I recently took a quickie work trip up to Toronto, Canada, and while sitting on the plane observing the stewardesses, err, flight attendants, I couldn't help but notice how incredibly anal they are about seat belts. They are so concerned with it, it has its own special light-up indicator above every seat and its own special little ding.

"Please keep your seat belt fastened during take-off until the indicator is turned off." "Please keep your seat belt fastened until the plane is through taxiing and at a complete stop." "Ooh, turbulence...everyone back in their seats immediately and fasten seat belt, NOW!"

I'm convinced there is some ulterior motive for the seat belt nazism. Because I mean let's face it...whilst on a flight one of two things is going to happen. A) The flight will go normally with the possibility of a little turbulence, none of which warrants actually wearing a seat belt. Or B) the plane crashes in a fiery blaze and everyone dies, seat belt or no. That's it. That's all that ever happens. So why the absolutely colossal waste of time with all the lights and dings and announcements? It just doesn't add up...

I was listening to the radio the other morning and heard an add for something known as the International Star Registry. I decided to write about it because I would like to shake the hand of the guy who came up with this scam. Nice work, my man...pure genius. For only $54 you get a freaking star named after you! How great is that?

I'm devising a copycat endeavor as I write. For only $29.95, a steal compared to that expensive star stuff, you can get a grain of sand named after you, complete with certificate of authenicity and a photo of the beach where your grain resides. Or for $19.95, an H2O molecule in the ocean of your choice. This is gonna be HUGE!

As a sidenote...I wonder if you get a discount if your star goes supernova? :)

Whenever I watch a video about Iraq I inevitably hear a soldier or some other military type mispronounce the word "cache" as "cashay" instead of just plain ol' "cash". As in, "We found the insurgent's weapons cashay." I've looked it up at least a half dozen times to verify that cashay is not some obscure alternate pronunciation that I was unaware of. And you know what I found? It's not.

So how does this happen? What is the explanation for this spontaneous mass mispronunciation phenomenon? My theory is that dumb-guy-A listens to prone-to-mispronounce-guy-B and then questions his own way of pronouncing a given word. Rather than look it up, dumb-guy-A starts to say it the wrong way, and then dumb-guy-C hears. And it snowballs from there until easily-annoyed-guy-D (me) hears it on CNN and is bothered enough to write a blog entry about it. :) I would love to hear alternative theories...

One other thing has been bothering me. It's December now and the stores are bombarding us with "seasonal" candy. Seasonal is a nice way of saying "only sells because of perceived affiliation with Christmas". A perfect example of a seasonal candy - the Candy Cane.

It's not a coincidence that the cane of candy is nowhere to be found in July. It's not that the candy cane is an uninspiring shaft of sugar, however, that I've chosen to write about it. What irks me most is the way they've chosen to package it. Innovative, year-round candies are constantly giving us new and exciting ways to minimize the "inside package" to "inside mouth" time. Simply pull this nifty red tab and watch as the packaging unravels effortlessly to reveal the now readily accessible goodies inside. That's technology at work, ladies and gentlemen...that's progress!

Alas, the candy cane makers have opted to remain in the packaging stone-age. You'll find no convenient pull-tab on these beasts, no reclosable slot/tab combo, no high-tech zip lock action, but rather a simple shrink-wrapping so tight that a wrapped cane and an unwrapped cane are virtually indistinguishable. Once you start the unwrapping process you'll find that seasonal candy must be mandated to use cheap cellophane that has this bizarre impossibly strong, incredibly weak characteristic duality which is somehow able to manifest itself at precisely the most inopportune times.

For example, the stuff is kevlar-esque when you first get a mind to break into it...but rather than just slip off the cane with one pull, it quickly loses all prior strength and you end up peeling it rather like a banana...only with an invisible peel. It's only once you begin to eat the candy cane and discover the cellophane shrapnel in your mouth that you realize that your peeling job was not thorough.

The real irony to this, however, is that there really are no fruits resulting from your labors, so to speak. Candy canes just aren't good. But I will leave the infamous cane's taste leaving something to be desired for a different post. :)

I'm sure you've heard the quote "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Listening to the radio this morning I heard a seat belt statistic that made me think of this quote and about how you really need to think about what a statistic means. Here's what they said:

"53% of car accident fatalities were not wearing their seat belt." Your first reaction might be, "oooh, 53%, that's a pretty big chunk, they should have been wearing their seat belt!" But think about it a little more. 53%, with a +/- 3% margin of error, which is pretty standard, is for all intents and purposes the same as 50%. So in other words, 50% of car accident fatalities WERE wearing their seat belt. So what does that tell us? If half of fatalities were wearing a seat belt and half were not, then what that tells me is that wearing a seat belt has a NEGLIGIBLE effect on your survivability in a serious traffic accident.

