2008 March | BoWilliams.com

Corn flake shaped vaguely like Illinois sells for $1,350

Consumption, Current Events, