Tag Humor

I Didn’t Know That (Ooops, corrected copy)

Michael 1 Comment

I recall a time when a graduate student would say something and by gosh, that was the way it was. It was sort of like the 1970s (ugh) equivalent of the Internet. You know darn well that 99.9% of what is on it would be disallowed in a court of law as hearsay, unfounded, or speculative, yet there is that part of you that is sure if you read it there, just as we used to be sure if we heard it from them, then it must be true.

There is no end to the things that I am sure are true. Well, that’s probably a bit overstated. I’m sure there is some end but I figure my end is closer than that end so to me it’s all endless. However, there are still some things that I don’t know that I want to add to the things that are true before one of those ends shows up around the bend.

For example, I know exactly where dust comes from. (If you don’t, don’t look it up, it’s disgusting! Ok, I’ll tell you. It’s mostly sloughed off skin. Yuck.) But I have no idea how I get dust inside a closed cabinet. Is that where the kitchen fairies who clean up the messes and put the dishes away hang out and let their skin hang out with them. If so, why are they just hanging out in my drawers and cabinets and not wiping the kitchen experiments gone awry off the counters and walls.

Another thing I can’t figure out is radio. I’m an educated person, a science educated person, who actually understands (and can spell) gluconeogenesis. I understand the theory of radio waves and how transmitters excite the air and receivers replicate the original wave patterns. But I have no idea how they know which is which. They say (“They” being the grad students of the 70s from whom I first heard this and “They” also being the Internet of the new millennium where I confirmed this just yesterday) that radio waves never stop. Whatever has been still is. So if everything ever transmitted – radio, television, cell phones, CB radios, walkie talkies, blue tooth, satellite radio, GPS, and the thousands of other things that I’ve forgotten or never knew about – is still floating around out there, how does my car always know what station to pluck out of the air for me? Personally, I think it’s magic.

They (there go them again) claim that it takes more calories to eat celery than celery contains making it a true negative calorie food. Assuming that you consider celery food. I’ll buy that because I can read how many calories celery contains (6 calories per stalk according to some sources) and how many calories it takes to chew, swallow, digest, and -ummm- eliminate celery (8 calories based on a University of Warwick study when extrapolated per stalk). I even know what a calorie is. That is, the energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree centigrade. And I know that the US FDA wants to require that calorie content of food be included in labeling, menus, even on vending machines. What I have no idea of is how you figure out how many calories a food has. Does burning that one stalk of celery raise one gram of water by six degrees? Or to make it more easily measured would you burn 1,440 stalks of celery to attempt to raise the temperature of one cup of water 240 degrees? And how would you even do that with a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or an Extra Crispy Chicken Little Sandwich, or a pack of Grandma’s Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies (the vending pack)?

So, in an Internet filled with people proclaiming all the things that they know, there you have a few things I am willing to admit that I don’t know. If you do, please feel free to add your comment and add to the things that I know and help me get the end a little further away from that other end. One thing though, even if you do know, I really don’t want to know how to measure how many calories are burned by digesting a bowl of chocolate moose tracks ice cream. Some things are best left a mystery.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Are you ready for some Bockey?

Michael Leave a comment

My favorite season began yesterday. No, not spring. That was a couple weeks ago, but it has what has been called a sign of spring, baseball. Actually, my favorite season is the ultimate overlap of seasons of baseball and hockey – it’s Bockey Season.

Major League Baseball 2016 opened down the road from me as the “Boys of Summer” braved temperatures in the 30s in their home opener. Then a few hours later across the river, the “Boys of Winter” burned up the ice at their last regular season home game for 2016. There’s nothing in common between the two sports other than they are my favorite sports. People around this town would call it anti-American but I don’t care much for football. People across the world would call it most typical for an American but I don’t care much for soccer. Basketball is best played by college kids and only for a couple of weeks around now. Golf confuses me, tennis exhausts me, curling is ok but even with rumors of a local club (with a waiting list to play even) try to find it to somewhere sometime, anywhere anytime.

For my money baseball and hockey are the way to go. To those who say baseball goes too slow or hockey goes too fast I say they aren’t paying close enough attention to either. Strategy and purpose abound in the movement of both games. A swing of the bat or stroke of the stick doesn’t just send the puck or the ball on its way but the choreographed movement of everybody on the playing surface. If you think hockey games are only where fights break out and baseball games are only good for catching up on your afternoon napping you clearly need to spend some time actually watching the games to see what really goes on in them.

