Hey Rae! You've Jumped the Shark

Every time I see her face, I go off my vittles for a week. It's a fantastic diet. Slimming with because of Rachael! She's so perky it makes me pukey.

And why would I want to cook a rock?!?

Yes, you've come to the right place

Been doing a little redecorating. Hope you like it.

Numbs, Numbers, Numbests

Which of these two statements makes you feel like you are throwing money away:

1. Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime?
2. Your airline miles are about to expire.

Follow-up question: when did airline miles become currency?!? And there's more! How do you react to this statement: Expiring Airline Miles Could Cost Consumers $28 Billion. What does that mean? Is this a figure akin to the national debt? Do we all share a portion of this amount? How exactly will future generations feel the impact of a lost $28 billion airline miles?

I thought I was pretty good at kicking around in a virtual landscape, but this has me perplexed. If my mother had misplaced her stack of S&H Green Stamps rather than spend an evening licking and sticking them into little books, would she have felt a loss over their value in merchandise or just regret at missing out on the experience of having the glue pumped from her stomach? (true story; it was quite a stack of stickers) I can function with the S&H function: you earn stickers by buying items A, B, and maybe C and when enough stickers accumulate, they can be redeemed for item D. If you lose the stickers, you can still buy item D and forever wonder if you would appreciate it more if it had cost you only postage and a little indigestion.

I cannot wrap my mind around losing airline miles, let alone get worked up about it. What frosts my chickens, however, is the fact that this virtual currency is taxed! Wow. That is quite a feat. There is nothing we can point to and say, "here is a pile of miles" yet somehow value is attached, calculated, and taxed. I am going to stop rating my dreams on a scale from 1 to 10 lest they be taxed.

Enough of that. I have another virtual number to share. How old are you? No, really. Well, there is more than one answer to that question—and I don't mean your actual age and what anniversary of your 29th birthday you happen to be celebrating. I happen to be 39 if you count only years. If you count other variables like smoking, drinking, stressing, commuting, and laughing, I am only 19 and can look forward to giggling for another 75 trips around the sun. I don't know the formula but I can point you to the Real Age calculator. Have fun and report back, kiddies.

And then they were billed. Last but not least for today, I would like to share with you a blurb regarding the presentation of numbers as brought to you by that bastion of incomprehensibility, the wireless phone industry. Also, mentioning this allows me to bring the iPhone into today's post and isn't that what it's all about anyway? I still do not have my very own but I have been getting enough pleasure vicariously through the stories of those who stood in line. David Pogue (should that be iPogue?) received his first bill and summed it up thusly:

This development illustrates yet another clash between Apple’s typical philosophy of elegance and simplicity—and the unprepared, cluelessness of its cellular partner.

Phun with Photos

So Mao, queen of the this castle's clouder, has recently been diagnosed with old kidneys. They haven't failed completely but they are tired. So Adventures with a Geriatric Cat now begins. The first thing that went through my mind when I found this out was that I have no really good pictures of this furball. I'm sure this will be rectified in the coming weeks and that she will dread seeing me stalking her with the clicking whirring flashing hand-held box. So to stick with the photo theme...

I'm having a hard time determining which is satire: Link - More fish movie posters

Living with The T, an individual who has never said no to trying out a pen and then buying as many of them as possible when it turns out to be perfect, I've grown numb to the plethora of ink-wielding devices in the house (this in no way means I can easily find one when I need one but that is a blog topic for another time). I realized how badly this pen obsession could go when I saw this Mercedes Pens.

Of course, the owner has a blog.

I've long been a fan of Worth1000.com, a site dedicated to keeping those creative juices flowing. A recent contest was entitled If Trekkies Ruled. My favorite photo-creation from the bunch:

Zeus save us! That face is perfect!

Here are a couple of other shots from a site I just found. From what I've seen so far, it seems to be more actual photos with results achieved in the darkroom rather than on the computer.

More fun with office products.

Too many chefs at the keyboard

A few days ago, I was repeating the ritual of restocking the dairy at home and inadvertently grabbed fat-free half-and-half. I think the cartons of this product should be neon in color and include a symbol warning consumers of impending doom. Something along the lines of Mr. Yuck would warn folks quite nicely. What is the point to fat-free half-and-half ?! Doesn't half-and-half exist in the first place so we can get our hands on the good part?

