Guess what? I have a blog. I know, I thought I'd forgotten about it, too.

In this post I shall attempt to slake your thirst for my opinions on the most mundane of matters through three brief advertising/shopping related discussions. Or maybe I just didn't have anything else to talk about so you're getting a bunch of junk that poured out of my head. It's a glass half-full/half-empty thing.

I've never been a big fan of changing the name of products, but when a company changes the name of similar products, making it hard to tell the difference between them, it is very frustrating. For years, if I wanted to buy a container of the lower fat Pringles¹, I knew that they were labelled as "Right Crisps." Was it a stupid name? Sure, but I knew what they were, and the name was always the same. Now there are Pringles labelled as "Light" and Pringles labelled as "Smart Flavors". One of these is the reduced fat version and the other is the "fat-free" olestra-containing version. If they aren't going to stick with one name, they should at least make it clear on the packaging whether or not you are buying the version that causes anal leakage.

The Wendy's commercials about "Threeconomics" bother me. The entire set of commercials bothers me because threeconomics is a stupid-sounding non-word. However, one commercial in particular really irritates me. It goes something like this:

[scrippet]
INT. BREAK ROOM - DAY

Three GUYS are sitting around the table eating SANDWICHES from Wendy's.

GUY 1
I'm going to use this Jr. bacon cheeseburger, crispy chicken and double stack to explain to you the basic principles of Threeconomics.

Guy 1 reaches across the table and takes the sandwiches from Guy 2 and Guy 3.

GUY 1
Supply.

Guy 2 reaches to take his sandwich.

GUY 2
Can I have my doubl-

GUY 1
(Pushing Guy 2's hand away)
Demand.

[/scrippet]


Clearly this commercial works only because the guy getting his burger stolen isn't a fat guy². If that were the case, the commercial would go more like this:


[scrippet]
INT. BREAK ROOM - DAY

Three GUYS are sitting around the table eating SANDWICHES from Wendy's.

GUY 1
I'm going to use this Jr. bacon cheeseburger, crispy chicken and double stack to explain to you the basic principles of 3conomics.

Guy 1 reaches across the table and takes the sandwiches from Guy 2 and Guy 3.

GUY 1
Supply.

GUY 2
What are you doing?

GUY 1
Demonstrating demand.

Guy 2 reaches over the table, punches Guy 1 and takes the sandwiches.

GUY 2
Hostile takeover.

[/scrippet]

My favorite thing about commercials now is that just about every one has the phrase "these days" or "in the current economy" while talking about how much you will save if you use their product. Do they enjoy trying to scare and/or depress people or do they really think people don't know that anything is going on³? I guess that's a possibility. It's not like it's been mentioned on the news, every TV show, ads, and articles as well as every other conversation that people have had with friends or coworkers.

¹ Shut it.

² I'm allowed to say that because I'm talking about my people. Unless you're one of us, you can't.

³ I know. They don't really enjoy it; they're just trying to use everyone's problems and fears to sell their product and who are we to criticize them for it.

A Superpowers Drug You Can Just Rub Into Your Skin? You'd Think It'd Be Something You Have to Freebase.

Because I can never resist a chance to see what I'd be like if I were a superhero or to do what all the cool kids are doing, I give you my alter-ego:

I'm not exactly thrilled with the name, but it's automatically assigned when you use the hero factory. And to be quite honest, I can't think of a better one. Suggestions?

When faced with the "abilities" section, which would more accurately be called "accessories", I considered the lightsaber, katana and pistol, but figured that even my superpowered self would be more likely to wield a spork than any of the other options. With my trusty spork by my side, I would definitely have powers matching those of the legendary Matter Eater Lad. No, I'm probably not the most useful superhero, but at least you'll never have to worry about those pesky leftovers at the superhero banquet.

It's reasonably accurate, at least from the neck up. From the neck down, it looks like I not only found motivation to work out but might find my name in the Mitchell Report as well.

Something about the uniform with the blue/gold makes me think of Invincible or The Immortal, but I'm probably the only one who will see that or even know what I'm babbling about. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some crime to fight. Tasty, delicious crime.

