September Ended Some Time Ago

I got to sleep in today because I can’t tell time!  


Well, I suppose that's one way to go about it.  Probably explains why you were late to work.  


I was in the office at precisely the usual time.  Maybe even a little early, since I beat that one school bus.

So, here's a little insight into how things go in Jeremy-Land. 

During the winter, the house tends to be pretty cold at night.  This is ostensibly to help the environment by lessening my use of fossil fuels, but it's also because it's cheaper.  I also own several blankets which do a terrific job of keeping me warm at night, and it would be a shame to waste their effectiveness.  I also enjoy wrapping myself up in a those blankets to make a little Jeremy Burrito at night, which would be too hot if the ambient temperature weren't on the low side.  Bottom line, cold house, warm blankets. 

That is, until about 20 minutes before my alarm goes off.

See, my programmable thermostat warms up the house during the time between my standard wake-up call and the time when I have to leave for work.  It's also smart enough to know that it takes around 20 minutes to heat the house, so it starts the ramp-up process a little early so that the correct temperature is achieved at the correct time.  It's pretty smart that way.

However, a side effect of that is that the temperature in the house is gradually increasing during that time to the point where the little Jeremy Burrito notices and becomes too warm, occasionally waking me up in that 20-minute window in between when the temperature starts increasing and when the alarm goes off.  It's a fact of life that I have to deal with in the winter months when the heat is on.  Not a big deal, usually.  If I find myself in this situation, I look at the clock, notice the time and make some snap decisions.

I believe I've noted on this Blag that despite my considerable genius, my brain may not be running at its full potential first thing in the morning. 

Regardless, if it's early in the temperature ramp process, and I still have around 20 minutes to go before the alarm, I just roll over and go back to sleep, effectively hitting the snooze button (which I otherwise never do on principle) until it's actually time to get up.  Failing that, if there's closer to 5 minutes left before alarm, there's not much snooze time left, and it will already be warm, so I'll just grab my phone and start reading through Email/Facebook/Twitter/Internets or whathaveyou to get a jump start on my day.  Then, once the alarm starts, I get out of bed and do the whole "getting up" thing. 

That's normal. 

Not long ago, I woke up in the morning, looked at the clock and noticed the time.  I figured that I had 5 minutes left until the alarm, so I grabbed the phone and started scrolling through notifications and such.  I went through this process for a little while before I realized that I was getting through more internets than I usually do in my 5 allotted minutes, and I was still cold, so I took another quick glance up at the clock (despite the fact that I was holding my phone which has any number of clocks on it).  It told me that I still had a full 28 minutes left before alarm time. 

So, apparently, my first viewing of the clock actually told me that I had 35 minutes of sleep time left, so I totally jumped the gun on the whole phone bit.  I still had a solid half hour to sleep in. 

Bonus! Collectible Quarters Now Even More Valuable!

Why do cents come in groups of 25, and dollars come in groups of 20?  

Please tell me this isn't one of those rhetorical questions like why we drive on parkways and park on driveways.  

Everybody loves amusing rhetorical questions!  But no...this isn't one of those.  It is rhetorical, I guess, since I'm not really expecting an explanation, but it really is a genuine question that has been plaguing me for a long long time.

Since about 7:30 this morning.  

That's a long time!  

So anyway, money is weird and confusing.  I remember back in grade school, when math class (or "maths," for our British readers) included many a lesson on currency.  They had to explain what coins were available and how to properly count out a certain number of cents using the fewest possible coins.  I never had a problem with it, since I'm a genius, but I would often have problems with self-righteous teachers telling me I got an answer wrong because I didn't put the cent sign after the correct number.  That sort of thing happens a lot when you're a genius.  It's the price we pay.  

Anyway, if you think about it, 25 is a weird number to use when dividing up a dollar.  Sure, it makes 50 really easy to come by, but is it honestly that much of a sacrifice for the sake of easy math?  If we were like the rest of the world (And by "rest of the world" I mean any country that uses Euros and the Bosnian Convertible Mark, since that's the amount of research I put into this...asking a Bosnian what money they used), dollar would be broken up into 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent increments.  Dollars already come in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 denominations for those of you who, unlike me, don't roll exclusively with hundreds.  

The only difference in American coins is the 25 cent coin, which isn't even twenty five cents!  Look at one...nowhere on there does it say it's worth 25 cents.  It says it's a Quarter Dollar.  So now, you not only have to understand currency and values, but you have to know fractions in order to figure out 25 cents.  Granted, it's not something that most of us think about, but that's exactly the sort of thing that pops into my head and builds a nest and stays for weeks.  In fact, almost none of our coins tell you how much they're worth.  Penny is one cent, Nickel is five cents, Dime is ten cents, Quarter is 25 cents, and Fifty-Cent Piece is not surprisingly Fifty Cents.  At least only the names of the Penny, Nickel, and Dime are missing from the coin itself...they actually tell you how much they're worth.  But tell somebody not from America to give you a Dime, and they won't know which coin to hand over, since none of them have the word "Dime" on them.  This is unnecessarily confusing.

So, while there is a genuine (and entirely reasonable) push to eliminate the penny from American currency, I think those efforts are a little off the mark.  We should be replacing the quarter with a 20-cent piece.  That way, at least the denominations on either side of the decimal point will match up and you only have to learn one set of math equations to deal with money.  You'll have 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50.  Then, regardless of if you have to come up with 83 cents or 83 dollars, you can do it the same way...a 50, a 20, a 10, and three 1s.  Boom, done.  