This morning, I was plodding through some newsprint, sipping contaminated coffee—what exactly is in fat-free half-and-half, anyway?—and reading that obesity is a social epidemic. I am paraphrasing here but the idea is that if your sibling is obese, your chance of becoming obese increases 40%. The conclusion was not that you share your sib's genes, rather that obesity spreads much in the same way fashion does. Fashion! Good grief. My morning angst slowly changed from "what poisons am I ingesting by using fat-free half-and-half" to "ohmigawd keeping up with the ever-spreading Joneses is not causality IT'S THE FOOD, STUPID!!" I love this comment:

" ... The study found a person's chances of becoming obese went up 57 percent if a friend did, 40 percent if a sibling did and 37 percent if a spouse did. In the closest friendships, the risk almost tripled. ...

Despite their findings, the researchers said people should not sever their relationships. ... "

Sheesh. I can just hear phone lines buzzing with the following: "I'm really sorry, Sally, I can't go for lunch with you at The Trough today because hanging out with you might make me fat."

To sum it up nicely, I point you to Inkling. She spent some time reading the comments to the story when it ran it the NY Times and describes the experience as the fascination of the abomination: much like a train wreck, you can't turn your eyes away from the gore. Rather than suffer through the comments myself, I find it easier to point you to her summary.

Aside: One of the studies Inkling links to studied multiple social factors on eating behaviors. As the number of people at a meal increases so do the size and duration of the meal. Meals eaten in large groups were over 75% larger than when eaten alone. Wow! My comment about eating at The Trough was done tongue in cheek. Good to know research backs me up.

I escaped the newsprint and went to the internet, coffee in hand. You may be wondering why I'm even using the abomination known as fat-free half-and-half. Well, I can only justify my actions by hating waste more than than taste (should I have written waist instead?). I'll drink the swill rather than just dump it and lose the $3, add the carton to the landfill and the contents to the water treatment plant without trying to learn from my mistake. Anyway, while reading RSS newsfeeds, I came across the following list of stories at The Consumerist, defender of those buy things. This is a non-doctored screenshot of the order in which the stories hit the wire:

I think Meg and Ben need to have a little inter-office convo as they're posting stories. I believe Meg's question about why people are fatter now than ever before, posted at 9:11 AM, was at least partially answered three minutes earlier when Ben posted the video of McD's rolling out a bigger bovine-on-a-bun menu item.
Links: obesity article, McBeef video

Once these words were out, I was gussing them up a bit and pulled down the following menu:
I propose a change to these menu options. How about instead they range from Smallest to OBESE ? Then we can justify the research into a link between typing and gaining weight.

Are you gonna eat that?

Questions I didn't know I had

How to Pour Ketchup - with diagrams and the physics behind the phenomenon. If you click to the homepage, you can also learn about the physics of a soccer ball.

I'm not complaining about the weather around here but I'm starting to prune. Oh, for a few days hot enough so that the words "iced coffee" sound refreshing rather than just the result of entropy. Here's an alternative method for making ice coffee without leaving the mug sitting out on the desk all day.

ǝǝɟɟoɔ ɥƃnouǝ pɐɥ ǝʌ,noʎ 'sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı

˙ʞɔıɹʇ ǝlʇʇıl ʇɐɥʇ pıp ı ʍoɥ s,ǝɹǝɥ

Another example of things I thought I knew and actually don't: all the presidents. I only scored 33 out of 43 on this quiz. On the other hand, how many names of dead white specifically-American guys should one be expected to recall? I knew all the assassinated ones because I recently listened to Assassination Vacation read by the author, Sarah Vowell (reviews and excerpt with audio option). I like when audio books are read by the authors. They can hit every inflection the way they meant it to be, uh, heard by the reader. Anyway, it was downright hilarious and educational. Why is it that I remember most the things I laugh at the hardest? Hmm. Note to self: ponder a new theory of education.

Here's something else to ponder: in 1984, AT&T was declared a monopoly and broken into 9 smaller entities. As of today, all but 4 of these original little bits are once again under at&t ownership. In fact, there are only 3 telecommunication companies today. Let's here it for choice! Cue the graphic.


