen them in the wild, you may wonder why anybody wants NOT to have them in his backyard.

Well here is a remarkable invention. Go here and play the short video. Then click on the inventor's name: Shawn Frayne to learn more. His invention is a belt that is suspended to allow wind, or even a gentle breeze, to make it vibrate. Magnets at one end of the belt turn this vibration into electricty. The belt is the only moving part, making the windbelt cheap and probably reliable. It can be scaled up to a large size, although the windbelt vibrations may pose interesting maintenance challenges for a really large belt. But in small scale, it seems like a very easy source of low-power electricity. In the video, Shawn explains the windbelt's advantages over wind turbines.I think we are going to see a lot more of this invention.

The bottomless bowl of cookie names:

Brian Wansink recently received an Ignobel prize for his Bottomless Bowl of Soup experiment. A good-natured scientist, he picked up his ignobel in person, even though I'm sure he feels, as I do, that he was getting the reward for brilliant experiment that demonstrated something truly useful. Wansink's research often illuminates how people decide when to stop eating, and this Ignobel story reminded me of when I was 18 years old and a camp counselor for the first time.

Before bedtime, a counselor from each bunk (my campers were 8 years old) picked up the milk and cookie snack that ended each day. We wanted our kids to eat this snack before bedtime (what did we know? It was 1959). An ongoing concern was the cookies: flat, blah sugar cookies without the slightest interesting variation. I made up names for the cookies each night: sasquatch cookies, umga blamga cookies, sugar-tower-armadillo cookies, whatever. The kids were always eager to hear what I would call them, and my co-counselor and I thought the names made the snacks go down better. (Wansink has done other research into how naming food can make it more or less desirable.)

In mid-summer, my parents visited me on my weekly day off. They brought me a Gugelhupf from our favorite Manhattan babka bakery. I ate some of it, and, at day's end, brought the rest back to share with the kids. As I held out the cake to them, they asked, "What's it called?" I think you can tell yourselves the end of this story.

If I Did it:

Have you read Justice Clarence Thomas's new book, If I were biased?

Freeze Frames from Video:

I am pretty sure that people rarely step through video to select individual frames to post on the internet. There are exceptions, especially with regard to evidence of crimes and women without underwear. But here's what I know: When you record a human being in motion, at thirty frames per second, you capture hilarious in-between expressions and postures that you'd never notice while watching them in motion. Some people are "worse" at this than others. When I worked on video capture, I watched many talking heads. Some of their faces remained quiet and placid while they talked; others flitted through hilarious momentary expressions that you could only see by looking at individual frames. Based on my experience, I have to wonder why such expressions are not showing up all over the internet. But I think I know why:

Good hi-res still shots always set the standard, at any time, for quality images on the internet. Still-frames are generally much clearer than motion frames. In fact, most people record their video in compressed formats. If you step through compressed formats of people in motion, you'll often see little detail, blurred images that trick your eye into seeing smooth motion. But these frames are no where as clear as posed still shots. Some day the quality of motion frames will dramatically improve, and then you'll all get to see these hilarious expressions. I doubt we'll have to wait more than ten years, so let's hope for the best!

Nec-tar-ine: (1,111)

Hey, this is my 1,111th post to Precision Blogging. How about that?

I was thinking: an awful lot of fruits have one or two syllable names in English. Apparently we like fruit names to be as simple as their operating instructions. 'Nectarine' is a notable exception. I suspected that this word was a 20th Century invention, but a quick web search will show you that the word is at least 400 years old.

Driving with a Red Inspection Sticker:

New Jersey used to send us a reminder, whenever we had to get our car inspected. Now there's an honor system, backed by a nasty ticket if a policeman catches you. We're supposed to READ our sticker to figure out when we need the next inspection.

One day my wife pointed out to me that I should have gotten the car inspected seven months ago. Life was very busy, so a few weeks passed. Each time I had to drive my car, I consciously chose roads that were unlikely to have police cars along the way. I felt like a nervy miscreant. Eventually I got my car inspected. It had a hideous problem that actually occurred the moment I handed the car over for inspection - the brakes failed. My car was now undrivable. They slapped a red sticker on the car and gave me 48 hours to repair it and return for reinspection. I had to get the car towed to the repair shop of my choice.

Two days later I drove my repaired car back to the inspection station. I drove proudly, head held high, not the least bit afraid of being stopped by a police car. After all, I no longer had an expired inspection sticker. I had a legal, RED, FAILED, sticker.