Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from The 36th Lock! 

I wish everyone out there a fun and prosperous 2011!

(Until the meteor hits sometime this summer, anyway... Shhh... Don't tell anyone.)

Giggle... Stop... You're Killin' Me...

I never read this before and, since I managed to finish up Racing the Beam - The Atari Video Computer System (a big ol' "meh"), and since it was a free download, I thought I'd give it a shot and see what all the fuss was about.

Here's my opinion:

Ha...  Haha... Teehee... Wait... seriously?  Ha!  HAHAHAHAH HAH HA HEE HEE HEE HA HAH HAH HA HA !!!  HA HA HAHAHA HA HA HEE HEE HA HA HA OH MY HAAHAHAHA!  OH, YEAH, THAT WILL WORK! HAHAHAHAH HA HA HA HOO HOO HOO HA HA!!!  OOOHHHH... "BOMBASTIC" AND "HIGHFALUTIN" IN THE SAME BOOK!  LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE GOT A THESAURUS FOR CHRISTMAS!!  HAHAHAAH!  HEE HEE HEE HEE!  'NOTHING TO LOSE BUT MY CHAINS', INDEED!  HEHEHHEE... WOO...  OH, MY RIBS...

In closing, a hilarious page-turner.  Short enough to blow through in a couple of hours but it needs more cartoons or maybe a word-seek to break up the prose a little.

Jolt Energy Gum Review

I recently purchased some Jolt Gum as a Christmas gift for a friend. Why? He read that caffeine is the best energizer out there for a pre-workout boost but he didn’t want the sloshing-around feeling you would get from drinking an energy drink or coffee before hitting the gym and thought maybe gum would do the trick.

I looked at the choices that Amazon had to offer, paying careful attention to the reviews. Most of the negative comments out there on caffeinated gum revolve around how awful it tastes – sort of like chewing No-Doz, I reckon. The Jolt Gum comments didn’t seem to be dominated by these issues so I bought a couple of cases. Jimmydunes was gracious enough to throw me a couple of packs and I gave it a whirl that same day.

The front of the package says that two pieces have the same caffeine content as a cup of coffee. It’s got guarana (for the caffeine, I guess) and ginseng (for the magic, I guess) in it. The back of the package says “Yes, we are THAT Jolt, the same Jolt as in Jolt Cola.” Neat.

I popped a couple of pieces as I sat down at the barber shop waiting to get my haircut. Yeah… I didn’t think that one through very well. What I failed to take into account is that this caffeine instantly hits you by being absorbed through your gums and whatnot instead of needlessly lollygagging around in your digestive system getting all diluted and stuff. In retrospect, I suppose I could have picked a worse time to try the gum if I was, say, headed into the O.R. to perform surgery and ended up going all “sushi chef” on someone’s appendix instead (I am a three-cup-a-day coffee and occasional energy drink drinker, FWIW. Your mileage may vary.).

So I sat and vibrated quietly to myself while I enjoyed the minty flavor of the gum. It tastes just like a regular piece of mint gum with a hint of a sharp overtone that might be the caffeine, some other ingredient, or just my imagination.

I was able to pull myself together enough to survive the haircut so I then went to the gym. I was about 28 minutes into my one-hour treadmill routine before it occurred to me to look down at the timer – something I usually do about every sixty seconds or so. Cool. Since I hit my “target heart rate” about the time I was telling the stylist that I wanted my sideburns a little shorter it is not clear if I technically had a “good” workout or “bad” workout, but it felt awesome, nonetheless.

There was no “sugar crash” and coming down off the caffeine rush was gentle.

You can order it through Amazon, of course, but you can also order it directly through the Jolt Gum site. If you buy the Support Our Troops packs, they will donate 7% of the sales to charities that help wounded or fallen members of the military or their families. That’s awesome, but, as of this writing, they appear to be out of stock on that item. I think that really, really sucks. I hope they decide to make internal substitutions so that the intent of the donation thing is met instead of throwing up their hands in mock helplessness because the “fancy art packs” are held up at the printers or whatever…

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. I seem to have noticed a pleasant, minor secondary effect from the gum that I am not going to go into here. See, I am in the process of performing a single-blind study on this effect and I don’t want to taint the results (just yet). It might just be my imagination, but, if I am interpreting what I think I experienced correctly I might be giving up Red Bulls forever in favor of this gum. I can’t exactly rule out “placebo effect” on myself, so if you have tried it and have noticed “nothing” or “something” let me know.

Nothing creepy, please.

2011 Resolutions

 A new year approacheth so, therefore, it is time to create new set of unreasonably lofty goals guaranteed to generate false hope and, later, self-loathing and guilt.

Because, this... THIS is the year you finally get your act together.  After all, future behavior cannot be predicted from past performance, to paraphrase those mutual fund TV ads... 

Look, just make peace right now with the fact that you are doomed to be defeated by your own misguided ambitions and you will save yourself a load of heartache later (you rarely see that disclaimer on the mutual fund commercials, btw).  To quote Homer Simpson "'Trying' is the first step towards failure".

Fine.  Don't take my advice.  But at least make sure that your list is packed with things that can't be easily quantified.  This way you can "lawyer-up" the results in a couple of months by redefining terms and conditions turning a clear and obvious failure to reach your target into a shining, if fuzzy, success story that will help you sleep like a baby for the rest of the year.

For example, don't say "I am going to donate 10% of my income to charity",  say "I am going to try and be a better person" instead.  You see what I did there?  I took an easily measurable goal - one that can be confirmed by others, no less - and turned it into a freshman's B-minus Philosophy midterm paper.  It could mean anything!  All you gotta do is let one person merge into traffic without flipping them off and you are golden!

What?  That's cheating?  Sigh... Ok.  How about this?  Instead of saying "I will lose thirty pounds this year" say "I will try not to eat two bowling balls worth of cheese this year".  Since the average American eats over thirty pounds of cheese per annum, you have your hard-sounding goal (complete with stuff to record in a little notebook or what have you), and you have a 50% shot of being successful even if you do absolutely nothing at all. 

