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A Momentary Lapse… November 24, 2004 · Justin strikes again… he went to heat up a Pop Tart the other morning, and started complaining about the cover on the toaster. Tigg has an apple theme in our kitchen... I suppose I should say in her kitchen... and has a couple of covers for some of the things in there. “The cover is a great thing, it hides that ugly toaster,” she argued. “It’s pointless” he said. “Well, for one thing it matches the one on the blender,” she pointed out. Justin ended the argument there... “We have a blender?” he asked, looking across the counter for it. · Two pet peeves that apply to the coffee shop I go to right now (it’s convenient and has a great flavored coffee), but they also work with some other places as well. Here’s number one… Don’t write on the cover of my cup. I’ve asked you to stop, but there you go again. I asked for my coffee with extra cream and extra sugar, not extra cream and extra scent of black ink. I know why you do it… to make it easier for the cashier. In other places I’ve gone though, they write on the cup to keep the orders straight. But at those other places, when they write on the cup, which will be under my hand. Hey, you work in the shop. You’ve seen more cups than I have. Won’t argue that. but haven’t you noticed the handy checklist your company has printed on the cup itself so you can do exactly what you’re doing on the cover? · And here’s number two… sizes. Oh sure, it was funny when Starbucks decided they needed to be fancy, needed to be different, and went with those venti or grande or whatever they are options. I still have no idea what the large size is since the ones that sound like it should be biggest I think is actually the small. I think. Anyway… This shop uses small and medium. I would absolutely love to know how many people order a large coffee during the day. If you only have two sizes, you don’t have a medium. · Heard an ad on the radio this morning. It was about an eye surgeon that proudly notes he has performed over 30,000 of those laser surgeries on patients since 1990. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with those numbers though. Let’s do the math on that. 1990… let’s be generous and call that 15 years. That’s 2,000 procedures a year. Translates to just over 38 per week. Or, with no vacations or days off… 365 days… over 5 a day. Alright… let’s take out 104 days for weekends and give him 10 holidays off… now it’s 251 days and about 8 procedures a day. That’s 8 procedures a day, 250 days a year, for 15 years. That doesn’t include other procedures, office hours, and any real vacation time. Sounds to me like he has to be overworked. · Recently I was talking about black currants, and I mentioned that I drive past a lot of corn fields on my way to and from work. In these fields around this time of the year there are tons of animals… geese, deer, and… turkeys. Lots and lots of turkeys. Usually I wonder if they know what Thursday is. Well, drove past the fields today, and with tomorrow the big day, Tigg and I didn’t see any turkeys. · Running some errands on Monday morning, November 22nd. In one of the places I had stopped, the television was on, with the Iranian Foreign Minister (Kamal Kharrazi) being interviewed on CNN. And, according to one of the anchors (I didn’t see the full interview), Kharrazi said that Iran was suspending their uranium enrichment program. Here’s the transcript. Now here’s my problem with this… because the Iranian Foreign Minister apparently thinks we’re idiots. Read the interview… He’s saying that Iran has suspended a program that never existed. Go back. Read it again. He said that “the whole enrichment process has been suspended. And this is going to be verified by inspectors of IAEA” and “the final measure naturally is to come up with a mechanism that would assure Europeans that Iran is not going to divert to nuclear weapons.” Now… I may be ignorant of a lot of things, but let’s look at this rationally. The primary use for enriched uranium, to my knowledge, is nuclear weapons. Not car engines, not paperclips, not home entertainment centers. Nuclear weapons. And Kharrazi has just said that Iran is suspending the enrichment program. So far, so good. Right? Ok… then he follows that up with “Iran does not have any plan to produce nuclear weapons.” Umm… then why was there a program to enrich the uranium that you had to suspend? · Scrunching mousse. Is that what point we’ve hit? Scrunching mousse? I was out shopping with Tigg the other day, she needed some shampoo, so down that aisle we trudged, and the next thing I know I’m looking at a bottle of scrunching mousse. Perhaps it’s bad enough that spellcheck didn’t kick the word scrunching out as a mistake. (It did, however, tell me that it doesn’t believe that spellcheck is a word. And since running spellcheck regularly frustrates the hell out of me because it tries to correct my grammar not only with options that are completely wrong, but they also make no sense… I’m leaving spellcheck spelled as is.) But I just don’t get a good feeling about mousse that’s specialized for scrunching. |