Go BIG or Go Home!

I am loving this story, about the town of Portland, Maine, who decided that they were going to OWN the record book for the largest whoopie pie ever made. The previous record, accomplished out in Pennsylvania, was a robust 250 pound whoopie pie, a full 90 pounds above my own body weight. The fine folks up in Portland weren’t just shooting for 251 lbs, though. Hell no! If you’re going to go big on whoopie pie, you go ALL IN BABY and craft a sweet ‘ol pile to the tune of……wait for it…..1,067 pounds! That is a 326% increase over the previous whoopie pie record. You have to like a town that really goes for it.

So I started thinking about other records and what would happen if they were eclipsed by 326%. If I’m doing my math right….

  • An NFL team would have to score 311 points in a game to beat the current record of 73 points by one team in a single game.
  • A hockey player would need a 904 point season to beat Wayne Gretzky’s record of 212 points in a single season.
  • The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 SS is currently the fastest car in the world at a top speed of 267 mph. Build a car that goes 326% faster and you’ve got a car that will go 1135 MPH.
  • Walmart did $405 billion dollars in revenue in 2010. Is there a retailer who thinks they can do $1.7 trillion?
  • You’d have to lift 2,475 pounds on a bar-bell to beat a man named Hossein Rezazedah (Iran), who lifted 579 pounds in a weightlifting competition in 2004.
  • If you can live to be 486 years old, you’ll beat Besse Cooper of Tennessee, who is 114 and currently the world’s oldest person. I bet she makes a mean whoopie pie, by the way.
  • You would need to squirt milk 38.4 feet out of your eye to beat Ilker Yilmaz’s record eye-milk-squirt distance of 9 feet, 2 inches. Don’t think for a minute that I am making this up.
  • Do you have roughly 4,650 clocks? If you do, you’ve beaten Jack Schoff, who has 1,094 of them. I’d hate to live at his house.
  • Last but not least, Niek Vermeulen of the Netherlands has collected – get this – 5,568 airline barf bags.  I wish I were kidding. You want to beat his record by 326% and really send a message to barf bag collectors of the world? Fnid yourself 23,754 of them. Better get to work.

It remains to be seen if I’ve set some kind of record for most wasted, unproductive time on a blog post with this one. Or if you’ve set your own personal record for the most potential time of great value lost. But I’m glad I could be a part of it somehow.

Over My Head

Yesterday I received the results of my blood work from the doctor, after having a physical a couple of weeks ago. All pistons seem to be pumping just fine. My cholesterol score was 146. There were a lot of other numbers associated with very large words – for which I had no idea what they meant. All I know is that all of the numbers were within the normal ranges provided and the doctor wrote – “blood very stable.” That’s nice. Anyway, I had two random childhood memories yesterday and they were very clear in my head, which is so bizarre…..

  • I must have been about 9 or 10. My dad came home one day after having had his physical and I asked him how it went. He said the doctor gave him six weeks to live. Given my age, I had not completely perfected the art of stating or recognizing sarcasm. I sort of knew he was kidding because we were (and are) a sarcastic lot. I called him on it, but he said it again and I began to whimper. Both of my parents probably knew to not let the slippery slope get any steeper, so dad came clean. I still think the whole thing was pretty funny.
  • Along those same lines, and probably about the same age, I remember one weeknight during the autumn a police officer (friend of the family) stopped by the house to say hello to my parents. I distinctly remember walking around the corner and seeing a police officer standing in the living room, so I was a little puzzled. My mother than said, laughing, “they’re here to take you!” I then ran into my bedroom and closed the door. I obviously should have seen the cues, given my mother was laughing, but I guess I just missed it. Again, it was immediately nipped in the bud. 

Sarcasm! I learned it young……. 

