Today’s theme is muffins.

More specifically, when they are going to put them out in the cafe.

I had an early morning meeting today and I wavered on whether I would just work from home and call in, or whether I would get up before dawn cracked and get into the office for it. I chose the latter for the sole reason that I went to bed at 9pm last night and simply couldn’t stay awake after 5:00am this morning.

I showered, drove into the office, and made my way to the cafe to get my coffee. Ironically I only drink decaf when I’m at work, but let’s not go there right now. Typically my breakfast consists of a banana. I used to get breakfast burritos but I’m watching my calories so bananas are a healthy/delicious and low-cal alternative.

While I was fixing my coffee I overheard a man say “when are you gonna put out the muffins?” or “where are the muffins?” or “give me my darn muffins!“. It was one of the three I’m sure. It had something to do with the fact that there were no muffins set out and he obviously wanted to have one for breakfast. As a note – they don’t set the muffins out until 7:00am, and it was only 6:45am. Tough luck dude. I grabbed my banana and smiled at him as I walked out of the cafe. (get your minds out of the gutter)

Muffins are pretty darn good – especially the muffin tops. I’ve always been one of those people who only likes the top of a cake or the top of a muffin. There’s something about the part that was closer to the heating element that gives it that wonderful crispness and deliciousness. I’ve even seen places that specifically sell “muffin tops” vs. the “muffin”. They know their target audience – and somehow muffin tops cost the same as an entire muffin in most of those shops. Strange.

Muffins are so amazing that there are even films dedicated to muffins. Muffin Films by Amy Winfrey offers some delightful animated movies honoring the muffin. Be sure to check out #6 – The Muffin Tree which has a wonderful moral lesson reminiscent of the Animaniacs.

Muffins, specifically muffin tops have also made it into the Urban Dictionary to describe: When a woman wears a pair of tight jeans that makes her flab spill out over the waistband, just like the top of a muffin sits over the edge of the paper case.

Powerful stuff. Powerful stuff indeed.

And so today I honor the muffin, the muffin top, the muffin bottom, and even the muffin wrapper. Praise be the muffin.

I had decided not to blog about it (I tweeted it instead), but I figured what the heck.

Yesterday was the SuperBowl, blah blah blah. Actually the game wasn’t bad, and I think that the Saints played well enough that they deserved the win. It’s good for New Orleans as well (and they sure reminded us of that throughout the entire broadcast).

But I found myself constantly distracted by twitter – watching people’s reactions to the commercials. Yes there were a FEW people talking about the game, but mostly people were commenting on the commercials. Unfortunately, this year we didn’t have that much to pick from.

Compared to previous years I say this year gets a D+ for quality and variety of commercials. There were a lot of themes this year: rodents, men in underwear, womanizing. But 90% of them weren’t even funny. (and did anyone notice that the F*cus on the F*mily advertisement was a bit toned down from the original plan?)

Only a few kept my attention and made me remember them (for various reasons), so here they are:

• KGB: It’s no longer just a secret police, now it’s a search engine (this one was memorable because of how dumb I think it is) – http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-super-bowl-commercials/09000d5d81645010/KGB-commercial
• Dante’s Inferno: A new game from Electronic Arts (looks like an amazing game although not available on PC) – http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-super-bowl-commercials/09000d5d81643a88/Dante-s-Inferno-commercial

And then two that are worth embedding for your viewing pleasure…

and of course…

For me, the Betty White ad wins the day. Why? Because, well, it’s Betty White! And if you don’t like it, she’ll cut you.

I hope you all had a wonderful SuperBowl Sunday!!

Some time ago David and I went to a wedding reception at a private home (vs. a public home) in a private neighbourhood (which wasn’t gated btw, just “private”). How did we know that it was a private neighbourhood? Why, by the sign of course…

As we drove down a long street toward a clustering of houses, we saw a sign similar to this one. I didn’t bother to stop and take a picture of the actual sign because I was laughing at the absurd nature of having such a sign in the first place.

