He And The Thrift Shop Guy Should Get Together

When Gandhi said “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” I don’t think “50 Cent” is what he was talking about

Well, I guess the only way to know for sure is to go ask him.  

Well, if I were to have a conversation with Gandhi, it would be an interesting experience, since he died 65 years ago, so I think that's out of the equation. 

First of all, let's get the elephant out of the room and acknowledge that there is plenty of doubt as to whether or not Gandhi actually said this phrase which has propagated itself onto just about every form of medium somebody can sell on the internets.  A more accurate interpretation of Gandhi's teachings on this particular subject may be Found Here.  Either way, it's a nice quote and sentiment.  

50 Cent (pronounced "Fiddy Sen") is Curtis Jackson III, a hip hop artist who does what hip hop artists do.  He raps about how good a rapper he is, holds up money in his "music" videos, engages in feuds with other rappers, and starts his own record labels.  This probably goes without saying.  Also, I've never seen one of his videos, so I'm just going with the assumption that he holds up money.  Go ahead and prove me wrong.  

In addition to being a hip hop artist, 50 Cent is an amount of money, equal to one half of a dollar.  This amount of cash is usually received as change for making a purchase without a whole dollar amount.  

Yeah, I think we got the joke.

In that case, I'll just leave off here by wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Indeed.  Jeremy will be on vacation next week, so there will be no Sametime Statuses for your edutainment.  As such, Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office from November 23 through December 1st.  We'll return on monday, 12/2 with all new goodies! 

Now I Want Chicken

In a bit of revisionist history, Cap’n Crunch teamed up with one of his sailors, Popeye, to make a chicken-flavored breakfast cereal.  It was terrible

Well, at least this time, Revisionist History is about fictional characters, so we won't get sued.  I still can't condone this.

The loyal readers have a right to know.  

They have a right to no further nonsense, is what I think you mean.

So anyway...everyone knows Horatio Magellan "Cap'n" Crunch, of breakfast cereal fame.  Everyone also knows the lovable Popeye the Sailor Man, who later went on to start his own chain of Fried Chicken Restaurants.  Did you know that Popeye was one of the crew of the S.S Guppy led by the Good Cap'n?  Well, these two astute sailors worked together for a number of years spreading their love of fine cuisine all over the world.  Not to be outdone by the cook of the ship "Hispanola" who's name escapes me at the moment, who had long since opened his own chain of fried chicken/fish/hush puppies restaurants, Popeye and Cap'n Crunch worked together on a number of culinary projects.  

Part of this expansion into the epicurean realm, Quaker Oats, the company already mass-producing the Good Cap'n's breakfast cereal commissioned Popeye to be the mascot for their own product, as seen in This Commercial From 1990.  While sales of Quaker Oatmeal weren't hurt by the nautical endorsement, it wasn't a boon for sales as Quaker was hoping for.  They decided to discontinue using Popeye as merely an advertisement, and to actively create a new breakfast product themed around the already successful Cap'n (who's product is also produced by Quaker).  The combination of Horatio Crunch's cereal expertise and Popeye's chicken talents resulted in "Popeye's Poultry Puffs," a crunchy corn-based ball cereal similar to Kix, but with the taste of chicken.  Really, it was mostly salt-flavored, like Ramen noodles, but was also available in honey barbecue.  

The only problem is that they were awful.  Unfortunately for Popeye (and his friendship with Horatio), the cereal tested miserably with the focus groups and never made it to the shelves.  Quaker offered Horatio Crunch a new long-term breakfast contract and a promotion to Admiral on the condition that he sever his working relationship with Popeye.  This resulted in a heated physical altercation between the Cap'n and the Sailor Man in which Popeye's right eye was permanently damaged (you can still see him squinting in every picture), and the two were never seen together again. 

Horatio Crunch was subsequently demoted back to Cap'n, given command of the Guppy again and sailed off into breakfast fame.  Popeye joined the long list of military-based chicken success stories (General Tso, Colonel Sanders, that guy from the Hispanola, etc.) by settling in Louisiana and devoting his life to his new restaurant.  The rest, as they say...is history. 