Genius. 

Friends Don't Let Friends Read Comment Sections

Who else set off the smoke alarm making dinner last night?  

In addition to all of the other topics you may already be familiar with, Jeremy is also a Culinary Genius.  Here's a fun-filled story of Jeremy's adventures with cooking dinner and trying to not burn his house down.  

So, yeah...my house was never in any danger of burning down.  

Also, people who post recipes on the internets need to learn science.  

Or maybe proofread. 

Anyway, not long ago, I was making dinner, as I am wont to do, using a brand new recipe I saw posted on the internets somewhere.  Strictly speaking, it was a recipe for a side dish, but that's beside the point entirely.  It was for over-roasted potatoes which are supposed to come out really soft, but still entirely contained within their potato-slice shape.  You get the idea.  So, the start of the recipe seemed entirely ordinary...peel and slice a couple pounds of potatoes, toss them with some olive oil and some secret herbs and spices, then arrange them on a baking pan.  I got through all of that pretty much intact.  

The next step was to heat the over to a rather significant temperature.  The temperature called for in the recipe seemed a little excessive at the time, but an undercooked potato can be hard, starchy tasting, and Lead To Hallucinations at the very worst, so I foolishly believed something I saw on the internet that wasn't posted on my Blag and set the oven. 

As it turns out, the temperature to which I set my over was not only too high for the cooking aspects of the recipe (I ended up cutting the cooking times nearly in half with satisfactory results), but it was too high for the smoke point of the olive oil I had used.  I thought that might be the case, but couldn't be bothered to look it up.  This caused a not insignificant amount of smoke to billow out of the oven when I opened it to turn over my potatoes.  Thinking quickly, I opened up some windows in the house and turned a fan on to clear the air.  

Thinking more slowly, my smoke alarm sounded off about 5 minutes later, alerting me to smoke in the house.  

For what it's worth, the potatoes came out fairly tasty.  In the manner of every comment ever on every recipe on every cooking site everywhere on the internets: 

"I'd give it 3.5 out of 5 stars, but only because I cooked it at a different temperature for different times, and I substituted all of these ingredients for some other crap because I decided to and didn't actually make the recipe that I'm reviewing.  It turned out okay, but my second cousin once removed didn't like the texture, so I took off another half of a star.  Would make again." 

Where It All Went Wrong

Nobody from fifth grade is ever going to tell me I was right about that question that one time

You're the only person from fifth grade who even remembers that question.  

That's part of what makes it worse.  Somewhere out there, there is a classroomful of people who were once all smug about being right when Jeremy was wrong who are living their miserable little lives in blissful ignorance of the fact that I was right.  Oh...and like one other person who had the same answer I did.  And a classroom textbook author who put in the wrong answer and owes me an apology that I'll never get.  

Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy holds grudges when it's funny.  

So, to preface this story, I would like to point out that this is all true.  Why it popped into my head the other day (and randomly does on occasion) I will never know.  We take you back to Jeremy's fifth grade class and a specific lesson dealing in the difference between fact and opinion.  We'll leave aside the fact that this is a lesson that could very well stand to be retaught to everyone talking about politics on the internets.  We all know the difference by now...a fact is a bit of information that can be researched and proven (true or false), while an opinion is somebody's personal belief about something.  For example, "George Washington's portrait is on the front of the $1 Bill" is a fact easily proven by looking at a $1 bill.  I can't do that, since I only roll with 100's, but that's beside the point.  "Nicolas Cage is the worst actor in the history of creation," is a personal viewpoint, which, while shared by most everyone, makes it merely an opinion.  

So, back in fifth grade, we had gotten a worksheet with a series of statements on it, and we were to identify whether each statement was a fact or an opinion.  One would think this is pretty easy, and one would be right.  "Fred has 15 pencils."  Fact.  "Susie is the best-dressed person in the class."  Opinion.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  100% score, right?  

Wrong.  

I got one marked wrong.  Now, I was never shown the teacher's edition of the worksheet which showed the publisher's answer, but my answer did not match what my fifth grade teacher thought the answer was.  Whether my teacher's answer matched the publisher's, I'll never know.  I suspect it did not.  While I'll admit that the question was tricky, the answer is pretty clear.  I remember it like it was yesterday. 

"Jim thinks that Billy is the best choice for class president."  

FACT. 

According to either my teacher or the publisher, that is incorrect.  The above statement is an opinion.  This is bull.  

You see...the statement is actually two things in one.  It's a fact referencing an opinion, which is why it's tricky.  Is Billy the best choice for class president?  Who knows?  That's an opinion....but that's not the question now, is it?  The question is whether or not JIM THINKS that Billy is the best choice.  That's an easy bit of information to research and prove one way or the other.  Ask Jim.  The best choice for class president is a matter of opinion, but identifying what somebody's opinion is is 100% fact.  

"Jeremy's opinion is that Nicolas Cage is the worst actor in the history of creation."  Fact.  Want to prove that Jeremy thinks that?  Ask Jeremy.  Spoiler alert:  I do think that. 

There was debate in the class about this question, and myself and like one other person were right about it, but that never seemed to matter.  I still got the question marked wrong and it has clearly affected the rest of my life.  I'm still waiting for my apology, but deep down inside, I know it will never arrive.