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Confidential to the guy I unfortunately witnessed at the supermarket deli the other day:

None of what you see in the deli display case could be strictly classified as “homemade.”You were standing at the far end of the deli display case, ogling the available salads. You were probably in your mid-fifties with a similarly aged woman standing near you.

Svetlana, the deli employee trying to help you, is not from this country (if the name wasn’t enough of a tip-off). Her command of the English language might be best described as “a work in progress.” However, she is pleasant, hard-working (she worked her way up from being a bagger), and generally one that tries to please the customer. I have a soft spot in my heart for Svetlana because she always tried to fit the maximum number of groceries into a bag, while limiting the weight of the bag and minimizing the chances the bag might break. When the groceries were all paid for and bagged, she always gave Sarah and I a little nod of the head and the tiniest smile. For some reason, we always found that to be more genuine than “Have a nice day” delivered by a sullen teenager.

So, there you stood, in your navy blue Lands End jacket, asking over and over again “Which of these are homemade?” while pointing at the deli display case. Svetlana did not understand your question (apparently the word homemade is not in her English vocabulary yet), but she was trying gamely to figure out what you wanted. However, since she could not answer your question, you just kept getting more and more agitated and making a truly stupendous mountain out of a non-existant molehill.

So, I’ve got news for you, dummy. None of them are homemade. It’s a supermarket deli. The very word “homemade” implies that something was made in a home. Everything you saw in the display case was made in batches where the smallest ingredient was measured in gallons. Have you tried the cookies? They are not homemade. They were made in gi-hugic batches in the bakery next to the deli. How about the rotisserie chickens? Nope. Not homemade either.

Did you happen to look up from the display case and see the industrial/institutional kitchen just beyond the deli? That is where all the deli foods are made (or even just defrosted after their journey across hundreds of miles from a factory somewhere else). Did that kitchen look like the place you would find homemade food cooking?

You see, the deli does not make homemade food. The deli sells food already prepared to people who either cannot cook, do not have time to cook, do not like to cook, or are too lazy to cook. To maximize profits while keeping prices low, everything is prepared using reasonably low-quality ingredients purchased in large quantities and prepared as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you want a homemade pie, you’re going to need to visit aisle five where the baking ingredients are kept. Once there, you can find flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and pie filling. If you need a fruit salad, perhaps you could have turned your lazy ass around and chosen some fruit from the produce section directly behind you. Ten minutes with a decent quality knife and a cutting board would have produced a homemade fruit sald.

Of course, none of that would short-circuit the whole process of getting homemade food any more than yelling at Svetlana did.

So, Mr. “Which of these are homemade,” I’ll be looking out for you from now on. Clearly, you don’t quite grasp the concept of mass-produced foods, supermarkets, and what is homemade. That makes me wonder what other basic concepts of modern living have also escaped your tiny mind.

Why must everyone describe the size of any given area in acres? Is everyone supposed to be born with a innate feel for exactly how large an acre is?If I had a used car for every time that someone described the area of something in terms of acres, I’d have the largest collection of used cars ever assembled.

Something is “forty acres” in size. That forest covers “four hundred acres.” Their yard is “half-an-acre” in size.

Here’s the deal. I don’t have the slightest idea of how big an acre is. Sure, it might be 4046.85642 meters squared, but how big is that? I can picture a square mile (this is America after all, and we use miles, damnit!). Why can’t people say that such and such is “forty square miles” in size. That I can understand.

A mile can be driven in a car. It can be walked on foot. It can be biked. How does one bike an acre? Does your car’s odometer register the number of acres traveled since it was assembled? Perhaps you step out for an evening walk of ten acres?

Of course not. You step out for a walk of a half-mile or a mile. You bike miles. Your car travels three thousand miles or more between oil changes. We all understand miles. Hence, to square those miles is no great intuitive leap. Heck, if you grew up in a state like South Dakota where there are section line roads, and each section is a square mile, it would seem almost easier to talk about area in terms of miles instead of acres.

Now, most of the people reading this essay are saying, “Dummy. You’re comparing acres with miles. That’s an area measurement and a distance measurement. Why don’t you compare grape jelly with sirloin steaks next?!” Unfortunately, that is false reasoning.

The acre has an interesting history. Originally, it was the area of land a yoke of oxen could plow in one day. So, he of the stronger, faster oxen had larger acres than he of the lazy, weak oxen. This meant that the acre was just as precise a unit of measurement as cubits were (the length of your forearm).

