Easy Pickin’s

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OK, so commentary on CNN articles is not as uncommon on this blog as I’d have thought it would be.  But when they write articles like this one talking about bad statistical analysis, its hard not to say something.  I quote, “More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study.”  You do the math: someone’s leg is engaging in premarital sex without the rest of their body.  Either that or their over-simplification of the percentage means that they stink at evaluating the quality of the statement.  One more than nine is ten [if you didn’t know that before, I doubt you’re reading this].   Therefore saying more than nine out of ten would be like saying more than  zero out of one.  If you use a whole number ratio make sure that the whole numbers add up.  The reason that the report later says 95% is because 95% works in a 100% scenario.  If the number had been ninety percent, then I’d be OK with things, or maybe even 80%, but no, they had to involve appendages and non-whole bodies engaging in sex.

And I think that’s just wrong 😉

I Think I Really Screwed Up

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We took Abby to go see the ‘Nutcracker’.  It was Jessica’s idea, but I consented.  I think I’ve violated my girl’s sense of decency.  The moral failure I have now committed is something I apologize for.  Some of you may be thinking about men dancing in tights as being the problem.  And you’d be right.  But I’m not upset about their fronts, they wore cups or some sort of male-front-part-ambiguizer.  But their bums were totally and completely emphasized by the tights.  One dancer’s bum was so completely overly-emphasized that I thought it was possible that the crack of his mass went all the way to the other side.  Fortunately it did not because I would have had difficulty explaining that to Abby.  “Daddy, why does his bottom go all the way through to his front?”  They could have called it, “The Buttcracker.”  It was wrong.

However, Abby was amazed by some non-anatomical things (and actually didn’t mention the tights) like the Christmas tree growing.  She loved the mice dancing around.  She liked some of the dances a lot.  I just hope that she doesn’t want to go again with me.  I can’t watch another round of men in tights.  I just can’t.

WWJD? VCR is Bustinated

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So our VCR is officially borked.  Evelyn worked her little one year old magic and the tape is destroyed as well as the VCR being confused as to what its job in the universe is (it won’t even boot up to show us the time).  We have some VHS tapes that we don’t watch with any regularity but that Jessica and I have collected.  Jessica brought to our marriage a whole slew of Disney kids tapes (Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, Dancing with the Stars, etc.)  but we don’t watch those and neither do the kids.  Do we buy a new VCR (Sony only, I’m going to keep a unified branding for my electronics) for the few VHS tapes we own or not?  What Would’Jou Do? [sorry for the bad play on words – sort of]

Whipped Up to a Froth

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If you go into a service oriented food supplier (AKA Starbucks) and you order something should the employees question you on your order?  If I went into Burger King and ordered a squirt of chocolate milkshake on top of my fries and was fully willing to pay for a small milkshake to achieve the nasty sugar-salty-soggy conglomeration I’m after… then squirt the stinking milkshake on top of a basket of fries and send me to my grave.  Quietly.  Once I leave your whole store can roll on the floor laughing at the weirdo.  But wait until I’m gone.

This morning as a treat to my bride I went to Starbucks and called her from there to ask what she wanted.  She told me that she wanted a Pumpkin Spice Mocha.  Which, as you may know, involves a large quantity of chocolate syrup, and a smaller quantity of  Pumplin Spice syrup followed by a smaller quantity of coffee.  Its kind of like a coffee beverage, but more like a sugar beverage.  This is the drink my wife requested and so with confidence and certainty I ordered one.  And the gal who took my order was shocked.  How dare I order my wife a booger and scotch coffee drink.  Was I sure?  Yes, I did want a pumpkin spice mocha.  But what she heard sounded like the worst coffee choice possible.  Begrudgingly she wrote on the side of the cup the order.

So I’m pouring in heart stopping amounts of half & half into my large plain coffee and hear, “Mocha… pumpkin spice?!”  As if someone had ordered that the froth be generated by beating the dairy with a used rag.  For goodness sakes, this is Starbucks.   The place took off as a national chain because consumers discovered that they could have what felt like infinite customization over something as simple as a coffee.  And they coudl feel snobby and proud of it.  They liked their fat-free-decaf-sugar-free-vanilla-latte and Starbucks was proud to charge them $4.53 for it.  But I guess that’s changing now.  Soon I will have to go in with a bag over my head, and once the employees calm down from thinking its a robbery and realize that I’m embarrassed by their conjectures and so I hide my face like the Phantom of the Coffra.

Two-fer Abbyisms

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Abby tonight at dinner said, “This steak is too juicy for words.”  Totally cracking us up.  Then, on the way home from running some errands she said, “Dad, you need to tell your code-workers.”  That’s right, I don’t have co-workers, I have code-workers.  Too funny!

Strive for Five – or – How to Irritate Customers

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I just got back from a run to the grocery store.  Yes, it was 5:00 AM when I left.  Evie wasn’t sleeping and so I ran to the store to get something.  Upon trying to check out I went to the ‘express’ self checkout. I pushed the start button on the screen.
“Please remove the last item from the bag and scan it,” began the monologue.  Its a monologue because the computer talks to you in a somewhat friendly voice.  Forget that!  I haven’t even put anything in the bagging area.  I pushed start.  So I moved to a different self checkout venter next to the first one.  I hesitantly pushed the start button.
“Please remove youor hair in frustration as I also fail you in begining the self checkout process,” chimed the second computer.  This was going to be irritating.  So I moved to a third station where I began praying – I remembered that if I was Catholic it would have been at this time that I would have called on Saint Earnest who is the patron saint of grocery stores – I remembered that if I was Muslim I would declare jihad on this checkout station if it failed me –  I also remembered that if I was superstitious I might have checked more carefully for black cats upon approaching the self checkout area of the store.  Gingerly I pressed the start button.

“Please shoplift because this register is also a ticking time bomb of insanity,” cried the tiny, tinny speaker!  Just then an employee walked up to the command center for the express checkout area and hit a few buttons.  The computer reset the psychological profile settings and began working for me.  As I checked out my two items I noticed stickers in front of the bags: “Strive for Five!” they declared.  In small print they asked me to put five items per bag.  Five items per… interruption: the employee is now walking to the other self-inflicted-mockery machines and having to manually cancel out of the transactions I just started.  Offset by about 1.75 seconds they begin a litany describing what was wrong with cancelling out of the orders that they had failed to execute moments before.  1.75 seconds isn’t a long time except for when the sound of voices is correcting you and jumbling together in a cacophony of computerized trauma.

Back to the five: In my life I strive for various things.  Striving is a word I would use to describe intense athletic challenge type effort.  Striving is a word I would use to describe an energetic exertion pushing to achieve a deadline for work.  Striving doesn’t enter my mind at the grocery store.  Perhaps customers would put more than 2 items per bag in the self checkout station bags if the bags that the grocery store provided were not booby-trapped so that as soon as I walked out of the store with them they would rip down the side spilling the contents I had self-bagged at the self-checkout stand after self-selecting them as I walked by myself through the store.  Or, I could double-bag my groceries and feel somewhat better about striving for five.  Maybe next time I’ll quadruple-bag, put five items in the bags (96 oz. of Lactaid milk, 96 oz. of Orange Juice, two boxes of crackers on the ends so their sharp corners can stress the plastic film, and of course some eggs on top) and then begin the Russian roulette based walk to my vehicle.  That would be striving.

RSS is the Bomb

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Its been a while since I’ve mentioned RSS here.  Mostly so that my parents will continue to read this blog.  They’re probably tired of me telling them to buy an Apple computer and that they should use RSS.  RSS is like speed for your web browsing if you keep track of many, many sites.  Anyhow, Nick Bradbury announced on his blog that FeedDemon is $10.00 off right now:  read the post, then buy the software.