Looking Forward to Temporary Insanity III

Everyone always wants to know how fast a vehicle can accelerate from 0 - 60. The question that never gets asked, however, is how fast a vehicle can decelerate from 60 - 0.

Kinda makes you wonder what happened to the first "Temporary Insanity".

Ben Goes Hunting At A Friend's House

Saturday night, my wife and I were visiting at our friends’ house. They have an enormous weed / bush growing out from under their back porch so everybody went out back to look at it (not much to do in North Florida). I had already looked at the weed earlier that night, so I decided to use the bathroom while the others were outside.

The bathroom is at the back of the house, with a window that faces the backyard. I was smart enough to shut the miniblinds over the window before I “got down to business”. Well, everything was fine until I reached for the toilet paper. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. Not on the wall, not on the back of the toilet or beside it, not on a stand, not even on the washer or dryer that faced the toilet. I looked everywhere! I even looked for a new package that I could open to get some out – but nothing.

I decided I was making the search much too hard for myself, and the T.P. was probably in some obvious location that I was clearly overlooking. I started reasoning out the situation. “Let’s see…it’s nowhere visible, so it must be somewhere that isn’t visible.” But from my location, I couldn’t reach any cabinets or drawers. “OK, what if it had been all used up by the last person?” I looked in the trash can, but saw no evidence of an empty roll. Man! Where is it? I was starting to get desperate.

Then, it hit me. I had shut the blinds before sitting down. Maybe, just maybe, it was on the window sill. I figured, as crazy as it sounds, it’s the only place I hadn’t looked, or thought to look, because the window was behind me. I reached back, lifted up the blinds, and…there it was. Yes! Come to find out, the man of the house had botched the installation job, so the wife was insistent upon getting a stand. Unfortunately for me, the stand hadn’t been purchased yet.

At least now I know what to get them for Christmas.

Planet Bizzle: Latest Posts Dull, Infrequent

I have to apologize for not blogging over the last few months. I’ve been pretty lazy lately (and by lately I mean the last four months). And it’s not like interesting things haven’t been happening…my wife and I went to a Weird Al concert, we vacationed to DisneyWorld and St. Augustine, and we’ve had some funny stuff happen around the house. I just haven’t been putting in the effort.

I do want to continue with the amusing pictures and the short blurbs about random stuff, but I am committed to getting back to the heart and soul of this blog – personal narratives. So…see you in six months!

Now That's Great Advertising!

And the Newsroom Falls Silent...

Radio Rocks!

True Fact: A voice being broadcast over the radio will be heard thirteen thousand miles away sooner than it will be heard at the back of the room from which it is broadcast. This is because radio waves travel much faster than normal sound waves. FYI, 13,000 miles is equivalent to the distance between Los Angeles and Rome...AND BACK. Awesome!

The Longest Sentence in Literature

French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922) wrote a sentence in his novel The Cities of the Plain (Sodom et Gomorrhe) that contains nine hundred fifty-eight words!

I copied the sentence into Microsoft Word, and it counted 958 words -- 4,671 characters. If you find it difficult to understand, don't worry about it. The Flesch Reading Ease scale grades passages on an index of 0-121, and passages that score 90.0 - 100.0 are easily understood by the average fifth grader. To take this further, The Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. This sentence scored 0.8. The grammatical check offered the following: “Long sentence – consider revising”. That’s probably the understatement of the millennium.

I know you're dying to get a look at it, so here it is:

"Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defense, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice."

And in French:

"Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire, jusqu'à la découverte du crime; sans situation qu'instable, comme pour le poète la veille fêté dans tous les salons, applaudi dans tous les théâtres de Londres, chassé le lendemain de tous les garnis sans pouvoir trouver un oreiller où reposer sa tête, tournant la meule comme Samson et disant comme lui: "Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté"; exclus même, hors les jours de grande infortune où le plus grand nombre se rallie autour de la victime, comme les juifs autour de Dreyfus, de la sympathie - parfois de la société - de leurs semblables, auxquels ils donnent le dégoût de voir ce qu'ils sont, dépeint dans un miroir, qui ne les flattant plus, accuse toutes les tares qu'ils n'avaient pas voulu remarquer chez eux-mêmes et qui leur fait comprendre que ce qu'ils appelaient leur amour (et à quoi, en jouant sur le mot, ils avaient, par sens social, annexé tout ce que la poésie, la peinture, la musique, la chevalerie, l'ascétisme, ont pu ajouter à l'amour) découle non d'un idéal de beauté qu'ils ont élu, mais d'une maladie inguérissable; comme les juifs encore (sauf quelques-uns qui ne veulent fréquenter que ceux de leur race, ont toujours à la bouche les mots rituels et les plaisanteries consacrées) se fuyant les uns les autres, recherchant ceux qui leur sont le plus opposés, qui ne veulent pas d'eux, pardonnant leurs rebuffades, s'enivrant de leurs complaisances; mais aussi rassemblés à leurs pareils par l'ostracisme qui les frappe, l'opprobre où ils sont tombés, ayant fini par prendre, par une persécution semblable à celle d'Israël, les caractères physiques et moraux d'une race, parfois beaux, souvent affreux, trouvant (malgré toutes les moqueries dont celui qui, plus mêlé, mieux assimilé à la race adverse, est relativement, en apparence, le moins inverti, accable celui qui l'est demeuré davantage), une détente dans la fréquentation de leurs semblables, et même un appui dans leur existence, si bien que, tout en niant qu'ils soient une race (dont le nom est la plus grande injure), ceux qui parviennent à cacher qu'ils en sont, ils les démasquent volontiers, moins pour leur nuire, ce qu'ils ne détestent pas, que pour s'excuser, et allant chercher comme un médecin l'appendicite l'inversion jusque dans l'histoire, ayant plaisir à rappeler que Socrate était l'un d'eux, comme les Israélites disent de Jésus, sans songer qu'il n'y avait pas d'anormaux quand l'homosexualité était la norme, pas d'anti-chrétiens avant le Christ, que l'opprobre seul fait le crime, parce qu'il n'a laissé subsister que ceux qui étaient réfractaires à toute prédication, à tout exemple, à tout châtiment, en vertu d'une disposition innée tellement spéciale qu'elle répugne plus aux autres hommes (encore qu'elle puisse s'accompagner de hautes qualités morales) que de certains vices qui y contredisent comme le vol, la cruauté, la mauvaise foi, mieux compris, donc plus excusés du commun des hommes; formant une franc-maçonnerie bien plus étendue, plus efficace et moins soupçonnée que celle des loges, car elle repose sur une identité de goûts, de besoins, d'habitudes, de dangers, d'apprentissage, de savoir, de trafic, de glossaire, et dans laquelle les membres mêmes, qui souhaitent de ne pas se connaître, aussitôt se reconnaissent à des signes naturels ou de convention, involontaires ou voulus, qui signalent un de ses semblables au mendiant dans le grand seigneur à qui il ferme la portière de sa voiture, au père dans le fiancé de sa fille, à celui qui avait voulu se guérir, se confesser, qui avait à se défendre, dans le médecin, dans le prêtre, dans l'avocat qu'il est allé trouver; tous obligés à protéger leur secret, mais ayant leur part d'un secret des autres que le reste de l'humanité ne soupçonne pas et qui fait qu'à eux les romans d'aventure les plus invraisemblables semblent vrais, car dans cette vie romanesque, anachronique, l'ambassadeur est ami du forçat: le prince, avec une certaine liberté d'allures que donne l'éducation aristocratique et qu'un petit bourgeois tremblant n'aurait pas en sortant de chez la duchesse, s'en va conférer avec l'apache; partie réprouvée de la collectivité humaine, mais partie importante, soupçonnée là où elle n'est pas, étalée, insolente, impunie là où elle n'est pas devinée; comptant des adhérents partout, dans le peuple, dans l'armée, dans le temple, au bagne, sur le trône; vivant enfin, du moins un grand nombre, dans l'intimité caressante et dangereuse avec les hommes de l'autre race, les provoquant, jouant avec eux à parler de son vice comme s'il n'était pas sien, jeu qui est rendu facile par l'aveuglement ou la fausseté des autres, jeu qui peut se prolonger des années jusqu'au jour du scandale où ces dompteurs sont dévorés; jusque-là obligés de cacher leur vie, de détourner leurs regards d'où ils voudraient se fixer, de les fixer sur ce dont ils voudraient se détourner, de changer le genre de bien des adjectifs dans leur vocabulaire, contrainte sociale, légère auprès de la contrainte intérieure que leur vice, ou ce qu'on nomme improprement ainsi, leur impose non plus à l'égard des autres mais d'eux-mêmes, et de façon qu'à eux-mêmes il ne leur paraisse pas un vice."

