Random musings

Commercials: There is a commercial for some brand of "nut snack." Several times when not really paying attention, it sounded like the announcer was saying "nut sack." Then I noticed there is a different version of the commercial where he says just "snack." So have other people heard what I heard?

Then there is a Target commercial where a man says he is Salma Hayek. I swear. Am I hearing this right? Because he doesn't look like the Salma Hayek I am thinking of. She's a little bustier, for one.

Maybe it's my ears.

I have also been pondering the commercial for the matchmaking service. I can't remember which one. Maybe eHarmony. And the guy says you fill out the form and then you are matched based on your answers. But how many people really know what they're like?

I know two people who swear up and down they never want to be like their mothers, but they've ALWAYS been exactly like their mothers in the exact traits they can't stand and want to avoid. Another friend was recently told she is disorganized, and she was appalled and angry at the very idea. But she IS disorganized. Last week alone she misplaced at least 7 items that I know of. And my ex believed he was honorable. I think we can all have a good chuckle about that one.

I know I have also expressed an opinion of myself and had people look at me like I am crazy, so they obviously do not see what I see.

So assuming the same is true for most people, how can anyone accurately describe themselves to someone else?

And then my mom told me she had a friend who had signed up for one of those and described herself as being in her 40s, which she is not. The friend's response? Do you think *they're* telling the truth? Which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise, don't you think?

But back to the people who believe they are telling the truth about themselves. This is why I love sending out personality tests to my friends. I always find it fascinating how they rate themselves on various criteria, and I wonder what they think about how I have rated myself. Is there eye-rolling and chuckling in disbelief?

Then think about how everyone looks out on the world through their own veil of past experience, education, social encounters, and everything else that makes up the pieces of their personal puzzle. If we all have skewed views of ourselves, how can anyone believe they see the world properly? What else might be out there that we don't see or understand?

Which leads to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Two people can see the same car accident, yet report different things. It doesn't mean one of those people is lying. They might both be telling the truth, but it's the truth as they saw it, from their perspective, through their veil.

I'm not really taking this anywhere. I just find it all extremely interesting. People are interesting.

I'm going to go find some good personality tests. :)

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince trailer

FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!

The official Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince trailer.

Mythbusters Fun

Have you ever watched the show Mythbusters? I like this show. They were doing all sorts of things for Shark Week, like having one guy go in the water and thrash and one guy play dead. They were in shark resistant chain mail, in water in the Bahamas, which apparently has the highest concentration of sharks anywhere. It was pretty amazing to see the number of sharks just swimming around the boat. Then when the guys went in the water, the thrashing man definitely drew a lot more attention. Did I mention they had dead fish stuck down their pants?

They also did one where they went down to a shipwreck at night, one night without lights and one night with, and the flashlights drew a lot more sharks than the darkness.

Oh, they also verified that sharks can see prey above the water and will jump up to eat stuff. They made baby sharks repel from magnets, but the adult sharks didn't seem to care too much. And adult sharks were not bothered by hot peppers. They're about to test whether someone being attacked by a shark has enough time to poke the shark in the eyes. I have always heard you should punch them on the nose, but poking in the eyes probably works too. They built a giant shark for the test. :)

These people look like they have a lot of fun at work, though. They're always so excited to build robot dogs and animatronic sharks and blow things up and drop things from great heights. I don't think I would be too keen on going underwater in the dark to attract sharks, though!

TRUE or MYTH?
A farmer thought he was just putting dinner on the table when he picked up an axe and beheaded one of his chickens. Turned out he had a legend on his hands after the now headless rooster bobbed and weaved back to the henhouse and lived for 18 more months -- without a head.


This was taken from the Mythbusters website. See other quizzes at http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/quiz/quiz.html


The answer?

TRUE! Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, Colo., did indeed own the world's only surviving headless chicken, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. He wielded the infamous axe in September 1945, unaware that he and his rooster would go down in history.