Say... I just thought of something... you might even lose the weight by not eating 30 pounds of cheese.  I know, it sounds borderline crazy, but it just might work.  Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to test this madcap theory without a control person who volunteers to eat sixty pounds of cheese in 2011.  Oh, wait, nevermind... Odds are I will be seated next to someone on a plane early next year that thinks that limiting themselves to 30 pounds of cheese during Lent is the height of self-restraint anyway, so I'll just ask how it's going when the time comes.

What?  How dare you!  I am not afraid of failure!  I embrace failure as a matter of course, I'll have you know, mainly because I often have little other choice.  I'll prove it right now.  Here is my list of easily quantifiable resolutions for 2011.  I will later post them in the sidebar under my BMI and give little updates on how I'm doing.

Please note that each of these things is "interesting" and "definable".  This is to further distinguish this list from a typical collection of ambiguous, boring goals.  I mean, I am not a fan of goals like "I'm gonna get in shape" (boring, fuzzy), but I'm also not a fan of goals like "I will not kill today" (exciting, worrisome, plagiarized). Trust me, though, that pen-spinning guy from the VW Sign and Drive commercials is “on the list”...

Anyway, each of these is intentionally and significantly out of my comfort zone.  You only have to know me to know how far out of the norm these goals are but I have provided a small explanation as to why these items are “resolutions” and not “hobbies” for those who don't know me.

Catch a Fish - How can 'going fishing' count as a resolution? Well, the last time I went fishing is when I was five years old. As I recall, I caught a sunfish and an eel. How hard is it to stick a worm on a hook and drop a line in the water? Not hard at all, but that's not “fishing”. There is an encyclopedia of information about fish, rods, reels, bait, lures, casting techniques, etc, etc, I need to gather and distill in short order before I can act as a convincing teacher for my young son.  Yes, I will be eating the fish, too.

Try Out for a Play – Public speaking freaks me out like nothing else can. I am cool with it if I am infinitely comfortable with the subject matter, but that only happens about 25% of the time I do it. So, I want to try out for any small part in any small play in any of the playhouses in the area. Mind you, I don't have to actually get the part – I'm not an actor after all – but I would definitely get super mega bonus points for pulling that off..

Run Two 5Ks – I have been quit smoking for about six weeks now, I think. No, wait. It's closer to 52 days 7 hours. Instead of replacing smokes with food and Xbox, I have been working out fairly consistently and I am in close to the best cardiovascular shape I have been in in about two decades (not really saying much, but there you go). I don't have to win or even place well, but that's not the point. I hate running, see, and I would like to stop hating running.

Qualify with a Pistol – I have fired a handgun about twenty times in my life. Fifteen of those rounds were fired about twenty years ago, and the other five about ten years ago. Basically, I know nothing about guns and, as with the fishing, this is something I feel I need to be able to teach my kid someday. What does qualify mean? I'm not sure. The NRA has a link to some sort of qualifying standards that seem ridiculously easy to meet (ten rounds in a paper-plate sized target at 15 feet, no time limit – or something like that). My dismissive attitude toward it is most likely based on my lack of understanding of the qualification and my lack of experience. Oh, yeah... I will be learning to shoot right-handed (I'm a lefty, see), so look out world – or at least the portion of the world forward of my position and lacking hard cover should look out.

That's about it for the resolutions for 2011... the public ones anyway. I have a few more things that I hope to accomplish during the upcoming year but I am keeping those to myself. I will crow online if I meet them or fail in an especially interesting way, otherwise I will shoulder the burden of my ineptitude without the snide derision of you guys. You know who you are.

Keep an eye on the sidebar for updates, and wish me luck.  In return for your luck, I leave you with this one last piece of advice, found in the instruction manual for the Cr-48 Notebook:

Two Days Off - A Boring Snow Post

Editor's Note:  This is just a long, rambly post about the recent snow event in the area.  It's not interesting, nor is it well organized.  The spelling might be ok, but I wouldn't swear to the grammar.  Basically, this is a stream-of-consciousness reminder to Future Me that we had an unusually big and enjoyable snow recently.  If you are looking for something wacky, these are not the droids you are looking for.  Move along...

Snow has been on the ground here for over two weeks now - the temperature was low enough to preserve former piles in shaded areas and on the northern sides of things.  With the addition of fifteen inches of new stuff a few days ago, it might hang around for another couple weeks regardless of the predicted warmup over the next few days.  A month of constant visible snow would be one for the record books.

Snow is a rare occurrence here and icicles are nearly unheard of, so I was pretty shocked to see a line of them on the entire front of my house.  Some were about a foot long...

When I was a kid back in New York it would not be unusual for rows of four-foot-long ice daggers to grace the thirty-foot-high gutters of the houses in my neighborhood.  We used to play an adult-endorsed game of knocking them down with snowballs.  In retrospect, that was probably really, really stupid, but it had the benefit of relieving the roof-line of hundreds of pounds of weight before the shingles or gutters could be violently ripped off.  If I ever catch my kid doing that, though, I will make him wish he had been brained by a fifty pound, fifty mph ice chunk...

As previously mentioned, we are three miles from the nearest plowed, sanded, and salted road.  Volunteers with tractors and plow-blades (I saw four out over the past couple of days) do their best to clear the way to the highway but they don't have the resources to de-ice the roads as well as a dedicated crew would.

Making it even tougher to get around is the presence of about a dozen corn, peanut, and cotton fields on the way to the main roads.  Usually, traffic drives down a street, packing and melting the snow a little and making it a little easier for the sun to warm the road in that spot.   After enough cars have passed, two grooves have been worn in the snow down to the asphalt and its not all that bad to drive on.  Near the fields, though, constant light winds blow powdered ice onto the road, instantly refilling and refreezing the slightly melted areas into three-hundred-yard-long ice rinks.

To further put a point on how bad it gets, I had to help the mail delivery person extricate herself from a ditch when I went to take the trash out yesterday.  You know it's tough out there when someone who drives for a living is in trouble...  I guess that's why, although the main roads are 100% snow-free (you would swear it never snowed), I had two paid days off.  Awesome.

So what'd I do with my time?