As it turns out I happen to be a fan of the seat belt as it probably saved me from injury about a year ago when I had a head-on collision, but I just thought this was an interesting example of a misleading statistic, whether they meant it to be or not.

I actually have a couple things today. Last night, while at the rec. center, I made the mistake of getting on the machine before changing the channel on the TV that was in front of me. Normally they are pretty good about having the TV's on the channel of whatever the happening event is...the NLCS, Monday Night Football, etc. But, to my horror, when it came back from commercial it was women's figure skating. Doh! But I was already going on the machine and I didn't want to stop to change the channel...so I decided to wait for someone to walk by to ask to change the channel to the baseball game for me. In the meantime, however, I couldn't help but make some observations about women's figure skating.

Figure skating is stupid. First of all, it's one of those lame subjective sports where you're at the mercy of judges, who are probably corrupt. Second, there is really only one element to a routine which separates one skater from another. They can all do the easy, frilly, artsy, boring stuff backwards and forwards blindfolded in their sleep. You know, skating forwards, skating backwards, waving their hands around, showing off the glitter in their hair, etc., which comprises like 99% of a routine. The only thing anyone is looking for is whether or not the skater falls down on her jumps. That is the essence of figure skating. She who falls least gets gold.

So I have a proposal for a new system for figure skating that removes the subjectivity entirely without really changing the essence of the sport. Take the most difficult jump in skating, and then have each skater attempt it 100 times in a row. The person who lands it the most gets the gold. 2nd, silver, etc. Done. No controversy, no corruption, takes less time, no glitter, everyone wins!

The second thing I'd like to talk about are the lines on the freeway. Or more accurately, the OLD lines that aren't supposed to be there anymore. For some reason, many months ago, they decided that the lanes of the freeway on I-15 that I drive to work each day all needed to be shifted over about 12 inches. Now, I'm no traffic engineer...so while it seems kind of odd, whatever. BUT, I have to take issue with their choice of old-line-concealment technique. Maybe it's just me, but giving the old lines a light coat of rubber cement just doesn't quite seem to do the job. Not only can you still see the lines plain as day, but now they have an annoying glare in the morning from the sun...which actually makes them MORE visible than the new lines. The result is that the freeway is now a confusing smorgasboard of lines making distinguishing between lanes a daunting task at the very least.

To summarize...we put a man on the moon, we can nuke the world 20 times over, but we can't make some simple traffic lines disappear. In the meantime bad drivers are driving willy nilly down the freeway, causing needless accidents...and my insurance premiums are rising. :)

Oops, I have been slacking on this whole blog thing. Maybe it's not for me, I doubt anyone even reads it. Oh well...it's free. :)

Two negative things happened this weekend. First BYU somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against TCU. 51-50, man what a score. I think this is like the first time in the history of the sport of football that someone has managed to botch two snaps in-a-row. Luckily I didn't go to it, nor was I watching it, because we were on our way to Mount Borah in Idaho. I had the ol' tivo recording the game in the unlikely event that BYU won, suffice it to say it didn't last long on the tivo's hard drive.

The other thing is we didn't make it to the top of Borah. I really really really hate to not summit, esp. when it takes 6 hours to drive there. But I think under the circumstances we made a wise choice. To continue in the conditions we encountered (5 inches of snow and ice on Chicken-Out Ridge) would have been suicidal at best I think. The one redeeming thing, however, was that the snow and clouds made the mountain incredibly scenic and I got an outstanding batch of Himalaya-esque photos out of the deal. Here's a taste...

A Picture Share!

Go cougars!

We did Dark Canyon (near Lake Powell) and Mount Peale (near Moab, highest mountain in the La Sals and highest in Utah outside of the High Uintas). Dark Canyon was pretty cool. Risk of death was as high as ever! :) Between almost getting hit by lightning, freaky big yellow spiders & rattlesnakes, and rocks that would just break sporadically and fall down sheer cliffs as you stepped on them, it definitely made for an interesting Labor Day weekend.

One bummer though...because of the torrential rain we received it was flash flooding through Dark Canyon and the normal nice, clear water was replaced by what I can only describe as chocolate milk. Here I am from what could be a scene right out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. :)

A Picture Share!

Timp saddle

I had a random thought today as I stood at the gas pump. I remember way back in the day when I was about 10 years old my friends talked me into buying a motorized uzi squirt gun. They all had one, and in the end I succumbed to the peer pressue and dropped the $10 that one cost. It was cool, we had squirt wars, it was all good.

Then my mom found out. Oh man was she pissed. How could I squander such a large amount on such a trivial, worthless toy? Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. I felt bad.

It was at about that moment, approx. 2.3 seconds from when I first depressed the pump handle, that the $10 spent mark on the LCD readout came and went like a blur.

Inflation notwithstanding, my how things have changed...