1, 2, 3 Is Easier. I Can Handle That

Whoever coined the phrase “Easy as pie” obviously never made a pie

Dinner at Jeremy's tonight!  He made dessert, apparently.

Actually, no.  I haven't made a pie recently, but I have done so in the past.  Either way, here we are, nearing pumpkin pie season, having made our way through summer pie season (cherry or strawberry-rhubarb are acceptable answers), and in the heart of apple pie season (I prefer Granny Smith apples for baking, but your mileage may vary).    Regardless of the season, it would seem, pie is involved.  So it's important to be able to make pies, or at the very least, eat them. 

In case you are caught unawares, making a pie is a pain in the buns.


Who's making buns?  I thought we were talking about pie.  


I suppose you can go with the new-fangled lazy approach and buy a pie crust, buy a can of pie filling, dump one into the other (the order matters here, people), and call it home-made pie, but that's not only the easy way out, but it's also too modern.  The phrase "Easy as pie" has been around since the last 1800s, long before the advent of pre-made or frozen pie crusts.  So I have no idea who it was that thought pie was easy, or why they thought that.  What I do know is that they've never made pie.

Pie is hard, folks.  You have to mix up all the ingredients to form a dough, then roll out the dough into the top and bottom crusts (not always applicable, since a Pumpkin pie usually has no upper crust, but you get the idea), mix up your filling, which usually involves some form of cooking other than just piling fruit into a bowl, transfer your crust into a pie pan without breaking it, loading the filling into the crusted pan, transferring the second crust (sometimes involving weaving....I've totally done that, too), trimming and crimping edges, baking, wrapping the crust edges with foil to prevent burning, and then finally, you get to the eating.  This is a lot of work.  Sure, most of the time it's totally worth it (seriously...who's ever had a really bad piece of pie?), but it's anything but easy.  Sadly, I'm forced to Call Bunk on things being as easy as pie.  

If It Said "Get Well Soon" I'd Feel Really Bad

A very special Happy Birthday to whoever’s mylar balloon landed on my deck last night

The odds of that person reading this right now are pretty slim.

While that may be true, on the off chance that I can brighten somebody's day, I'm taking this opportunity to extend a birthday wish.   

So, here I am this morning, getting ready for work, as I am wont to do, and I notice a string going across part of my deck.  As it turns out, it was attached to a balloon which said "Happy Birthday."  I don't know anyone upwind from me who's had a birthday recently, and there was no name and address attached to the string, so I'm pretty much at a loss in terms of who it belongs to.  All I know is that their birthday celebration included at least one mylar balloon.  

I'm assuming there was more involved, but one can never judge.  

So, I guess my plan for this balloon is to hold on to it for a couple days to see if anyone shows up to claim it, and if not, I'll dispose of it humanely.  Just seems like a waste of a perfectly good, though somewhat flat, balloon.  Happy Belated Birthday! 

I Don't Know Of Any Song Using Krang's Name

I heard a song not long ago saying I’d better be ready to Rock Steady.  What about Bebop?

I would suggest that you always be ready to both Rock Steady and Bebop.  That way, regardless of the situation you find yourself in, you'll be prepared.  

So today's Sametime Status comes to you courtesy of the song "Rocksteady" by Marc Broussard.  I'd never heard it until recently, and didn't really think all that much of it.  Apparently, it was released in 2004, so that doesn't say a lot for me, either.  

Regardless, the song was very adamant that I be prepared to Rock Steady when Mr. Broussard showed up.  I'm not entirely clear as to why, but that's neither here nor there.  In theory, it should have made me think about how I would go about Rocking Steady, but as is often the case, I started thinking about cartoons.  

