Pure Twaddle

But seriously, good luck to everyone in Egypt, police and civilian alike.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Mozilla’s highlight and right-click search is an indispensable part of my browsing. When I’m reading text and I come across a strange word or reference that’s way over my head, I right-click, search it in a new tab, learn what I need, then jump right back to what I was reading.

To my dismay the New York Time‘s blocks this functionality with a nasty little ToolTip script that forces you to research highlighted words with there terrible meta-definition system (in a pop-up, no less!). This script also blocks the ability to copy-and-paste text; probably a paranoid reaction by the Times that a blogger, heaven forbid, may want to blockquote some text from an article.

After a bit of digging around in the page source, I found the offending scripts and excised them with AdBlock using these rules:

||graphics8.nytimes.com/js/util/tooltip.js

||graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

Light testing shows these rules don’t break any other site functionality.

On a side note, when I first sought a solution, I searched Google for “new york times copy paste script,” which brought up Free Copy & Paste JavaScripts and other Scripts as a first hit, from About.com, which is owned by the New York Times company. At least one of their branches doesn’t fear basic information sharing.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Scene: The Frozen Food Aisle. Our Hero is stocking frozen cereal

Enter a Middle-Aged Man in Army Coat

MAMiAC
Do you have any just regular plain waffles?

OUR HERO
Nope. Just the gluten-free ones.

MAMiAC
Jesus! What the hell did people do twenty years ago? Gluten-free. Cage-free eggs. (Gestures to the dairy section) They’re showing mercy to chickens. When I was in Vietnam, we killed people; we didn’t show any mercy.

OH
Yes, but they were technically free-range.

MAMiAC
(Laughs) Yeah. (Exits)

OH
(To himself) I need a new job.

Popularity: 7% [?]