Everyday Should Be Caturday

Today I am once again drawing not from my imagination, but from internet phenomena. This time, it's a website mashup. College football blog, Every Day Should Be Saturday meet lolcats and the meme of putting poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect captions on pictures.

With that, I give you Everyday Should Be Caturday, a brief recap of the 2007 college football season told through poorly captioned pictures.^*



Division I-AA Appalachian State upsets #5 Michigan, setting the stage for one of the strangest college football seasons in memory.



Duke breaks 22 game losing streak.



Heavily favored USC loses at home to Stanford, disrupting the race for the national title.

Nebraska loses to Kansas, giving up a record 76 points.

Alabama's $4 million dollar man can't keep his team from falling to Louisiana-Monroe.

Kansas maintains a perfect record until losing the final game of the regular season to Missouri, knocking them out of the national title hunt and the Big XII Championship Game.

McFadden wins Walter Camp award and becomes the first player to finish as the runner-up for the Heisman in consecutive years.

Florida quarterback Tim Tebow becomes the first player to rush and throw for 20+ touchdowns in a season, sets record for most rushing touchdowns by a quarterback in a single season, outruns speeding bullet, becomes first underclassman to win Heisman.

In a season where no win is certain, Ohio State regains the #1 ranking and a spot in the BCS Championship by taking a month off.

...and nothing more. While others fell throughout the season, Hawaii stands as the only undefeated team after the regular season, but is left out of the BCS Championship.

^*Pictures taken from wherever a google image search led me. Captions added using the lolcat generator from icanhascheezburger.com

The Fount of Useless Information Overanalyzes Lyrics

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" is an Academy Award winning song written by Frank Loesser and often played around Christmas time. I think the time has come to examine these lyrics a little closer and see just what we can find.

For those of you not familiar with the song, it is a duet sung by a woman who wants to go home and a man, who is trying to convince her that she should stay.

As the song progresses, she continues to say that she should leave:

"I really can't stay
I've got to go away
This evening has been
So very nice
My mother will start to worry
My father will be pacing the floor
So really I'd better scurry"

With each of her lines, the man answers imploring that she stay. But look at the tactics he uses. A few of his better lines:

"Baby it's cold outside"

"Beautiful, please don't hurry"

"No cabs to be had out there"

"What's the sense in hurting my pride
Baby don't hold out"

Sensing that she was not amenable to fear of weather, flattery or inability to travel, he progresses to pity.

"How can you do this thing to me
Making my life long sorrow
If you caught pneumonia and died"

Finally, realizing that pity is not working, he shifts to using guilt to get his way.

But the real kicker is in these two lines (this time written with both parts).

"The neighbors might think - Baby, it's bad out there
Say, what's in this drink - No cabs to be had out there"

Umm...yeah. It's called Rohypnol or, in popular parlance, a Roofie.

That's right, it may be played at Christmas time, but it's not so much a Christmas song as it is a date rape song. And with that I will leave you to never hear the song the same way again.

Well Played, Amazon.com

I was completely out of ideas for Christmas presents for Melissa this year, so I started browsing Amazon in the hopes that something would give me an idea. It turns out that Amazon has created all sorts of gift guides for different personalities and relationships. Everything from "The Dude" which, not surprisingly, suggests a copy of The Big Lebowski to "Grandpa" who based on these suggestions spends all his time shaving, checking his tire pressure and wondering what time it is.

While I knew that it was highly unlikely that I would find something appropriate in the "Girlfriend/Wife" section, I decided to go ahead while hoping that something would at least point me in a new direction. While I was amused by some of the suggestions that would have made for an awfully awkward gift opening on Christmas morning if a man gave them to his wife in front of her entire family, the one that really caught my eye was this entire section. Yes, that's right, Amazon suggests that if you need help finding a gift for your girlfriend/wife, you should try giving her an elliptical trainer. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a suggestion for what to give your wife if you already happen to have a girlfriend, but I can't come up with a way that it would be a good idea to give a woman a gift that says "You could really use to lose a few pounds. Let's see if using this thing will help out the size of your butt. It's really looking big recently." While I was trying to figure out how this could have ended up as a suggestion, it finally hit me. If any man actually followed that suggestion, he would not only have purchased a fairly expensive elliptical trainer, but after the gift had been given, he would also be scrambling for a new gift that was not only suitable, but also was nice (read: expensive) enough to express just how sorry he really is about that whole misunderstanding. All in all, I think it's a very clever plan by Amazon, but I have to wonder how many people would actually fall into that trap.

Fortunately for me, Melissa came along to put me out of my misery and just told me what to get her.

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.

A Weather Haiku, Complete with Onomatopoetic Expression of Disgust

the year's first real snow

wet disgusting slushy mess

'tis the season. Blech!

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.