The morning after the snow, I woke up early and shoveled and salted the steps, sidewalk, driveway, and made a path to the mailbox for the old man across the way.  He's in no condition to do it himself, he has questionable decision making skills, and I didn't want to see a repeat of "The Nor'easter Incident", see.   After that, I did my sidewalk and driveway and then went over to help my snow-shovel-less neighbors dig their guests' cars' out of their driveway.  As odd as it sounds, it was nice to get out and do that work - I guess it's in the blood.

Surprisingly, the snow is still too crummy to make snowmen so we had to settle for snow angels.  Mine are the large, intentional ones.  My two-year-old's angels are small, ill-defined, and face-down.  Hey, you try walking around in butt-high snow...

This snow, he learned that wearing an ice-encrusted scarf sucks, but riding down the slide of his playhouse into a soft snowbank is awesome.  I learned that his ironically named "Arctic Cat" electric vehicle is terrible in ice and snow.  The plastic wheels just have no grab at all, so it was mostly me and the wife pushing and pulling the thing up and down the street while the boy did his darnedest to steer us into a ditch or mailbox.

The tree and all the inside Christmas decorations have been taken down.  The lights will be taken down Friday after most of the snow and ice is gone.  That day, I will also cut up the tree and burn it in the firepit, roasting the chestnuts that didn't get cooked on Christmas.

See?  Told you.  This post just ends.  No final joke.  No closing supposedly-trenchant insight.  Just a dot at the end of this sentence.

Biggish Snow

Interesting weather for this area... 

Starting last night a little over a foot of snow has blanketed the area, making the outside world look newly minted and magical and making the local weather people don sackcloth which they then rend in despair.  Their histrionic wailing and gnashing of teeth tends to wake my toddler, so I have just been watching the news on mute while he is napping.

It's hard to take them seriously when they spend twenty minutes polling the locals on the "secret" to making a good snowman and then follow up on snow survival tips that seems overly focused on determining which of your family members would "cook up real nice-like" if worse came to worst. 

Seriously, though, it's pretty bad out there.  VDOT has done a pretty good job cleaning the main roads, which is great if you actually live near a main road or are merely a fan of the plowing arts.  That piece of information, though,  is basically just trivia to about 90% of the people that live here - interesting but useless.

The wife and I are sitting by the fire looking at the live feeds from the various traffic cams out there (Thanks, Big Brother!).  We are playing a game we like to call "Oh, woodja look at THAT *&%#@#!" as some slackjawed local fishtails down the highway clearly with visions of Jimmie Johnson dancing in his head.  The traffic camera feeds are, of course, silent, but I think a Spike Jones or Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack would fit nicely for these trailblazers.

Whoops... the boy just woke up, so I gotta go.  There is a 99.9% chance of no work tomorrow, so I expect it will be all about snowmen and cocoa and family and other picture postcard jazz.  Sweet.

Merry Christmas!

Click here to see a video that a co-worker sent me last week. 

Mighty Taco at 1:38.  La Nova at 1:53.  Poor slob shoveling his roof at 2:15. 

Enjoy!

She Must Be Very Prowd

It took me about 2.6 seconds to run through every emotion I had when I saw this.  Well, every emotion except "optimism toward the future", that is.

Is Tropical Smoothie Healthy?

I noticed recently that my gym had a brochure holder that was filled with flyers from the Tropical Smoothie Café place right next door. I had never eaten at one and the tagline “Eat Better, Feel Better” made the place give off a seriously healthy vibe so I decided to check it out after I finished my workout.

After looking over the menu and seeing the suspiciously generous portions in front of the other customers I decided to check out the nutritional information online first – you know, to answer the question “Is it actually healthy to eat there?”

Hey, I relish bad-for-you food just as much as the next guy (probably more) but that’s when I know for a fact that what I am eating is unhealthy. I mean, Pizza Hut is not the one posting flyers next to the elliptical machines - kinda-sorta-but-not-quite implying that eating a whole Meat Lover’s Pizza has practically the same benefits as, say, doing fifty sit-ups.

Like most things, as tedious and nearly defeating as it seems, “healthy” is a fuzzy, hard-to-define term. It turns out that “fat content”, “recommended daily allowances”, and “serving sizes” are also phrases that are hugely open to (mis)interpretation. It is very difficult, even using the dot-gov sites out there, to get a black-or-white, one-or-zero, yes-or-no answer to many health-related questions because, after all, every person is a uniquely beautiful freaking snowflake.

For example, if you are an adult you need between 25% and 35% (a HUGE window) of your daily intake to be “fat”. Too much and you start poisoning yourself, and too little and you risk not getting enough stuff like Vitamin E in your system. Oh, hey, but it can just be any old fat – trans fats are right out, and the remainder can be further divided and subdivided into “good” and “bad” (depending on context, body type, age, etc.) until there is really no such thing as either category anymore.

Any sort of global analysis into what is good for you or what is bad for you can be flipped upside-down tomorrow by the next big “discovery”: “STRAWBERRIES CAUSE AUTISM, CURE PROSTATE CANCER IN OBESE MICE”. Joanne Graduate Student gets her Master’s in “Super-Scientific Marginally-Useful But Important-Sounding Biological Hoo-ha and Funding Hustling”, the New York Times gets its headline for its Health section, and you get more confused than ever.

Well, screw it. The first stake has to be driven into the ground somewhere. Here are my assumptions, constraints, and definitions for this “study”.

