Shoes

Adults didn't play video games when I was a kid. Video games were a toy and once you reached a certain age you would move onto more important things... like watching tv, doing puzzles and trying to remember that persons name who used to live down the street.

Video games were released on a schedule revolving around the winter and summer olympics. If you didn't like the game that had just come out you had to wait two years until the next one came out or get back in line for "Pong". To my parents a video arcade game as they called them was something you did until the shuffle table was free or as a warm up for bumper pool. If you have a spare hour I dare you to ask my dad about the time the pinball machine was broken and he was forced to play "Night Driver".

All of this to say I've started to see an alarming number of kids wearing roller shoes. They are actual shoes with wheels on them that parents give their kids to make them think walking is now fun. Getting grocery's, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn, going inside the Burger King because drive thru line was too long are all jobs now being done by kids wearing roller shoes. They are everywhere. I wonder if these kids will grow up and keep wearing their roller shoe's the way adults now play video games. Eventually people won't remember how to walk, which really isn't very different from how I still can't remember the guy's name who used to live down the street.

Umbrella

Rain has a very good friend called wind with which it almost always travels. Wind presents two major problems when it comes to the umbrella. The first being that you still get wet because rain doesn't travel straight down, contrary to its appearance in comic books. The other problem is that the wind gusts will actually cause you to stumble around, giving the appearance of intoxication. So now you are tottering around with a flying projectile that has a sharp pointy tip.

If, by some random chance, you make it to your destination not having:

A. Been propelled by your umbrella into oncoming traffic.
B. Poked out an old lady's eye who was waiting for the bus.
C. Had it do the inside out thing that all umbrella's like to do.
D. Been voted off the street because your taking up more room than the guy who's walking three dogs at the same time.

Now that you have made it to your destination you must stand outside in the rain and make the judgment call of whether the umbrella will actually fit through the door. If it's a single door, then you will never fit your umbrella through without tilting it on an angle causing water to drip all over you. Now if it's a double door, the proceedings will inevitably look like a scene from an old silent movie.

Defying all odds, you have gotten into a building without getting wet using an umbrella. All you have to do is put it away. Have you ever closed an umbrella that's still over your head? All that water that you have been keeping off your body gets released onto you from some hidden reservoir built into the top of all umbrella's. There's a trick that I have seen done by holding the umbrella away from you with outstretched arms and close it with the tip pointing towards the ground. These are the people that I call professional umbrella users. Wanting to be like the professionals, I tried that same technique only to have the umbrella jam, causing an involuntary reflex to bring the umbrella over my head again to inspect the malfunction. After closing the hinge, the umbrella proceeded to close swiftly over my head followed by an indoor rainfall, defeating the whole purpose of using such a terrible contraption.

Why not just leave the umbrella at home? Trust me on this one, I always do.

Google

It's time relax and look up some useless facts on the internet.  Let's see I'm at google, now I only need to think of something to search for.  Here's a list of the most popular google search's in Canada for 2008.  

1. facebook
2. youtube
3. lyrics
4. weather
5. games
6. google
7. hotmail
8. yahoo
9. map
10. canada

I can hear the conversation between me and my wife now.  "Nick, what are you doing on the computer.  "I'm looking up google". 

"You mean your using google to search".  

"No, I'm looking up google on google".  

"Why"?  That's when the conversation would get awkward because I'm really not sure why I'm looking up google on google.  I guess it seemed more interesting than map or lyrics.  

Nobody's really looking up anything on the internet.  Why are we searching for generic lyrics.  No song it particular I just want to know some lyrics.  I have always considered google to be an index for this giant encyclopedia of information.  It turns out to be nothing more than a barometer showing how stupid we really are.  Why not look up something useful on google?  Because I'm to busy using it to search for yahoo.

Postal

The best part about the postal service is that everybody complained so much when the price of stamps kept going up by 2 cents every year that they made a stamp that never loses it's value.  This stamp will always be worth the amount needed to send a letter.  It's actually the safest place to put your money because it's guaranteed to rise equally with inflation.  RRSP, property, stock's, mutual funds... Those are all for sucker's; I've got my retirement fund all tied up in permanent stamps.


I'm really glad that I don't have to negotiate with the postal service because they would clearly have the advantage.  I would like to send this letter from Auckland to Christchurch.  Yes, I am aware that's over 1000km.  Of course, I know there is also a three hour ferry ride necessary just to get there.  Yes, I am also aware that fuel cost's $1.80 a liter.  Let's see you want me to make an offer.  Hmmmm...  I don't know, $200 sounds fair to me.  Before long, they would have me up to $300, realizing I had no alternative other than driving it there myself.


In reality, they only want 50 cents to mail my letter.  Why not put the post office in charge of the space program?  They would have a postal outlet setup between mars and the moon in under a year.  But it wouldn't take long for the people on Mars to complain that those permanent stamps they bought on earth weren't being honored in space.  I would just be happy to send a post card to Guy Laliberte for $5.  

Pro Athlete

The dream of every elite pro athlete is to retire after winning a championship while they are still a first rate player. On the other hand there are a lot of pro athletes that love the game and want to play it as long as they can and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. They will bounce around from team to team hardly getting any playing time but still hanging around the game they love. Most of these players hope to transition into coaches. Helping out the younger players in a mentoring role is a great way to achieve this.

Not me. I consider myself one of the greats in my sport and a real professional that wants to go out on the top of my game. My worst nightmare would be being remembered as the person who had a good run but was a shadow of their former self in the latter years of his career. Why not play a second game of scrabble against my wife? Because I won the first game!