I'm Not Dead and Other Bits of Useless Information

Since you aren't all privy to all of the email, IM or other conversations I've had with some, but not all, of you, I figure I should post an update answering some of these questions.

Q: Yo, you dead?
A: No, despite my eating habits, I am still alive. The inactivity on this site is not the result of my departure from this life, but thank you for your concern.

Q: Have you given up your blog completely?
A: Are you kidding? I just forked over ten bucks to keep this snazzy URL. That would be like spending money on Netflix and never watching or returning your DVDs...You know what; let's move on.

Q: Are you going to post again?
A: What do you think you're reading now? Ok, maybe I shouldn't berate the few readers I have left. Will I post other things again? Yes. Will I post on a regular basis? Well, don't hold your breath for the 3-5 days a week stuff anymore.

Q: You haven't posted 3-5 days a week in a couple years, if ever.
A: That's not a question. Now shut up.

Q: Why aren't you posting anything?
A: Multiple reasons. First, I've had this blog for over 4 years now. I've only got so much to say, and there's only so much I am willing to discuss in a place like this that is quasi-anonymous and not remotely private. Second, my job has been getting more demanding as time goes on, and recently, I changed positions (sort of) making things even more demanding. This all means that I don't have much in the way of mental capacity to think of things to say. Rest assured, when I think of something to post about, you'll see it...assuming I have time to write and can write coherently.

Q: So, anything exciting going on in your life?
A: Not really, no. Unless you want to discuss lot release and need by dates, I'm a boring conversationalist.

Q: Have you at least seen any good movies recently?
A: Actually, yes. We went to see Coraline last weekend. If you haven't seen it, please do. It's great.

Q: What about TV?
A: The usual. Lost, BSG, Good Eats, etc. I did give up on Heroes part way through the first half of this season. It was so bad that I've cancelled the TiVo season pass for it. It could suddenly turn into the best show ever, and I'd never know. We did get an HD TiVo for ourselves for Christmas and have discovered that the ability to watch movies and old TV shows instantly using Netflix and TiVo is a great thing. We've watched lots of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that way.

Q: Read any good books?
A: Yes, I have. I have a soft spot for fantasy and I started reading Brandon Sanderson after hearing that he was going to be finishing The Wheel of Time. I've read Elantris and all three of the Mistborn books and recommend that fantasy lovers do the same. Now, in preparation for this fall's (scheduled) release of the last WoT novel, I'm rereading all of the Wheel of Time books. Of course, that's around 9000-10000 pages (or around 3 million words) of the same author, so we'll see how that goes.

Q: Some of these don't really sound like questions people have asked you.
A: Again, please put your submission in the form of a question.

Q: People didn't really ask you all this stuff, did they?
A: No, it was mostly the things about if I had quit or if I was ever posting again. It did give me a chance to have a conversation with myself and give updates on several things, though.

There you have it. You're now all up to date with my life. If you actually read this far, you have my thanks and my apologies. As a reward, feel free to throw out a topic for discussion. I'll probably ignore it, but you never know; you just might end up with a long-winded diatribe on it. I may be busy, but I'm still opinionated and wordy.

Quickly...

Have I mentioned my adoration for Mental Floss here in the past? I don't think I have. It's both informative and fun. You never really know what you're going to learn from one day to the next. Take, for example, today's article about Thomas Crapper. In addition to being full of facts about pretty much anything, there are quizzes and a daily brain game. I highly recommend checking it out.

You Can Feel It In The Air

I get a word of the day email sent to me every day. I've thought in the past that it would be nice if more of the words were ones that were new to me rather than 5 of the 7 in any given week being reasonably common words. Well, they must have listened because today's word was something entirely new and different.

I'm not sure which surprised me more, that October 30 is pronounced \PAL-puh-bul\ or that it has a meaning other than "the day before Halloween."

Hope your \PAL-pub-bul\ is enjoyable.

People Who've Appeared in Bestsellers? People Who Make Others' Lives Miserable?

I was originally planning to write something completely different, but then this came to mind and just kind of took over. In the end, I figured the world needs more $25,000 Pyramid style posts. Feel free to take a shot at figuring out the answer.

1. Death, from the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett.

2. Shai'tan, also known as The Dark One or Great Lord of the Dark. The big bad guy that no one ever sees in the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.

