Cerebrate Good Times

High school graduation (You either get to look forward to many more years of school, or you can look forward to managing a McDonalds.) First kiss (The nerves sort of spoil the romance.) Getting a job (If it was that great, they wouldn’t have to pay you.) Buying a house (There’s no landlord to fix things, and if you can’t pay your mortgage you’re out on the street.) What else?

I usually prefer to generate my own content rather than just post links to amusing things, but today I'm going to make an exception. This is so great I had to share it with all of you.

Has any perforated packaging on any product ever opened the way it’s supposed to? Seriously, has anyone out there pulled the little tab or whatever and actually had it tear precisely along the perforation as it was supposed to? I want to know how often this happens.

I’ve always been a light sleeper. That’s good if your house catches on fire, but not so good if you have lots of noise on your street. Which is a more likely occurrence? Anyway, over time the conditions that must be met in order for me to sleep have gotten more and more specific. I can now only sleep when I’m on my stomach, at the right side of the bed, with my nose just sticking out over the side (for fresh air). The temperature needs to be 70 or below, I have to have a fan on for noise, and the pillow has to be tucked under my head just so. I should note that these are only the requirements for me to get to sleep initially at night. When I wake up during the night I don’t always have to be precisely positioned to get back to sleep. But still, it’s a strange thing. Also, if I take a nap during the day, I can go to sleep on my back, which I simply can’t do at night. And sleep in the afternoon somehow counts double: if I sleep for an hour, it takes me two hours to get to sleep th...

Here’s a pointless game. I’ll use song lyrics to ask a question, and you try to find lyrics from a different song that fit as an answer to the question. Here’s an example to get the creative juices flowing. “If I was a dancer, where would I dance?” ( Psychosis , The Refreshments) “In a happy little foreign town, where the stars hung upside down…” ( We Danced Anyway , Deanna Carter) The first person to answer the question can then add a question of their own, to be answered by ensuing comments. Assuming anyone actually tries this, I’ll try to publish the comments immediately to make things less confusing. Okay, here’s the question. I’ll make it an easy one: “Who do you love?” ( Love, Come Lighten My Load , Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers) [answer:]"I'm in love with Stacy's Mom." [next question:] "Everybody loves a clown, so why don't you?" [answer:] "Send in the clowns." [next question:] "Why do birds suddenly appear, ever...

I’m afraid I have to make an addition to the list of foods that should be good but aren’t. Today’s entry is blueberries. Blueberries look good, and they’re good when they’re made into syrup or something (Ooh, and they're great in bagels or muffins), but eating blueberries plain kind of creeps me out. They have that weird little extra skin on one end, and they’re full of seeds. Plus they just don’t taste like much. And on another note, my wife has been enjoying DVDs of Charles in Charge lately. As a consequence of this, I have the theme song constantly running through my head. One of the lines states that he’s misunderstood. What exactly is it about Charles that is misunderstood? He seems like a pretty straightforward guy to me. [Note: My wife says that the line is actually "It's understood." So apparently the thing that's actually misunderstood is the line about being understood. I'm not sure that's any better.]

I don’t know where people get these things, but they worry me. I think there’s some sort of cult mentality going on here. We need to do something about them.

Every week or so, I get an email reminding me about my high school reunion coming up in August. I was excited at the prospect of seeing some old friends again, until I looked at the people who had actually committed to come. It strikes me that there are really only two kinds of people who go to these reunions: those who want to brag about how successful they are, and those who are lonely and desperate and clinging to the hope that they’ll be able to hook up with an equally desperate person attending the reunion. So I’m becoming less sure of my desire to attend. Should I go?

Sometimes, to counter needlessly complicated thinking (such as the previous post), my brain decides to even things out by dumbing things down a bit. So let’s talk about paper plates. You can buy those really cheap ones for a fraction of the price of the thicker plates with the fancy designs. But you end up accidentally using four of the cheap ones, since they always stick together, so you probably don’t save any money anyway. Is it too late to blame this post on the summer cold I have?