1. You are forced to grab a sandwich (or equivalent) from one of the following places: Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy’s, or Tropical Smoothie Café. I chose these specifically because I drive by them every day, making them my “fast food options”.
2. You can only order one thing off the menu – no drinks or sides.
3. The 25% to 35% fat thing is too fuzzy because it implies “Well, maybe 40% or 41% isn’t so bad…” and down the slippery slope you go. I am using the USDA implied 30% as my baseline. Above that line is “bad” and below it is “good”.
4. Lower calorie food is better than higher calorie food, and lower fat food is better than higher fat food. The closer you are to “zero calories, zero fat” the better. I know it would be fatal to follow that “guideline” – it is just a convenient metric. If it bothers you, consider using the titles “Guilty Calories” and “Guilty Fat”, the goal being to reduce how bad you should feel indulging in a fast food item.
5. Expanding on Number 4, since we are interested in how far away we are from “zero calories, zero fat” there are some instances where a fattier choice might actually be “healthier” for you because it has less calories, and vice versa. It’s a math thing.
6. The USDA recommends 2,000 calories a day for an average adult. I won’t get into rolling my eyes over that right now, but that implies that 670 calories or so makes a “meal”, assuming “three squares a day” is a good thing.
7. A gram of fat is nine calories. At least, that’s what “the Google” thinks. The various nutritional information guides from the fast-food places seem to vary by up to 20% on that value…
8. I am not trying to measure “deliciousness” or “fullness” here. Some menu items might be the perfect amalgam of “tasty” and “deadly” while some others might be as satisfying to eat as a shot glass full of shredded cardboard.
9. I am using data from the online nutritional information that each of these places puts on their websites. Any mistakes or typos are my own, probably. If you see one, let me know and I will fix it if possible, although I doubt that the general trend will be disturbed.

Enough chit-chat. Here’s the graph. Click to enlarge.

Each fast-food place had about twenty items that could be considered a “wrap” or a “sandwich” that were in their main menus (no kids items were used). Only the “best” items (closest to the origin) and “worst” items (furthest from origin) are labeled. We are looking for general trends, here, not trying to promote or indict a specific menu item. You can find all the nutritional data online (or send me an email and I will eventually send you the raw data).

One green shaded area highlights all foods that are lower than 30% fat and the other highlights things that are under one meal’s worth of calories. The red area highlights the choices that are above both of these limits. All fast food places had at least one item in this “Rectangle of Shame”, but only Burger King had no choices at all in the dark green area of the graph. McDonald’s, whose name is typically used as a pejorative when describing stuff that is the prime standard for bad food, is, surprisingly, not all that horrible.

The ellipses enclose all of the choices available in as small of an area as possible (free-hand), giving you an idea of the variability in the menu items. Furthermore, the locations of the diamonds represent the averages of each of the corresponding fast food places where the size of the diamond is proportional to how the menu items cluster around that average (the standard deviation for you math types). Basically, the smaller the ellipse and the smaller the diamond, the tighter the menu items conform to the company standard.

Getting back to the original question “Is Tropical Smoothie healthy?” we see that the average sandwich or wrap from them has about 560 calories and is 30% fat. Shockingly, this is a higher calorie content than the average of all the menu items of all four places. In case you are wondering, their Ultimate Club represents this average the best, coming in at 560 calories and 28% fat. About half of their menu items fall in the dark green rectangle we are calling “healthy” and only one item falls in the red area you are probably better off avoiding altogether.

So the answer seems to be “Yes”. I would have a much higher probability of randomly choosing something off their main sandwich menu that is healthier than any of the other fast-food choices. Cool.

Of course, with my choice of a Cranberry Walnut Chicken Salad Bistro Sandwich with cheddar and honey mustard dressing, a Peanut Paradise smoothie to drink, a bag of chips for a side and a cookie for dessert, I could easily blow through all of my government allotted calories in a single meal…

Say, that sounds delicious... I'll do an additional five miles on the treadmill tomorrow to make up for it, I swear.

La Nova Wings Delivery

I blew off going to the gym after work today to see if my La Nova wings made it here safely from their trip from Buffalo.  The box on the porch appeared undamaged and was very cold to the touch, so all signs were pointing to "YES".  Sweet.

Here is the shipping box containing my five pounds of wings.

My new DayGlo yellow/green t-shirt, guaranteed to violate the living hell out of the dress code of absolutely anywhere at all.  It is very comfortable, but my wife won't let me even wear it around the house.  What a gyp.

One of the two bags that came in the shipping cooler, along with a whole mess of...

...dry ice!  Huge chunks of it were left over from the overnight shipping process.  Awesome!  I played around with the leftover frozen CO2 while I waited for my wings to heat up in the freezer (you read that right) before I could cook them.

So far I have had 15 of the wings -the rest need to be saved for the nearly-twenty people that are stopping by for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day meals.  They are very, very good.  Not bland, not too spicy, and, as far as I can remember, better than anything I have ever had in this area  Good sized pieces and good distribution of wings and legs.  They heat up well in the microwave, too.

Well, so far in my quest to re-capture a taste of home, I have gotten Mighty Taco burritos, sponge candy, Vernor's Ginger Ale, and now La Nova wings.  Now I need to figure out a way to have shipped a milkshake from Reid's and a fish fry dinner from the UAW hall (both in Lockport) and I may never actually need to visit the area ever again.

Until the afternoon of April 8th, 2024, that is.  See you then.

Whatcha Doooin'?

The hall bathroom is complete and is ready for our Christmas visitors - man, I am glad that is over.  This will be known to me as "The Project That Broke All My Tools".  In the pic on the left you see all the tools that gave their lives to make the new bathroom happen. My Craftsman Radial Arm Saw (broken table adjustment knob), Skil Angle Grinder (broken on/off switch), Industrial power drill (old, frayed, dangerous cord), and even my Roomba Dirtdog (broken internal gears) are all going to live on a farm with a kindly old couple after Christmas, I am told.

I finished all of the Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and final challenges in Kinect Adventures.  While playing these games, I swear I heard the ghosts of a hundred billion badly abused Marios and Sonics chuckling mirthlessly as I tried and failed to hop cliffs or dodge things: "Not so easy to jump the 200 foot ravine, is it?   Ohhh.... Poor baby... Did you miss the cloud jewels again? Boo freaking hoo. Come talk to me when you get dipped in lava after some kid forces you to misjudge the leap over the spinny fireball things for the 50th time..."

Finished Griftopia by Matt Taibbi.  Although I loved the well-thought-out anger and outrage, it was pretty obvious about halfway through the book the author was not going to present any sort of suggestions or solutions to the perceived mess the USA is in, which made the ranting a little tedious – after a while I was like “Jeez, dude, pick up your own pitchfork, I'm busy.” The writing style is overall solid, he doesn't appear to "pick sides" in the traditional political sense, and Chapter 2 gets my vote for "Most Awesomely Named Chapter Ever in a Non-fiction Book".  Look it up.