3. People who still get confused by the internet.

Bad Hair Day

There is a long history of comic book characters looking silly. In an attempt to make characters distinguishable and memorable, they have had outlandish clothing, hairstyles and body types. Sometimes it seems as if a character really drew the short straw. Looking back, there have been all sorts of bad hair-dos¹, but few stand out as being as bad for as long as Guy Gardner (one of the Green Lanterns²).

Here, we see Gardner exhibiting both a bad haircut and bad attitude as a member of Justice League International.

Over the years, his character has changed, but his hairstylist apparently hasn't.

Here, we can see him sporting a style I like to call the 1UP.

Unfortunately for Gardner, his hair issues have followed him from the printed page all the way to the toy store. There's just no escape for him.

¹ One that obviously stands out is Storm's Mr. T mohawk, but that was at least a temporary thing.

² Yeah, one of the Green Lanterns not the Green Lantern. Since we're talking about comics, it's a lot more complicated than even that, but I'm trying to keep it fairly simple (or at least not too confusing) here.

Long, Rambling and Probably Not Worth Reading

I haven't posted in a while, and I'll try to get back to regular posting (for all none of you who notice or care), but for now I just wanted to put down a couple of things that have been in my head for a while.¹

Not long ago, a coworker was telling me about how her feelings on the financial crisis² had changed and had done so practically overnight. One day, she was watching the news and discussions of government bailouts of various financial organizations and was vehemently opposed to it. They made the bad choices, not her. They should foot the bill, not her. It's hard to fault the logic at that level. Why should she, or anyone else, pay for the mistakes of others? The next day, things turned around. One of the organizations that was failing was hers. She's almost ready to retire and much of her retirement money was invested through this organization. Now it was time to panic. The government needed to do something to protect people like her. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't the person who made bad choices, but now she was going to be punished as if she had. It's remarkable how much things change in such a short period of time. We all make snap judgements all the time on every subject--This person is wrong, that person is right--but we rarely stop to consider why it is that the other person has an opposing viewpoint, only how their viewpoint would impact us or how it differs from our own. Sometimes, a little time taken to understand what someone else is dealing with is all it takes to make a big difference in our perception. The point is that empathy, for lack of a better word, is good. Empathy is right, empathy works. I'm not saying it's the answer to all of life's problems, but I am saying that it can make it a lot easier to deal with each other as we deal with those problems.

A few days before I had that conversation with my coworker, reports came out about the death of author David Foster Wallace. Among the many articles and tributes, I found an article that referenced (and linked to a copy of) a commencement address he had given in 2005. Like the earlier conversation, the things said in that address have stuck in my head ever since. He pointed out that we choose what we think and what we think about (including our refusal to acknowledge that anyone else could have reasons for not doing exactly what we want), and that perhaps by choosing to consider that our assumptions about other people are not the only reality that we set ourselves free³. That's exactly what was demonstrated in the conversation I'd had with my coworker. Initially, her decisions were based on what she saw as reality. The problem was that it wasn't everything. It took putting her in the place of someone else to see that reality is much bigger than she realized--much bigger than any of us realize.

I am not the center of the universe. Maybe if my thought process reflected that and was not simply how does this affect me or how will this person's actions inconvenience me, I could be a little happier, a little more free, a little more understanding. Maybe. I don't know. All I do know is that it can't hurt⁴.



¹ And this might end up sounding soapboxy, but it's not intended to (and hopefully it's not too soapboxy).

² I'm not about to try to tackle the issue itself, for several reasons. First, it's not the point of this post. Second, it's entirely too complex to try to discuss here. Finally, this is a silly blog full of pop culture, trivia, ill-advised attempts at humor and the occasional trite observation (like today). To discuss something this important here would trivialize it, be insulting and not solve anything anyway (also why you will never see a grand discussion of religion, politics or other things people hold dear...it's absolutely the wrong forum).

³ I'm not going to try to explain or quote the entire thing here, but here is a remarkable passage: "It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. " The rest you can read for yourself and let his words say things far better than I ever could. Typing David Foster Wallace Commencement into google returns almost a hundred thousand hits, so it's not hard to find: Here is a link to one transcript.

