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There are a few that have really stood out to me, lately... one I haven't been able to find in a form that I can share with you here, so I'm going to hold off on telling you about it for now, but a couple of quick ones...

The colon cancer people actually have this as their catchphrase: We're behind your behind. I heard it on the radio and thought it was a joke, but it's the real deal. I think that's brilliant.

And another that was brilliant in a somewhat less intentional way was for a furniture store: "save up to 30% or more!".

Now this has been a pet peeve of mine for a while... seeing a sign in a store saying "Sale - up to 50% off". I might be the only one, but I'm a lot less interested in knowing that, if I go in, I am guaranteed never to be able to save more than 50%... I'd like to know I'm going to get it for at least whatever percent off. If I had my way, all the save "up to" signs would be replaced by save "at least" signs.

But being told that I will save absolutely no more than 30% or I will save more than 30%... well, how can you not trust those guys? I would suggest double-checking when they're ringing things through, though... just in case.

Happy shopping.

There Are So Many

There are a lot of things that I don't get. And not just math things, either: why people who drive so slowly don't just take the bus, instead. Why stores and restaurants with two doors seem to like to keep one of them locked (they are trying to reduce their business by 50%?). Why people making signs don't bother to check their spelling.

But here's the one that's been getting me, lately: when I buy bagels (one of the things I'm enjoying about being back in Canada), and they say "sliced" on the bag, they only kind of are. I don't know if you've had these, so I'll try to describe it.

Imagine that you're holding an unsliced bagel in your hand, with your thumb on one side and forefinger on the other. Someone challenges you to slice it without moving your hands... and so you cut on one side until the knife comes up against your thumb and finger, then go from the other side, until the same thing happens. You're left with a bagel that's sliced about 80% of the way through (40% on each side) and you hand the knife back, with a look on your face like you tried to do one of those little wooden puzzles where you have to do something that looks impossible until you know how.

Only, it seems, no one knows how.

Now I would guess that, with the extensive popularity that bagels have enjoyed over the last however-many decades, there is some pretty significant technology that's been developed for them. There is for everything, right? And like in most industries, I suspect that the big companies have access to the best of that technology... I mean, those bagel guys must have the equivalent of nuclear-powered nano computers for bagels, whatever that might be.

But they can't figure out how to slice them all the way through.

I can understand not slicing the bagels - for people who really like their bagels whole. I've never met any of those people, but I'm not saying they're not out there, and I support them completely. I can also understand slicing the bagels, for people (like me) who like to have their bagels in two pieces. What I don't understand is partially slicing the bagels except for a strip down the middle that stays attached so that, to get them apart, you still need to slice them yourself.

There might be something to this that I'm just not getting... maybe they've had focus groups, and the feedback has come in that some people want to put things in the sides, kind of like Subway used to do, without having them touch in the middle. Or that they're going hiking or something with their bagels, and taking all the sandwich fixings with them; they don't want the bagel to separate during the hike, but like to have a little help to know where to slice when they find the appropriate blade on the old Swiss army knife.

Or maybe they need to have a baked-goods summit of some kind. I think that the hamburger bun people have done rather well... they leave a little bit so the buns aren't flying all over the bag, but they do it at the side so the buns don't just rip into pieces when you try to separate them. Can any of you UN-type people set up something like that?

In any case, this is making me hungry.

I'm going to go have a hamburger.

Infiltrated

I've been infiltrated.

I don't know if Apple specifically planned it that way, but a covert agent has been working on me, trying to get me to buy an iPod.

And it almost worked.

I got to thinking - 160 GB would be pretty cool - I could put all my music on it at a pretty high bit-rate. And even some movies. And the new ones have a battery life that a lot of people are pegging at 40+ hours on a charge for music. And there are programs other than iTunes that you can use now to manage the music you play... meaning you can actually move it around however you want, without Apple telling you which computers you're allowed to use to listen to it.

And then I started to read.

It turns out that Apple has changed a few things with the new ones (called iPod Classic, or sixth generation/6G). They have a new algorithm that they're using for the digital/analog conversion. And the hardware has changed, too - the DAC is coming from another manufacturer. And in the hi-fi community, people are not happy.

Turns out the sound is, to a critical listener, nowhere near as good as it was for previous incarnations - less natural, less punchy and vibrant, with harmonic overtones missing. Which is all I need to know for now, until either a firmware fix or a version with better hardware (or both) is released.

Whew.

Close call.

It Doesn't Mean I'm Fussy

I cleaned out my bag this morning - the one I carry my PC in and (when I'm traveling for work) more or less everything else, too. It wasn't that messy... I had a couple old chocolates in the bottom, a few pieces of paper I don't need any more, and some stuff to put into different pockets, but it felt good to get it organized. Really good, actually. And I realized that the amount of pleasure I derive from organizing something insignificant like that is completely disproportionate to either the amount of effort required or the real-life impact of the activity.

That's pretty cool. It's like some kind of vending machine where you put in a buck and it spits out three.

Plus, now I know how to plan my weekend.

Taste Test

Well, I popped up a bit of white and yellow corn and did a side-by-side comparison. The results were surprising:

• Taste - the white is quite a bit sweeter and more pleasant than the yellow.
• Texture - the yellow popped up much fluffier than the white, and was less chewy. The white had by far fewer husks, but that is not enough to compensate for the compactness of the popped corn. I do plan to test again, though, since the volume of the corn once it was popped was far less than I was used to (and I know my popcorn pot pretty well). It may be an anomaly, but at this point, the yellow wins.
• Appearance - this is a draw: the size and shape of the yellow corn was much nicer, but the color of the white is better.
• Ease of Preparation - no appreciable difference.
  

Overall winner: close, but I'm choosing white by a small margin. I'll sure eat yellow if it's in front of me, though...