Category Archives: Fun

Big fat moleman here

A week or two ago, I received a piece of junk email. In and of itself, this is not an unusual event; junk email is like a runny nose: there’s always more. But this particular piece of junk … well, let’s put it this way: if the people in charge of D-Day were as accurate as this particular spammer, the troops would have landed in Rhode Island.

Those of you who know me are familiar with the shape of my body; for those who don’t know me, I think health care professionals call it “string bean.” According to the BMI scale, I hover on the edge of being underweight; to make my watch fit my wrist, I had to remove every removable link and move the clasp as far as possible. Once, when I declined to join my father in ordering food at a deli, the owner looked at me and said, in his thick accent, “Are you sure? You need some meat on your bones!”

In summary: I am lightweight and portable.

With that context, imagine my laughter when this email invaded my inbox.

Hi, I hate to be the one to mention this, but people continue to talk about your weight issue and it just disgusts me. Whether you know it by now, people are always chattering about each other at work but you come up more than enough. I wasn’t the happiest or best-fit up until a year ago or so but that did change. Thanks to my dam brother-in-law(of all people). Anyhow, it was for the best.

What I am saying is that you need to do something different and maybe you can make the same difference I did. Try this stuff I used. I took it on the idea it’s just more junk but it worked great. I see more positive reviews on it nowadays and makes me feel even better. So, I am encouraging a change, not only in the chatter around here but in you personally.
-Anonymous for now
Using an anonymous email website to send this btw;)
When it helps/works just send a memo out with the name “Angel” in it. Then you can take me out to lunch to thank you. Talk to you sooner than later I hope;)

(If you know the source of the post title, you get 10 extra cool points. If you don’t, order Brian Regan’s DVD.)

Frennies from heaven: an answer of sorts

In response to my recent post about prices listed in fractions of cents (Frennies from heaven, 13 February), Phoebe posed a question:

Why is it that gas stations are the only ones to charge a fraction? How did that get started and why does it continue?

Yahoo made an attempt to answer that very question, but they found no concrete explanation; “Theories abound, but none are definitive,” they say.  But they don’t leave us high and dry; they do helpfully list the theories, and it seems most believe it is simply a marketing gimmick.

(Most interestingly, they do note that Canadian gas stations do the same, but with a twist: Canadian stations don’t always end their prices with .9.)

I hope that provides you some peace of mind.

Underachievement on Ice: the musical

The Red Wings are playing the Coyotes in Phoenix tonight. The Coyotes have been subpar this season; before tonight’s game, they were 25-30-3. That context introduced humor into one piece of music the arena staff chose: during one break in play, they flipped the switch on Switchfoot’s “Meant to Live.”

We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?

Have the Coyotes been that disappointing?

(They lost to the Wings 4-1.  Now they’re 25-31-3.)

Frennies from heaven

Ah, the penny: that humble mortar in the masonry of American money. No other piece of U.S. currency would benefit from the expertise of a good psychiatrist as much as the penny. It is battered, bruised and beleaguered; it is derided as worthless; it is daily deemed a hassle and discarded as financial effluvium. Even the Detroit Lions are more highly-regarded than the penny.

Oddly enough, though the penny is so thoroughly downtrodden, it is not the runt of the litter. There is an even smaller denomination, but it gathers no criticism, perhaps because no one has spotted this younger sibling of the penny in the wild. However, many have seen evidence of its existence — almost always at gas stations. What is this unheralded, unhated, virtually unknown coin?

Why, it’s the 1/10 cent. The fractional penny. Or, less awkwardly, the frenny.

I have long been a skeptic of the existence of the frenny. I thought it was just a pricing game by the gas stations: “Our gas is only $2.19 … and 9/10 of a penny, but don’t you worry about that almost-penny.” (Of course, I thought games were supposed to be fun, too, so my credibility may already be suspect.) But then I went to my local Meijer, and my skepticism was challenged.

Like many other establishments, Meijer now helpfully provides a change-eating machine from Coinstar. The machine, with its near-insatiable appetite, ingests coins nearly as effortlessly as Simon Cowell ingests the tone-deaf. When the machine finishes its meal, it spits out a dejected, sobbing person. And when the Coinstar finishes with the coins, it provides a receipt that tells a cashier how much money to give you.

If you are a perceptive reader — and if you are, I suggest you find a perceptive writer to read — you may have noted that I did not say the receipt tells you simply how much money you fed the Hungry Hungry Coinstar. That’s not how these things work. The Coinstar isn’t a bank machine that generously smiles upon customers (because it knows the bank will extract its fees other ways); it’s a little green business machine. All those little gears and circuit boards need income to support their extravagant lifestyles, so it claims a fee for its services — a fee which is pleasantly proclaimed by a sign on the front of the machine.

The fee is not overwhelming, particularly considering the extensive social lives of modern gears and circuit boards; it’s just a little awkward. For the privilege of having your change counted and digested by Coinstar, you’re charged eight and nine-tenths cents per dollar. It actually has the fraction visual, too, like it’s better than those other morally bankrupt change eaters that have the audacity to charge 8.9 cents. Ignorant, unsophisticated curs, the lot.

When I see Coinstar’s fee, I am tempted to feed one dollar’s worth of coins into the machine, just to see if it might spit a frenny at me. For just a moment, I am distracted by the oddly fulfilling thought of holding an elusive frenny in my hand; however, I soon remember what a frenny is worth, and I realize I would have wasted eight and nine-tenths cents on the pursuit of currency that would buy me nothing.

Unless I could accumulate nine frennies. Then I could buy a gallon of gas.

But enough about me; now you click on me

Life on the internet can be exasperating.

Like many people, I spend plenty of time on a computer. I spend my entire workday in front of a computer, and in my free time, both my photography pursuits and this pesky little blog compel me to gaze at my monitor as if it holds not just the meaning of life itself (42, I’m told), but also the recipe for McDonald’s Special Sauce (rumored to have something to do with G. Love) within its gleaming rectangular lake of pixels.

As part of that time on the computer, I spend my fair share of time on the internet, because … well, that’s why it exists. The internet, it seems, is much like Mt. Everest: why surf? Because it’s there!

With that justification, exploring the internet is a lifelong pursuit. The content just keeps going, and the extent of one’s exploration is limited only by one’s stamina and force of will; in this sense, the internet is much like graduation ceremonies. Except the internet is constantly updated with additional content, whereas graduation ceremonies are syndicated reruns.

Since the pursuit of the knowledge of the internet is never-ending, there are countless opportunities to find its exasperating qualities. And I don’t mean myspace. No, I’m talking about a less conspicuous exasperation.

While surfi…I mean, engaging in wide-ranging long-term computer-based research, it is common for me to visit several sites at once, because my generation invented and perfected Attention Deficit Disorder and I Have A Short Attention Span For No Good Reason Disorder. And since the world has been slow to awaken to the brilliant and generally life-changing development of tabbed browsing, there are times I am forced to endure multiple browser windows.

Really, running multiple browsers isn’t a serious issue. Just unrefined, like a rotary phone in a touch-tone world. But it lends itself to one of the internet’s exasperations: self-aggrandizing websites. Not so much in content, but in behavior.

I’m sure you know the type — the sites that consider themselves so overwhelmingly important that when they do something truly noteworthy, like, OMG, load a page!, they don’t sound a quiet alarm in the background. Instead, without warning, you’re whisked away from your profound (ESPN.com) research to see what the internet hath wrought. But the urgency of the interruption is needless, as the site only wants to say hey, you remember how you asked for me? I’m here. Check me out. Worship my source code.

Fortunately for both me and the internet, this is not an overwhelming trend. Most sites haven’t developed the look-at-me complex; only a few consider themselves so important that only the long-lost child of Dan Rather and Katie Couric could report the major breaking news that Gmail just fulfilled Burrill Strong’s request to open a new message.

Now I’m just waiting for my TV to change channels when something noteworthy happens on another network. Until that happens, if you need me, I’ll be at the nearest graduation ceremony.