⁴I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I can change, and you can change...sorry got a little carried away there, but you get the point⁵.

⁵ That "If I can change, and you can change" thing is from Rocky IV, by the way. Just thought I'd help you figure out where you'd heard it before.

Yeah, I Said It

Since I've already shared my probably unpopular opinion on the Olympics, I figured why not go ahead a give you a few more.

I don't like Wes Anderson movies. People tell me I will. People tell me I should. I've tried to like them. I've even tried to convince myself that I liked them, but really it just doesn't work. Oh, sure I may sit there thinking "Hey, that's one quirky character. Yeah, how clever to make that person completely unlike any human being I would ever choose to be around for more than twenty seconds." A joke may make me half-heartedly chuckle or almost smile, but by the end I realize that I don't like any of the characters, and there's a pretty good chance that I may want to fall asleep.^*

I can't wait for the presidential race to be over. I hate that everything on TV and the internet has to do with the election and that all I hear anywhere is about how my candidate is better than yours, blah blah blabbity blah. Not only that, but I've got news for you: Every time I hear anything from one candidate it makes me want to vote for the other guy. Yeah, that's right the other guy. Campaign ads? Counterproductive. Negative ads? Doubly so. Send me an email or tell me all about how evil his opponent is? Damaging my opinion of your candidate and in all likelihood, of you as well.^** I'm fully capable of learning things, forming opinions and making decisions all on my own, thank you. And if you think that I don't mean your party or your candidate and that surely there is an exemption, you're wrong. That's right, despite being far too old to be mistaken for one, I'm apparently a rebellious teenager who is going to go against anything anyone tells me just out of the need to rebel.

If you happen to hear a spinning noise coming from underground, don't worry, that is likely just everyone who was associated with the original version of The Women^*** rolling over in their respective graves. Alternatively, it could be the career of Meg Ryan, which I'm fairly certain did pass away a few years ago.

Yeah, I realize that last one wasn't very controversial, but I couldn't think of another topic and really needed a way to end this post and, like magic, the trailer just came on TV.



^*Oh, I am so getting my hipster card revoked for this. . . or would be, if I were ever hip enough to have one.

^**Also damaging to my opinion of you: Being unable to realize that, while someone may have the same agenda as you, they still have an agenda and that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't automatically believe everything someone says just because they agree with you.

^***Just the ones who have actually died. I make no claims about how anyone from the first film, who is still living feels about the remake or how much time they spend in graves.

They Like Their Cryptids Like They Like Their Coffee...

So, apparently someone found bigfoot? Viral marketing for a book/TV show/movie, or just more nutjobs? I guess we'll find out once they reveal all their evidence. I'm relatively sure I know where I stand on this one.

Still Uninspired

Here we go again.

Something occurred to me the other day. If a vegetarian is someone who eats vegetables, what precisely does that mean when someone claims to be a humanitarian?

Shortly after this, it occurred to me that Gallagher wants his shtick back.

I'm always way behind the times, so most of you have probably already been to this site, but in case you haven't check out Cake Wrecks, which celebrates some of the more disturbing baked goods people have ever paid for.

Are run and ran really that hard to keep straight? If you have problems with which one to use, just remember, "...and I ran. I ran so far away." and the rest all pretty much takes care of itself.

It was Ribfest here this weekend, and one of the vendors was called O.T.'s. They were really good, but I couldn't help wondering if it was going to turn out that they sold barbecue and Scientology.^1,2

Wow, apparently I only thought I hated the faux Breakfast Club commercial. What I feel for that one is nothing compared to the ad (for Kraft, I think) where they add "pure" to everything they say, like "purefect" and "pureka."Then there is the Pizza Hut commercial where the delivery person pretends to be a French baker while people try their new Dunkers. Look, I'm not saying that they may not be tasty, but it doesn't take a genius to identify a breadstick with chocolate chips on top.

This weekend we were driving along the road and saw that some business had their sign alternating between showing the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celcius. It stated that the temp was 23°C, which seemed fairly reasonable, then switched and told us that it was -126°F. I'm not sure which surprised me more: that I had really underdressed for the weather and was going to die within moments of leaving the car or that I really must have been remembering those calculations for temperature conversion wrong. I guess they weren't kidding in school when they told us that if you didn't use what you learned, you'd lose it.

