Politicians Are Not Welcome On My Lake

When the government defaults tonight, I call dibs on repossessing Lake Tahoe!

I just want a new car.  One of the congressional limos should do just fine.

So here we are, on the brink of self-induced financial disaster, and still listening to speeches of talking points and rhetoric.  If any of my loyal readers out there thought this would be any different, I feel bad for you and offer whatever services are at my disposal to help you.  

Tonight at midnight is the time the country goes into default for the first time ever, violating the 14th Amendment to the same Constitution that everyone loves to throw in the face of the other side.  While I'm not an economics expert, nor am I an expert in loan default (thought I have often considered the fact that it would be in my best interests to allow my mortgage to go into foreclosure, but that's beside the point entirely), I have come up with a scenario that I believe works out well for me.  If the country defaults, we get to use the country as collateral to collect.  

So, in order to get the ball rolling, I've claimed Lake Tahoe.  It's in sunny Nevada, it's a prime vacation spot with sunny beaches, boats, night life, casinos and everything a person of leisure could possibly want.  It seems like the perfect place for me, so it's mine.  I called it.  The country has a lot of other great stuff...what do you want to stake your claim to?  

How About It, Kellogg's?

How can there be two different sizes of Mini Wheats? 

They're all the same.  Some of them just haven't grown up all the way yet.

I have a confession to make.  Today's Sametime Status is incorrect.  I wrote it this morning without full knowledge of what I was talking about, and I made an error.  It happens, let's move on. 

There are three different sizes of Mini Wheats. 

So, I don't eat cereal very often, but it happens on occasion.  I don't have a specific cereal that I always get...it very much depends on what kind of mood I was in the last time I was in the grocery store.  Sometimes it's Raisin Bran (The kind with the little crunchies in it, not just the regular stuff), sometimes it's Frosted Flakes, sometimes Peanut Butter Puffs...I vary.  I have no idea at what point in my life I realized that Frosted Mini Wheats were good, but it happened somewhere along the way.  I also can't accurately recall the last time I bought a box of Frosted Mini Wheats, but I can guarantee you it has been several years.  Unlike Frosted Flakes or Cocoa Pebbles, which haven't changed in seemingly forever, I was unprepared for the fact that Frosted Mini Wheats now came in a ludicrous number of varieties. 

There are Brown Sugar ones, Maple Brown Sugar ones, Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, Mixed Berry, Cinnamon...who knows what else.  I'm okay with adding flavors to the cereal, since it doesn't change the nature of the product, just adds a little variety.  But when I looked back at the row of boxes to make sure I had grabbed regular plain old Frosted Mini Wheats, I saw another, redder box of regular plain old Frosted Mini Wheats (For the record, my box was orange).  Both boxes said Frosted Mini Wheats.  Both boxes said "Regular."    So why was my box different?  Well, unbeknownst to me, Mini Wheats now came in multiple sizes, and mine weren't the regular size.  

So, now, in addition to having Mini Wheats, we have Mini Wheats "Little Bites" and Mini Wheats "Big Bites."  This is nonsense.  I'm an engineer, and we engineers deal in both precision and standards.  Once the standard for "Mini" has been set, you can't simply change it all willy-nilly.  Mini is a very specific size of Wheat, and if you are going to shift gears and make a completely different size of Wheat, you can no longer call it "Mini."  Especially if it's considerably larger, then it's just "Wheat."  Except for the fact that the standard for "Shredded Wheat" has also already been established, and It's Monstrous.  So maybe we jumped the gun on the whole "Mini Wheat" concept, and should have left ourselves with something a little more granular to describe the size of our Wheat?  Either way, you can't just go around making different sizes of Mini Wheat and still call it Mini Wheat.

Only Woke Up Because Of The Blue Moon In My Eyes

It’s a little sad to watch the slow, painful death of my alarm clock

Is that why you were late for work yesterday?

In fact, it is.  But only by a few minutes...it wasn't so bad.  

Downright refreshing for some of us.

So what appears to be happening is the power amplifier of my alarm clock is dying for some unknown reason.  The electronics all work fine, but the final output, in terms of sound, is an ever-decreasing amount of sound.  Sure, the left channel speakers haven't worked in some time (which makes for remarkably interesting music when the radio station plays Bohemian Rhapsody in the morning), but I assume this is an unrelated event.  So yesterday, my alarm clock started playing it's little beeping noises, but the volume was so low, I didn't notice it for like 20 minutes.  I turned up the volume, but the output today was less than was expected.  I fully expect the sound output to be zero within the next couple of days.  This is a bad thing as far as alarm clocks are concerned.  So, I set out on my quest to procure a new alarm clock.  This is so much worse than you might expect.  

You see, my current alarm clock is so much more than an alarm clock.  It's all fancy and stuff.  It not only has a "Gentle Wake" feature so the beeping starts at a low volume and slowly increases until you wake up, but is also has a "Weekend Sleeper" function which can be set to automatically not go off on Saturday and Sunday.  It had a pleasant blue face which was not annoying while sleeping, it had a CD player which I even used like twice, and it actually had totally decent sound for a small radio.  It was a good and faithful multi-featured alarm clock.  People don't make these anymore. 