If you don’t share my enthusiasm for these two sports that’s fine. I’ll still enjoy them – and I’ll get to enjoy them for a couple months. And they have more in common than just having me for a mutual fan. They might be the Boys of Winter but when the playoffs get tight and the wins go back and forth, the Stanley Cup might not be raised until mid June less than a week before the solstice. And before the Boys of Summer threw out the first pitch yesterday, the grounds crew had to scrape the snow off the outfield. That’s blending the seasons.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

It’s ____ (8 letters)

Michael 1 Comment

It’s the first day of winter, the first of summer for those of you south of the Equator. That makes it the shortest day of the year, or the longest again for those in the southern hemisphere. And that’s good news! The days are going to get longer and back to consistently warm and pleasant. Or bad news and the days will be getter shorter and colder. It’s like a tale of two cities, or worlds. And it’s all very puzzling.

And that reminds me…today is also International Crossword Puzzle Day! (How’s that for a cheesy segue?)  (Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.)

Crossword Puzzle Day, December 21, the 102nd anniversary of the first publication of what would soon become a worldwide fascination with filling in little squares on a rectangular grid based on sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic clues in the morning paper over morning coffee sometimes wishing it was something much stronger in that cup.

Crossword puzzles are pretty universal. Everybody knows of them, almost everybody has completed at least one of them, and a whole lot of somebodies work at one or more of them just about every day. Crossword puzzles sharpen the mind, improve vocabulary, and provide bragging rights for the nerdier ones of us out here.

I had done a puzzle or two here or there usually to relieve boredom perhaps on a flight when I had forgotten a book and was tired of paging through the in-flight catalog. Then I ended up in the hospital.  When I got to the point that I was looking forward to watching The Price is Right I knew that I was in deep doodoo. That’s when my daughter downloaded a crossword puzzle app for my tablet. Since then I have acrossed and downed my way back to mental health.

I still do a puzzle a day and my mind is sharp, my vocabulary adequate, and I’m just as nerdy as always and darned proud of it. Even if I don’t know the value of today’s shopper’s showcase.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Want to work on that first crossword puzzle. To see it and read a history of crossword puzzles click here to read Tiffany Crawford’s article on the 100th Anniversary of the Crossword Puzzle in 2013 in the Vancouver Sun.
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/This+History+December+1913/9311790/story.html

 

Thinking Zebras -or- The Great Annual Christmas Catalog Shopping Guide 2015 Edition

Michael Leave a comment

Here it is, what you’ve been waiting for, the annual, official, one of a kind, nothing else like it, here for this year, the great, the yearly, the Christmas catalog shopping guide for 2015. Whew!

I’m going to have to consider changing the name of the Guide. Catalogs, although still a favorite reader for keeping on the coffee table for use during hockey intermissions, are going the way of corded telephones and VCRs. They are being usurped by their e-mail brethren and show up not once or twice a season but once or twice a day. Yet the over-riding intent is the same, to tempt you into buying the stuff that you have absolutely no idea they even made.

You don’t need me to guide you to radio controlled fishing boats, inflatable radio controlled minions, or sound activated dancing water portable speakers. No, the guide this year returns to the land of excess.

What can be more excessive than a replica Stanley Cup popcorn maker for a mere $99.99 (the popcorn maker is real, it’s the Stanley Cup that is the replica)? How about a motorized, rideable drinks cooler for a mere-er $999.95. You say you want something more sophisticated than hockey and beer? There is always the world’s largest Scrabble game. At over 7 feet by 8 feet this game will keep you on your toes – while reaching to spell a word. It can be under your tree for only $12,000, shipping extra.

The 2011 Guide featured what was then the most expensive item to appear in a catalog that appeared in my mailbox. That was the Optimal Resonance Audiophile Four-Way Three-Dimensional Soundstage Quality Speakers at an amazingly unrealistic $60,000.  Why I would get a catalog with items priced at more than I paid for my last 3 cars combined I don’t know. For some reason, I continue to get mail from that company. This year, we top that by better than half. The new official most expensive item in a holiday gift guide that was sent to me (still, why?) is at $185,000 a game. They call it a simulator but it’s an arcade game for your home, a race simulator mimicking 12 different types of race cars on a variety of track and conditions. Plan on having a 6 x 8 foot space cleared out in the family room for this gem.  You should know this “car” has manual transmission. You might want to buy a beater at the local used car lot to practice your shifting if you haven’t been in a stick lately.