The animal, now dubbed Mike and celebrated with a festival, Web sites and various magazine articles, apparently survived because the blade missed his jugular vein and a clot prevented him from bleeding to death. The axe blow landed high enough that most of the chicken's brain stem and one ear remained intact. Olsen kept the animal fed and watered by inserting an eyedropper directly into his gullet. Eighteen months after the chicken lost his head he choked to death in a motel room. Residents of Fruita remember Mike as "a big fat chicken who didn't know he didn't have a head."

A Moment from History

So I'm gathering trivia for games for the staff party and I come across this on Wikipedia:

Charlemagne
King of the Franks from 768 to his death. He expanded the Frankish kingdoms into a Frankish Empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 as a rival of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of art, religion, and culture through the medium of the Catholic Church. Through his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define both Western Europe and the Middle Ages. He is numbered as Charles I in the regnal lists of France, Germany, and the Holy Roman Empire.


So, like, very impressive and all, right? So then the next sentence begins, :The son of King Pippin the Short....


And that gets me to laughing. King Pippin the Short? FIERCE! Oh, no, we're being attacked by King Pippin the Short! AIEEEEEEEEE!!!!! And how short do you have to be in the 700s to be given the moniker, "The Short."

Just to be thorough (and because I really wanted to find out his height), I did look into it more and found this:

Pepin's name can be very confusing. Historically, historians have vacillated between preference for Pepin, derived from the French Pépin, and the German Pippin. His nickname is also subject to whims, le Bref being translated as either "the Short" or "the Younger". The Younger is explained as referring to the fact that he was the younger of the two Arnulfing Pepins who ruled as mayors of the palace; the Short as deriving from the tales of Notker Balbalus regarding the King's diminutive size. More novel suggestions include a suggestion that "the Short" referred to his hair—since he was the first Frankish king to wear his hair shorn short. Dutton, PE, Charlemagne's Mustache.

So the mystery is explained. But I still have an image in my head of this little king running to attack the knees of his opponents.

More Annoying Commercials

Okay. I’m back to complain about stupid commercials. The first is that stupid, insulting, $%*#$%^(@* FreeCreditReport.com commercial where the guy sings that if he’d only checked his girlfriend’s credit report before getting married, he’d be a happy bachelor with a dog instead of living in her parents’ basement. Every time I see this commercial I think, “WHERE IS YOUR DAMN MONEY, YOU LOSER!!!!!!!!!!!” So his girlfriend’s bad credit means HE can’t get a loan for a mortgage? They can’t live in an apartment on HIS salary? She made him get rid of his DOG? He should thank his lucky stars her parents are kind and generous enough to let a slob like him share their living space! I HATE THIS COMMERCIAL!!!!!!!!! And instead of going out and getting a job, while SHE’S IN THE BACKGROUND DOING LAUNDRY, he’s standing there WHINING about how awful he has it. As Kevin said to me today, maybe if he wasn’t hanging out with his chump friends all the time...

The other commercial that is currently getting on my nerves is that stupid Charmin commercial with the cartoon bears. Charmin has come out with a more durable toilet paper. Because apparently bears in the woods get toilet tissue stuck all over their bums. And apparently people must get toilet tissue stuck all over their bums, too, or else Charmin wouldn’t be coming out with a product like this. So I have to ask myself – who are these people who don’t know how to wipe themselves??? How do they get through life? Why don’t they shave their tushies? I find it all very disturbing.

I find the cartoon bears using Charmin in the woods very disturbing too. Why are these bears using toilet paper? Do they do their shopping online? Perhaps with credit cards they’ve kept from victims they’ve eaten? Is that why they NEED toilet paper? Do they all hide behind trees to do their business? Would I know I was in bear territory when I came across the pile of poo covered in tattered toilet tissue? Is this just another example of urban sprawl invading pristine wilderness?

I’m going to go read a book. There will be no commercial interruptions.

