Author: Muttrox

Look at the fast one they’re trying to pull with my favorite cereal. In nearly every situation, stores incentivize you to buy more product by giving you a discount for getting larger quantities. Super-size meals and Costco are good examples. But every once in a while, they count on your being overly inured to that and innumerate.

The small version is $2.99 for 12 ounces. The big box is $4.99. $4.99 is two thirds more price, so they should give you two thirds more food, or 20 ounces. But they only give you 18.8 ounces. You get ripped off by buying the bigger box!!

Our 4-year old went to a birthday party at HippoHop, a.k.a “The Bouncy Place”. She finished her birthday cake early, and we went out to do some more bouncing. An employee stopped us shortly after we began. We weren’t allowed to bounce anymore.
“Why not?”
“Because she just ate. She might throw up on another child, and then we are liable.”

Oh my goodness. How absurd. How often does this happen, that children vomit on each other. And that it becomes a legal issue. What exactly is the charge, what would HippoHop be liable for? Assault and battery?

And doesn’t t the same logic apply to ordering dessert at a restaurant? There could be vomiting there. Or ordering food anywhere at any time? McDonalds never asked me if just came in from a jog. Six Flags doesn’t seem to care who vomits on who.

In summary – ridiculous.

For the first time in many many years, I am living through a regular professional day without any keys.

1) I don’t need car keys. I live less than a mile from work. I walked over this morning. I hope to do this more.
2) I don’t need house keys. The front door is a coded lock, I just punch in the number. (Or use an I-phone app to open it remotely.)

It feels ridiculously different and freeing to not be carrying keys around.

As many of you know, the Muttrox clan just upgraded our living situation. Here are some scenes from the transition.

We haven’t sold the old house yet. They are getting it fixed up. Here are all the doors in a row, all painted white, all drying off.

The most important move of them all! The hot tub is moved off the back porch, getting ready for transport to the new house. These are the same guys who brought it over in 2006, as soon as they came up the driveway they remembered the job.

We foolishly used movers for only the big furniture. That means Mr. Muttrox has been going back and forth humping everything we own over the the new place. Here is our garage, nearly filled up with… stuff. The second one is a panorama shot.

For years, we’ve been sleeping on a queen size mattress and box spring lying on the floor. Not even a frame. One of the first things to get was a decent bed. This is one of the Westin Heavenly Bed kingsize mattresses. I don’t think a taser would have stopped him from jumping on it.

A great parenting moment. The new house had ladybugs in it. This is because they had to air it out during construction. Not a big deal, but we wanted to get rid of them. I figured there were forty or fifty. I offered the kids a ten cent per ladybug bounty, dead or alive. They found almost 250 of them! Well worth the money to have a bug-free house, and the kids were blown away by their windfall.

The new house has very high ceilings, even in the (unfinished) basement. That seems great at first. But it also means that changing a light bulb is a get-out-the-ladder-job.

I love this. Whoever made this was clearly trying to say that trash should be thrown in here. So they labeled it litter. But it isn’t! Litter is “Trash, such as paper, cans, and bottles, that is left lying in an open or public place.” It was litter until you threw it in here, but now it isn’t anymore. The rest of the area is for litter, this (by definition) is not. It should be labeled “Not Litter!”

Some pictures of Obama

Why Coke cost a nickel for 70 years.

How long would you last if you were unemployed? An interesting interactive experience.

Underappreciated

Christmas Card

Evil

Amazing half-court shot

Evangelists

Going up…

The greatest game of tag ever

The 25 best comic strips of all time. (I have my disagreements with the choices.)

Weather alert up nawth

Once again, I failed to win any money at SuperBowl Squares. I am a lucky man in nearly every way in life, but in this one way, I am ridiculously unlucky. Consider:

• I have been playing for approximately twenty years.
• Each year, I have four chances to win.
• Each year, I buy between 5 and 25 squares. Yes, two years I bought 25 squares and still came up empty.