Some random closer info:

I bought some Stride Mega Mystery Gum.  First off, Stride, did you really need to trademark the term "Mega Mystery"?  Just calm down, for crissakes.  Second, my guess on the mystery flavor is "grapefruit with a hint of pinecone".

Placed my order with La Nova to get some wings shipped here from Buffalo - they should be here Wednesday.  The Mighty Taco burritos were pricey-but-totally-worth-it, sure, as was (is? were?) the three pounds of sponge candy.  The Vernors Ginger Ale was another taste of home I was glad to find.  Will the five pounds of La Nova Wings be worth $1.38 apiece?  Stay tuned!

Rumor has it that we will be getting Dance Central for Christmas. My wife was horrified that I did so much better than her in the demo when I am, at best, a pathetic embarrassment on the dance floor. What she forgets is that my career path since high school has more than adequately prepared me to instantly follow ridiculous orders from a wide variety of two-dimensional masters so this game is pretty much business as usual for me. Since she cherishes her “dignity” and “independent thought”, being commanded to break into “the Running Man” (or whatever) at the spur of the moment causes her enough pause to drop points. Victory is sort of mine!

200 Years

 I recently watched a video that sums up the past 200 years of worldwide socio-economic changes in about five minutes.  Sounds like a real snoozefest, right?  Wrong.  Check it out for yourself below.

I was completely blown away by the elegance of the presentation, and, in any case, I am a real sucker for long-term metrics like this.

Speaking of which, Google has come out with something called Google n-Grams which graphs trends in the written frequency of words or combinations of words over the past 200 years.  You can get a sense for how important a topic is/was (to the literate folks who were fortunate/rich/powerful enough to get published, anyway) by searching the database for keywords.  Some of my searches are below:

The Eternal Struggle

It looks like "good" has been on the decline for the past couple of centuries, but is still way ahead of "evil". Similar trends pop up with "angel vs. demon" and "God vs. Satan" with similar upswings for the good guys in the 1980s after a long drop.

Science vs. Religion - Fight!

It looks like science reached parity with religion somewhere around 1920 and has been in the lead ever since.  Go science!  I knew the invention of the tommy-gun would push us over the top!

Meek, Schmeek!

More interesting than the fact that "eye for an eye" has consistently been ahead of "turn the other cheek" are the weird spikes every 70 or 80 years.  We should be due any minute now...

You can also do more than two comparisons at a time like in the examples below:

The Chumbawamba Index

The New York Index

Here is what the search for "Y2K" looks like.  Notice the bump in the 1950s and 1980s.  Weird.

Unless... Kind of suspicious that the bumps somewhat line up, eh, Doc Brown?

I look forward to wasting huge swaths of time looking for meaningless correlations in the future.  Enjoy!

Random Post Redux

Not enough happening to write a big ol' post about. Here's a bunch of mini topics for you, though.  Enjoy!

An inch and a half of snow slash rain fell on the area today, shutting down where I work and shutting my son's daycare. My wife and I had the foresight to carpool this morning so we all came home around noon seeing many, many wrecked vehicles and even one upside-down truck along the way.

After I shoveled and salted, we fired up the wood-burning stove, got out the Christmas gifts, and, while the boy napped, we wrapped.

We ate about one-half a pound of the three pounds of sponge candy we had imported from Western New York.  You can go to http://www.spongecandy.com/ to get your own delivered right to your doorstep from an awesome little candy shop in Buffalo.

The bathroom renovation is nearly done - only the detail work is left.  Yep, nothing like a room renovation to angry up the blood and engender utter hate toward the lazy %$#@ that lived in the house before you.  No five-cent drywall anchor?  You just glued the shower curtain holder to the wall, then?  Well done...

I guess I'll end this one with a hint for one of the unsolved puzzles...  Let's make it for the Pallet Table:

Hint 2 (Posted 12/16/10): Gur jbeq "gernfher" vf va gur fbyhgvba.

Just shift the letters in the hint by 13 to decipher the clue or copy and paste the hint here.  You can go to the Secret Puzzle Hints Page to see all the hints for the Unsolved Puzzles.  Good Luck!

Answers Some Questions, Begs Way More

Maybe putting the Nativity scene in the playroom was not as well thought out an idea as it looked on paper...

Well, I Guess I'll Go Get Some Coffee...

Man, this is gonna take almost as long to copy as my text file listing all the reasons I hate my Prius...

Wow! A Big, Round Number!

I saw this sign when I was filling up my tank and thought “700 million gallons a year, eh? Sounds like a big deal. I wonder if it really is.”

Let’s do a few “back of the envelope” calculations and see what we get.

First off, let’s try to get a feel for how much “stuff” 700 million gallons of gas is. It would fill more than 2 Houston Astrodomes, 42 Spaceship Earths at the Epcot Center, or an average twelve-mile stretch of the Erie Barge Canal.

700,000,000 gallons would weigh as much as nearly six Empire State Buildings, it would take a full 15 minutes to flow all of this fuel over Niagara Falls, and It would cost about two billion dollars to buy this much gas at an average gas station (assuming you had the 190 years it would take to “fill ‘er up” at an average pump).

[Insert impressed whistle here] Sure does sound like whole big bunches… Let’s look at some more numbers, though.

WolframAlpha (always with the WolframAlpha, this guy… :)) says that there are 254.4 million registered vehicles out there.

The USDOT and other sources say that these cars drove about three trillion miles altogether last year, so everyone seems to drive about 11,800 miles annually. Meh, sounds low. 12k-15k seems to be the range using various sources out there, but it is in the ballpark.

Assuming everyone’s tires are equally deflated (so everyone shares blame) each car wastes 2.75 gallons per year. Since the average fuel efficiency for these vehicles is around 25 miles per gallon, these cars “lose” 68.8 miles of driving potential each year. I can only assume people unconsciously budget for more gas to cover this loss rather than shrug their shoulders and stay home or hoof it for the rest of the year when their tank goes dry on December 28th or so…

68.8 miles is about 0.6% of the distance the average person drives (or, in other words, is the hit their fuel economy takes) each year. According to the fueleconomy.gov website “Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.3 percent for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires”. Ok. This implies that everyone’s tires are, on average, two pounds low, or about seven percent.

