When Does Week 2 Start?

After Week 1, my Fantasy Fantasy Football team is in first place 

Good for you, Jeremy!  One of these days, we might get you to bump up to actual Fantasy Football.

Not very likely.  

So, Fantasy Football is a big deal thing.  It costs businesses an estimated 17 Billion dollars per season (estimate by Fortune Magazine for the 2016 season) in lost worker productivity.  Lots and lots of people spend lots and lots of time organizing rosters of digital players, and root for their statistics, and not their teams, in the week's NFL games.  It's a little weird having shifted from a world of "I hope my team wins" to "I hope my team wins by one point and the other team scores a ton because I need their quarterback to throw many touchdown passes."  It happens. 

It doesn't happen for me, though.  See, I don't pay nearly enough attention to football to participate in Fantasy Football.  That takes more than just a knowledge of how the sport is played and an only passing interest in ever even seeing the games.  If somebody says, "Hey, Jeremy.  We're going to a restaurant establishment in the Greater Jeremy Area to watch football.  You must join," then I will join.  Failing that, there's a better than even chance that I'll find something to do that does not involve football.  

This leads to a shortage of knowledge about football.

I don't know which teams are good, which teams have which players, which players are any good, which team has players that might be good some day, which teams have which strengths and weaknesses which can be used to an advantage (a smart Fantasy Football player would avoid starting a reasonably good wide receiver if he's playing against the best pass defense in the league, for example)...none of that nonsense.  To become good at Fantasy Football, I would need to obtain a great deal of knowledge about a subject I don't care about.  So first, I would need to obtain a more than rudimentary interest in football, then obtain all of this knowledge.  I simply don't care that much.  

I don't play Fantasy Football.

This, of course, doesn't stop people from talking about Fantasy Football non-stop during the football season.  It's okay, I guess.  It's something that interests them.  But, if I'm to be part of nearly any conversation for the next 5 months (since most of my friends don't talk about hockey), I need to do Fantasy Football.  Therefore, I have a Fantasy Fantasy Football team, in which I pretend to have a Fantasy Football team.  It accomplishes pretty much the same thing as regular Fantasy Football but without any of the fuss of Fantasy Football.  There are no league drafts, or salary caps, or decisions on how many kickers to carry, or scouting reports for upcoming games, or Oxford commas, or last minute roster changes due to injury.  But, I can still brag about how well my team did last week.  It works because nobody cares enough to actually see if I'm in first place or not.  They're too busy deciding which Wide Receiver to start next week. 

Look, Kids! Big Ben...Parliament!

Do we really need 4 auto parts stores within 10 miles on the same road?  

Well, if your car breaks down, how far do you really want to walk to get to an auto parts store?  This actually seems a little sparse if you look at it that way.  

So, most of you know by now that I work as an engineer.  Many people misunderstand what this means.  They think I can build anything, understand all things mechanical, and can fix anything that happens to break.  Most of this is not true.  I'm only mildly competent at building things (ask me how my circular tchotchke stand is coming together), I have a rudimentary understanding of machines, and can fix a number of things that I would consider slightly above average.  These things are not what engineering is all about.  That said, one of the things that I roughly never fix by myself is my car.  

I know how to take the wheels off, to change a tire or whatnot, I can find and fill a majority of the consumable fluids, I can take the wiper blades off, and I'm pretty sure I've changed a headlight, but that's about it.  Because of this, I have precious little use for auto parts stores.  I'm not the target market for them.

So, the fact that there is an auto parts store within a mile of my house is all but lost on me.  I've bought things there, to be sure...some cleaning products, the aforementioned wiper blades, and a new battery when the one I had died (they installed it for me...but I probably could have done that myself if need be).  But overall, my shadow does not spend an awful lot of time darkening the door of that particular location.  This is not because the location is inconvenient.  

It was announced not long ago that a segment of land not far from my house was going to be developed for business.  Often, this is a very exciting time, as some new store or restaurant will be joining the local economy and offering me new places to buy stuff and/or have dinner.  It was significantly less exciting when it was announced that the businesses that would be setting up shop in that locale were going to be a franchise location of a chain of low-priced buffet style restaurants (which we'll refer to, for strictly Blag purposes as "Aurelian Paddock"), and an auto parts store.  Seriously?  It's less than two miles from the existing auto parts store.  

Less than 8 miles in the other direction from the original auto parts store, on the exact same road as the aforementioned auto parts stores, there is an auto parts store.  We are now entering overkill country.  

All that having been said...I was driving along this particular stretch of road (In between the two southernmost auto parts stores) and I passed a plaza that I have passed many times.  A dance club at the end of the plaza was closed and demolished a couple years ago, and has been a dirt patch ever since, but recently had started to see some construction-type action.  This time around, I saw a "Coming Soon" sign, telling me what exciting new business opportunity was being added to the location.  And guess what is about to be coming to the site!  

An auto parts store.  

There you have it.  Within 10 miles on a single stretch of road in the Greater Jeremy Area, there will soon be no fewer than 4 auto parts stores...and I'm pretty sure at least two of them are from the same chain.  

In case you're wondering, this is, in fact, the same stretch of road that has no fewer than 6 (and I think it's actually 8 now) Doughnut Franchises in roughly the same distance.

Efficiency!

It’s a new record!  My new phone book didn’t even make it within 50 feet of my house!

What's a "phone book?"

Star Trek has always done a remarkably good job of predicting the future.  Perhaps there's a lot to be said for self-fulfilling prophecies, such as the designer of the original flip-phone modelling it after a Star Trek communicator, but an awful lot of the technology that has appeared on Star Trek later appeared in real life.  Touch screens, cell phones, tablet computers, Google Glass, verbal computer interfaces...the list goes on.  

What might this have to do with phone books, you might ask?  Well, I've seen many episodes of Star Trek over the years, encompassing four different TV shows (Never watched "Enterprise," and I'm not entirely sure why), all of the movies, and even a couple of the books.  In all of that media, I have never once seen somebody open up a phone book to look up somebody's number.  Maybe this is a true harbinger of things to come, but for the time being, though just about everybody in the entire phone-using community has graduated to using a computer to look up phone numbers (or just doing it on a smartphone, which can then instantly make the call for you), the phone company remains 100% insistent on providing phone books.  I haven't used one in a long, long time, and it's now been over a year since one has even been in my house.  

I thought it was amusing Last Year that my phone book lasted 5 hours in between being dropped off at my doorstep, finding its way to the recycle bin in the garage, and making its way to the curb.   Well, ladies, gentlemen, and people from Elmira, a new standard has been set!  That's right, in a genius moment of laziness, the phone company people, instead of placing my new phone book on my doorstep, simply tossed it out the window of their car onto the end of my driveway.  Awesome.  

Fortunately, they still had the presence of mind to do this on garbage day.  Upon taking the trash and recycling bins out to the curb, I simply paused to add the new phone book to the collection.  Yes, the book again lasted a matter of hours, but never got any closer to the house than the end of the driveway.  Great job, phone company.  You made the process of instantly throwing out your phone book one step shorter.