Muttroxia

How does this sell? You can buy chocolate, or vanilla, or strawberry, in any proportions. But instead, you choose to get exactly equal portions of each, all shoved in the same container, why? Why would you limit yourself like that? You can’t even eat your favorite flavor in isolation. You eat vanilla, some strawberry’s gonna get in. That’s just how it is.

And strawberry. Strawberry? What the heck is strawberry doing there? Who, at any time, would rather eat strawberry than chocolate or vanilla!? This was meant to be rhetorical. But informal polling has convinced me that there’s an awful lot of strawberry weirdos out there. To all of them I say, you are seriously weird. Seriously.

Growing up, my father would occasionally purchase neapolitan, just for kicks. And our family would destroy the chocolate and vanilla in about, oh, 35 seconds. The strawberry would just sit there. And sit. A few months later, my father would get a strange urge to buy another carton of neapolitan, and it would repeat. Eventually there would be three or four boxes of ice cream left, each with one carefully sculpted strawberry third remaining. Once in a while, my father would see these and begin to lecture us about waste and how much things cost.

How did strawberry even get in there? Rumor has it those were the most popular flavors when neapolitan ice cream was invented. I think there was just a really good strawberry salesman somewhere! (That’s a ripoff of Brian Regan’s cranapple bit by the way.)

It’s hard to believe they are still the most popular flavors. And indeed, they are not. Per the International Ice Cream Association, here are the top 10 flavors.

1. Vanilla, 29%
2. Chocolate, 8.9%
3. Butter pecan, 5.3%
4. Strawberry, 5.3%
5. Neapolitan, 4.2%
6. Chocolate chip, 3.9%
7. French vanilla, 3.8%
8. Cookies and cream, 3.6%
9. Vanilla fudge ripple, 2.6%
10. Praline pecan, 1.7%

(Isn’t it funny that neapolitan is counted as it’s own flavor?) So it seems that the strawberry should be replaced with butter pecan. Which just sounds sickening, honestly.

That site has other gems. We all know the “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” song, right? Well, they have the complete lyrics!

…Iceberg, Lindberg, Sol Berg and Ginzberg,
Ice cream Cohen.
I scream, you scream, everybody wants ice cream.
Rah, rah, raaazberry!

No, they really don’t write ’em like that anymore. They’d get picketed.

Update: This is from 2019. Neapolitan is now at number 10. This is a good trend. Cookies n’ Cream is the best flavor ever invented, and has moved all the way up to number 3.

1. Vanilla
2. Chocolate
3. Cookies N’ Cream
4. Mint Chocolate Chip
5. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
6. Buttered Pecan
7. Cookie Dough
8. Strawberry
9. Moose Tracks
10. Neapolitan

Weightlifting has many benefits. The obvious one is increase of muscle mass. Most people don’t realize the real work of the body is not during the workout, but after. In a really good workout with weights, you work the muscles to failure. That means actually killing off many off the fibers and tissue. Over the course of the next few days, the body works to repair the muscle, and make it better. This is why you alternate body sections — the idea is to give any given muscle a few days to recuperate before killing it off again. (Note that many people don’t work out this way, you still get plenty of benefit even if you don’t work all the way to muscle failure.) The re-creation of the muscle is what burns the calories, it takes a lot of work and energy.

Likewise, when you suffer any kind of injury, your body needs energy to recuperate and rebuild it’s systems. Many of us have lost those few key pounds when we have a virus. When you run a fever, your body is literally cooking itself. Fighting disease takes energy, and recuperating afterwards does also.

Blood loss is one such injury. When you give blood, your body needs time to recuperate. That’s why you’re supposed to take it easy for a few days afterwards, your body needs time to rebuild. This logically leads to an obvious weight-loss strategy.

Donating blood five times a year not only is the right thing to do (go here for more info, or just get in touch with me directly), you can lose weight while doing it! Now that’s a win-win! And if you can’t give blood, at least get sick every so often.

(P.S. No, I’m not serious about this as a real weight-loss strategy. You really should give blood though.)

This is a piece of marketing material I got recently from some stupid company. It abounds with poor reasoning.

Does your [system metric] surpass a 70% succes rate (outperforming the industry average of just 30%)? Does your [other system metric] exceed 25% (putting the industry’s 5-7% average to shame)?

Why, no it doesn’t. You have me interested. Pray, continue.

These are the results our top-performing clients are getting

You have lost my interest. I have not bothered to work out the statistics, but if the average is 30%, out of the 5,700 clients you quote later, the fact that some of them might get very high metrics, simply by chance alone, seems rather… obvious. Furthermore, all clients are different, there are always those that by the nature of what they do get higher scores at any given metric.

yes, even ones who [do a lot of this].

No, really? You think there might be a little cause and effect confusion? Maybe they do more because it works? Or maybe they do more, so they spend time making sure it works?

And [our company] is one of the reason why.

One of the reasons? Boy, you’re really going out on a limb there.