Upon victory I quickly realized that I would never be able to repeat. My brain has a governor on it that limits me to focusing on 3 and 4 letter words. Sometimes I'll add an "s" or "er" and take the points of the larger word but usually those words weren't my original creation. You can tell that I've being playing scrabble because the board usually consists of either tools or things that I can actually see around me such as saw, sander, cup, lamp, shoe. How I won the game I'm not entirely sure. Cat on triple word score does add up I discovered. Maybe someday I'll put my title on the line but for now I'm 99.9% sure I'll stay retired.

Car Battery

My previous post got me thinking about car battery's and how we boost them.  Why not have a smaller second battery inside your car that can be used to boost your car in an emergency?

Lets pretend that I had job that was actually important and beneficial to society, say a doctor and I left my lights on all night.  I get up to go to work and my battery's dead.  Okay maybe that's a bad example because a doctor would drive a new car which would turn off the lights automatically.  How about this doctor's driving a courtesy car because their car's in the shop.  Plus it's the middle of winter and they didn't want to take out their summer car, I mean my summer car.  The sick people of the world are depending on me to help them get healthy again.

Instead of waiting at least an hour for the tow truck to come and give me a boost I just flip a switch inside the car that draws power from the backup battery and away I go.  It's also a win for the tow truck companies because they will just make up the lost revue from car boosts by charging more for a tow and do less work at the same time.  Then once they've established their new towing rates people like myself will soon start to leave the switch on and drain the second battery, gaining back all their previous clients.  I see a future post wondering why not a switch that automatically flips back to the main battery once the car's been started.

Forgetfulness

I forget things all the time.  I'm an equal opportunist with my forgetfulness.  It doesn't matter if it's for myself,  somebody else or the grocery list.  By that, I mean the whole grocery list.  I'm great at remembering to make a grocery list but it rarely finds it's way to the store with me.  If I do remember to bring it with me, the only thing that list does is double the amount of time that I'll spend there. Because how am I supposed to remember to bring a pen to check things off the list?  The problem is the items on the list don't line up exactly with the layout of the store.  I'm presented with two options.  Use my fingernail to try and scratch the item off the list, which turns into a big game of memory trying to remember what's still on the list and what's in the cart.  Or sequentially work my way down the list.  I'll end up passing by the banana's three times, wondering why my wife couldn't put the bananas, oranges, apples and grapefruit together.

Yet, certain mundane acts go by without ever being forgotten.  I have never heard anybody say "I can't believe I left the shower running all day long.  That's the second time this week!"  Could you imagine forgetting to turn the lawnmower off?  "There goes the neighbor cursing up a storm because he left the mower running again for over a hour."  Or the how about leaving the vacuum cleaner on.  "What's that noise coming from the closet?  Silly me, I must have forgot to turn off the vacuum when I put it away."

Sadly, I see the trend of forgetfulness increasing in my life.  I don't think that I could remember to turn off my headlights everyday for an entire year.  Up to this point in my life, I haven't successful reached this goal.  To combat this, I purchased one of those portable car boosters.  It's saved me a couple of times.  The only problem is that I took it in to charge up the battery one night and forgot it in the house.  Why not look at the bright side?  Soon, I'll have forgotten all about it.

Stupid

I really hate being stupid!  It's no fun at all, take my word for it.  I'll have conversations with my wife and have no clue what she's talking about because she's using words like incredulous or superfluous.  See, your thinking what kind of idiot doesn't know what those words mean, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

"Nick that was really incredulous of you to return the toaster after you broke it".  First off I don't think that I broke it.  The manufacturer should have had a label saying not dishwasher safe.  Secondly I believe it was mearly a coincidence that it stopped working, while still under warranty I should add around the same time of my ingenious cleaning method.  Now a smart person would know how to respond to my wife's statement.  A person of average intelligence would simply ask what the word means and move on.  A stupid person like myself pretends they know what the words means and then adds it to their vocabulary without even looking it up in the dictionary.  Why would I waste my time looking it up when I have clearly heard the word being used in a sentence and it's painfully obvious incredulous means something similar to incredible because of how incredible I am for returning the broken toaster to the store and getting a new one for free.

"That TV is the most superfluous purchase you have ever made", with new TV on the brain I was trying to figure out what I had just been told.  My wife has no idea that I don't understand half the words she says because they aren't big words to her, hardly even worthy of being used in a game of scrabble.  A big word to her consists of the letter z and q used twice without the letter u.  Being an optimist I come up with the most plausible definition of my super fabulous new TV.

This kind of thing happens everyday around our house all the time.  Why not give more examples?  I would, but quite honestly I'm to stupid to remember them.

Email

My main e-mail address is lambnick@hotmail.com .  I've had this address for 15 years.  When I signed up I was actually upset that nicklamb@hotmail.com was taken.  Then I realized a couple of years later that friends were putting underscores and numbers into their names for an e-mail address.  If I was just signing up for a hotmail account today the address would look something like la_mb15_nick1999_73@hotmail.com .  All of the good e-mail addresses are taken unless your super old like myself or you use one of the home based e-mail addresses.

Why not just start putting underscores and numbers into kids names.  That way every kid can have his or her own hotmail account without adding additional numbers or underscores to their name.  If my parents had named me N_ic_78k I could get a hotmail account with name no problem.

To avoid doubles and devastating disappointment from not having an e-mail account with your name before leaving the hospital you would have to name your kid by picking a hotmail account for them.  If the name chosen was already taken you would be given a list of suggestions resembling the one you choose.  This actually takes care of two problems.  No more having two kids named Chris in class.  There would be Chris_98_r and Chris_3_4_ , teachers would love it.  Now everybody will have their own unique name along with e-mail address.