See, Rocksteady was a character in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe of comics, cartoons, movies, and merchandise.  He was your standard, run of the mill street thug before being turned into a mutant rhinoceros street thug by Shredder.  He was always in the company of Bebop, also a street thug turned mutant warthog.  If Shredder was thinking properly, he would have turned one of them into a Honey Badger, but I digress again.  I was saddened by the fact that though Rocksteady was a primary subject of this song I was hearing, Bebop was nowhere to be found.  

So, Jeremy has decided to give all of you the rest of the week off to watch cartoons or whatever.  He'll be on vacation until monday.  As such, Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office tomorrrow, returning on 11/18.  Have a good weekend, everybody!

My Only Problem With The Show

So the primary species on Melmac looks like ALF, but cats evolved to be exactly the same as they are on earth

One more beloved TV show from everybody's past crapped all over by Jeremy.  Why does it have to be like this?   

It's just how the world works.  Lucky you!

So anyway, ALF was a sitcom from back in the late 80's.  It starred a puppet as alien Gordon Shumway who crash landed on top of the house of the Tanner family.  The family subsequently had to hide him from the government and their nosey neighbors while teaching him all about life, love, and culture here on earth.  

Despite the fact that the family knew his name was Gordon Shumway, they persisted in calling him "ALF" which was an acronym for "Alien Life Form" first introduced by family patriarch Willie Tanner in the first episode.  Seems an awful lot like getting a new puppy, naming him "Phydeaux" and referring to him as "Dog" for the rest of his life. 

Despite the fact that Gordon grew up on a planet multiple light years from earth (named Melmac, though the planet is said to have been destroyed in a nuclear war), and having myriad physical and philosophical differences from humans, a remarkably illogical number of similarities existed between the two species.  Melackians had pianos, a version of baseball, a standard currency, similar indoor plumbing fixtures, personal address through a given name and surname, and somehow were able to speak English (I don't know if this was ever canonically explained, but I don't care, it's ridiculous).  

 In addition, Melmackians had domesticated cats.  Their roles in society were completely different, as cats were similar to cows on Melmac, primarily used as food, but basically the same species.  So much so that Gordon was able to instantly recognize the Tanner family cat as a cat and proceed to try to eat him at every opportunity...to hilarious effect, of course.  This seems strange.  It's Well Documented that Melmac has a purple sun, among other planetary differences.  If we assume for a moment that traditional cats were not native only to earth (and transported within the last 9000 years as the current domesticated species), we're supposed to assume that life evolved on planet Melmac entirely differently for humanoids (resulting in an ALF-looking species) than it did for felines?  

By the way, this Blag is written by a scientist, so we believe in evolution here.  Sorry if this offends you.  

I'm forced to Call Bunk on Melmackian cats.  Thousands upon thousands of different species have existed, evolved, and maybe even become extinct here on earth, and the ones that have remained are here through unbelievably remote odds.  To believe that even one species could possibly progress in the same manner on two different planets with striking physical differences over millions of years of evolution is just too much of a reach for me.  Sorry, Gordon. 

Is It for Temperature Control?

How much do you have to love football to be the guy on Sunday squirting water into the players’ mouths?  

It would be amazing if that guy made more money than you.

He probably does, but for the good of the entire world, I certainly hope not.  

So, you've all seen this guy.  He has what has to be the worst job in the entire NFL.  He stands there on the sidelines holding a towel and two water bottles.  When players come from the field to the sidelines, he hands them the towel so they can wipe their heads, and then the players stare off into space and open their mouth while our hero squirts water into it.  That's his job.  He quirts water into people's mouths so they don't have to do it themselves.  

This is nonsense.  

These are some of the largest and most powerful athletes in the entire sporting world.  They're capable of bench pressing me.  I have to believe that their grips are strong enough to compress a water bottle enough to get a drink.  Yet, the team has a guy...presumably a paid position...who's sole job it is to squirt water at people.  It completely baffles me why the professional athletes are incapable of getting a drink of water by themselves.  I do it all the time, and I'm only am amateur. 