As I'm quickly finding out, electronics companies have realized that a lot of people simply use their smartphones as alarm clocks now, so the options in terms of clock radios are fairly slim.  Many of the upper-echelon clock radios out there are made to be compatible with iPhones, which I don't have.  At least partially because all of these radios use Apple's moronic proprietary connecter which just changed last year, so any iPhone-compatible clock radio you bought before the even more moronic "Lightning Connector" is now useless.  You have to buy a new radio to be compatible with the new phone you just bought because Apple is too greedy to/can't be bothered to use a universal dock.  All of these clock radios are out. 

Also available are clock radios with a USB connection for those of us with Android phones or any other device which uses USB.  This would seem to be the way to go, except that most don't actually connect your device to the amplifier using the USB...they're simply charging connections.  Also, very few of these have built-in radios, so regardless, you're relying on your cell phone for virtually all of the audio functions of the unit.  

I just want an alarm clock that can charge my phone, connect to it to play music if I want, have a radio if I want that, has decent sound so I can listen to the aforementioned radio while I get ready for work, has two different alarm settings, a gentle-wake feature and an automatic weekend mode.  This is clearly too much to ask, because I've been searching for a day and a half now and have found precisely bupkus. 

I Hear James Van Der Beek Is Free

Attention, makers of “Sharknado”...“Bird Flu Bee Hive.”  You’re welcome

Coming soon, to theaters in all the towns where people you hate live...

So, we're all familiar with "The Asylum" by now, right?  They're the bargain basement film production company responsible for trashterpieces like "Snakes on a Train," "Mega Shark vs. Crocasaurus," "Mega Python vs Gateroid," and of course, "Sharknado."  Many of these films spend their lives going direct to video or being broadcast on the SyFy channel, formerly known as SciFi before they morally had to remove any semblance of the word "science" from their name.  

Well, after the smash hit that was "Sharknado," my friends at "The Asylum"...

Who else can't believe it's taken Jeremy this long to use the phrase "My friends at the asylum?"  Show of hands?

...are scrambling to find their next great idea.  The only thing they seem to have come up with, aside from 13/13/13 (The shocking sequel to the apocalyptic thriller "12/12/12"), Alone For Christmas, The Bell Witch Haunting, Wonderland, and Atilla, is a sequel named...and I wish I was making this up..."Sharknado 2, The Second One."  Yes, the well is running dry.  So, I've taken it upon myself to supply them with the next big thing, because that's just the kind of guy I am.

Sadistic?  Evil?  Sociopathic?

Generous with my creativity!  The idea is Genius.  The single greatest threat surrounding mankind is the upcoming Bird Flu Pandemic...everyone knows this.  People are also currently scared by the swarms of Giant Killer Hornets currently marauding their way through China.  So, combine the two into one massively horrifying film spectacular!  A queen bee gets infected with Bird Flu while stinging a rogue chicken that escaped from being culled.  The queen infects the rest of the hive, and Bird Flu-laced hornets proceed to wreak havoc over the entire global population, swarming and spreading deadly Bird Flu everywhere.  The film practically writes itself.  So, when can I expect my first royalty check, and how soon after that can I put this idea on my IMBD page? 

Keanu Reeves Plays Spock

Well, it’s official.  WALL-E is better at flying a fire extinguisher than Sandra Bullock  


It's also official!  Jeremy is going to disparage one of the best-reviewed movies of the year.  Have at it, Jeremy.


As of this writing, "Gravity" is chugging along with a tidy 98% Tomato Meter.  They don't get a whole lot better than that, but I have an issue with that number.  I'm pretty sure that the reviewers are artificially giving it a good review based on cinematics and visuals rather than the quality of the movie itself.  The film is basically the next sequel to "Speed," but up in space and with fewer bad guys.  The idea is that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are astronauts fixing the Hubble Space Telescope in the not-entirely-too-far-off-future.  Either the Chinese or the Russians (I honestly forget who) blow up a satellite which causes a deadly storm of space-shrapnel to destroy everything in orbit in a series of chain-reaction barrages in Null-G.  Our heroes must then find a way back to earth.  Adventure ensues.  

So, let's leave aside some of the more nit-picky scientific inaccuracies such as the orbital physics of the Hubble Telescope versus the International Space Station and how it's basically impossible to jump from one to the next, and just deal with Null-G training.  It is implied that our heroes have been in space for a considerable amount of time....on the order of weeks.  It stands to reason that people entrusted with that job would be familiar with some of the basic concepts of working while in orbit.  It's shown that they do have some training when it comes to using tools and the whole equal and opposite reaction thing.  So why is it that when it's time to put out a fire, Sandra Bullock thinks that just floating in the middle of the room and spraying a fire extinguisher isn't going to have consequences?  She quickly learns the hard way that she goes flying the other direction and smacks her head into the wall.  Seems like the kind of thing that should be second-nature to astronauts. 