Peanuts, Boxes and 1970

So, as discussed yesterday, I was preoccupied over the last week or so trying to see the world through my children’s eyes while on vacation. Today I am back to being focused on seeing the world through adult eyes and my eyes weren’t happy at all when I was putting out the trash this morning and had to relocate what felt like one trillion little packing peanuts from a box into a trash bag. Have you ever tried this? It requires the steadiest of hands, skills of the finest surgeon and the patience of a saint, really. For one, the flaps of the box inevitably get in the way during your transfer and launch the peanuts in all directions – except into the bag, of course. Oh, also, you MUST make sure that you are in a completely insulated biodome bubble with NO wind whatsoever, otherwise the peanuts, again, fly in all directions – except into the bag. If you so much as take a breath near the peanuts, then forget about it. No bag.

Ah, then there is the small area at the top of the bag where some of the peanuts land. It’s a netherworld where they’re not quite in the bag, but they didn’t exactly miss, either. Your options are limited – you can attempt to pull up the edges of the bag, whereupon the peanuts will just fly into the air and it will remind you of one of those little snow-dome toys, as the peanuts rain down all over the place like a celebration. or you can choose to just pick them up off the periphery and place them into the bag with your hands, if you have four days. So they’re just sitting there, on the periphery and you are frozen in fear. It turns into a game where basically the world is conspiring against having the peanuts end up in the bag. You’re lucky if, after two hours, you have 10% of the peanuts safely tucked away in the bag.

Which leads me to my next related rant, which is this: why the fark do I have to empty all the boxes and break them down and cut them up anyway? This is potentially my least favorite thing to do. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here before that in order for our town recycling to take boxes away, they have to be broken down and cut up into a certain size in order for the recycling guys to take them – and that size is approximately the size of an atom. It’s really quite ridiculous, to the point that sometimes I just take them to the huge bin at the school that says “cardboard” and dump it all in there. Of course, I have to do this in the dark of the night, wearing all black and a black ski-mask with those little eye-holes because there are stickers ALL over the bin that say “no resident dumping.” I say “fuck that!” If you want to arrest me for recycling, go ahead. I’ll be the talk of the town.

Anyway, back to the weekly recycling haul – I can’t figure out for the life of me why I need to cut the boxes up, because all they do is crush it all when it goes into the truck. So someone please tell me, why do I have to break a box down and cut it up when it just gets crushed by the crusher-thing in the truck anyway? Whatever. My latest thing is that I’ve been cutting the pieces a little bigger each time, just to see what I can get away with.

Finally, the next stage of my national anti-box & peanuts campaign will be asking each and every place where we buy something to ship items to me without a box. That introduces all kinds of potential problems, but there’s a good chance that it will take less time than transferring packing peanuts and breaking down and cutting up boxes. I employed this tactic with the poor souls at Ace Hardware, where Steph and I purchased some porch furniture. They brought it on the truck and I went out there when they pulled in and said they can take it out of the boxes and then take the empty boxes with them. They did! I rule!

Continuing yesterday’s post, here’s my yearbook photo from 1970. Yes, these are really my face. This one made me laugh because a) the glasses are a little crooked, which makes me look high, and b) in the 1990s, I had glasses kinda similar to the ones they’ve put on me here.  I love it:

No Offense….

Whenever someone starts off a sentence with “no offense, but…..” – then prepare to be offended. Even a little bit. That being said….

No offense to divers, but is it really necessary to have color commentators for diving competitions? I mean, I can understand a play-by-play person telling us who’s diving, where they’re from and who’s winning the competition, but I don’t need to hear color commentary, especially when everyone is virtually doing the same dive. There’s really nothing you can add. Last night, in our never-ending battle to find something (ANYTHING!) compelling to watch on television this summer, Steph and I stopped at diving for a few minutes and watched 3 divers. The color commentator said virtually the same thing each time. Steph summarized it best when she mocked, “in order to jump high, you MUST jump high.”

Someone should pay her big money to do this!

Oh Baby, Hoggify

This might be the funniest video I’ve seen this year. It’s “normal” for about the first :30 seconds and then it’s off to the races. I was laughing so damn hard…..hat tip to Fort Miley.