Come back later, maybe I'll have something to say...but I doubt it.

^1. To be fair, their food was incredible and I think that may have been someone's name. I'm not ruling anything out yet though.
^2. Also, I thought it would be amusing to come up with a lyrics for a song about Ribfest using Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song, but I couldn't really get any further than making jokes about gout, but it's probably all for the best.

Cornbread: Ain't Nothin' Wrong With That

Guess what? I don't have much of anything interesting to say, so you're getting a bunch of uninteresting things that have been bouncing around in my mind.

We have a spam filter at work that filters out pretty much anything that could be spam. It does a good job, but occasionally something will slip through. The other day, a few messages made it past the filter so I ended up with an inbox containing four copies of the same spam message from different "senders." As I was deleting them, I noticed that the first name of the sender for one of the messages was Slartibartfast. Are spammers developing a sense of humor?

Ok, I think I've got this all figured out. If warm chicken tastes good, cold crunchy veggies taste good, a warm chicken-cold crunchy salad tastes good-good then my new chocolate-covered garlic-stuffed shrimp should taste good-good-good. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be rich.

If you're walking around a store like Target, even if you are a pathetic backward-hat wearing frat boy, people should not be able to smell you three aisles away. Seriously Stinky, wearing that much cologne is not going to make women line up for the chance to bear your children. Do us all a favor and ease back just a little bit.

Here's something I don't think I've talked about on here in the past. I was a really big fan of the X-Files for quite a while. In fact, the first movie came out just over ten years ago. Also just over ten years ago, Melissa and I got married and moved across the country so that I could start school in Illinois. One of the very first things we did upon arriving in Illinois was find out where a theater was so that we could go see X-Files. By one of the first things, I mean that when we went to the grocery store for the first time so that we had at least some food in the house to eat (which also happened to be the day the movie was released) we asked one of the employees where the theater was so that as soon as we put the groceries away, we could go see it. Priorities, you know? I've said all that to say this: I don't know if it's that it has been 6 years since the show ended or how the last few seasons went or the fact that the best reviews I have seen have been barely even lukewarm, but I haven't seen the new movie yet. I'm not sure if I will.

Our air conditioner is currently broken. It just so happens that the company that is going to fix it is called Bel Aire. It turns out that if you suggest asking the repair guy if he is The Prince, other people may not think you are as funny as you do. (Note: Only suggest asking this. Don't actually ask or they may leave you to fix it yourself.)

Have you seen the commercial for JC Penney where a bunch of kids far too young to have ever seen The Breakfast Club are re-enacting The Breakfast Club? I am irrationally angered by that commercial.

Is that it? Yeah, that's it.

Je voudrais le poulet et les frites

There is a commercial for a language learning program that I hear on the radio fairly often. In this ad, the person talks about how all his friends doubted him when he said that he could order in French. He then goes on to explain what he said when the waiter arrived and how it makes him so much cooler than any of his friends¹. My problem isn't so much that he learned to speak another language or that he used his new found skills to order. In fact, my issue is not really even with the superiority complex he seems to have developed along with his linguistic abilities. My problem is that (a) I speak French like a 5 year-old² and I could have said what he did and (b) the commercial cuts off before his friends find out that their oh-so-sophisticated friend just asked for chicken and french fries³. I'd like to think that they all ordered something nice off the menu and since he insisted on ordering in French, the only thing he could figure out how to say was something off the kids menu. Hopefully, they brought him some milk in a sippy cup, too.

¹ This isn't actually stated in the commercial, but it's implied. I mean, come on. He's trying to impress his friends by ordering in French, and clearly looks down on the because they can't.

² And not a bright 5 year-old, either. It's like the really slow one that everyone says/hopes will eventually catch up to everyone else.

³ Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with chicken or french fries or even both of them together⁴. It's just that if you need to order in French, there might be something slightly more daring you could try.

⁴ There was initially an entire rant here spanning at least two more footnotes about combining chicken with various things, including waffles, how to order chicken'n'waffles in French and whether they would even know what you were talking about in a French restaurant if you tried to order chicken and waffles. I eventually decided it was a little too wordy and even calling it tangential would be a stretch.

