Monday, June 02, 2008

Sadly, This is the Kind of Stuff That Keeps Me Up at Night

Next time you are in a 7-eleven, go to the fountain drink section of the store and note the following about the sizes of the cups:

Gulp: 20 oz. (591 mL)

Big Gulp: 32 oz. (946 mL)

Super Big Gulp: 44 oz (1301 mL)

Double Gulp: 64 oz. (1893 mL)

Notice the problem?

The DOUBLE Gulp.

It has been named very poorly. Very, very poorly. It is not double the size of the Gulp. It should be the “Triple and a Little Bit More Gulp.”

Though I understand how that might not roll off the tongue and may not even fit on the side of the cup when you typeset it in HUGE letters.

They recently increased the size of the Gulp from 16 oz. (473 mL) to its current size. So the problem used to be even worse.

And, if you were the sort of person who was prone to thinking obsessively about the sizes and names of the cups in a 7-eleven and started a letter writing campaign to the Southland Corporation (7-eleven’s former corporate name) a while back which politely pointed out this glaring inconsistency in their product line and has been writing letters about this issue to the company every single week for YEARS and have NEVER heard back from them, except a stupid form letter that says “thanks for visiting 7-eleven!” and a coupon for a free Slurpee, good through August of 1999 and have basically been treated like a pariah and been banned from the neighborhood 7-eleven after organizing a smallish protest (a drunk guy and underage kids loitering and looking for someone to buy them some beer), tossing all the offending cups on the floor and then storming out while shrieking, “THESE ARE NOT DOUBLE. YOU CAN’T CALL THESE DOUBLE GULPS, WHEN CLEARLY THEY ARE NOT DOUBLE THE SIZE OF THE GULP!”; well, you might just feel a little bummed.

Though I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course.

Jon scribbled this mess on 06/02/08 at 12:02 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

I Have Caller ID for When Larry E. Calls

A month or so ago, I emailed John Moltz and naïvely said, “Hey, John! We should do a podcast together!”

He wrote back instantly and said, “Who is this? How did you get my address? Please never email me again.”

Thus was born the Technology! Whiskey! Sexy! podcast.

The first episode is on the site. (Or here for direct download.) I’ll have the iTunes subscription info Real Soon Now™ and will update the TWS site (and here, duh) as soon as I have it.

It’s funny.

Guaranteed chuckles or your money back.

And in case you need to know what the podcast is about before you devote 16 minutes and 25 seconds of your life to it: The podcast relates to technology in the same way a doughnut correlates to world peace. In other words, not very much at all and only in the most peripheral way and if the negotiators went out for crullers before sitting down at the peace talks.

Mmmm. Doughnuts.

Enjoy.

(Moltz is the first voice you hear, by the way. TONS of editing and filtering on his track. He normally sounds like a squeaky and mewling kitten. You can still hear a bit of that in the recording, technology can’t fix everything, you know.)

Finally, here is the iTunes link.

itunes badge

Jon scribbled this mess on 05/28/08 at 09:58 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Edited

My birthday is in a couple weeks.

I’ll be 41.

In the words of the great HOGD-MAN:

THAT IS ALL.


*EDITED TO ADD: Specifically, it’s the 10th of June.

** EDITED TO ADD: In lieu of presents, I’d like someone to kick George Lucas in the gonads. Hard.

*** EDITED TO ADD: As a measure of my youth and vitality, my face has decided that I am still 17 and sprouted a veritable forest of acne.

† EDITED TO ADD: Well, it’s not so much a forest as it is one really large, painful and prominent zit.

‡ EDITED TO ADD: It’s on my nose.

†† EDITED TO ADD: Anyway, my point is that though my pores may disagree, I’m not really that stressed about turning 41. A few months after I turned 40, I went through a small, though major and relatively traumatic mental freak-out as I looked back over my life and realized that though my years on earth are probably over halfway spent, I haven’t done anything I considered particularly meaningful, was generally grumpy about how certain things had turned out and a few lingering issues from my youthful upbringing burbled their way up into my awareness. No big deal really, just your standard mid life crisis fodder, though with the added kicker of my having utterly ignored all that stuff over the years and my general disinclination toward self-examination or self-assessment. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, kids. Therapy sucks, though it’s amazingly helpful. And that’s probably all I’ll have to say about that.

‡‡ EDITED TO ADD: Seriously, this zit is taking up half my face now. I have a small mirror here at my desk and it’d be safe to describe this situation as “more zit than nose.”

§ EDITED TO ADD: It’s growing larger. It’s moved beyond my face, is the size of Montana, will soon gain sentience and stride the Earth, raining death and destruction down upon on a cowering mankind. Run for the hills and take cover!

§§ EDITED TO ADD: Tell my family I love them! I go now to a better, hopefully less immensely large zit-filled afterlife.

§§§ EDITED TO ADD: Have a nice day.

Jon scribbled this mess on 05/27/08 at 10:27 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, May 23, 2008

Here, Smell This, Does It Smell Weird to You?

Reha and I have a long standing argument about body odor.

I say it stinks and she says she loves the odor!

Wait, that’s not true at all.

This is the crux of the argument:

Say you go work out very intensely for a short period of time. You sweat.

Does that “fresh” sweat stink?

To my nose, it does not. And based on my YEARS of research on this matter, I feel that fresh sweat doesn’t stink. Perspiration is essentially odorless. It doesn’t become flagrantly aromatic for a while.

My years of experience equals doing a lot of unsolicited sniffing in locker rooms. And subsequent hospital trips to repair numerous broken bones. Turns out people don’t enjoy being stealthily sniffed. The things I do for science!

See, the stench of nasty? It’s caused by bacteria breaking down and doing their thing and those byproducts give off the fetid ickiness. These bacteria are on you all the time and can’t be avoided and they tend to flourish in dark, moist and oxygen poor environments. Like your feet or underarms or any of your other nether regions.

Reha thinks you immediately stink after a hard workout and I respectfully disagree, pointing to all my research notes and field data (and my broken nose from the last “incident").

“Look, I’m just saying, it’s the bacteria that smells, not the sweat itself!”

Jonah overhears all of this and blurts out, “Of course it doesn’t stink. Bacteria don’t have noses! They can’t smell!”

Which lets me know that he knows how to construct a dangling modifier joke, so I can scratch that off my grand parental To Do List.

Next up on that list, how to make it look like you aren’t sniffing someone when in reality, you totally are!

Jon scribbled this mess on 05/23/08 at 11:47 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Math is Hard!

Possibly the worst thing to come out of this nasty primary fight in the Democratic party is that the Clinton campaign has reinforced the notion that girls (OK, women) can’t do math.

As of this moment Senator Clinton is saying she’s ahead in the popular vote in the Democratic primaries. This is insane, of course, but no one wants to argue with a crazy person.

It’s a bit convoluted, but here’s how she gets there:


No need even to vote anymore obviously. She has this thing wrapped up on simple logic anyway!

Jon scribbled this mess on 05/22/08 at 08:27 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link
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