P is for Penguin

I feel a little like Jessica Alba in the movie Good Luck Chuck saying this, but today I was wondering why penguins waddle. I mean, it's pretty amazing to me (regardless of their oldest standing record of best-dressed in the animal kingdom) that those penguin chicks even bother to mate with men that waddle from here to there. I mean they have legs.... right?

I bet all it would take is one badass motha-penguin who decided to get from here to there like Rollo Larson on Sanford and Son. I'm talking about the fast walk, with large steps, arm pumping back and forth like a man with a mission and somewhere to be (not your typical Snoop Dogg pimp walk and definitely not your typical penguin dweeby waddle).


















Yeeeeeeeahh....

That would definitely get the penguin ladies. But clearly that P is for Penguin the pimp has not yet entered into the world and the masses will have to patiently waddle. And as it turns out, it is an energy/heat-saving mechanism - in the cold weather they expose less of their legs waddling than striding and expend the least effort, conserving their calories for more ...ughem... productive activities. Like swimming in icy cold water.

Maybe things happen the way they do for a reason after all...
Do we discover patterns or create them?

Misconceptions and Madness

The word crusty almost never describes something good.

Shower heads.

Crusty.


The word reverberates in my head as if someone took a fingernail and scraped the calcification off that bad boy. Sounds just like it means, crusty. It's never a pleasant descriptor. Except maybe bread. And salmon. Yeah, I think bread and fish fillets are the exception to crusty = bad. Or is that crispy? I guess crispy is a synonym for crusty? That's it. Crusty is the ugly stepsister of crispy.


Moving along.


Another common misconception is the word automatic.

It almost never really means it's taken care of all by itself (- and is it just me or is the word 'automatic' peculiarly hard to define?). I'm constantly reminded of that particular fact while I'm standing at the bathroom sink waiting (vigorously moving my hands in every imaginable position) for the water to appear. I feel pretty cool during these times in my life. George Jetson sure did have a lot more finesse.

A lot of things seem easier than they are to do. Playing football, jumping rope, making calculations on a graphing calculator, speaking a foreign language (Cah-mo es-tah huus-ted my mom says) ... not being hypocritical. Which is why I think that you should try and focus on the things you are good at, instead of trying to make yourself better at the things you're bad at. You can either excel at your strengths or, at the very most, be mediocre in your weaknesses. So why not focus your energy on honing your good qualities and skills??

I think we were all good at different things, and everyone is good at something. Find out what if you haven't already!

Literally and actually waiting for the water to turn on.

Empty Your Pockets

The topic of this blog hit me as I was taking my dog for our ritual 6am morning stroll down poop alley. Pockets. You can find them on most garments, as a feature of office supplies, in your car, the back of an airplane seat, and on various other mundane, everyday objects. They're used for storing things, collecting small debris, and capturing your attention at 3 second intervals like a Morse code message.

For this particular occasion, the pockets were my sweatpants pockets storing my doggie bag and gate keys. These pants pockets aren't particularly deep, they are rather wide, and they are angled just a tad bit downward for ease of placing your hands in them.

Good for hand occupation, bad for transporting miscellany.

While the plastic grocery sack would be an unfortunate loss - leaving a steamer on the lawn for the neighbors to step in, accompanied by angry stares from those looky-loos that think I'm an irresponsible pet owner not picking it up... - what I would really be bummed to lose would be the keys. They are my only access back into my gate and they cannot be duplicated.

Quite often I use my pockets to transport or carry important items that I wouldn't want to lose. Which is why, every time I'm using my pocket to store something, I imagine it falling out, the ramifications of that event, and then I put my hand in my pocket to make sure the contents are secure/still there. A mental role call to calm my fears. This event happens frequently until I finally decide to take out the item and hold it in my hand until I get where I'm going.

I'd say most things in my pockets, depending on the pocket dimension and build obviously, have about a 60/40 chance of falling out, and if they did fall out, I'd say there would be around a 40% chance that I wouldn't notice. So... just putting anything in my pocket is almost a 25% chance that I'd lose it. I'd say these stats apply to most of the general population so either pockets have evolved to the function of a lonely place to keep your hands on occasion, or they are a representation of the older, more care-free days where people were OK with the chance that they'd lose a 1/4 of their valuables kept in pockets.

Anyway, I'll take the risk for convenience. Literally and actually using my pockets for more than my hands.

Rock Bottom

Today I received the following email:(Click the image to view closer)
Rock.
Bottom.

Revealing and Revelling

I love jigsaw puzzles, jenga, and sudoku. My favorite game growing up was picture hunt . . . you know the one where they show you two pictures and you have to spot the differences? I had all 4 Where's Waldo books that came out in the 1990s. To this day I can look at any of them and point out where that little candy cane man is, AND I can find his dropped items. It literally took me 3 seconds to look at the department store picture above and find Wally next to the table with the boots. Seriously, I'm that good! (Nothing really to be proud of, it's mainly due to a self-entertaining childhood and many late nights up in bed with my flashlight just trying to find... that ... last... little... set of ...glasses.. YES! There they ARE!!!)

I should have known what I'd become later in life.

Now I'm one of those people that prides myself at finding things others look over. It's an intrinsic quality that I'll never be able to kick. I notice the extras in movies. I catch spelling mistakes. I remember weird quirks people have and things they want for their birthdays. I've come to terms with it and I'm currently assessing how I can best use it to my advantage.

So you can imagine my delight when I was reading an article in the New York Times and saw the word canceled. "What?!", I thought, a typo in a such a prestigious newspaper??... followed by a few mental "tshch" and "pshtcha"s. I hastily opened an new web broswer window to double check my discovery on dictionary.com only to find that cancelled is the British form of the word and the modern day English word is correctly, to my dismay, Canceled. I guess both being right is better than me being wrong!

Hmph.

I comfort myself in the fact that the English language is one of the hardest languages to learn. Mainly because there are so many exceptions and special instances, ... neighbors and weigh ... or how past tense is sometimes the same as future tense - read (I read a book) is spelled the same as read (I am going to read a book). The problem goes further, once you get to learn it all, they change it on you.

Take for example, the double space. I was taught in grammar school that you're only supposed to use one space after periods, and that the old double space standard was a remnant from the old typewriter days. I despise the double space. I work with people that double space and just to spite them, I go back and erase every little extra space. It's tedious and time-consuming but the effects are similar to scrubbing the grout on your kitchen tile floor. In the end, gleaming in all its glory.

Ok, so I'm an extremist with a hint of perfectionism. What can I say? Old habits die hard and I learned at a very young age to spot the differences and find the missing pieces. So I suggest you take a long hard look at the board games you loved as a kid and determine what they say about you. I bet it's something good. :)