Book Quotes

I thought these were interesting, given the time period in which they took place. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

From the book Alfred C. Kinsey, by James H. Jones

* * *

A glance at South Orange’s newspaper during the years immediately after 1900 provides an inventory of [residents’] fears. With varying degrees of alarm, local editors informed their readers about the rising divorce rate, working women, intemperance, the race problem, unemployment, and …the fear by many members of the middle class that recent immigrants …would take over the country by outbreeding old-stock Americans.

* * *

With the standards set so high, many American males had a hard time fulfilling their culture’s requirements to “be a man.” Everywhere there were signs of men who felt that something had gone wrong in their lives. Many had a vague apprehension that they did not measure up, as though they consistently yet inexplicably fell short of some invisible mark society expected them to meet. …Joining the ranks of those who walked around feeling anxious about their failure to meet the ideal were those who complained of a gnawing sense of disquietude, a fear that life was passing them by, that their daily experiences somehow failed to bring them into contact with the “real” world. Though voiced somewhat differently, each of these complaints registered the confusion many middle-class men felt about their gender identity, signaling a crisis of masculinity that reverberated in popular culture no less than in individual lives.

* * *

Almost to the person, the founders of the [Boy Scouts of America] regarded urban life as a cancer that was devouring the physical and moral strength of the nation. In the introduction to Boy Scouts of America: A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-craft (1910), Ernest Thompson Seton…. [said] the last few decades had all but ruined the nation’s boys. Young men had been assaulted by new and insidious forces that threatened to sap every ounce of manhood from their spirit. Industrialization, urbanization, the collapse of small farms, and the decline of religion had produced “a very different type of youth in the country today.” Modern-day boys had no respect for their parents or superiors, no knowledge of tools, no ability to survive in the wilderness, and no devotion to what Seton called “the safe old moral standards.” Nor could their bodies match the splendid physiques of their ancestors. Neglecting their own athletic skills, they flocked to sporting events where they did “nothing but sit on the benches and look on, while indulging their tastes for tobacco and alcohol.”

* * *

Reformers used the rising divorce rate as proof of the need for change. Between 1870 and 1920, the divorce rate rose fifteenfold, and by 1924 one marriage out of seven ended in divorce.

By Request: Sarai Vents, Part Deux

Apparently, someone out there reads my blog and likes me to vent. There was much disappointment at my lack of recent venting. I'm not going to name names or anything (Melissa Shimkus), but you know who you are.

So I have more to vent about. :)

I absolutely HATE those stupid fake deer people put in their front yards. The thing that strikes me as funny is you only see this in rural settings, where REAL DEER actually live. You never see fake deer on the lawns in the suburbs or inner city (though you do sometimes pass alarming lawns filled with all manner of junk, from manger scenes in the middle of summer to birdbaths to plastic flowers stuck in the grass pretending to be growing - I think these yards are designed to frighten would-be criminals into believing the owners are insane).

Fake deer. Why? WHY? Usually they are pointing toward the road, so as you approach and see it out of the corner of your eye you think there is a real deer getting ready to mosey in front of your car. This can lead to accidents, people! Two weeks ago, however, I spotted a fake deer family nestled most preciously in the shade of a tree. There was a mama deer, papa deer, and a couple of baby deer. They were all sitting on the ground, facing the tree as if to say, "Whew! Sure is hot out here! Thank goodness for this tree." Or perhaps they were worshiping the tree. I can't be sure. But the poor deer had a severe case of peeling paint. It must have been genetic, because the entire deer family suffered from it.

Another irritant is fake geese on porches, and sometimes in yards. Even better than fake geese, however, are fake geese wearing seasonal costumes. They sell these costumes in catalogs. I've seen them. You can buy one for every holiday. This was first pointed out to me by my friend Lynn in England, so it must be an international phenomenon.

And don't get me started on lawn cherubs. Okay. Naked children with wings and creepy smiles. Made of stone. Sometimes they don't have creepy smiles, but wear sad expressions. Because that's cheery to see in someone's yard. Always brightens my day.

That is my vent for the day. I made a list while we were traveling, so there are more vents to come. But my blog will not always be about venting.

Someday I'll get back to posting useless trivia. :)