So, an acre was fixed to be 10 sqare chains (tangentially: a chain’s length is either 66 feet or 100 feet, depending on whose chain is used). But, it still doesn’t correspond neatly to meters or hectares, nor does it correspond to feet (in most instances; remember the chain dependancy mentioned above), yards, or miles. Sure, an acre can be expressed in squared terms of all those measurements, but not neatly like meters and hectares (1 hectare = 10,000 sq. meters).

An acre is nothing more than a shorthand way of compressing a squared distance measurement in conversation and writing. Rather than saying, “Well, I live on 43,560 sq. ft. or 10 square chains” someone might say, “I live on an acre.”

So, why don’t we simply invent other terms to express oddball squared distance values? Let’s term 4 square miles a “rorvak” and 16 square miles a “frindorg.” Then, we could talk about owning a farm with 2 rorvaks of land someday while cities could express their metropolitan size in frindorgs.

Ultimately, those terms are no different than acre. My made up terms just happen to be unfamiliar.

Another argument for using acres is that they are a convenient way of expressing area measurements that everyone uses. That argument doesn’t hold water at all. I would challange anyone to tell me the area of my monitor screen (it’s a 15″ LCD) in acres. Need me to scale up a bit? How about the size of my living room in acres? Still too small? How about the size of my house in acres?

About the only thing ever measured in acres is land or very large areas. If we’re measuring land or very large areas, why not use square miles and be done with it? Why use a word that doesn’t make communication any easier?

To further cloud the issue of acres, there are different acre measurements in different parts of the world. The international acre is 0.0162 square meters smaller than the American acre.

So, if folks in the US expressed areas in square miles or yards (remember, this is America, damnit! We don’t use the metric system) and those so inclined to use the heretical metric system used square meters or hectares, acres could go the way of polio or smallpox.

The other incredibly useless way to talk about the size of an area is to translate the size of an area into football fields.

• “An asteroid the size of a football field…”
• “Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or MLRS, which can shoot up to 12 rockets in one minute and destroy an area the size of a football field”
• “…USS Abraham Lincoln dimensions are usually given in football fields…” Really? Dimensions on the Abe are giving in football fields?
  • “Can I get a nut 1/7000th of a football field in diameter?”
  • “How tall are you sailor?”
    “I’m 1/60th of a football field tall, sir!”
  • “The printer needs some more paper that measures 0.0019 football fields by 0.0025 football fields before our orders from the Pentagon will finish printing.”
• “This National Landmark vessel, nearly the size of a football field,
  was…”

Etc., Etc., Etc.

There are several problems with this stupd linguistic crutch.

1. A football field means different things to different people. In America, a football field is used by the NFL. In England, a football field is used by soccer teams like Manchester United. The two field sizes are different. So, to describe something in terms of a football field can only lead to confusion. Is that a British football field, or an American football field? To make thing even murkier, the Canadian Football League plays a game closely related to American football, but on a field that has different dimensions.

   Before anyone claims that such confusion could never happen, allow me to present Exhibit A: a page about pyroclastic flows. This page describes uses a wonderful smashing of mental orientation when it describes the width of a (round) lava dome formed on Mount St. Helens in lengths of a football field (don’t even get me started on how a round object apparently has a width. Maybe the writer of the page could tell me the round object’s length next?). Now, you might think that the page is clearly referencing American football fields, as it discusses an American volcano. Until you realize that the page is served off of a server in the United Kingdom with no mention of American authors. Now, are the football fields in question American or British?

2. People who don’t spend much time on football fields, generallly don’t know or care how big such a field is. Sure, they might be able to say, “It’s one hundred yards long; one hundred and twenty yards long if you include both end zones” but intellectually knowing how big something is doesn’t mean that you can picture it in your minds eye. For instance, if I told you that Lake Superior holds 12,100 cubic km of fresh water, that wouldn’t mean much to most people. However, if I told you that Lake Superior contains more water than all the other Great Lakes combined and then some, that is a useful comparison, something with which your mind can be comfortable.

Finally, the newest entry in my “I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up” gallery is a page that explains how an acre is about the size of a football field.

Tonight I attended a presentation by a local technology consulting company, and Novell to a local Linux user group. After the conclusion of the sordid affair, I was left with one overriding question:

How do so many people survive when they leave home without their critical thinking skills?Nearly everyone there was completely caught up in the Novell marketdroid’s spiel, which was frustrating.

The marketdroid showed a slide, and then showed another slide with information that completely contradicted the first slide. What happened when I call him on this? I was made out to be the bad guy. Marketdroid showed contradictory slides time after time after time.

