Saturday, March 31, 2007

Jiving--or the failure to jive

The guilt of eves dropping on someone else's conversation which was reported below--a sorely tempting avenue for a psychologist--caused me to remember another communication that wasn't intended for me. As a prude, I am glad that I do not have a clear imagination of what may have gone on, but I quite suspect that the background was rather juicy. I only hope that the writer was married and that the implied activity was with his or her spouse. Yes, that's rather naive. As a "fall back" hope, I hope that the person elected not to be in a jiving state.

One day back in college, there was a prominently posted note on the door across from my apartment. I remember the message to this day: "You may call me a loser, but celibacy and I just don't jive."

Her dream revisited

Sometime ago in a post entitled "She Had a Dream," I discussed overhearing two women talking. One had had a dream that apparently had involved a comparison of the respective French fries served at Del Taco and Baskin Robbins. It never even occurred to me that a restaurant with a Spanish would feature fries. Apparently, the chain actually does. I can't imagine that Baskin Robbins will add this fare to its menu, but as this post attests, and as the song goes, "I've been wrong before." Admittedly not very often, but nevertheless.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Use innovation by a naive, eccentric, absent-minded professor

Use innovation involves customers finding a use for a product that was not initially intended by the inventor or manufacturer. It was found, for example, back in the old days before the advent of Campbell's "chunky" soups, that many consumers would, on their own, add "substance"--such as frozen vegetables or more meat--to the old cans of condensed soup.

Today, I was reading a student paper that involved beer pong balls. Supposedly, these would be used in a game--seemingly a very messy one--in which two teams would compete on who could first get a ball into each of the opposing team's cups. Yes, marketing this type of product raises some ethical issues, but before I could even get that far, I had to see what these looked like. I first did a Google image search, but most of the pictures did not show balls actually being thrown. Therefore, I went to Youtube to see some video footage of this game. Interestingly, both the two clips I saw featured hip hop music in the background. I realize that a sample of two is not much, but is it only urban, cool people--and not country bumpkins--who play this? Who ever dreamed of the idea that Youtube could be used for serious academic work?

On the ethical issue, anything that encourages drinking is rather suspect. However, I wonder if the amount of time spent on this game--which appears to confine the beer cups to a table--reduces the time left for drinking. Also, of course, we would have to hope that a lot of beer is splashed from the cups and thus not drunk. Better yet, I would hope that students would use this game with--and drink only--alcohol free beer. ("Yes," I can just hear some people say, "keep dreaming!")

Thursday, March 22, 2007

More dreams...

Some dreams that I have had recently:

1. My mother was moving to some other country--the specific one was not clear--but until she could claim her furniture in that country, she had sent the furniture for storage in Japan.

2. I had to take another set of qualifying exams. This is some nine years after I made the final defense of my dissertation!

Salmon

The other day, I had dinner at my sister's. She mentioned that the salmon was Atlantic salmon.

"Have you ever tried Indian Ocean salmon?" I asked her.

"No, I haven't," my sister replied.

"Neither have I," I admitted.