Kablammo!

Thank you, Dennis. Fight the good fight.

One of these days, or weeks or months or years, I’m going to remember that there are people who are more than willing to help me, and who don’t want me to fail horribly. And one of these days, it is to be hoped, I’ll let myself be helped before it’s too late—even if it means asking for help. I swear.

Note: I’m not too proud to ask for help, I just really really hate bothering or inconveniencing people. Which sometimes makes me end up inconveniencing people a thousand times worse down the road, when something eminently preventable spirals or festers or snowballs out of control.

So, yeah.

In other news, I saw The Tallest Man on Earth yesterday, and he put on a great show. He briefly forgot the words to one of his own songs, but these things happen. Plus, he covered for it pretty well, and it was a very friendly & appreciative crowd. Also, Mr on Earth himself is quite a friendly and good-natured guy. A+++, would see again.

I noticed yesterday that the victor of the most recent video format war might be considered extremely unfortunately named.

See, I saw an ad yesterday promoting the home video release of a movie. The voiceover for the ad said the movie was “now available on DVD and blurry high-def.” I thought I must have misheard it, so I was (for once) relieved when the ad was repeated 30 seconds later and I got a chance to listen to it again. But it still sounded like “blurry high-def” to me.

I think that’s how I’ll refer to it in all contexts from now on: “Oh, I see you have one of them blurry video players!” “Do you have a lot of blurry movies?” “I don’t think that blurry stuff is worth the cost of upgrading.”

Speaking of corn… Considering that the cows that provide the beef are fed a diet of corn and basically every other ingredient is sweetened with corn, you could argue that McDonald’s really serves cornburgers.

And speaking of speaking of corn, what a fortuitous billboard to drive past while having the above discussion:

????????
What is it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of puzzle where a picture of a Big Mac represents a certain value? Is it a rebus? I really can’t be sure.

The most obvious interpretation might be “100% beef”. But that would mean that “Big Mac” symbolizes zero. I doubt that suggesting McDonald’s’ flagship product equates to nothingness is what Ronald’s ad mavens had in mind.

Yet the only other plausible interpretation I could come up with [1] was “1% beef”, just outright ignoring the non-ASCII characters. [2] And that seems even more ridiculous, and even less like it would be the desired message.

But if it’s “100% beef”, it’s unclear what the percentage would be referring to. The only antecedent on the billboard itself is an entire Big Mac; buns, cheese, Thousand Island secret sauce, and all. Unless they’re making their bread out of beef these days, the overall beef percentage in a Big Mac is well below unity, regardless of whether you’re measuring by weight or volume.

…

A lot of these problems could have been avoided if they’d just used hamburger patties as zeroes, and put a huge Big Mac behind the text. Patties are a good deal rounder than entire burgers [3], so they’re a more straightforward stand-in for zeroes [4]; and equating a patty to zero wouldn’t be as belittling to the brand. Plus, the patties themselves are (or should be) an awful lot closer to 100% beef than the sandwiches as wholes.

Though now I’m tempted to try a proper hamburger sandwich (think “bread sandwich”, but with hamburgers rather than slices of bread).

* * *

[1] I’m assuming base 10 here. This billboard is from McDonald’s, after all, not Google.

[2] Is there a Unicode codepoint for “Big Mac”? How about “hamburger”?

[3] Were this a Wendy’s billboard, their square patties would present an entirely different set of problems. But that’s for a different discussion.

[4] Of course, zeroes usually aren’t perfectly round either, which I’ve been known to complain about in other advertisements. But no matter how you render your zeroes, they’re going to look more similar to hamburger patties than to hamburger sandwiches, so the point remains.

All things considered, my life is going extremely well. And I’m lucky enough that I don’t even know how lucky I am. I will try to allow myself to enjoy it.

…

And I’ll try to focus on how good I have it, even though I’ve screwed myself over again at work. So it goes.

According to the Associated Press, the world has gone topsy-turvy:

High gas prices drive farmer to switch to mules

MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — High gas prices have driven a Warren County farmer and his sons to hitch a tractor rake to a pair of mules to gather hay from their fields. T.R. Raymond bought Dolly and Molly at the Dixon mule sale last year. Son Danny Raymond trained them and also modified the tractor rake so the mules could pull it.

T.R. Raymond says the mules are slower than a petroleum-powered tractor, but there are benefits.

“This fuel’s so high, you can’t afford it,” he said. “We can feed these mules cheaper than we can buy fuel. That’s the truth.”

And Danny Raymond says he just likes using the mules around the farm.

“We’ve been using them quite a bit,” he said.

Brother Robert Raymond added, “It’s the way of the future.”

As Thomas Edison once said, “We will make mules so inexpensive that only the rich will use tractors.” Or something to that effect, at least. I wonder what else the future has in store.

I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that “Lojack” is the opposite of “Hijack”. Wow.

In other news, Linux (specifically, Ubuntu (specifically, Hardy Heron)) is dead to me, and I officially no longer have any interest in running it on my desktop. Not worth the hassle. I’ve had to recover my MBR and reconfigure GRUB far too many times in the past couple of days. GRUB errors 17, 15 and 13 were bad enough, but error 5 (“Partition table invalid or corrupt: This error is returned if the sanity checks on the integrity of the partition table fail. This is a bad sign.“) was the last straw.

Again, none of these seemed to justify an individual post:

• As much as I’m opposed to the “Economic Stimulus Payments” as a policy decision—which is severely—I will confess that I’m giddy with the anticipation of getting my $600 check. I know full well that it’s not free money, and in fact I think Americans are actually undertaxed. But I already have my heart set on buying something to stimulate the economy. (I’ll be the German economy I’m stimulating, but at least that’s better than stimulating the Chinese economy, right?) And so it is that I’m somewhat miffed to learn that it will be weeks before I see a dime.
• At 3:30 A.M. today, I was awoken by the pungent smell of cabbage. I gleefully went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, then tasted the concoction I’d left cooking in the Crock-Potâ„¢ brand slow cooker. It was absolutely delicious. Being an idiot, I then went back to bed, leaving the Crock-Potâ„¢ plugged in and turned on. By morning the concoction had become a disgusting, inedible mess. I’ll chalk this one up as a learning experience, and I’ll try to remember to pick up another jar of sauerkraut on my way home so I can try again.
• So it turns out that my favorite cafeteria cashier lady is Ethiopian. I’m going to look up how to say “Thank you” in Amharic.

I thought that carton of ice cream looked a bit different from how I remembered. Take a look at this picture (new carton on top, old one on the bottom):

I’m disappointed in you, Breyer’s. You used to have integrity.

Song of the Moment: «Fratres (for 12 cellos)» — Arvo Pärt

There must be a bird’s nest on the window-ledge of my apartment. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for the remarkably loud pre-dawn cheeping this morning. Unfortunately, the most likely place for a nest would be a corner of the building that would be pretty hard for me to get a look at from inside. I’ll have to try taking the screen out of one of my windows or something, because it would be pretty rad to get a nice photograph of some baby birds. Especially if they’re going to keep waking me up at 6 in the morning.

In other news, I remain unaddicted to WoW. Take that.