Of course, the presenters (who tried really hard to take boring to places it has never been and has no business ever going), were well trained in Pavlovian techniques. Those who asked questions friendly to the presenters were presented with Novell swag, while those who asked probing, critical questions were showered in scorn.

To make the evening even more entertaining, not one person (other than myself) ever asked the presenters why we should care about what they are saying. It seemed to be assumed by all that the Novell clowns were bringing the Word down from the mountain (or Utah, such as the case might be).

To make matters even worse, why on Earth didn’t anyone else call the presenters on the fact that they showed up with Windows laptops to demo Linux products to a Linux user group?!? That’s like driving up a convention of Ford truck dealers in a Chevrolet.

What ever happened to Linux users possessing a sense of the cynic, the skeptic? If I wanted to hang out with a bunch of marketdroid believers, I’d find a Windows user group.

Has anyone else noticed the decline of Cracker Jack? There are now very few peanuts in a box. I counted seven the other day.

Beyond the lesser number of peanuts, the prizes these days are worthless. It wasn’t very long ago that one could get plastic trinkets inside a box of Cracker Jack. I remember getting jumping frogs, little kaleidoscopes, and the like in the not very distant past.

Now, all the “prizes” are lame little puzzles printed on pieces of paper.

None of this is incredibly surprising when you consider that Cracker Jack is now owned by Frito-Lays. Frito-Lays is the largest, most profitable subsidiary of the $27 billion food industry leviathon, PepsiCo. And, if you’re a food industry leviathon, cutting out a few peanuts and plastic gee-gaws for the sake of short-term profitabilty only makes sense, no matter how much the change cheapens the product’s image in the long run.

Since when did the USA become so utterly stocked to the rafters with motivated, creative individuals that we couldn’t use a couple more?

Remember the Cubans who tried to escape the to US on an old truck that they converted to a boat? They were stopped at sea by the Coast Guard, their truck was sunk, and the occupants of the truck were returned to Cuba.

Now, three of same Cubans are trying to get here again. They converted a 1959 Buick into an ocean-going vessel and set sail for Florida again. Eleven Cubans (try getting eleven people into a car on land, much less at sea) were captured by the Coast Guard and their car was sunk.

It seems to me that these are exactly the sort of people the USA ought to be trying to attract. Clearly, the guys who turned an old car into a sea-worthy vessel, who timed their voyage for good weather and calm seas, who were not deterred by failing a first time, are smart, creative, hard-working, forward-thinking, never-say-die people. Since when did we have too many of those folks around here?!? You can go weeks at a time without finding a person like that in the US.

This country was founded by people just like those gentlemen: people with vision; people with backbone; people who were determined to make their own way in the world. Remember David Farragut’s famous cry? “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” I can almost picture the Cubans in question, just before they drive off the beach in Cuba and into the ocean saying, “Damn the Coast Guard! Full speed ahead!” Why are we turning people like that away?

Some folks would argue that these Cubans were going to be nothing more than a drain on our already stretched social support system. Let’s put those folks on an inland with an old car, some hardware, some tools, and a limited amount of food and see how they do. Let me remind you: these Cubans converted a 1959 Buick into a sea going boat that held eleven people! Do you honestly think they couldn’t make a living fixing cars? Heck, they’d do well to setup their own garage. I’d be willing to buy a car, just to get those guys to fix it. It would go in an oil change, and come out with wings, and the ability to fly for short distances.

This country clearly needs to stop and think for a minute before reflexively slamming the door in the face of people who clearly fit the mold of what we all would like to be.

The low-rider, hip-hugging blue jeans trend has gone far enough. Why must I be subjected to large quantities of gratuitous ass crack in public places?Sarah and I were at the Ani DiFranco concert last night. We generally like to sit on the aisle so that we can come and go as we please. This means standing up periodically to let those seated farther down the row of seats pass, but there are tradeoffs for everything in life so standing up periodically doesn’t bother me.

Well, as we were sitting on the aisle, so were the people sitting in front of us. And, if we had to stand up reasonably often, so did the people in front of us.

Normally, that wouldn’t bother me in the least. Like I said, there is a price to be paid for sitting on the aisle. However, one of the girls in front of us was in no way slender and she was wearing the ever-so-fashionable hip-hugging, low-rider jeans with a too-short shirt.

Everytime this wonderful person stood up to let people pass, my field of view was filled with gratuitous ass crack as her jeans were riding too low and the back of her shirt was riding too high.