My Big Mouth Cost Me $500!

Recently, I went to the dentist because I needed to get two fillings on the upper right side of my mouth. Dr. T started in, got the first one finished, and then discovered he couldn't do the second one because the tooth was too damaged. The tooth in question is called "No. 2". All four of my wisdom teeth have already been pulled (see previous post titled, "I've Only Got 28 Teeth Left!") so it's now the one that's farthest back.

The dentist told me I would need a root canal, followed by a buildup and then a crown. Since we were already 30 minutes into my 1-hour appointment, the dentist told me he would start and see how far he could get. He ground down the tooth, started (and finished) the root canal, and glued some sort of flat cap over the stub that was left (to protect the nerves). At one point, there was some sort of soldering-iron type instrument in my mouth...there was smoke coming out and everything, and the thing burned the inside of my cheek!

I made an appointment to come back two days later for the rest. In the meanwhile I found out the whole thing was going to cost me about $500. My wife said, "Why didn't you just have him pull it? If it's the one that's farthest back, you don't really need it." Brilliant idea. But that made a little too much sense for me.

When I got back to the dentist's office this morning, I asked him that same question. He said that for most people, he would just pull the tooth. Most people have smaller mouths, and he wouldn't be able get the right angle on the top teeth that were that far back. But I had such a nice, big mouth, he had easy access - which resulted in my root canal/crown combo. Sheesh! Me and my big mouth.

Oh, and by the way, I now only have 27 1/2 teeth left!

2006 College Bowl Mania Results

During the bowl season, I participated in ESPN's College Bowl Mania, at ESPN.com. It's a contest where you pick the winners of all 32 bowl games and assign a unique confidence level of 1-32 for all of the games.

I finished with a 24-8 record! Not too shabby. I finished 3,242 out of about 200,000. That put me in the top 98.3%. In my group, I finished 4th.
The best part was the participation in my group, "FSU Seminoles". In the ESPN College Pick'Em, Angela and I create a group for ourselves, and allow others to join if they want. We usually get about 5 or 6 other people. This time, I found out about the game right when it started, so I was one of the first people to create a group. I named it "FSU Seminoles" and gave us the motto "looking forward to 2007." Would you believe 139 people joined the group? It was a lot of fun! I would have finished at #1 in the group if Ohio State would have beaten Florida in the National Championship. I put all 32 points on the Buckeyes, and you know how that turned out...oh well. We talked smack on the bulletin board (there were some Miami fans in the group...go figure) and the leaderboard was helpful to gauge your position against others.

I definitely plan on hosting a group again next year. Maybe the motto will be "Seminoles finish season at #1". Hey, I can dream, can't I?

'The Carousel of Progress' Song

It's funny, one of our favorite rides at the Magic Kingdom is the 'Carousel of Progress'. It's Walt Disney's own idea, and it's pretty cool. Guests enter a theatre for an animatronic show about progress in the 20th century. The show follows a man named John and his family as they experience the growth of technology. In between scenes, the theatre turns and rotates around the center stage. When it comes to rest again, you are viewing the same family (their ages don't change) experiencing a later period of the century.

In between scenes, as the theatre is rotating, the characters all sing this really catchy song. After our last trip, I finally got all the words in the right place. So, for posterity, I present the lyrics to "A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow".

There's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
Yes, there's a great big beautiful tomorrow,
And tomorrow is just a day away.

Man has a dream, and that's the start
He follows his dream with mind and heart
And when it becomes a reality,
It's a dream come true for you and me.

Oh there's a great big beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end of every day,
Yes there's a great big beautiful tomorrow -
Just a day away!