So, here you have a guy who I'm going to assume has his pick of what he wants to do for a living.  He chooses to work for an NFL team because he likes football.  He clearly can't be one of the players, perhaps not ready for the front office yet, got cut from the grounds-keeping crew, working his way up to being a trainer perhaps...and the only job left for him is water boy.  He sticks it out, just so he can say he works for an NFL team and gets his 2 1/2 seconds of air time on national TV when he's squirting water into a star player's mouth.  I can't imagine what it is about this job that keeps this guy coming back week after week.  The only thing that could even begin to explain it is a deep-seeded love of football and the chance to get into the games for free every weekend.  

You Came Here. This Is Your Fault

What do you get when you fill a sock with bass wind instruments made out of potatoes?

Jeremy...we've talked about this.

And based on that discussion, I decided to go with this as my Sametime Status today.  

 

But, the readers deserve better than this.

The readers, who are good and wonderful people, know what they're getting into when they come here.  This is exactly the kind of thing they come here for!

And they're going to stop if you go ahead with this, you know that, right?

Nah.  They're love me all the more for it.

You are completely delusional.  Seriously....I'm begging you not to finish this joke.

I'm going to.

Fine...don't say I didn't warn you.  So, Jeremy...what DO you get when you fill a sock with bass wind instruments made out of potatoes?

A Tube of Tuber Tubas! 

I'm leaving.

Have a good weekend, everybody!    

Vote Jeremy in 2028!!!

The 2013 campaign season is mercifully behind us.  In unrelated news, campaigning for the 2014 elections is in full swing!

I don't know if we can really fully embrace the 2014 elections just yet.  We need a good solid week or two of analysis from the 2013 elections first.

Very true, but so much of that analysis will consist of the implications the 2013 elections are going to have on the 2014 elections.  Two sides of the same coin, perhaps. 

Or the same side of two different coins, if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be believed.   

So what we now have are inane gasbags who are going to sit around on TV and talk about other inane gasbags who just got elected to do nothing but sit around and argue about why they should get re-elected next time.  It's a vicious circle, really.  The really amusing part about this particular election is how everybody is claiming victory, which you wouldn't think to be the case.

So there's this Governor who got re-elected in a walk.  It was actually terrific that the polls closed at 8PM Tuesday night, and at 8:02, with 0% of the vote counted, CNN declared a winner.  He won the election, but the other side also said that they won because the guy who actually won is closer to their ideology than other people from the governor's party.  

Another race for governor in a different state had a very different outcome.  Early polls suggested that one of the candidates would win in a landslide, if lots of people turned out to vote.  Roughly 25% of the population actually voted, and the guy won a close race.  The other candidate declared victory because the race was closer than it might have been, which means the other guy's policies are all wrong.  

Either way, all of these elected "leaders" will now go around campaigning for their next election every time a TV camera is trained on them.  We'll get to hear lots and lots about how the other side is destroying the country and how the only way we can avoid a disastrous fate is to vote for one party over the other.  Basically, business as usual, which means that this election...like the last many elections, and the next one...didn't change a thing.  Please prove me wrong. 

Just One Deeply Concerned Citizen

There was an awful lot of road construction in Georgia between 1979 and 1985.  Hopefully, they've got that all sorted out by now

Can I safely assume that you looked up construction project plans from Georgia for the time period in question?  

You absolutely can not.

In that case, I somewhat hesitate to ask how you drew this conclusion.

Well, if you remember Not Too Long Ago, I had a Sametime Status that had to do with the theme song to the old TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard."  Well, as is often the case, once my mind gets its little claws wrapped around something, I end up watching a bunch of Youtube videos about it.  

I would hope there's some form of therapy or a support group for this problem of yours.

What I came to learn is that there are no roads in Hazzard County Georgia.  There's one little town which may or may not be called "Hazzard" and that has a little bit of pavement, but the roads seem to be about 50 feet long, enough for a car to be forced to drift around corners before driving off into the countryside on dirt roads.  