Turns out, we learn why a little later, when she's adrift in space and uses the fire extinguisher to proper herself toward the next orbiting satellite.  This was an incredibly unique cinematic achievement, as we haven't had a scene like that in a film ever...since 2008, when WALL-E did the exact same thing but in a Far More Adorable Way.  I'm not a rocket scientist, so maybe there's some major difference between the mechanics of flying with a fire extinguisher while in low earth orbit versus flying with a fire extinguisher adrift in deep space, but the average audience probably won't care.  

Overall, the story of this movie falls a little flat.  There some remarkably forced back-story about Sandra Bullock and her character's deceased child which involves the kind of emotional detachment that would probably make somebody unfit for NASA service.  There's the formulaic triumph over tragedy drama build-up that we've seen over and over and over in Hollywood.  There's the ridiculous Sandra Bullock-as-an-embryo metaphoric scene.  There's the 3D effects for the sake of 3D effects...there's really not a lot to like about this movie.  

Except for the cinematography, which includes some of the most amazing visuals you will ever see on the silver screen.  The fact that nearly the entire movie takes place in low earth orbit and null-gravity makes the filming amazing.  Characters are suspended and spinning wildly out of control the whole time.  Stuff floats around, water beads up (yes, tears bead up, too), Marvin the Martian floats off into space, moving characters and vehicles keep moving without opposing forces.  You have never seen a movie like this before.  You may not see a movie like this again.  Just too bad they didn't make it a better movie.  


This has been another edition of Jeremy Is In The Theatre. 

Yes, Reader. I'm Pointing At Us.

I always point at people when I tell them they’re awesome.  That way, there are always three fingers pointing back at me

I don't think that's how the saying goes...

Sure, the whole point of the phrase is to demean somebody for being negative.  But isn't there a little bit of irony in pointing out the fault in somebody pointing out the fault in somebody else?  I prefer to take the tired old phrase and turn it around into something positive and more optimistic.  I'm also fantastic at being modest.  

Anyway...you've all heard somebody say that you should never point fingers, because there's three other fingers pointing back at you.  As if to insinuate that I'm always to blame when I realize that somebody else screwed up.  That always seemed a little wrong to me, but I guess it works for congress.    So I had always used a slightly different loophole when finger-pointing.  I would instead gesture with my entire hand.  That way, there weren't any fingers pointing back at me when I wasn't the one who fouled things up in the first place.  

Now, I've gone and usurped this little cliche for my own affirmative purposes...and let's be honest, for the truth.  I can certainly accept that there are other awesome people in the world, so I am not loathe to point out their awesomeness to them.  I will point at them, say "You're awesome!" and truly mean it.  But, of course, those other three fingers are pointed right back at myself.  After all, if I'm going to take 3 times the blame for when they suck, I'm going to take 3 times the credit when they're awesome.  

Speaking of awesome...

Yeah, it's pretty awesome that I'm able to type this to you right now.  My computer is on life-support at the moment, functioning minute-by-minute until I get a new hard drive delivered.   I don't know when I'll be getting that, or how much I'll be able to use this thing until the next BSOD, so I'd better post this while I can. 

Somebody Thought This Was A Good Idea

Why is Domino's running a commercial showing that the people who answer their phones are incompetent buffoons?  

Have you been to a Domino's lately?  

Oh come on now, be nice.  I'm sure the highly-trained folks at Domino's are perfectly nice and talented people who may read blags on the internets.  Their management may not agree, as it would seem.

So recently, I started seeing a new commercial for Domino's pizza...( Watch It Here, if you'd like ) wherein Domino's is trying to show you how easy and convenient it is to order all of your pizza and pizza-related foodstuffs over the internets on Their Website.  In all fairness, the website ordering is totally decent, though Other Pizza Places have Online Ordering as well, so it's not all that special anymore.  In order to show how great it is to order pizza over the internets, the commercial features a Domino's employee fumbling all over himself trying to take a pizza order over the phone.  

While the point of the commercial is certainly to show how simple and error-proof the online ordering system is, it leads me to believe that Domino's employees are unable to do some of the most basic and vital aspects of their jobs.  Those aspects, of course, being to take an order for a pizza and subsequently create that food for the customer.  Are we to believe that the only viable way to ensure proper food creation now is through online ordering?  That the competence of the Domino's staff has reached such a low point that they can't even be trusted to talk on the phone?  If I can't trust the restaurant staff to properly write down the toppings for a pizza, why should I trust them to actually create my pizza in a correct and sanitary manner?  Your commercial has instilled that much doubt in your abilities.

Or is this entirely be design?  Maybe you don't want that level of customer-employee interaction.  Is it pure laziness that you want me to do your employees' work for you?  If they're busy talking on the phone, they're not busy making pizza...so pass the grunt work off onto the customer?  Or maybe you can get away with having fewer employees staffing your restaurants so you can make a bigger profit?  Either way, I no longer believe that your restaurant is able to meet my pizza-making needs, so I don't think I'll be ordering from you anytime soon.  The Papa John's is closer anyway.