Here's a timesaver: a list (requires registration) of 101 meals ready in 10 minutes of less. Hey, we all gotta eat right? But filling the gastric void takes away from all sorts of other summer activities, like blogging, so any quick eats are a good thing ... right? Pray tell, who is Mr. Bittman addressing when he suggests boiling a lobster for a quick meal (#12 on list)? I know the minimum wage just got bumped to a whopping $5.85 per hour but c'mon. Lobster prices are currently at or near an all time high of $15 per pound. Since these cuddly crustaceans average 1 1/2 to 2 pounds in size, one hour of toil gets you maybe a couple of legs and an antenna. Forget the claws where the real meat is found.


This talk about food has made me hungry. I'ma hankerin' for a hunk o' cheese.

Almost made coffee come out my nose

Today's giggle:



The video itself made me laugh but not as hard as the fact that some technician in the studio kept playing the clip over and over. As the first gent demonstrates, the job of the talking heads is to explain the obvious. When the giggles start to hit, somebody kept replaying the tape. That's the part I find especially hilarious.

Let's get organized (or at least talk about doing so)

Here's the trend of the day, kids: let's clean up the squalor! But first, an anecdote.

The Boy, genetically related to The T, has been staying with us. The question arises: what does The Boy eat? Well, any food starting with a 'P' is a good candidate for ingestion. This list includes pizza, pizza Hot Pockets, pasta, Pop-Tarts, and pgrapes. I experienced what might have been a rustic living versus appliance technology gap when The Boy took his mug from phot pchocolate into the kitchen and put it in the sink. You might be thinking to yourself, where is she going with this? Well, when I say "The Boy put the mug in the sink" what I mean to say is that he balanced it atop the pile of drying clean dishes rather than set it in the empty sink just inches to the right. I took the scene in and realized he is a child of his upbringing. His parents went without an ice cream scoop for a time rather than bring one into the house that was not dishwasher safe. Everything gets put in the dishwasher. The Boy may not have recognized the pile of dishes for what they were: clean and drying and waiting to be put away rather a pile of dirty dishes waiting to be put in our non-existent dishwasher.

Add this perspective to the list of Beloit College Mindset List.

Speaking of lists, here's a list of Ten Things to do in 10 minutes so you can feel like you accomplished something and possible rediscover a flat surface in your home. I particularly like the suggestion to clean up something virtual (TiVo season pass subscriptions) and the comparison of closet hangers to Tribbles.

If books are your own version of Tribbles and happen to cover every surface in your abode, flat or otherwise, here's a list of 20 ways to set them free and/or possibly acquire others. Remember, if they love you, they'll return.

If you recently heard yourself saying, "Where's my %^&# hair clip?" you should curse no more. The iPod Shuffle has become a hair accessory.


That's all for now. I'm off to move a pile of books so I can sit and read anything other than the latest way-too-long tome by JK Rowling.

À boire ou je tue le chien! (brought to you by French expressions you won't learn at school...)

Good Clean Fun

In the spirit of keeping you amused, I offer the following selection of games.

The Wikipedia Game
Goal: Get from one Wikipedia page to another by only clicking on links in articles. Players start from the same page for one topic, say the female mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. Another topic, say Jell-O, is chosen as the target. Players can only click on links to reach the target. No typing is allowed.

This takes the Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon game to a whole new level. In the interest of research, I did a solo run connecting Hypatia to Jell-O in 17 clicks. I believe the breakthrough click was "screaming jelly babies" which led me to "gelatin" which I called success so I could go back and read more about jelly babies, screaming or otherwise. Here's my path:

Hypatia --> Mathematics --> Scientific method --> scientific community --> popular culture --> commercial --> advertisement --> brand --> jingles --> snacks --> list of snack foods --> geplak --> sugar --> calorie --> food energy --> screaming jelly babies --> jelly baby --> gelatin

Thanks to Writing as Joe for bringing this to my attention. Should I have called this entry I'm Joe's Game to keep in the spirit of previous posts?

White Jigsaw Yeah OK, so Flash based jigsaws aren't really all that hard because the pieces will snap into place at some point ... right? Well, this was amusing when the pieces got small and the playing board seemed to get bigger.

Sheep Dash! How fast are your reflexes? Five sheep are going to bolt and your job is to stun 'em. I was remarkably consistent:



Too many games to count. Well, I haven't finished counting them, anyway. What a great use for Flash. Very creative, simple, amusing. Give 'em a go.

I'm going to see how many Wiki clicks it takes to get from Apple, Inc. to tooth decay. See you next time.

Math in the Wild

Yum. Unnecessary Dairy Overlap. Is it cheese or a pasteurized cheese-food product, ala Kraft slices?