What are the odds?

• 5 out of 100 squares: (.95) ^ 4 = 18.5% chance of winning
• 10 out of 100 squares: (.90) ^ 4 = 34.3% chance of winning
• 25 out of 100 squares: (.75) ^ 4 = 68.3% chance of winning

Most years I took between five and 10 squares. I did not keep records, but I guess the breakdown is something like this (I am being conservative):

• 14 years of 5 squares = (1-18.5%)^14 = 5.7% chance of losing each of these years.
• 4 years of 10 squares = (1-34.3)^4 = 18% chance of losing each of these years.
• 2 years of 25 squares= (1-68.3)^2 = 10% chance of losing each of these years.

Put it all together. 5.7% * 18% * 10% = 0.1%, or 1 in 1,000. I am at the 99.9%th percentile for losing. Yay, I’m exceptional!

Ten years. As of today, my oldest son is ten years old. Unbelievable to think about that little nothing ten years ago growing into the remarkable child that he is today.

Him: There’s someone at my school that I’m 7 minutes older than.
Me: Really! Who is it?
Him: It’s Francisca Eason.
Me: Huh. How about that.
Him: Actually, she almost got expelled. She’s really annoying, and they wanted to expel her because she’s so annoying, but her Mom is some kind of boss at the school so she’s still there.
Me: They don’t expel people for being annoying.
Him: Hey, I have my theories.

At a company event, there was a quiz question to win a prize. How much revenue did we make with product X in 2012? Closest guess wins (you can go over).

My guess was 9.6 million dollars. The other guesses were $100,000, $150,000, $170,000. The actual answer was 3.3 million dollars. Naturally the host gave the prize to the $170,000 guesser. After all, they were off by 3.2MM, and I was off by 6.3MM, twice as much.

However, anyone with a science or math background would see that I was off by only 200%, and the next closest guesser was off by almost 2,000%! Despite my well-supported case, I chose not to pursue the point. Sometimes it’s not worth it.

The first three sentences of Harrington on Hold ’em is about the smartest thing I’ve ever read about poker:

Like all variations of poker, no-limit hold ’em looks like a card game. But it’s not, really.
No-limit hold ’em is actually a game of wagering base on imperfect information that uses cards to construct the situations for wagering.

From today’s New York Times.

The party’s deficit-cutting agenda relies heavily on reducing taxes for the wealthy, which irks middle-class voters, and cutting spending on government programs, like Social Security and Medicare, that are popular with many voters.

This has it exactly backwards. The party’s agenda is not deficit-cutting that chooses reducing taxes for the wealthy as a means to achieve that end. The party’s goal is reducing taxes for the wealthy, and uses deficit-cutting as a political game to achieve that end. Whenever there has been a conflict between the deficit and the rich in the party’s actions, the rich have won.

Consider the estate tax. The GOP was more than happy to add hundreds of millions to the deficit with no offset of any kind. Why? Because the benefits all went to the rich.

Or consider the recent fiscal cliff insanity. Remember what going over the cliff meant. It meant greatly reducing the deficit. Increase revenue (through taxes) and decrease spending. If the GOP’s goal was truly deficit reduction, this would have been a dream proposal, they would have happily sailed off the edge. However, because it contained increased taxes for the wealthy, they had to be against it. And note how the estate tax was one of the elements in the bargain, even though it would seem to be a minor part of the issue.

The modern republican party is based around one idea. That idea is consolidating more and more of the national income and assets to the wealthy.

Out of nowhere:

Him: Dad, did you know there are naked ladies on YouTube?
Me (taken by surprise): What?
Him: Yeah, they just dance and stuff with no clothes on.
Me (trying to be factual): Yes. Yes, I did know that.
Him: It’s weird! Dad, Dad – why would a lady take off her clothes and dance on the camera?
Me (completely at a loss for a good answer): It’s because – maybe they need mon – no, well some men – Oh, just ask me again in five years!