Three minutes of entertainment

The phone rings. I answer it. “Hello, Orest here.”

The silence and the click are my first clues that this is a telephone solicitation call.

A moment later she speaks. “Hello, is this Mr. ...” and she mangles my last name. If she had paid attention when I answered the phone she’d have known who this was. “Did I pronounce your last name correctly, Mr. ...?” she asks and mangles my last name again.

“No,” I say in an unfriendly tone.

She just continues with her script. “This call may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes.”

Excellent. This recording should be an educational case study for whoever ends up reviewing the call. Perhaps I should have told her “This call may be blogged for entertainment purposes.”

She asks me a bunch of questions such as “Do you have a personal computer”, and “Do you make purchases online”, to which I answer no to all, in the same tone.

She just continues with her script and tries to sell me insurance anyways. She is using the “assumed close” approach. I let her go through her script, during which period I become all the more convinced that I do not want to buy what she is selling.

She finishes her script and asks me the question to confirm my identity so that they can send me their package which I can cancel after so many days if I don’t want it.

“Thank you for your call. I’m going to pass on your offer. Have a nice day,” I tell her in a kind, final, and guilt free tone. I decline without actually using the word "no". Verbal kung fu - I give her no resistance that she could push back against.

She thanks me for my time. I say goodbye and hang up the phone.

I think about the Tony Robbins lesson about the noisy train that goes by and disrupts one of his seminars, and how he responded.

Woo hoo! A telephone solicitation call! Three minutes of entertainment, and I get to practice saying no, and I get to contribute to the amount of quality in the world. Woo hoo!

70% chance of obesity

This week I heard an announcer on the radio say that "if you live in Ontario there is a 70% chance that you're obese."

I have lived in Ontario all my life and I can state with absolute certainty that the percent chance that I am obese is zero, zero, zero.

Split Personality Disorder

Here is a statistic you should know about. Watch the video below to learn more.

A dog eat biscuit world

That episode last month with the cat food left a bad taste in my mouth for a while (see Roasted almonds). I told Jan that I wouldn't eat cat food anymore. So today she makes a batch of dog biscuits.

She's going to put them in bone-shaped tin containers and sell them.

I decide that I am going to refrain from sampling them. Stay away!

I succeeded. Mostly. Right up until Jan took one and right in front of me she bit into it and ate it. Then she told me how good it was and offered me one. So with some hesitation I finally tried it. She was right! It really was yummy. It's made of sesame and flour and other normal ingredients that one would find in a cookie made for human consumption. Except for chocolate of course.

I ate two before she cut me off.

At dinner, something got caught in her throat and she started coughing and gagging, trying to dislodge it and make it come out. "What's the matter Jan, do you have a hairball?"

A hard day's night

Many self development and motivational workshops that I've attended over the years teach about the importance of having a purpose or a mission, as something that will motivate me to get out of bed each morning. Well, the thing that motivates me to get out of bed most mornings is my bladder.

When I got up this morning, William the cat was in his usual position by the front door, waiting to be let out. I let him out and then went and did my morning routine in the bathroom, stuff like shower and get dressed. When I went into the kitchen for breakfast, I saw William come in with his let me out body language. Huh? Didn't I already let him out? What was he doing back inside?

I sometimes wonder what he does all day when he goes out. I imagine him going to the office, carrying a briefcase in his mouth. Goodbye William, have a good day at the office. Don't forget your Metropass.

Then I think about the fact that he was named after William Wallace, the character from Braveheart. I get a different image then of what he does when he's out all day. Goodbye William, have fun storming the castle.

Roasted almonds

Was at another Legacy Discovery weekend couple of days ago. How many have I now been part of? Enough to have lost track.

Got home from the event early in the evening on Sunday. Felt like I had missed church, found out about a cell group meeting being held that night at Vern's house, and still had enough energy to get myself out of the house and on my way there.

Grabbed some snacks on the way out. A bowl on the kitchen table, a large round ceramic bowl, full of weird shaped roasted almonds. Or so I thought. My housemates must have gone grocery shopping while I was away. I grabbed a handful and popped them into my mouth as I headed for the door. Munch munch, chew chew, swallow swallow.

