What would happen if.... (8/22 edition)

....Siskel (RIP), Ebert, or Roeper (the new Siskel, really), were double-jointed like Carol in the UK? This would make their modus operandi of movie reviewing more trifurcated. Thumbs up, thumbs down, or the rare thumbs sideways!!

A popular concept at work is for somebody to unload leftover food in the company lunchroom. These leftovers are usually in the form of extra Halloween candy.....large sheet cakes that were half unfinished from the weekend....or a tin of cookies. I say, let's incorporate a broader range of choices. I want to see somebody bring in the uneaten half of a steak. Perhaps some hot dogs that didn't get finished up. The key, really, is to make sure they don't look picked over. Cut the steak cleanly with a sharp knife, so it looks like it was a properly unserved piece of meat, suitable for being picked over in the lunchroom, after all. How about a bowl of chicken wings? Meat doesn't seem as common, on the list of foods you find in the lunch room.

Anybody who's ever watched cartoons on TV is familiar with the dreaded rolling snowball down a hill. The protagonist runs as fast as he can to avoid it, but the snowball gets bigger and bigger. Nobody EVER steps to the side and lets the snowball pass. Not only would the character avoid becoming incorporated into the snowball in a horrific crash, but it would offer the opportunity to interact with the audience, lauding his own knowledge of three dimensions.

I just heard Merv Griffin died this past week. He created Wheel of Fortune for TV. A couple of times on this show, I got the puzzle with NO letters, just by the shape of the words before anyone had spun. The first time I did this was for a place, District of Columbia. Anyway, the categories are becoming more and more bizarre, as though they're afraid to ever use the same "phrase" or "person" again that they might have used 10 years earlier in an episode. One odd category that I sort of like is "before & after" where you might have to solve for something like "The Battle of Bunker Hill Street Blues". That's not as good as the one I came up with a few years ago -- "Microsoft Word To Your Mother". Now, aside from the fact that the lexicon of Vanilla Ice isn't particularly popular any more....I wonder how one submits puzzle ideas to the show, and if they would pay someone $100 for it. That might be a good idea for the producers, actually.

Alice in Chains blew Velvet Revolver off the stage last night. If nothing else, I hope Scott Weiland realizes how lucky he is not to be dead like Layne Staley. We all lost ten years' worth of AiC tunes thanks to Staley's drug-infused death....and Stone Temple Pilots kinda had some of the same problems for a while there with Weiland. Yes, we might still all be listening to grunge! :) oh wait, no smileys allowed in discussing grunge...that's not happy music.

One website I use for work a lot apparently requires me to change my password every 36 days. I have no idea why that number, but I've kept a record the last year as to when I'm prompted to change it. My favorite workaround? Change it, and then use the voluntary "change password" option to change it right back to the regular one. I know some places track your password history and won't let you re-use an old one. Not these guys, though. (It's actually a "Fortune 100" company, I've overheard.)

That reminds me, I love hearing when things are praised for being "Top N" in a category, where N is a bizarre number like 15 or 30. (As in, one of the top 15 golf courses on the east coast.) Clearly, the actual ranking is probably N or N-1 at best. If you were ranked number 4, you would describe yourself as one of the top 5....not one of the top 20, top 50, or top 100, right? And you might not say "one of the top 4" because with such an un-round number such as 4....you're not fooling anyone that you're anything BUT number four. So I'm guessing that the "Fortune 100" company above would NOT qualify as a "Fortune 50" company.

If the government had any forethought about computers, they would not have allowed ZIP codes and social security numbers to start with 0. Yes, you can format the Excel cells to show the leading zero, but that's more work than would be necessary if they'd started them with 1. Some of the best ones are SSNs from Vermont, which start usually 008- or 009-, so you have to watch for two extra zeros. If left in numeric format, those zeros just go away.

When my original dentist retired, my records were transferred to another guy in the same town. I'd never had a cavity, but the first time I see the new guy, he finds one on my partially-erupted wisdom tooth, and suggests I get them pulled. Sure -- stupid wisdom tooth, ruining my perfect oral history -- get out, and take your friends with you -- the old guilt by association idea. Anyway, after they're pulled by a dental surgeon, I kept them and wanted to bring them back the next year to have him identify the cavity. I forgot them, so it was actually 2 years later before I brought them to him. Gotta give him credit, he knew exactly which tooth was which, and where the cavity was. He said that in dental school, the students would have to walk around a table of random teeth and identify them all -- including the red herrings of animal teeth thrown in there for fun.