Hmmm. This is sounding less and less like a big deal, but, I am a worrier so let’s see if maybe there is something I can do about this apparent epidemic that needed to be brought to my attention in bright yellow 100-point font.

Let me whip out my tire gauge and just… Wait. How accurate is this thing, anyway? If I am going to be able to help save gas I need a reasonably precise measurement of how much air is in my tires. According to this Edmunds site, the very best you can realistically expect from your average (mechanical) pressure gauge is +/- 2 pounds from true, which totally swamps the estimated underinflation you are looking for.

But it gets better. The temperature in an average American city typically fluctuates about 20F degrees over the course of a day. According to tiretrack, a good rule of thumb is that tire pressure will vary about 1 pound per 10F degrees, so that’s another two-pound delta right there.

Of course, the temperature of your tires (and, therefore, the pressure) increases as the rolling friction from driving heats them up. The temperature of the road you are driving on and whether it is wet or dry matters, too.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a hyper-accurate pressure gauge and you are measuring your tire pressure in your hermetically sealed, temperature controlled garage just before you drive the car anywhere. How often should you measure your tires to save money?

Well, as of the writing of this post, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline is $2.88, meaning that you waste about eight dollars per year due to your shameful, shameful negligence of your tire pressure. Let’s say that your name is Joe Q. Pitcrew and it takes you three minutes to check and correct all four tires on your car. If you check it every day, you will have spent 18.25 hours over the course of a year fiddling around like this.

Since we are playing with averages, here, the mean wage for a worker in the USA is $43,460 per year, making the average person’s time “worth” $20.89 per hour. Checking your tires every day, then, could be seen as costing you $381.24 (in time) per year! To break even, assuming your tire gauge and air compressor usage are both free, the most often you should check your tires (assuming the very act of checking magically puts them in stasis until the next time you check) is about 7 or 8 times a year, or about every month and a half.

Seven or eight times a year seems reasonable – high, but not excessive. To tell you the truth, though, I am probably just going to continue with my time-tested method of “sometimes-noticing-that-one-of-my-tires-seems-low-if-I-happen-to-be-approaching-the-car-from-that-direction-and-I-am-not-distracted-by-anything-else”.

To be clear, I am not advocating driving around on your rims all grindy and sparky and stuff. I am just saying that ExxonMobil probably should have taken the money they spent on advertising just how much they care about my tires (and, by extension, Planet Earth, I guess) and donated it to charity or lowered the price of gas a smidge or something.

Just sayin'.

What is This?

This is a screen shot from an old-school arcade game I remember from decades ago. 

Can you guess what it is?

Bathroom Project (Part III)

(Continued from Part II)

For those of you who don’t like long posts, you are in luck! The other two I posted today are relatively short – just a few paragraphs and located conveniently just below and just above this one. If the sight of lots of words, though, makes you sad but you are still curious about what this article is about here’s the summary: I painted the bathroom. It is blue. Now you can go – the squirrels aren’t going to chase themselves, after all. Oh, wait. They do… Well, I’m sure you will make yourself useful somehow…

Still on the fence whether you should read on or not? Here’s a little more: The walls were painted three times this week. Call me Mr. “Princess and the Pea”, but I actually feel a little claustrophobic walking into the room now that the already small bathroom is now six paint layers narrower…

Enough summaries. Just read.

My wife is getting herself a gift for Christmas: a court order preventing me from ever again picking colors for the walls of our house. I suppose I could complain but she is totally right. It’s really for my own good and the good of society.

As part of the Bathroom Renovation Project the walls needed to be painted. We were not looking for a drastic change – just something to freshen up the vertical surfaces a bit. That’s all.

I took a piece of old trim that had some of the old color on it to Lowe’s to match it with the Valspar paint cards. Drunk with the power of actually being allowed to make a decision that affects the building where I sleep and store my stuff, I picked a “blue” that was not too different from the paint drip on the trim piece.

I have often read that human eyes are non-linear light sensors and that colors are perceived slightly differently based on biology and sociology. It would be awesome if either of those facts could give me the slightest bit of comfort rather than just take up brain space that could be otherwise used to, say, store a useful skill like matching two colors, just to pick something randomly out of thin air…

The dried paint dot on the can lid perfectly matched the sample card which matched my (in retrospect delusional) preconceptions of how the color should look on the wall. Awesome. Time to go home and paint.

Now would be a good time to interject that anything I say should not be seen as an indictment of Valspar, their paints, or their unexpectedly involved public relations officers. Anyone still hanging in there after eight or so paragraphs should know that any and all negative descriptors used in this article reflect solely on me and my painting skills. The cans of interior latex house paint and the company that makes them are completely innocent.

“Hmm… that sure is… blue…” I thought, opening the can. “Maybe it will look a lot different on the wall after it dries and darkens a bit.”

Umm, no. Not really. I mean, it’s good quality paint, but it is not, like, magical or anything. There are probably places that this shade of blue looks good in but my hall bathroom is not one of them.

How to describe the color… Hmm… Well, although the hue did not match any of the other blue accents in the room like the shower curtain or the picture frames, it perfectly matched the extruded plastic insert in my son’s port-a-potty. The color reminded me of the startling blue arc flash you briefly see when the filament in an incandescent light bulb suddenly pops. I suppose if a bunch of bank robbers ran in, taped up and tarped the bathroom really carefully, then simultaneously opened their loot bags with the explosive blue dye canisters in them, you would get an idea of what it looked like.

My wife called it “Carnival Blue” – a phrase that somehow boils the above paragraph down into just two words without minimizing the off-putting nature of how it felt to be surrounded by the color.

As much as I didn’t want to redo the room, the color had to go.

So, rather than entering the bathroom in the little-known Better Homes and Gardens contest for “Least Relaxing Place in Which to Evacuate Your Bowels” I decided to repaint it. Obviously, I wasn’t allowed to pick the paint by myself this time - my wife took my hand and gently led me to the color cards that did not induce vomiting or retinal bleeding.

