Just Can't Let It Go

Yes, I’m still annoyed with that trivia question we got right.  Yes, I have a problem


This is merely scratching the coat of wax on the surface of your problems, Jeremy.  


So, not long ago was Trivia Night.  It's a thing that happens all over the place in all manner of forms.  In this particular instance, there was actually a buzzer that you had to press, and a guy who had to run around the bar getting people's answers after they buzzed in.  It was a unique change of pace and offered some significant advantages over other pub trivia methods once they replaced the battery in our buzzer and allowed it to actually work halfway through the first round.   

Needless to say, our team was composed of geniuses like myself and we won.  That's tangential to the story.  

One of the reasons that we won was our brutal domination of a category in the second round that involved weaponry used in Science Fiction.  Questions ranged all the way from Tron to the Death Star.  One of the questions dealt with Star Trek.  Surprise surprise.  Pretty much as soon as the host mentions anything out of the Star Trek universe, you're pretty much certain that the answer is going to be "phasers," and you'd be correct.  That was, in fact, the answer, and we totally did get it right.  However, there was a quirk in the question itself that irritated me.  The question said something about a thing you can set to stun, and then went on to talk about how it's a thing that Kirk and Spock would fire at the Borg.  

Star Trek fans are cringing right now.  

Yes, setting the phasers to "stun" is classic Star Trek.  Kirk, Spock, and the Borg are key fixtures in Star Trek.  But, kids...the timeline here is just all wrong.  See, Kirk and Spock were part of The Original Series, which deals with the Enterprise's "Five Year Mission" which takes place between the years 2245 and 2250.  Humans weren't introduced to the Borg until well into "The Next Generation,"in the year 2365.  While it's entirely true that the crews of The Original Series and Next Gen had some minor overlaps (McCoy had an abnormally long life and was a guest on Next Gen's Enterprise once, Scotty was trapped in suspended animation and made a single appearance, Spock was a Vulcan, so he lived long enough to see the Next Gen Crew, and there was an entire movie devoted to time travel between the two crews), none of these overlaps dealt with the Borg.  

It's quite safe to say that the trivia question was Bunk, as Kirk and Spock never canonically fired their phasers on the Borg...set to stun or otherwise. 

How About It, Future?

So, I guess now, we just look forward to April 5, 2063

It's really the only thing left.  A little sad, really.  

So, today is October 22, 2015.  I'm sure you've heard about this recently, but as of today, the entirety of the events in the "Back to the Future" trilogy have occurred in the past.  No, we don't have shoes with power laces, we don't quite have hoverboards (with water functionality or otherwise), and we don't have home nuclear fusion reactors that run on banana peels.  Also, the Cubs won't be winning the World Series.  

So what's next?  Now that we've looked forward at this vision of the future and have been left with nothing but disappointment, what future event can we look forward to?  

It seems obvious, really.  

NASA came out last week and showed evidence of some large object blocking the light coming from a distant star.  The star in question, named "KIC 8462852" (I propose renaming it to "Jeremy", but ball's in your court, NASA) has been under watch by scientists for 6 years.  During that time, we have seen the light from that star being interrupted on a far more irregular basis and by a far more significant basis than any planet would produce.  As time goes by, this may very well be the first significant evidence we've discovered of life outside of earth.  

April 5, 2063 is the day that humans successfully first achieve faster-than-light travel, thus resulting in First Contact with the Vulcan species.  I mean...canonically.  So it seems pretty clear that we have 47 years, 5 months and 14 days to get our act together as a species.  We'll also be keeping a close eye on anyone with the surname Cochrane to name their child Zefram. 

I Don't Have Room For All Those Jars

One fertilizer company severely overestimates the amount of money I spend on salsa

There can be no possible universe where this sentence makes any sense.  What in the blue crap are you talking about, Jeremy?  

I got an email yesterday.  That should sort it out for you. 

Not even a little.  

So, I occasionally like to attempt to get the grass in my front yard to grow better than it does.  That is to say, I would like there to be grass instead of the usual weeds and bald spots and whatnot.  Most times, this seems like a pointless endeavor, but I keep trying.  One of the things that I have done to achieve this goal is to sign myself up on an email list for a certain fertilizer company so that they can send me periodic reminders as to when is a good time to use their products for best results.  Otherwise, I'd forget about it, and the usual stuff happens with my attempted grass.  For strictly Blag purposes, we'll refer to this company as "Montgomery's."  

Nerd.  

So anyway, "Montgomery's" makes a variety of botanical products, not all of which are directly related to lawn care.  They also make a relatively famous product for all manner of plants which we'll call "PhenomenalGrowing."  I've used this product with great success in my flower pots, and I would highly recommend it for the right price.  As should come as no shock to anyone who's ever read an email, a sign-up to be reminded to fertilize my lawn is also tacit approval for this company to send me emails about all of their other products roughly twice a week.  Well, not long ago, I received one of their regular missives about "PhenomenalGrowing."  The subject line of this email, and I am not making this up, was, "Grow Your Own Salsa And Save."  

The content of the email, I can only imagine, is how to use "PhenomenalGrowing" to fertilize some tomato, onion, and pepper plants in order to stimulate their growth, thus creating more output for you to make salsa with.  By doing this, you can avoid paying for salsa at the grocery store and paying the huge corporate markup found therein.  

To level set here, a jar of salsa at the grocery costs somewhere in the neighborhood of three dollars.  The cost to set up a small garden, purchase the appropriate soil, seeds, "PhenomenalGrowing," and implements needed to not only cultivate the garden, but turn the output into salsa is somewhere in the neighborhood of a crapload more than three dollars.  The email clearly assumes that I already have a garden with an appropriate crop, and if I used their product to increase the output, I could not only have all of my usual stuff, but have plenty left over to make salsa.  This is not the case.  

Now, don't get me wrong, I like salsa as much as the next guy, but given the current state of my fruits and vegetables crop (that being precisely zero), I can't even imagine the amount of salsa I would have to theoretically buy in order to save money by growing my own.  It would be enough for me to actually get tired of eating tacos...and that's simply a world in which I don't want to live.  If it's all the same to you, "Montgomery's," I'll go ahead and continue using your product on my flowers and buy salsa from the grocery store.  If, however, you want to sponsor my salsa garden, well then, we can talk.