Scrambled eggs, sesame seeds, i386 computers, clowns and Superman
11/13/05
Note to self: scramble the eggs before frying them. They mix a lot better that way. And there's time to put in some salt.
I can't believe I did that. I don't know, I've been making a lot of omelets lately, and just at that moment mixing the eggs in a bowl beforehand seemed too "omelety," and I've always thought of making scrambled eggs as "easier." Imperfect memory that I have, I forgot the jillion times I've made scrambled eggs before, and I fell for it. It's amazing. No matter how highly we think of ourselves, sometimes we still do incredibly dumb things. Huh.
On another food related note, why do we eat sesame seeds? I mean they're so small. I have trouble imagining one of our prehistoric ancestors thinking, "hey, that looks like something I could eat." I think that for when most new things were first tried out as food items, the alternative must have been starvation, searching out new "delicacies" for the Chinese emperors notwithstanding. I would think there would be a strong reluctance to see if some plant or animal you'd never heard of being eaten was edible -- because you'd never know what would turn out to be poisonous. Why take that chance unless you were starving? So, new things we're probably not usually tried out as foods on a whim. Looking at a sesame seed, it's so small, and you'd have to gather a lot of them just to get a mouthful to see if it would kill ya or not. So we have, 1) not very filling individually, and 2) it would take effort to collect enough just to see if they were toxic or not. Hmm. I don't know. Maybe rodents were observed eating them and surviving...
Rambling in a new direction, at my first job after college I had a computer with an unusual input device -- the desk. The computer would reboot if you hit the desk it was sitting on too hard. It was a 386 and I bought a vga card myself just so I could use the 16 bit (or was it 8?) vga color monitor. Hey, it was 1993 and I was fresh out of school, come on. So yeah, if you hit the desk too hard, it would reboot. This was a metal desk with drawers on the sides. The chair I had would not fit under the desk, between the drawers. This caused the computer to reboot a lot. So you might ask, why didn't I just try to pull the chair in more gently? I did try, I really did. But because the chair did not fit under the desk, because of the arms, I was always sitting on the edge of my seat, and couldn't lean against the back of the chair, not if I wanted to get close enough to the keyboard to do any work anyway. So without thinking I was always trying to pull the chair in closer while I worked, often being rewarded with a spontaneous reboot. Worse than that, I was excited about my job. I was programming in C (in ms-dos) and in those days that was still where it was at. So I'd get all excited about the code I was going to write, I'd run to my desk, jump in the chair, gettin' ready to code and BAM! oh shit. It's a wonder I got anything done at all. I learned to save a lot.
So what's the moral of the story? I dunno, maybe something along the lines of a message to management about how not to de-motivate their geeks, er, ahem, I mean IT staff, with crappy equipment and bad furniture? I just decided to blog it because I thought it was a funny story, which means I'm looking back at it now and laughing. Out loud. Head thrown back. That's good.
Driving home the other day, I noticed I was driving next to a clown in a Volvo. Full clown get-up, at least what I could see from the chest up through his car window. "Happy" clown, clearly bored with my sudden amusement at seeing him. I was grinning almost completely like an idiot, he returned a weak smile. "Clowns have to drive to their gigs too" I was supposed to realize, which I did.
Last, this is something that's been rattling around in the back of my head for so long, I really just have to post it regardless of how lame I think it is. I should say I am not really a fan of Superman, I don't know the "canon," if there is one, and really I find myself more intrigued by the back story (Jor-el, the planet Krypton, etc.) and the super powers, than by the rest of the story.
So, I think the people who make the cartoons and movies are confused as to the reasoning behind how it is that Superman is able to fly. See, Krypton was supposed to be a giant planet, so the aliens that evolved there would have to have more powerful muscles than we need here on Earth, just to hold themselves up and walk. Oddly enough they look human, and not more like elephants, with thick legs directly under their bodies and a generally stocky build. That aside, bringing one of them to Earth, via the escape pod daddy built, again strangely enough for just one passenger, they would find the gravity here much less than they were equipped to deal with. Like our own astronaut's voyages to the moon, they'd find that they would get a lot more out of a single step than they expected. Keep in mind that even as the Apollo astronauts bounced around the moon in leaps best measured in yards, they were also wearing lead boots just to keep that from getting too out of control. So Superman doesn't really fly, he jumps. He jumps really good. He should have no more control over where he comes down, and what he does in the air, than a skydiver does. So no swooping down to save Lois Lane and then somehow flying back up to the top of the skyscraper without first contacting the ground, or something else he could again jump from. To conclude this lameitude, there is no reason that a piece of his home planet -- kryptonite -- should magically rob him of his powers. No more so than the equipment brought from Earth did anything like this to the astronauts that went to the moon.