But I stood up for myself and I got to pick the texture. Victory, thy name is Eggshell…

It took two coats of “Kinda North Carolina Tar Heels” blue to cover the “Chinese Knockoff Duke Blue Devils” blue, but it is done. The lights, paintings, switch covers and mirror are all back up. All that remains now is reconditioning and installation the baseboards, adding trim and moulding, installing the new shower head, cutting and re-mounting the closet door, changing out the towel racks, changing doorknobs and hinges, re-painting the heater vent, and adding stone tiles above the tub.

Pfft. It’s practically like I’m on vacation!

(To be continued…)

Funnus Quizzus Answer

A while ago I had Google Translate turn chunks of four songs on my iPod into Latin.

I said that after the original post slid off the bottom of the page I would post the solutions if no one had guessed them first.

Here they are:

Song 1: Banditos - The Refreshments
Song 2: Roots Radical – Rancid
Song 3: Teenagers – My Chemical Romance
Song 4: Eye of the Tiger – Survivor

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

"Alright, people... we have had a banner year - profits are way up and our brand recognition is second to none.  What we need now is an idea that sounds good on paper, but is actually an open invitation to a non-stop stream of completely justifiable lawsuits..."

Trimming the Tree

Our cheap-o artificial Christmas tree died last year after more than a decade of faithful service.  The disintegration process really stepped up its pace over the last couple of years and many of the bendy wire bits were breaking under their own weight.

We decided to go with a real one this year, which is awesome.  I love the smell of a fresh cut pine tree and I even enjoy the ritual of watering it twice a day.

Getting rid of it is kind of a hassle, though. The last time I had one I decided to get rid of it by cutting it to pieces and chucking it in the wood burning stove. 
Oh... My... God...

It looked like a solid cube of angry fire was being barely contained behind the tempered glass, and I would not have been shocked to get a phone call from the neighbors alerting us to the twenty-foot flames roaring out of the top of the chimney.  I am pretty sure it would have been a more controlled burn it I had decided to chuck water balloons filled with gasoline in there instead.

Speaking of things my wife won't let me forget...

A very long time ago when my wife and I were dating my roommate and I got a real tree for the holidays.  We jumped the gun on decorating, and, because we didn't let it settle long enough, it fell over a couple of hours later.  No big deal, but to hear my wife tell it you would swear she was going to whip out an old newspaper with the headline "DOZENS PERISH, HUNDREDS INJURED IN TRAGIC XMAS TREE MISHAP.  ISMAY SAFE, MRS. ASTOR MAYBE, NOTED NAMES MISSING".

To prevent a repeat of that and to offload the blame when it eventually trundles my way,  I asked “the Google” how long a Christmas tree should settle before decorating it.  Basically, the Internet shrugged its shoulders and grumped "I dunno... a day, maybe?".  I was a little surprised there wasn't more of a consensus, but I was even more shocked to read the claim that "there is no wrong way to decorate a Christmas tree"...

Oh, really?  (strokes beard) I accept your challenge...

1. Do not hang the ornaments from the little hooks - use a jai-alai scoop to fire them into the tree at upwards of 100 mph.
2. Use a hot glue gun to affix hundreds and hundreds of grocery store birthday candles to the branches
3. Pour all of your decorations into a giant bin and dip the tree into it and swirl it around as though you were making cotton candy
4. Wind the lights as tightly as possible as though you were hogtying a calf or a damsel before she is placed onto the railroad tracks.
5. Go door to door with the tree asking for one ornament at each house, stone-souping your way to a fully decorated tree.
6. Blindfold and spin each of the decorators around and around pin the tail on the donkey style
7. If it takes two people one hour to decorate a tree, it should take 30 people about 4 minutes.  Try it.

As usual, suggestions welcome.

Bathroom Project (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

We went out as a family to pick tiles and get the rest of the stuff to start the flooring project.  My poor son has spent more time in his short life in the Lowe's flooring section than what is reasonable for any human to endure, nevermind a two-year-old. I guess Friday night was the last straw for him because he totally lost it moments after hitting the tile aisle.  Only the promise of seeing the array of inflatable Santas and snowmen on the other side of the store could mollify him. 

This is not something you typically witness on home improvement shows, but it would be awesome to see folks forced to pick kitchen cabinets or whatever in three minutes or less because a toddler in the group is going into meltdown:

Designer: (bellowing to make himself heard over the screaming kid) YOU SEE, THE LIGHT REFLECTING FROM THE OAK REALLY ACCENTS THE COUNTERTOPS...
Home Owner: (waving him off impatiently) SURE, SURE, WHATEVER JUST PICK SOME AND LET'S GO! WE'LL WORRY ABOUT THAT #$%! LATER!

So, tiles were chosen basically because they occupied space and had mass. Their looks, which were nice enough, were incidental.

I began tearing up the linoleum in the bathroom Saturday morning.  It was actually pretty easy to get up - I didn't need the crowbar I mentioned after all. :) Well, I did, but only to remove the trim and baseboards.

Jimmydunes helped me cut the cement board into the appropriate jigsaw puzzle shapes.  We used a Black & Decker 4 1/2 inch angle grinder with a masonry blade to make that happen since the utility knife was not up to the task.  I used this tool before to shape the blocks and the capstones for the garden and firepit.  It worked well especially for the seven inch toilet hole but the ON/OFF switch started acting up and then popped off altogether two cuts from completion.  The thing would operate only by jamming a screwdriver into the slot where the switch was.  Since operating the tool that way would take four hands and a complete and utter disregard for our safety and the safety of those around us, we decided to score and snap the last bits instead.

Screwing the cement board down was time consuming but fairly uneventful.  I had to use a 20-year-old corded drill to do most of that step - my cordless drill was just not up to the task. After electrical-taping the mess out of the embrittled and frayed cord, the screws went in easily. That is the last time I will use that drill, though...

Laying the tile was actually a lot of fun.  I was pleased to discover that the distance from the sink cabinet to the wall, when using quarter inch grout spacing, was an integer number of tiles.  The closet was similarly conveniently sized and shaped.  I still had a lot of cuts to do, though, and I  burned through a 4" tile saw blade before I could complete laying the tile.  That was fine with me since I had been at it for twelve straight hours and needed a break anyway.