It bugs me when people say statistics is just lies. It isn’t, it’s a technique that can be used or misused. Jackholes like this companies’ “Sales Manager, Strategic Marketing” don’t help.

I was just listening to a cool song, “Jack gets up” by Leo Kottke. It has a line in it,

If you look in the mirror,
it’s your fathers face,
and the thin grin, and the thin grin…

I’m at the age where I’m starting to see my fathers face in the mirror. But this made me think, why my father? Why not my mother? Do I just have stronger memories of my father from this age? Do boys instinctively compare themselves to their father, and girls to their mother?

What about you? Whose face do you see?

Brothers and Sisters: The Dad dies to start it off.
Six Feet Under: The Dad dies to start it off. And then someone new dies at the beginning of every episode.
Desperate Housewives: The neighbor dies to start it off, and then becomes the narrator.
The Shield: An undercover Internal Affairs investigator is murdered in cold blood by the protagonist in the first episode, setting up the (a)moral context for the show.
Party of Five (?): I know the premise is the dead parents, but do they actually die to start the show?

Any others?

… and it looks like my new universal remote control

The number of remote controls on our couch-side table is truly horrifying. There are so many that we have no space left to put down our water glasses or soda cans. We have five remotes:

– TV
– VHS
– DVD
– Receiver
– Cable box

To watch anything, you have to use at least 3 remotes – 1 to turn on the receiver and switch to the correct input, 1 to turn on the TV, and 1 to control the component you wanted to watch (VCR, DVD, or cable). As a techie AV guy, I was completely fine with this setup, but you’ll win the bet if you guess that it drove my girlfriend crazy. Like most women, it took her forever to figure out what remote did what, and she was always worried that she’d hit the wrong button and mess up all my carefully calibrated gear.

Last week this all changed. A friend of mine recommended checking out a Logitech Harmony remote control while I was at Best Buy stocking up on all the other stuff that my new HD TV has required me to upgrade (HDMI cables, an upconverting DVD player, etc). “You will love this remote,” he confidently predicted. “It controls everything with one button, and you can program it on your Mac.”

Program it from my Mac? Control everything with one button? Where do I sign up!!!

This remote control is a miracle. Why didn’t someone think of this ten years ago? We’ve all seen the so-called “universal remotes” – huge things with a thousand buttons that claim to control all your gear, usually with a fancy name like “Remote Commander!” They all worked on the same principle – on the top row of the remote, you click which component you want to control, then click the buttons below to perform a task, then click the component button of the next thing you want to control, etc. Took forever. And who could remember what all the buttons did, since each one had multiple functions?

The genius of Logitech is that they realized that the smartest way is control things is to have a SINGLE BUTTON for each task – so (for example), when you hit the “play movie” button, the remote will:

– turn on the TV
– switch the TV to the correct input & aspect ratio
– turn on the receiver
– switch the receiver to the correct input
– turn on the DVD player
– start playing the DVD!

How great is that? All from hitting one button! The remote does all the work! Can you guess what the other buttons are? That’s right – obvious things you want to do, like “watch TV”, “listen to music”, “play a game”, etc!

Here’s how this Holy Grail works. You load the Harmony software onto your Mac or PC, and then type in the manufacturer and model numbers of all your gear. The software downloads the right codes & info from Logitech’s online database and uses the USB cable that comes included to program your Harmony remote for you. If you want to be geeky (you bet I did!) you can configure your remote down to the tiniest detail, controlling what functions appear on the remote’s screen (and in what order), or even mapping specialized buttons onto your remote. Once your remote is configured, you can test everything and the remote’s Help function can make adjustments if anything is still not working perfectly. It truly, honestly, 100%, does not get any better or easier than this.

I got the 670 model because it was marketed as the best one for controlling a DVR. At Best Buy, it was $150, but on Amazon, it was only $100 plus $5 for shipping. You may cry out in shock, “A hundred dollars? For a hundred dollars, I’ll gladly juggle all those remotes and hit all those buttons myself and save the money.” If that’s what you say… then you, sir, clearly don’t understand what is important or fun in life.

NYT’s Ethicist column last week talked about blogging. Not surprsingly, he got it completely wrong.

Here’s the question:

I interview high-school seniors who apply to my alma mater. I routinely Google these students and discovered that one posted information on his blog that reflects poorly on him. May I ask him about the blog? May I mention it to the university? Should it affect the score I give him?

The answer features a couple of doozies, “You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.” Um, sure. Except a diary is usually kept locked away somewhere, not published for everyone in the world to see. And the answer presumes that a blog is a diary. I humbly submit Muttroxia as a counter-example — I sincerely hope no one thinks these ridiculous posts are my deepest darkest secrets and feelings.

What did the university think? “[He] checked with the university and was told not to ask the student about the blog but to include its URL with his report.” Sure, that’s ethical. It’s not OK for an interviewer to get a full picture of the student, but it is for the university? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as Aristotle opined.