I (did not) Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet

Today's earthquake in southern Illinois was felt in various parts of the country including here in southern Michigan, but at 5:30 in the morning, I didn't notice a thing. We are about 250 miles from the epicenter, but you'd never know this by watching our local newscasts. This was a huge story on our news today, and rather than just acknowledge that it happened and that a few people might have felt something small, we had to discuss the impact it had on people here. They interviewed probably a half dozen people about their experiences which included things like "the papers on the fridge flapping ever so slightly." If nothing else, it reminded me of why I can't stand watching local news.

The End of The Odyssey

As I imagine most of you are probably already aware, Arthur C. Clarke passed away recently. Unlike many people whose exposure to Clarke was mostly through 2001: A Space Odyssey, my primary exposure was through the television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and later Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers. These shows sparked an interest (or perhaps helped to kindle a just beginning interest) in understanding the world around me and realizing that there is a why behind every what. To this day, I still remember my father coming to find me to tell me that it was time for Mysterious World to start (this was in the pre-TiVo days...how did we live like that?) and then watching with him as they dealt with phenomena like ball lightning and cryptozoology.

You can agree or disagree with much of what Clarke has said, but there is no mistaking that he was an intelligent man who had a wonderful way with words. As such, I can see no better tribute than to present a few of my favorite insightful and amusing quotes.

"Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) 'It's completely impossible — don't waste my time'; (2) 'It's possible, but it's not worth doing'; (3) 'I said it was a good idea all along.'"

"Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy."

What is often described as Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

"One cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying."

And probably my favorite, from the episode of Mysterious World dealing with the possibilities of as yet undiscovered ape men: "If anyone gave me 100 dollars to bet on it, I'd put 40 on the Yeti, 10 on Bigfoot and keep the 50 for myself."

You're Embarrassing Us In Front of Chad

So, I'm not the only person out there who sees the new Alltel commercials and wonders what happened to Sprint, right? Right?

An Open Letter and Request for Moratorium

Dear People of Everywhere,

We all seem to like thinking that we are vastly different than everyone else. We put ourselves into smaller and smaller groups and think that these groups are nothing like any other groups. We find ways to identify ourselves based on location and come up with clever things to show how different we are than everyone else. I'm not going to request that we stop this altogether and try to make the world a better place, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

I have lived in several places in various parts of the country, and I have yet to live in a single place where people do not say "That's (place) weather for you. If you don't like it, just wait five minutes." Just stop, people. That's all weather for you. Weather changes. That's what is does. I humbly request on behalf of all mankind that no one ever use this phrase again.

Sincerely (and also kind of grumpily),

Craig



There, I've done my part, now you go and do something to make the world a better place.

Either a Useful Learning Tool or a Complete Misapplication of Chemistry and a Waste of Candy

For a lot longer than I should admit (several years), the idea of comparing enzyme kinetics to people eating candy from a community candy dish has been floating around in my head. It all started when I was in graduate school and I noticed that the Jolly Ranchers that had been brought in after Halloween seemed to be eaten in a certain order. I thought that it would be amusing to chart this over time (but was too lazy and not quite nerdy enough to do so). The more I thought about this the more I liked this idea and the more I realized that it works pretty well as a model for how enzymes work^*.


The basic requirements for an enzyme catalyzed reaction are that you have:

Substrate: Basically this is your starting material. In our case, Jolly Ranchers.

Enzyme: This is a biological catalyst, which helps to convert the substrate to product while remaining unchanged. In this case, our enzymes are people^**.

Product: This is the end material. In this case we'll call it the empty candy wrappers.


You start off with a high concentration of substrate (candy) and a steady concentration of enzymes (people). On occasion, an enzyme and and substrate will collide (i.e. someone walks past the candy dish) and if the substrate is appropriate, a reaction may occur (the person unwraps and eats the candy). As time goes on, different substrates (flavors) collide with the enzymes and some are found to bind and be metabolized better than others. By graphing the amount of substrate used over time (or in this example, the amount of candy still remaining over time) it is possible to look at the rate of consumption and determine which is the preferred substrate.


When I have paid attention to this in the past, what I have found looks something like this.