Pretentious, yes. Useful, no. Ignorable, yes.

I mean seriously, the only people who would go into the neighbourhood are people who live there, people who are visiting, or people who have been invited. Is a yellow sign really going to stop anyone from going into that neighbourhood if they really have their heart set on it? Um, no.

In fact, I would venture to say that seeing that sign made me WANT to go into the neighbourhood just to see if they had something special going on that they didn’t want anyone to know about. The answer to that was NO, but I wouldn’t have known that had I not gone into the neighbourhood in the first place.

But as things do, it got me thinking…

What would all the “appropriate” exceptions be to the rule of “Private Road”? Who would they say IS permitted to use the road besides the residents? Let’s think about this for a moment…

• Utility providers: power, gas, water, sewer, trash, street cleaning, recycling, telephone, internet
• Maintenance workers: plumbing, heating and air conditioning, roofers, painters, landscapers, gardeners, masons, housekeepers, nanny services
• Delivery services: furniture, flowers and gifts, UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, food service, your dealer
• Friend’s and Family members

When I think about the type of people who come to my house, the list is pretty comprehensive and I don’t live on a “Private Road”. So who exactly is this sign putting on notice? The only thing I could come up with was:

• Traveling salesman: vacuum cleaners, knives, etc. (do these even exist anymore?)
• Religious groups: LDS missionaries, Moonies, local churchgoers checking in on why you haven’t been in months, etc.

So then why couldn’t the sign just say “No Solicitors beyond this point”? That seems to be more descriptive of the people you actually want to stay away.

If you truly wanted things to be private then go live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no utilities. And don’t ever order anything online. And have your own garden. And no sending any mail either. And actually just don’t even tell us you’re going, just go. I’m not sure anyone will miss you because you’ve been living on that private road and we haven’t seen you anyway.

Meh.

I got my results back from my Health for Life bloodwork yesterday. The numbers weren’t all that surprising – my cholesterol numbers are good but my triglycerides and body fat index are high. When I was entering the numbers into the little evaluation system, I noticed that you could enter numbers associated with tests done while fasting, and tests done while non-fasting. I didn’t remember doing anything fast, and so…

It got me thinking (and we all know where that usually leads)…

I am becoming tired of words with more than one meaning, especially when there are other words that share a meaning but those words themselves only have one meaning (or at least a fewer number of meanings).

Confused already? Don’t worry – this is the 800th post on this blog so you know I’m not going to leave you hanging.

Let’s take the words “fast” and “quick” and do a comparison.

Right off the bat you will notice that fast can mean two different things: going without food, doing something rapidly or quickly. Which begs the question, why would I ever need to use the word fast for the latter definition when there are perfectly good words like rapid or quick?

Rapid could be a problem though, since that could describe quickly moving water –  so let’s reserve rapid as a noun for, well, rapids, and look at quick.

I am moving quickly. The water is moving quickly (and we call those rapids). There’s really no other use for quickly than to imply speedy motion. This means that I can reserve fast for going without food, rapid for noun-only use, and quick(ly) to describe the speed of something. (Don’t even THINK about telling me that quick can be a noun used to describe that part under your nail/cuticle, because it can’t.)

You can see from this example that we have a LOT of work to do if we’re going to clean up the English language from all this nonsense.

Staying within the “movement” theme: book. When I was in middle school, kids would say “He was bookin’” to describe that someone was running quickly. I really don’t know how a noun that describes written words got turned into a verb for quick running, but at this point do we really question the absurdity of our language? No, not when letter combinations like “doh” and “google” find their way into the dictionary.

Want something more topical? Shorty. Shorty typically means a slang term for someone of diminutive height. Now it describes a 140 character story/message on twitter (which is also known as a tweet – because apparently we need two names for the same thing, both of which already had definitions beforehand).

It’s pervasive. It’s everywhere. It’s time for a crusade against this despicable double-talk. Let’s get out there and book on down to the library and come up with a rapid way to stop the madness fast!