Out of Service

My current apartment was, like many apartments, at various points home to several tenants who like to still get mail delivered here. Each month, without fail, I get a small, brown envelope from the Wall Street Journal addressed to some guy who lived here before me. Needless to say, I wasn't surprised to find some mail from the AARP in my box a couple weeks ago.

I was surprised, however, to read my own name through that cool little envelope sneak-preview window. Was this a "Happy Birthday, keep us in mind after about another 40" card? A cheap ploy to get me to sign up my grandparents? As it turns out, they wanted me to sign up! They even included one of those useless and official-looking fake member cards, with my name embossed right there on the front. And it turns out I've been authorized by none other than the CEO himself, Mr. William D. Novelli.



I used to think you were supposed to work before you retired, but apparently they're looking for people straight out of college these days. It seemed like a crazy mix up at first, but maybe the AARP finally got sick of industry snatching up all the young talent and felt like getting active in the recruiting process. And if they want me that bad, I will definitely give their offer some serious consideration.

Lessons in counterintuitive time and energy efficiency

I once was recently asked why I had on the window sill above my sink three partially full squeeze bottles of the same dish soap.



My rationalization of an answer is that I'm terribly efficient. You see, when I'm running low on dish soap, I make sure to buy more and set it next to the old. I'd like to use the old soap before I crack open the new, but when time is of the essence the newer bottle serves my needs much better. When I have the time to wait around a bit, I'll use up the old one. If I pick from my three choices of soap bottles according to time availability, in the end I'm using the same amount of dish soap but saving precious time, so as a system it works out well. Now if I happen to buy varying scents of dish soap, then I can also factor that into the choice according to my immediate tastes, but that's a level of complexity I'm not sure you're ready for.

This all reminded me of a system I discovered long ago, one that I would recommend to any and all: that is when I dry off after a shower, I use at least two towels in succession. Everyone knows concurrent exchange is for suckers, and that's exactly what you get with one towel. As the towel soaks up more of your wetness, the less able it is to do its job, and you're left in the middle of the saturation range, still damp and very sad.



But if you do a quick wipe with one towel and jump to the next, you're throwing in multiple iterations of concurrent exchange for a radical step-wise attempt at countercurrent exchange, which any good lesson in ichthyological physiology will teach you is the real deal.



"But then you have to wash your towels twice as often, negating the benefit of your short-sighted instant gratification!" you (Matt) might say (have said before). My first retort here is that you're spreading the 'towel use' among both (or more) towels you use, so the total usage of the towels remains the same. My second retort is that, you know that these towels are being used to wipe water off of you right after you get out of the shower, right? How dirty could they really get? Washing towels probably has more to do with them being too damp and growing some sort of mold, algae, or phytoplankton--which should be reduced in my design, due to the fact that each towel gets less wet than it would if it were shouldering the whole load itself. So, if anything, this system should also result in less towel washing, especially if you have four or more towels and you rotate through them like you're tightening bolts around an oil pan.

So follow my plan, and you'll find yourself with loads of extra time, which you can use as inefficiently as you like--say, in writing an extraordinarily long-winded blog post about some really insignificant stuff.

Peeve

"Talk drink of water" is one of those things that irritates me each time I hear it, mainly because it doesn't make any sense at all. It's not "tall drink of water", it's "long drink of water". As in, for a tall person, a drink of water has a long way to go.

If you say someone is a "tall drink of water", you're really just using the word 'tall' to call them 'tall'. If you're going to use the word tall, then why not throw anything behind it? "Tall stack of books", "tall space shuttle", "tall drink of Vitamin Water" - the possibilities are endless and dumb.

So, just to beat it into you, the next time you're looking to describe a rangy guy or gal, they'd be a "long drink of water". Or, if you're in the mood, a tall "pile of yard work", "pair of aviator sunglasses", etc.

What's the move?

Say there's that special and 'just-out-of-reach' guy/girl that you've got your eye on, and you find yourself in a position to lend them something of not-inconsequential value but that you wouldn't miss. Do you highlight your generosity and insist they just keep the item, or do you guarantee another meeting by making sure to get your item back?

And the award goes to...

"Award-winning" is such a meaningless term. 'Award-winning director', 'award-winning restaurant', 'award-winning automaker'--what isn't award-winning these days? I just gave this blog the award for "The Best Blog that I Write", so now it's award-winning! Even if you discount self-given awards like the one above (probably a good idea), I could still tell my brother to give me an award on behalf of his blog that he never updates and then bam, truly award-winning. I mean, some awards aren't even good--this blog could win the award for "Worst Blog Ever" and I'd flaunt the half-truth of my award-winningness as often as I could.

An even if you only count positive awards, you're still in the weeds. I mean, La Burrita serves award-winning Mexican food, but only because 'best' is a subjective term that a lot of people take to mean 'closest to the dorms'. I bet if you always had to specify the award in question, we'd see a lot less of this stuff thrown about.

Movie Review: Taken

This poster is very representative of the movie as a whole--Liam Neeson's obvious awesomeness is masked by terrible dialogue.

Firstly, this movie gets points for featuring character actor Xander Berkeley, who was the tight guy in Gattaca, but it loses all those points because he didn't do anything or say anything good. It loses points because Famke Janssen didn't look nearly as hot as she did in any of the X-Men movies.

It scores points for starring Liam Neeson, who is pretty badass (and, some might argue, more of a star than Jon Voight). It scores even more points for being an hour and a half of pure, uninterrupted footage of Liam Neeson literally kicking ass and taking names. It scores bonus points for featuring a scene I've long wished to see in more movies (no spoilers here).

In the end, though, it loses points for being one of the most ridiculous movies ever. It was unrealistic to an incredible point, and I'm generous with unrealism. Casting a six-foot-five 22 year old to play 17 was a bad move, writing cringe-worthy dialogue was a bad move, not taking advantage of the obvious fantastical nature of the story to make Liam Neeson even more of a badass was a bad move, and making the whole movie ridiculous was the worst move of all.

After advanced summations, the end result is a score of:

104 points

It's good enough to see, but good enough to spend money on? I dunno. Taking my cue from At the Movies' new rating system, I'm giving Taken a 'Download it.'

Speculation is more important than knowledge.

As mentioned a few posts back, I kinda watched part of 'The Bucket List' some time last month or something. I didn't watch the whole movie, but since it's a movie I can only assume it went like so: both Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson did crazy stuff for an hour or so before finding out from their embarrassed oncologists that thanks to a mix-up down in the lab, they both just had the flu.

Everyone who watches TV knows that this kind of mix-up in 'the lab' is a common occurrence in hospitals, but it's never explained. And despite being intimately familiar with labs, lab equipment, lab workers, and lab work, I've never worked in a hospital lab itself, so I will now speculate wildly about them.

The high rate of error for lab work is undeniably tied to the fact that, regardless of where one is at the time, tests are never being done "up in" the lab--samples are, without exception, sent "down to" the lab, which puts it somewhere between the basement and the abode of Hades. I imagine 'the lab' as the hospital equivalent of a dungeon, and I can't imagine any skilled person performing sufficiently precise work in such damp, poorly lit conditions, let alone the disfigured ogre types you usually find down there. On top of that, the only equipment I've ever seen in dungeons is made of wood and metal spikes and looks like it's made mainly for stretching people out or breaking their bones (which would be pretty counter-productive to the focus of the work going on upstairs). I just can't imagine the wooden, pirate ship wheel crank-operated centrifuge working as well as your basic automatic model.