About the title. If spending 30-some years working in the medical field taught me anything it was never discount the obvious. We, and probably many other professions, had a saying. When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras. One of the first holiday mailings I received this year proudly displayed this year’s hottest gift for your most precocious toddler. You know, the one for whom an ordinary rocking horse just won’t do. For that little tyke, the gift (that would be THE gift) is the hand carved rocking zebra. A steal at $9,000.

It’s Christmas. Discount the obvious.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Want to see past Christmas Catalog Gift Guides?
2014 – The Great Annual Christmas Catalog Shopping Guide
2012 – And If You Order Now
2011 – Buy the Way

 

Out to Pasture

Michael Leave a comment

2015 is an historic year in the world of horse racing. If you owned a television or a computer or a newspaper subscription you couldn’t have missed the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years. That’s not historic. It happened before. It was 37 years ago but still it had happened. No history was made.  History was made when American Pharoah (yes, that really is spelled wrong but that’s part of his charm) won horse racing’s Grand Slam – the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, the Belmont Stakes, and The Breeders’ Cup Classic. He is the first horse to win all four races. Ever. That’s history.

It is also a fitting end to his active racing career. It is now time to for this stud to, ah, retire and go stand stud. The breeding company who handles American Pharoah’s breeding business has set a price of $200,000 per, umm, coupling. If he stands for 160 mares a year, a not unrealistic number, he stands to make $32 million a year. A thoroughbred’s average lifespan is 25 to 30 years, he is 3 years old, so he has 22 to 27 years to, uh, horse around. Just to make math a little easier, in twenty years he gets to make about $640 million with a couple years left over to relax, travel, maybe visit the grandkids, and have a bronze statue of him cast for posterity.

I too retired this year. Figuring the lifespan of my immediate predecessors I also could have about 22 to 27 years to go. I figure my retirement plan is worth about $32,000 a year and I further figure I will probably stand in the grocery store checkout lane about 160 times a year. In twenty years I’ll have made the princely sum of $640,000 and will still have a couple of years to sit around on my posterior.

I wonder if in my next life I can come back as a racehorse.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Children of the Candy Corn

Michael 2 Comments

Listen up everyone.  Today, as is October 30 of every year, is National Candy Corn Day!  And you thought you had to wait for the last day of the month for the only good holiday in October.

Candy corn is good stuff.  Butter, sugar, honey.  What more could you ask for?  Add some food coloring and a little more than an hour of your time and you have the ultimate fall candy.  Better still, hop on down to the grocery store and buy packs of the stuff in a little more than a minute.

Some of you reading this might remember making or getting home made candy and treats for Halloween.  Candy corn, candied apples, fudges, cookies, popcorn balls, and gooey nut clusters were classics where kids would memorize the houses for year to year gratification.  Then some psychopath decided it was a good idea to stick razor blades in apples and now all any self-respecting parent will let a child keep is whatever comes sealed by the manufacturer.

Today if you want home made you better hope that a very generous soul invites you to his or her (or their) house party. Or, bring back the traditions and make your own for your own.  Nothing wrong with that.  And you control the ingredients.  Perhaps a splash of rum added to the popcorn balls’ caramel paste or some bourbon infused marshmallows to hold the nut clusters together.  Maybe bobbing for apples in a barrel of Riesling.  Now that’s a party!

But back to the candy corn.  Yes it’s fall and yes the ultimate is chowing down on those little kernels usually before they even hit the candy dish.  But there is so much more one can do with these a-maize-ing treats.  Sprinkle them on your cupcakes like, well like sprinkles.  Let them play with your cereals either in your Rice Krispy treats or Chex mixes.  Add them to a batch of chocolate chip cookies.  Mix them with the peanuts before adding that whole kit and caboodle to popcorn and caramel for an even sweeter popcorn ball.

And finally, three words that will serve you well for the entire fall season:  Candy Corn and Prosecco.  It doesn’t get any better than that.

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.