I recently read an article that stated it is unlikely that any terrorist group would be able to build a nuclear bomb, because it’s enormously expensive and difficult to enrich uranium, and weapons-grade nuclear materials are very tightly controlled. But this morning I was thinking about the ever-increasing price of oil. Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producer in the world, and it also has known ties with terrorists. What if they deliberately limited production, causing prices to rise, in order to fund the nuclear ambitions of terrorists? And that, my friends, is how to create something to worry about out of thin air. But hey, the media do it all the time.

In math classes we are taught that if a number is 5 or above, you round it up, and you round it down if it’s 4 or lower. Does that rule still hold true when it comes to personal information? At what point are you allowed to round your age up? If you’re 17 and your birthday is one week away, are you allowed to say you’re 18? Obviously from a legal perspective you can’t do that, but what about in casual conversation? And what about height? I’m tired of being half an inch shy of six feet tall. And yet I can’t bring myself to round it up, because it somehow seems dishonest. And then, of course, there’s the question of weight. I’d like to gather a bunch of people and weigh them, then compare their actual weight with what their driver’s license says. That could make for some amusing cases of “creative math.”

Pictured below is our little garden. We're using a technique called square foot gardening , which lets you pack a lot of veggies (or flowers, if you really want) in a small space. The strings divide it into square feet, so you can better keep track of what you plant and where. Last night when I went out to water the garden, one of the strings was weighed down under some dirt. I thought that was odd, and as I pulled the string up from the dirt I saw that it was weighed down because a cat had had been digging in my garden. Guess how I knew it was a cat. (Hint: it involves a shovel and a plastic bag.) Not pictured: cat feces

Things you should never say during a job interview: “Sorry I’m late. I’m terrible at managing my time.” “I plan to have your job in six months.” “Do you mind if I take off my shoes? It helps dry out the fungus.” “As you can see, I listed my parole officer as a reference.” “Do you have any Cheetos? I’ve got a bad case of the munchies.” “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Jabba the Hutt?” What else?

Which produces worse results: a singer who tries to launch an acting career (like Mariah Carey), or an actor who tries to launch a singing career (like Steven Seagal)?

There's something that's been bothering me lately. Many of us think that "the world is full of stupid people," as the song goes. We are convinced that the majority of those around us are morons. And yet, statistically speaking, there is probably an overlap, which means that some of us who think that way are in the stupid majority. I mean, if 60% of people think that 90% of the world is stupid, some of those 60% must be included. Ipso fact o. (I just threw that Latin in there to try to convince myself that I'm not part of the 90%.)

The other night I had a dream that I was still in college. It was near the end of the semester and I suddenly realized that I had a couple classes that I blew off entirely and never went to or did work for. Now I realize that I’ve had that dream a lot of times. What are some dreams you’ve had multiple times?

Here's my latest idea for a T-shirt:

Lately I’ve been perusing the archives on the Popular Science website. It’s always cool to read about robots and crazy scientific theories, but the thing that I like best is reading about some long-running experiment that was about to take place, then going over to Wikipedia to see how it turned out, since the article was written five years ago. It’s a great way to get your news, if you’ve got the patience. It’s kind of like seeing GM’s “ Futurama ” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, which was all about how wonderful (and, presumably, drug-free) life in the 1960s was going to be.

Every once in a while there is a short time when the air temperature outside is absolutely perfect. If I stand still I can’t feel the air at all; it’s not warm or cold, but absolutely neutral. I haven’t been able to figure out what that temperature is, but it happened again on Sunday when I was at my parents’ house. I also realized that it’s important that the sun not be shining directly on me, or it will feel too warm. I rushed inside and looked at this neat thermometer they have which tells the outside temperature, and it said 78 degrees. So now I’ll have to conduct some sort of experiment to see if that truly is the perfect temperature. Am I the only one who has noticed this? BTW, thanks for the title idea, Jen.

Every once in a while there is a short time when the air temperature outside is absolutely perfect. If I stand still I can’t feel the air at all; it’s not warm or cold, but absolutely neutral. I haven’t been able to figure out what that temperature is, but it happened again on Sunday when I was at my parents’ house. I also realized that it’s important that the sun not be shining directly on me, or it will feel too warm. I rushed inside and looked at this neat thermometer they have which tells the outside temperature, and it said 78 degrees. So now I’ll have to conduct some sort of experiment to see if that truly is the perfect temperature. Am I the only one who has noticed this? BTW, thanks for the title idea, Jen.