The last cuts were made the following morning and the last tile was set into place around noon.  I had six hours to kill before I could grout so I went to the gym and afterward we all went and picked out a Christmas tree (a live one this year).   After hauling it up into the loft dealing with the stand, fun time was over and it was time to get back to work.

I finished grouting at about 9PM.  I thought the white grout would look a little weird with the off-white tiles, but it looks just fine. 

I re-installed the toilet today, and everything seemed to go fine. No leaks (yet). Props to Jimmydunes for the suggestion that a small sticky note with the words “HEY, $%#*, DID YOU REMEMBER TO TAKE THE RAG OUT OF THE HOLE?” printed on it be stuck to the toilet. This reminds the installer that the rag that he/she stuffed in the outlet piping to allow him/her the privilege of breathing more oxygen than sewer gas while the floor was put in should probably be taken out BEFORE the toilet is re-mounted. Apparently, this comes from experience...

So far, so good with the bathroom project. Next comes the painting, I think... but we might be looking at a new sink this week. We will see.

(To be continued...)

Bathroom Project

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

One thing that I am especially thankful for is that the family will be gathering at our house for Christmas this year. My goal is to make the place so delightfully festive that Normal Rockwell pukes in his grave.

But, before I can get around to decking the bejezus out of the halls, I have a project to do. Mrs. Snowurchin wants the floor in the hall bathroom replaced so, since it is long overdue and I have not had a project in a while, I am pretty amped.

The idea is to take up the original linoleum and put down stone tiles. Obviously, this is the perfect opportunity to repaint the room, recondition the baseboards, add decorative trim top and bottom, install a new shower head, replace doorknobs and hinges, reseal the sink, install higher quality towel racks, and install some stone wall tiles in a bare area above the bathtub.

I honestly wonder how much of that other stuff will actually get done before Christmas...

The important thing is to get the floor finished as quickly as possible, though, so that my wife can have her bathroom back and my 2-year-old can go back to “bathtime” instead of “quickly hosing off in the shower time”.

It is 9:07 AM Friday. The wife, our son, and her dad are out at Wal-Mart doing the Black Friday thing and I am most certainly not (Hey – yet another thing to be thankful for!). While they are out fighting the crowds and trying to see how many linear miles of rainbow-colored duct tape they can buy for fifty cents, I am coming up with a list of things I am going to need to make the new floor happen. This is definitely one of those situation where we are both thinking “Sucker!”.

After we leave here and arrive back home I will take some measurements and also take an inventory of the tools and materials I have on-hand. Tonight we will go to Lowe's and buy all the stuff I need for Phase 1 (new floor, minimal life disruption) of this project. Jimmydunes is scheduled to come over tomorrow morning to help me move the toilet and to teach me the ins and outs of that sort of plumbing – something he has done but I have not.

I just hope the linoleum is easy to tear up, but I have a strong suspicion it will not be. Here is my reasoning. It's long and rambly, but I do get to the point eventually - just hear me out.

See, I have a belief – call it a delusional superstition if you want – that most events that happen in our day-to-day lives that are ever so slightly outside of the norm are not happenstance, but occur for a reason. Bits of slight fortune somewhat balance the bits of slight misfortune that happen, and vice-versa.

An unexpected $500 bonus in your paycheck somewhat offsets the unexpected $600 tax bill you get in the mail a week later. The power supply in your work computer fails causing you to lose the last 15 minutes of your presentation hours before a gaping network security flaw exposes your entire organization to a vicious hacker attack. I am sure you have noticed stuff like that in your own life.

So what is this supposed “reason” that I am talking about? It is nothing magical or mystical. It has nothing to do with angels or demons. It just has to do with balance. Oh, and not “balance” in a creepy sissified Zen way, either. I am talking straight-up, purely mathematical balance.

Look at it this way. What I see as a normal day might be seen by others as a rainbow-and-unicorns filled existence straight out of an old Disney flick. Other extremely fortunate people might see my day-to-day comings and goings as something sadly comical and possibly even worthy of pity. Everyone has their own personal yardstick as to what is “normal” that evolves as the major events of their life change who they were yesterday into who they are today.

Obviously, little things happen just to the plus and just to the minus of your baseline all the time, regardless of where that line relates to anyone else's. People are nearly infinitely adaptable. Heaping fortune or misfortune upon someone causes what they see as “normal” to shift until a new personal baseline is reached, with little ups and downs jittering around that new level.

Just to be clear: I am not talking about huge life events. I am talking about things that are barely out of the mundane - stuff like finding a wheat penny in your change, not the birth of a child or being involved in a near-fatal car wreck. Not stuff that is “all part of God's grand plan” or whatever – after all, no respectable deity is going to give a damn about whether or not you left your umbrella at the office as it starts to rain. I am just talking about the little things, and I am just talking about one way to appreciate the statistics behind them.

My belief is that, by acknowledging this “law of averages”, you can see the little pluses and minuses in a new light. Using retrospect, totally and genuinely unrelated events can be forced to fit together in a “why-because” framework in a very satisfying and sometimes fun way. Why did my shoelace break? So I could run into an old friend at Wal-Mart when I went to pick up a new set. Why did I find $20 a couple of weeks ago? To help pay for the speeding ticket I got today. Why did I drop that lightbulb in the kitchen? So, while sweeping up the shattered glass, I could find the wedding band I lost last year.

Thinking about things in this way helps make visible the gossamer thread that connects the billions of infinitesimal events in everyone's lives, and it lets me enjoy the small pluses in my own that much more.

What does this have to do with the bathroom floor? Well, a while ago the installation guys accidentally left a medium-sized crowbar in the back of a closet after they finished with the downstairs flooring renovation. They may have used it to tear up the old linoleum in the kitchen.

So “why” did they leave the crowbar behind? So I could have an easier time pulling up the extremely difficult old flooring in the bathroom six months later!

Of course, sometimes a crowbar is just a crowbar... :)

I will post with updates when I can.