Yikes! I paid over $35 to listen to Ani sing and play guitar, not to see some random girl’s pasty white, flabby, unattractive, exposed posterior. Where is the justice here?

If I walked around with the top half of butt crack hanging out for all the world to see, wouldn’t people be more than a bit offended?

So, if you find yourself wearing hip-hugger, low-rider jeans, experiment at home with a friend or significant other before wearing the jeans out in public. If you’re flashing tail bone and the Grand Butt Cheek Canyon when you stand up, those jeans are not you. If you insist on wearing such jeans, please, please, please, wear a shirt long enough to be tucked in for everyone else’s sake.

Yes, that was a UW-Madison professor who discovered how to cut cheese with a laser. Let’s face it, didn’t we all get up every morning wondering, “When are those smarty-pants scientists going to figure out how to cut cheese with a laser already?!?”

Did the world reallyl need this sort of research? Did this do anything to dispel Wisconsin’s reputation as a state full of cheeseheads. Other scientists are out there trying to cure cancer, make cars and trucks more efficient, and use plants to reclaim toxic waste sites. Heck, even research into Dick Cheney’s pet, clean coal, sounds like a better use of research time. But no, Wisconsin scientists are out there busily trying to figure out how to cut cheese with lasers.

What big breakthrough will they discover next? How to operate a grill full of bratwurst by remote control?

A Fond Du Lac, WI man blames Charter Communications for “his television addiction, his wife’s 50-pound weight gain and his children being ‘lazy channel surfers.’”

What will make this man happy? “$5,000 or three computers, and a lifetime supply of free Internet service.”

The complete story includes more absurd details guaranteed to make you cringe at the thought that this man has the right to vote.

Yesterday afternoon, five inches of snow fell on Madison in just a couple of
hours. Sarah and I just happened to be out and about running an errand
when the snow started coming down in earnest.

The Beltline highway, on
which we were traveling, is normally a high-speed, limited access road
similar to an Interstate highway. Yesterday, however, with blowing and
drifting snow and limited vision, most people were traveling about 30-45
mph.

Select idiots eager to leap out of the gene pool (most driving
pickup trucks and SUVs), were traveling 50-65 mph in the so-called fast
lane. This morning, the local NPR station leads off with this
headline, “Five inches of snow caused two huge pile-up accidents
on the Interstate 90 on Madison’s East Side.”

My initial
reaction, of course, was that five inches of snow had nothing to do with
it. The real cause of the accidents was a failure of people to
recognize that travel conditions dictated slower speeds and increased
attention to the road. However, not a word was said in the report
about how it requires too many people traveling entirely too fast in poor
conditions to cause a 42 car collision and a twelve car collision.

Rather than blame drivers for acting like idiots and taking lives into their
hands (their own lives and others), society chooses to blame the snow.

How dare the snow fall in Wisconsin in January!

Even after leaving the
Beltline, Sarah and I saw accident after accident on the surface
streets. Most of the accidents were one car rear-ending another car
after driving too fast or following too closely.

Have people forgotten
that even though they have all-wheel drive to get going, oftentimes the
biggest problem in the winter is getting stopped?!? Of course, society
doesn’t fault people for driving like idiots. We’d rather fault the
snow. I thought that this excerpt from the Wisconsin State
Journal was telling:

“The first officer at the scene of the crash was State Patrol Sgt. Dennis
Kruger. He said several cars that passed him while he was driving to the
scene of the accident at 35 mph with his emergency lights on were eventually
involved in the pileup.

“‘I had my window rolled down and could hear the cars crashing into
each other as I rolled up to the scene,’ Kruger said.’ ‘You just
can’t stop on glare ice.’”

The home improvement industry would be better served by turning out more
specific instructions.

The directions we used to install the door this
weekend were something like seven steps. Of course, the directions
started at a point where you had a door-shaped hole in the house. No
guidance in taking out the old door or making a fresh, new hole in your
house was given. Even the steps that were listed were occasionally
vague. Some pointers about how to use shims to hold the door in place
would have been nice. Some tips on how to center the door in the
opening, while maintaining a square frame, with a door that swung freely in
the frame would have been greatly appreciated. Instead, we got
glowingly vague instructions and happy little line-drawing people.

This sort of nearly worthless instruction is not limited to pre-hung
doors. Nearly every sort of home improvement project is not burdened
with a surfeit of instructions, but rather awash in a sea of silence for
specific steps in the process. If directions to build a new house were
written like most home improvement project directions, they would read
something like this:

1. Remove parts for new house from package.
2. Build new house.
3. Move in and enjoy your new home!