It didn't take long to realize that these were not nuts. Nuts have a kind of salty flavor, these did not. They crunched differently than nuts do. They tasted kind of fishy.

Decided to go back into the kitchen for a glass of water to wash down the taste. Then it hit me what these snacks really were. I confirmed my suspicion back in the kitchen when I noticed that the area on the floor were there are normally two bowls was vacant. The two bowls that the cat eats out of. Looked at the kitchen table. Saw two bowls there. One had the dry food to which I had just helped myself. The other was the little bowl with the picture of a cat on it, and contained his wet food. Why these two bowls were on the kitchen table I do not know.

The glass of water didn't help wash away the taste. I got to Vern's house and he offered me a crisp which I accepted. He also offered me ice cream. I declined, he offered again, I accepted. Ate the crisp, ate the ice cream. It helped kill the taste of the cat food. Not for long though. By the time I was on my way home I could feel the after taste again.

I came home and told Jan that those dry roasted almonds on the table had gotten stale.

Do not leave popcorn unattended in microwave

A few weeks ago I was playing around in GIMP, the open source graphic image manipulator. I read some tutorials on how to make starfields and nebulas. Tonight I read a tutorial on how to make a planet.

I felt like munching on a snack and I'd already had some ice cream so I found a bag of popcorn and put it in the microwave oven. I don't trust the Popcorn setting and I recall from past experience that 2:30 is about the amount of time that it takes. So I punched in 2:30, hit Start, and went back to my laptop to build my first planet.

Two and a half minutes the microwave beeped. I went back to the kitchen and opened the microwave door. Smoky smoky smoky! There was a nice big burn mark on the paper bag. So 2:30 is too long for this brand of popcorn. But it is enough time to make a decent looking planet.

Allergic reaction?

I think I am allergic to Touched By An Angel.

There is a book in the house, it's called In the Words of Angels. It contains “twenty inspiring stories from Touched By An Angel"; it belongs to one of my house mates. I like to read when I'm eating and I often pick up this book and read a couple of stories while I'm having my breakfast or dinner.

With every story that I've read in this book, I've experienced an allergic reaction. My throat constricts, my eyes water, and I feel a peculiar sensation in my heart. Are those not symptoms of an allergy? So far I haven't needed an epinephrine.

How dating is like football

So without going down to the level of crudity, here is how I see the Dating Game as being like football.

The Dating Game is like football except I have an unlimited number of downs to make touchdown - I am not limited to three or four downs before I lose possession of the ball.

There is no opposing team to tackle me. I may fall or fumble the ball. If I fall it is not because someone has tackled me, it is simply because I fell. Maybe my shoelaces were untied and I tripped over them - I get up, retie my shoelaces and try again. Maybe the most I can run is six yards at a time so I advance the ball as far as I can before I stumble, then get up and move the ball the next six yards. I challenge and stretch myself so that I reach the point where I advance seven yards at a time.

I never lose possession of the ball. When I stumble I might drop the ball and lose track of where the ball is. I find the ball then continue my next play from there.

When the pond is dry I cast my line in another pond. I haven't figured out a football analogy for this one yet so I am murphing my mixaphors.

Will SETI taste like spam?

You may be aware of the SETI project - Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A number of efforts have been organized to detect signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The general approach of most SETI efforts is to survey the sky for for evidence of transmissions from a civilization on some distant planet. A certain form, known as Active SETI or METI (Messages to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) consists of sending signals into space in the hope that they will be detected by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Discussions of this approach consider that a response may be altruistic, benign, or malevolent.

Let's consider this possibility. Extraterrestrial life detects our signals and responds. If they react like us humans do, pretty soon we will be overrun with extraterrestrial messages offering various devices for penis enlargement. We will receive requests to supply personal banking information so that the First Galactic Bank of Arcturus can verify our records. We will receive requests soliciting our assistance in moving large amounts of money trapped in an account held by a wealthy alien in the Sirius sector.

Will gmail be able to handle the intergalactic spam problem?