You can see that clearly Cherry is eaten the fastest, with Watermelon, Apple and Lemon right behind. Grape is typically not consumed at the same rate and the preferred substrates are used first. Why no one bothers to eat the last Lemon is beyond me. I guess everyone is trying to be polite, but enzymes aren't usually concerned with manners.

Another thing that can be learned is that if one were to repeat this experiment with the new "Original Flavors" of Jolly Ranchers which substitute Blue Raspberry for Lemon, the resulting curves would likely look like this.





This graph indicates that Blue Raspberry is not only not the preferred substance but goes essentially untouched by the enzymes.

Much like actual enzymes, it is possible to obtain mutants which may show increased or decreased preference for various substrates. A mutant^*** which uses Blue Raspberry as the preferred substrate is highly desirable because...well, that means more of the others for the rest of us.

^* A highly simplified model with huge flaws, it should be noted.

^** Technically, our enzymes don't meet the requirements because they are changed when they become fat from all the candy, but surely you don't expect perfection from a silly model like this.

^*** A mutant which prefers Blue Raspberry is pretty much a freak. Good luck finding one to eat all the nasty Jolly Ranchers while leaving all the good ones for you.

Remember, Remember

Today, as you know is November 5th. You may or may not remember that today is also Guy Fawkes Day. I really don't know how you can have a cooler holiday than one that remembers the thwarting of a plot by a guy who wanted to make sure things blow'd up real good, and celebrates it by blowing other things up real good.

Other things bouncing around in my head at the moment:

I'm tired of hearing Sally Field talk about how well Boniva fits into her busy schedule. You know, some of her girlfriends have to set aside time every week to take their osteoporosis medicine. What are you doing that you can't take the time to take one single pill a week? Is the pill the size of a football? Do you have problems swallowing? Seriously, if you are at that point in your life and not taking a half dozen pills a day, you're doing pretty good. One more a week doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

We went to the grocery store last night and as we left I wondered "Can we sue Meijer for getting a Gloria Estefan song stuck in my head?" I'm fairly sure the answer is no, but it should be yes.

Really little kids dressed up in costumes and going trick-or-treating are cute. Obnoxious teenagers doing the same are not. We bought way too much Halloween candy, as always. We were popular, however, because we discovered that if we went to one of the warehouse type stores we could give away full sized candy bars without spending more than buying the minis at the grocery store.

The store we went to was Gordon Food Service, which is designed mostly for restaurant and catering needs. I love the store because you never know what absurd thing you are going to find. For example, the one gallon container of imitation vanilla.



Speaking of strange things found at the store, I noticed recently that one of our local stores has a very large can that claims to contain a whole cooked chicken. I just found this to be amusing.

Want to see me alienate a significant percentage of my readers? I liked The Daily Show much better when Craig Kilborn was the host. I find it entirely too self-important and not funny now. I keep thinking I'll eventually write a whole post about this, but I have to put it out there even without devoting an entire post to it.

Reaper is funny. Pushing Daisies is clever and sweet, if a little eccentric. Chuck cracks me up. I still wish Lost was already back on.

Lolsecretz is absolutely hilarious. You should go read it now. Of course, if you aren't familiar with Post Secret (but after my last post you should be) or the unstoppable phenomenon that is Lolcats (but if you are online, you pretty much have to be), it won't make much sense.

I have a few other things I want to write about, but they will have to wait until later when I have time, energy and the mental capacity to write it properly.

And finally, I'm not promising anything, but if you happen to watch the college football game on ESPN 2 tomorrow night and see a very fat man dressed in black, it could be me. Of course, it's a football game where the home team's main color is black, so it could be just about anyone else, too.

Rejected PostSecrets

By now, pretty much everyone is familiar with PostSecret, the blog made up of anonymous postcards with awful, sometimes sad, sometimes horrific secrets written on them. What you may not know is that PostSecret doesn't use all of the secrets sent to them. In fact, there are some categories that automatically get dropped in the discard pile. In a stunning exposé, I am presenting here 3 types of secrets that never manage to make it onto the PS blog or into one of the books.




Category 1: Adolescent Male Humor








Category 2: Cultural Reference




















Category 3: Meta