Trail Mix

I don’t like trail mix.  If you remember my post about the amount of ingredients in foods, you already can guess why.  I would like to expand on the specific example of trail mix and hopefully illuminate some insights along the way.

The design behind trail mix, if there is one at all, is that the salty components combine with the chocolately M&M’s to form a distinctive taste combination.  Although I can admit that there is some validity to this combination, it is ruined by the overall disgusting nature of the nuts, raisins, and little broken pretzel bits.  (I like pretzels, don’t get me wrong.)  Honestly the only reason kids or adults with odd snack choices tolerate trail mix is because of the M&M’s.  I would be the first person to pick out and eat all the M&M’s, but they are usually so contaminated by the salts and bad-tastiness to the point of inedibility.

Trail mix provides a unique metaphorical insight into our own lives.  I guess the point is that you shouldn’t let the nuts and raisins in your life contaminate the M&M’s.  Or you could just buy a pack of M&M’s from the vending machine instead.  I don’t know what that would symbolize.  But now all I can think about is that I want some M&M’s.

"Highschoolers"

I find it odd how in many recent television shows and movies, adults play the roles of teenagers.  Remember High School Musical, High School Musical 2, and High School Musical 3: Senior Year?  Hopefully not.  In these movies, popular actor Zac Efron plays a high school drama queen basketball star.  He was already 19 when acting in the first movie, but by the third he was 21.  When he is supposed to be an 18-year-old senior, he is in reality a 21-year-old man.  Or, to point out a more obvious example, he was 22 when he played the main role in the movie 17 Again.  In a different more recent example, actress Jennifer Lawrence (22) in The Hunger Games, played the role of a teenage girl.

Well, what difference does it make?  When you have adults playing the roles of “highschoolers,” people generally not in contact with teenagers on a day-to-day basis gain a false sense of what they look like.  Keep in mind, a 14-year-old girl is still in high school.  Highschoolers are not these full-grown, well-developed adults movies and TV shows convince most people that they are.

Also, it artificially raises expectations of obnoxious preteen girls.

EPCOT

Most people are aware that EPCOT is a theme park part of Disney World in Florida.  Most people, however, don’t know what the acronym stands for.  Maybe “Exciting Place of Cool and Outstanding Terrificness?” Nope.  It actually stands for the “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.”

Walt Disney, near the end of his career, wanted to invest in an experiment in urban planning and design.  He planned out the design of city using modern technology, especially in transportation.  He theorized that if a city was designed thinking about modern methods of transportation, instead of being the jumbled mess of hundreds of years of development, many problems of modern cities could be solved.  Unfortunately he dies before his vision could be implemented, and they decided to turn EPCOT into a theme park instead.

Here is a two-part video of Walt Disney explaining his plan.  The interesting parts about the city’s design starts halfway through the first video, and continues through the second.

Cellulose Fibers

Today I pondered the age old question: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

I thought about it for a while, before turning to Wolfram.  It turns out that there was a research experiment performed on woodchucks entitled “The Ability of Woodchucks to Chuck Cellulose Fibers”, concluding that they are able to chuck approximately 361.9237 cubic centimeters of wood per day.

This is essentially the epitome of useless information, and for some reason I feel like I am finally prepared to go on a trivia game show.

Emphasis

The sentence, “I didn’t say she stole my money” has seven different meanings based on which word gets the emphasis.

“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – Accusing someone else.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – Questioning the entirety of the event.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – He screamed it.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – The dog did.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – “Borrowed”.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – She stole Bob’s money.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.” – Only the credit card, jewelry, and the car.

At this moment it has come to my attention that there is an eighth (please do not stare at the word “eighth” too long – it will make you question the nature of words, the english language, and even your life itself) way to say this sentence:

“I didn’t say she stole my money!” – Anger at a friend who after many times has confused the intentions of your statement, and is now going on explaining all of the different meanings with stupid little joke/explanations afterwards.

Daily Cycle of Motivation

My levels of motivation throughout the day:

Professional Equipment

In almost every endeavor that requires skill and practice, there will be higher quality tools to help you get the job done.  However, just because you have professional equipment doesn’t mean you are a professional.

The most common instance of this mentality is in photography.  Better cameras do increase the image quality, but they can’t give you better lighting, angle, or creativity.  Just because you have a professional camera doesn’t mean you are instantly a photographer.

Another case is sports.  Better racquets, fishing poles, skis, boards, and shoes slightly improve performance, but are not necessary to do well.  

The most deceptive category of professional equipment is software.  For nearly all creative projects, there are one or two “go to” programs.  Whether it’s editing videos, drawing, graphic design, animation, music, or 3D modeling, many people are convinced that they can only create a good product with an expensive application.  In these cases having more advanced tools at your disposable can be a hinderance, actually decreasing the overall quality of your project.

In summary, you can’t buy your way to expertise.  Trust me, your pictures of your food/pets/self will turn out just the same if taken from your phone.

Costumer Service

Appropriate, helpful, and competent customer service can greatly increase your reputation as a company, and equally bad customer service can hurt it just as much.  It is very difficult to have a neutral experience with customer service, where you think no differently of them after the encounter.  Because of this, I am going to provide my list of suggestions for those in charge of customer service.

1.  Use real people.  No one wants an automated email response, a link to useless online information, or to talk to a machine.  It shows that you don’t care about people, and they will become very frustrated.

2.  Go out of your way to help people.  Although not all requests can be fulfilled, going above and beyond someone’s expectations will impress them, and make them more loyal to your company as a whole, giving you additional profit in the long run.

3.  Don’t give me crap.  I absolutely hate when people refer me to higher-ups later on in a conversation, when they knew all along they couldn’t solve the problem themselves.  Or, the worst is when they defend their action by saying they have no control.  A bureaucracy is just a network of people to blame the problem on.

Authentic Italian

Whenever a restaurant or food item claims to be “authentic Italian,” I imagine what a real “authentic Italian” restaurant would be.  I would hire Italian people, tell them not to speak english to costumers, and only accept Euros as payment.  All food would be extremely expensive since it would be imported from Italy, but the people wouldn’t really notice since they have to convert all of their money to Euros before they made a purchase.  For added charm I would tell the cooks to be lenient on health codes, and get angry on occasion with customers.  Pizza and noodles would be available, but without much customization options, so you would have to take what you get.

As I think more about this, the more I don’t mind that it isn’t true authentic Italian.

A Riddle

I am a game with no ball, field, or score.
I am difficult during, but easy after.
I contradict myself, I make perfect sense,
and I have only one way to win.

What am I?