The odd thing about all of these dirt roads is that they're constantly under construction.  Everywhere people drive at remarkably high speeds, they're faced with construction crews with large piles of dirt placed directly in the road.  With a single flagman positioned on one side of the construction, and only about 5 feet in front of the dirt pile (which is nowhere near enough of a buffer), this provides a remarkably unsafe work zone, and leads to cars running into these unfortunately placed piles and becoming airborne.  After one incident like this, you'd think there would be an investigation into how to make these work zones safer for the workers and the general public, but it seems like there never was, as this issue kept on happening for 6 years.  The Hazzard County Department of Public Works should really be investigated for allowing this sort of, dare I quip, hazardous work environment to continue.  

There's also the issue of the crumbling infrastructure throughout the county.  The sheer number of bridges that are "out" all over the place is staggering, causing people to resort to jumping their cars over rivers, streams, gulleys, farm houses, and ponds.  Why there was ever a bridge over a pond in the first place is anyone's guess, and only serves as a further indictment of Hazzard Country's poor town planning.  Where these bridges have been destroyed, there are never any signs posted as a warning, nor are the roads blocked off in any way, endangering the public some more.  In addition to the poor bridge maintenance, the maintenance of the dirt roads themselves leaves plenty to be desired.  Many of the roads seem to have large dips in them sufficient for causing cars to leave the road surface and once again become airborne.  Other roads have large patches of shrubbery overgrowing the roadway.  It probably comes as no surprise to you at this point that these shrubberies are readily run over by cars traveling at high speeds causing two or more of the car's wheels to leave the road surface, causing the car to either tip over (occasionally only tip to one side, riding on two wheels until the driver can rectify the situation), or leave the road surface entirely.  

After 1985, I stopped paying much attention to the goings on in Hazzard County, so I'm not sure whether any or all of these problems have been resolved.  For the sake of the county's residents, I certainly hope they have.  It sounds like an awfully dangerous place to live.  

For those interested in doing your own research into these issues, please consult This Resource. 

His Nickname Is Probably "Tiny"

In an amusing bit of irony, a football player named Incognito is the subject of a lot of news headlines

Incognito:  adjective.  Having one's identity concealed, as under an assumed name, especially to avoid notice or formal attentions.  I'd say having your name and picture splattered all over CNN and ESPN is the opposite of that. 

Football suffers from sharing the bulk of its playing season with Hockey, as you can well imagine.  That said, for the most part, football is played one day out of the week, and the other six, we can pretty safely ignore it.  The NFL tries to make it more relevant by having games on Thursday (which everybody hates) and monday (which nobody stays awake long enough to watch).  But you can't argue the fact that football is relevant that one day out of the week, so we can talk about it here for a bit.  

Apparently, it's become news that football players can be mean to each other.  Nowhere is this worse than in Miami, where one of the team's players has been suspended from the team for "conduct detrimental to the team" which by and large consists of being too mean to the rookies.  

To be clear, Jeremy is by no means condoning or marginalizing the topic of bullying.  He's using hyperbole to make a joke.  This message especially goes out to all of the very large football players who may be offended by this.  

The part of this story that's actually amusing is that the guy who got suspended is named "Incognito," and he's doing a remarkably poor job avoiding notice or formal attentions.  Perhaps if he kept a lower key, none of this would be an issue. 

I'm Not Planning On Leaving My Job At The Moment

Silly CCR.  You can’t roll on a river, you have to float

Well, if the Proud Mary was one of those floating casinos, you could roll dice while on the river, thereby validating the lyrics a little bit.

So today's Sametime Status concerns the classic CCR song "Proud Mary" which repeats the phrase "Rollin'...Rollin'...Rollin' on the river."  The song, I guess, is about a boat, and I've always assumed that it had nothing to do with gambling.  Here are some fun facts about this song:

• John Fogerty had never been east of Montana by the time this song, from the album "Bayou Country."

Despite the fact that the song consists of roughly one chord (The bridge changes, but that's about it), Fogerty claims to have been inspired by Beethoven's 5th syphony.

The song has since been covered over 100 times.  Some Of Which are significantly better Than Others.