For what it’s worth, I think it is not only fair for the interviewer to look at the blog, but admirable. The interviewer is not a formal official of the college. Their job is to get a fuller picture and a subjective portrait that overworked officials might not be able to. Examing the public record is fulfilling that duty. (Mrs. Muttrox, who actually does this, disagrees.)

P.S. Although his column is good Sunday morning entertainment, you should know that Randy Cohen is not a real ethicist in any way. He’s a bright guy who found a good niche in the newspaper advice field. If you disagree with him, you have just as much formal training as he does, which is to say, none.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be one hundredth as cool as this. And oh yeah, I was in a little band called Queen.

OK, OK, My readers don’t have Times Select. Brian May is one of the contributing authors to their new cosmology blog. How cool is that?

The New York Times had an entertaining article on why playing the lottery is worth it. It agrees with my point of view. One dollar now and then is a cheap price to play for the fun of dreaming about winning.

But it also included this gaffe:

Large rewards make most people reckless, whether they’re on the winning or losing end. A 2003 University of Vermont study found that lottery players who said they preferred to receive potential winnings in annuity payments — generally thought to be safer than receiving the money all at once, in a lump sum — often changed their minds when they actually won. And the higher the jackpot, the more likely people were to prefer a lump-sum payout, the researchers found. (Mr. Nabors chose a lump sum.)

Yes, people change their mind. They should. Taking the lump sum is a smarter thing to do. It’s not being greedy, it’s being prudent.

Ever wonder how the exact payout amount is determined? It’s pretty straightforward financial calculations, figuring out the present value of those annual payments. As always, the key input is the interest rate. And for this, they use a very conservative number. Why? Because the lottery has to invest in state bonds and other very conservative investments, so from their point of view, that is appropriate. However, you as a private investor, can do better in the market (in most cases). You have investment options available to you that the state does not. Therefore, you can generate a higher rate of return. Which means you get more money by taking the lump sum up front and investing it wisely.

Happy birthday to me — thanks for the wishes all! To celebrate, I officially started wearing glasses today. Gads. Combined with just a tinge of grey hair on the temples, there is no doubt I have been graduated to the next phase of life.

And to cap off the fun, when I came back from lunch I left the keys in the car. Running. *Sigh*

God I love getting older.

From CNN.com:

Only Van Halen’s second lead singer, Sammy Hagar, and ex-bass player Michael Anthony turned up for their induction. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen has just gone into rehab and original lead singer David Lee Roth stayed away in a tiff over what he would perform.

From Billboard.com:

“Velvet Revolver performed in place of Van Halen and without Roth. Frontman Scott Weiland explained the ensuing controversy: “We were asked to perform. Kinda what happened was, he wanted to sing the song ‘Jump.’ We felt from an artistic standpoint, and I’m being totally honest with you, that it wasn’t a song we felt comfortable with. We don’t have keyboards. To bring a keyboard on stage wouldn’t work for us. We said we’d do “Jamie’s Cryin'” or “You Really Got Me,” and he was adamant that wasn’t okay.”

Dear Scott Weiland – you don’t get to tell David Lee Roth what song he sings at his Rock N Roll Hall of Fame induction!!! You haven’t earned it! You are a pathetic junkie – a junkie who should be down on his knees every hour, thanking God that he gets to be in a band with Slash. When Diamond Dave says “Jump”, you say, “How loud?”

We recently bought a new refrigerator. Things have changed in the refrigerator industry, I’ll tell you that. For all the gimmicks, most of the modern refrigerator designs are clearly worse.

Freezers ought to be on the bottom. That’s common sense. Heat rises. Therefore, the cold stuff goes below. Yet, new refrigerators have the freezer area on top or on the side.

Side by side is another bad design choice. Ideally, the interior of the refrigerator is just open space that you can configure to meet your needs. But a side by side design puts a big vertical barrier in the middle. This reduces how you can arrange items in there.

The problem is compounded by building in all kinds of specific compartments for specific kinds of food. Here’s the milk area, and here’s the vegetable area, and here’s the fruits, and the butter, etc. You know what, why don’t you let me put my food where I feel like putting my food. It’s all the same freakin’ temperature, what’s the difference?

The biggest gimmick is the ice and water dispensers. If you look inside the refrigerator, it’s shocking how much room the machinery takes up. On some models, 20% of the total space is taken up getting the water and ice to the outside. And what do you get for that? The water never tastes good. The depression is never big enough to fit a normal glass. Oh, but you save a miniscule amount of energy by not opening the door. Whoopee.

Stainless steel is another one. What is the point of stainless steel? It makes your kitchen looks industrial. It gets dirty instantly, and you can’t even clean it with a normal cleaning solution. Why would anyone get stainless steel? They would get it because now everyone has stainless steel, so that’s how you have a “nice” looking kitchen, where “nice” is what all the other people have.

And the price… the cost of any refrigerator above the basic block model is incredible. When my friend told me how much he paid for his, I practically laughed in his face. Then we went shopping, and I ended up spending even more.