Affiliate marketing just reached a whole new level of absurdity.

Yes, it finally happened: Someone made a website that pays you to come click on their affiliate referral links before you make a purchase online. So while most advertising takes up space on websites with some legitimate purpose (such as actual content or networking or porn or whatever) in the hopes of reminding people who came to that site for its content or networking or porn that they really, really want to buy something, this site asks people who already know that they want to buy something to come to them for the express purpose of getting their grubby little hands on some of the money that the company they're about to make a purchase from spends trying to track down customers.

Apparently this site BigCrumbs has been around since 2005, but I just heard about them last week through a promotional link in an invoice I received for a recent eBay purchase. Diagram that BigCrumbs uses to explains their workings below.

What I can't believe is that retailers are actually willing to pay for these sales. Don't you people realize these customers were going to buy your crap anyway???

This whole concept is simultaneously revolting and fascinating. I mean, wouldn't this money be better spent offering all customers lower prices or investing in research to make products more sophisticated or more environmentally sustainable?

But you know what? I signed up anyway, 'cause I have to do important research into how this actually works, GIANT Microbes-style. So if you're interested, use one of these here referral links and kick a little $$$ my way, plskthx!

Personal note: My family began celebrating (if only through cheeky verbal acknowledgement) the winter solstice around the time I became old enough to protest the vague attempts my parents briefly and occasionally made at actual religious observance.

But in 2004, my mother thoughtfully sent me a bouquet of flowers from a Brooklyn florist to amp up the holiday spirit a notch. The card said:

Dear Laurin,
Enjoy the beuty of the winners solstice.
Love, Mom, Dad, and Mickel

Since then, every December 21st has been an opportunity to bask in the beutiful glow of the winners solstice instead.

Last year on the 21st I brought you a wikipedia-summarizing description of lesser-known winter festivals, from HumanLight to Soyal to Karachun.

This year, enjoy the above-provided peak into my family's endless capacity to derive humor from an unintentionally hilarious florist's card, and a brief explanation of the movement of the "official" date to celebrate this fine holiday.

This graph, courtesy of, well, you know, apparently shows how the Gregorian calendar gradually falls behind the seasons, despite making a notable correction (the frequent spikes on the chart) each leap year. But biggest corrections (marking the beginning and end of each chunk of the chart) happen on the centennial years, which are never leap years unless they're divisible by 400—like the year 2000, in which there was no realignment between the Gregorian calendar and the seasons.

Why these seismic shifts happen in years that aren't correcting for the disparity between our 24 hour day and the variable amount of time the planet actually takes to rotate on its axis 365-day calendar and the 365.2424 days over which we experience the change in seasons [thanks, Michael!] has now joined the fact that the universe is expanding (despite being infinite! how is that possible?), in the ranks astronomical/physical/mathematical facts that just hurt to think about. Hopefully my brother will offer up some help in the comments.

Happy winners solstice!

update: Michael sez:

It takes the Earth about 365.26 days to revolve around the Sun, but […] Earth's rotational axis is not perpendicular with the radius of Earth's orbit, […] which is why we have seasons in the first place. This axis, however, does not stay still. Polaris, a well-known nautical guide, is currently directly above the Earth's northern axis, but in a few thousand years this will not be so. This wobble accounts for the difference between a sidereal year [the time it takes for the sun to return to the same position (as viewed from earth) of alignment with the stars of the celestial sphere] and a tropical year [the time it takes to pass through a full year's worth of seasons], but in this case it subtracts from the time because the axis is wobbling in a clockwise direction. Finally, we arrive with the fact that a tropical year is about 365.2424 days.


Because the tropical year is longer than the calendar year, the Earth will be 0.9696 days behind the calendar every four years. That means that once the leap year comes, the Earth will actually be 0.0304 days ahead of the calendar. Multiply this number by 25 to arrive [at] 0.76, the number of days ahead that this error will [accumulate] to every 100 years. (There are 25 sets of 4 years in 100 years.) To account for THIS error, we have common years on centurial years, but, oops, now the Earth is 0.24 days behind. Multiply this number by 4 to arrive with 0.96, the number of days behind that this error will [accumulate] to every 400 years. To account for THIS error, we have a leap year on centurial years divisible by 400 (remember that normally centurial years WOULDN'T be leap years), reducing the error down to 0.04 days every 400 years. You'll recall that we had a leap year in 2000 despite the fact that it was a centurial year. We still have some error, but at this point it's so small that we'll let the people deal with it 10,000 years from now when the equinoxes are finally off by a whole day.

I'm recently returned to my beloved home after a somewhat disappointing trip to Madrid (flickr set).

Madrid proved to have an excessive number of pickpockets (one of whom I thwarted, in classic New York style, as she attempted to rob my mother), and a disappointing lack of olive tapenade. Main lesson learned: When you live in a city as incomprable as New York, it's best to limit vacation to the countryside and take only short day trips into nearby cities. If you stay in one city too long, all you can think of is how much better New York does that whole "city" thing.

But the best part of Madrid, by far, was the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, which showed me an awesome new side of everyone's favorite surrealist.

My hometown, St. Petersburg, Florida, happens to have a larger Dalí collection than the Reina Sofia, but some rather peculiar and interesting stuff of his does call Madrid home.

exhibit a: "Girl at the Window," 1925

Wait, who did you say this was painted by??? I mean, the colors and textures are totally Dalí but what's wrong with this picture? (Answer: Nothing, which is exactly what's wrong with it.)

exhibit b: L'Âge D'Or, 1930

Embeded videos don't work in all RSS aggregators. To see the videos, you may have to sojourn to the actual post.

And only five short years after painting "Girl at the Window," Dalí co-wrote this savagely weird movie with fellow crazy-man Luis Buñel, which, according to the BBC's movie site, actually caused audience riots. One has to wonder: What were these people expecting to see when they bought tickets for a Buñel/Dalí collaboration???

I couldn't understand a word of it at the Reina Sofia, but luckily the YouTube version provides subtitles. Check it out at 1:10 after 20 seconds of vanity from the uploader (not undeserved, since she did dig this up, in addition to tons of other classic stuff) and 90 make that 70…errr…50 seconds of titles [Thanks, brother! I never could get my units of measurement straight.].

Even on its own, the opening scorpion montage is pretty much priceless.