Another Bear To Follow You Around

Commercials should not use the word “bestest”  

Yet, there is so very much one that does.  It's a pretty terrible commercial regardless, but this just pretty well seals the deal.  

Even for those of you, like me, who have joined the war on Christmas, we're now officially in the Christmas season.  Thanksgiving is long past, it's Mid December, trees are up, lights are on, presents are wrapped, cookies are made, Hanukkah is over...fine.  It's Christmas.  This means Christmas music is everywhere, and there's nothing we can do about it, because it's actually justified now.  

Of course, Christmas music is often misused, such as in the case of a certain car manufacturer who is misusing the holiday pile of hot garbage classic, "Jingle Bell Rock" for their radio commercials.  There need to be rules about this sort of thing.  The lyrics are a little messed up in order to fit into the rhythm of the song, but not quite as horribly as that mobile phone add which uses "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" to sing every last legal disclaimer ever invented for a mobile phone carrier.  They also end the jingle (no pun intended) by singing, "That's why *Unnamed Car Sales Event* Roooooooocks!"  Seriously?  Nothing "rocks" anymore.  This is a clear case of some stuffed shirt advertising executive going out of his way to show just how hip and cool he is with the current generation while failing miserably at it.  And the poor singer who is just trying to make a living by singing commercial jingles is on the receiving end of a terrible lyric sheet.   

The lyrics also for some completely inexplicable reason make use of the word "bestest."  It doesn't even fit the music!  It doesn't make sense either musically or linguistically, and yet it's one of the key points of the song.  It really is pretty terrible and just helps put people out of the Christmas spirit. 

So uhmmm...Happy Holidays!

That's going to wrap up 2015 for all of us here at Jeremy Is In The Office!  We'll be Out Of The Office through the remainder of the Holiday Season and return on monday, January 4th with a whole new year of Sametime Fun and Frivolity.  Who knows...maybe one of these years, we'll start getting this "comedy" thing right.  

Have a safe and merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, and we'll see everyone in January! 

The Real Answer Is In Your Little Brown Jug

Is it too soon for accidental Ritchie Valens jokes?  Asking for a friend...


Here's a secret.  The "friend" is Jeremy. 


I have no idea what you're talking about.  Today's Sametime Status is referring to a purely hypothetical person who, for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call "Jerome."   


Fair enough, Jerome...I mean, Jeremy.  How did you go about accidentally making a Ritchie Valens joke anyway?


Well, one of my...I mean Jerome's coworkers uses his Sametime Status as a vehicle for sharing daily trivia questions with his loyal readers.  Not long ago, the question was about a big band leader who mysteriously vanished some time ago.


First person who starts singing "In The Mood" gets a boot in the pants.  


While discussing the question with others, one person remarked how they thought the answer dealt with "The Day The Music Died," but couldn't remember the name of the artist involved.  I...I mean...Jerome...absentmindedly remarked, "No, that was Ritchie Valens.  They know where he landed," in order to disqualify the answer for a question having to do with a missing person. 


Nice work, pinhead. 


So, for those of you unawares, Ritchie Valens, along with Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Roger Peterson died in a plane crash in Iowa on February 3, 1959.  That day would become known as "The Day The Music Died," as Valens, Holly, and Richardson were all well known musical artists of the day.  

It quite honestly was merely a poor choice of words to say that they "landed," and at least a little insensitive.  I...I mean...Jerome felt a little bad about the somewhat Freudian slip, but 56 years after the fact, maybe the statute of limitations has worn off.  After all, we can make the Abraham Lincoln joke now, and that's okay!  


"I need to see this play like I need a hole in the head."  


It's not quite The Skeleton Joke, but nothing is.  

I've Turned It Into A Game

My toy train doesn’t stop where it’s supposed to

You're supposed to buy it a little station to stop at, Jeremy.  Clearly, the problem is you.

That's not exactly the problem.  It stops correctly when I tell it to.  I just usually don't tell it to.

So how can you complain that it doesn't stop in the right place?  There's no tiny engineer running the thing.

Because math.

So, you're probably aware by now that I work as an engineer.  That means that things are supposed to be consistent and make sense in order to make me happy.  Ideally, if you do things the exact same way each time, you get the same results every time.  It's the natural order of things, and it's really quite satisfying when it works out. 

My train doesn't work out.  

I should explain one other concept here.  I got an adorably tiny toy train to run around the base of my Christmas tree.  Its purpose in life is to do just that...meaning I'm not entirely clear what I'm going to do with the thing for 10 months out of the year, but that's beyond the scope of these proceedings.  What's important is that I bought a toy train.  Also worthy of note is that the lights on my tree are plugged into a timer.  At some point in the early evening, the lights come on, and at some point slightly after bedtime, the lights turn off.  Pretty standard fare.  Well, the toy train is plugged into the same timer, so when the lights come on, the train starts its little rectangular journey.  I have not adjusted the speed of the train since I set up the tree.  This is important.  

So, you would expect that with the train running at a constant speed (It kinda doesn't, since it goes a little slower when it has to make the climb to the rug, and goes a little faster on the way down to the floor, but you really have to be paying attention to notice the difference.  Either way, it's a pretty consistent variation, so it shouldn't matter) and the timer running for a constant time, and the length of track being constant, that there should be some order to the place where the train stops when the timer turns everything off.  

You would be wrong.  

This irritates me a little.  I would think that the train would make a reasonably consistent number of laps around the tree, stopping in a predictable place with respect to the last stop.  If one day, it stops in the front of the rectangle, and the next day it stops on the right side, I would expect the following day, it would stop in the back, having completed X+3/4 laps in the allotted time.  I don't know where the variation is coming from, but there is clearly some margin for error in my system, since the train stops seemingly wherever it darn well chooses.  Either the train is not traveling at a constant speed, or the timer just guesses at what time it's supposed to click off.  The track length is pretty fixed here.  Those are the only two possibilities, really.  It drives me a little nutty, and is the sort of thing nobody else would have even noticed if I hadn't said anything.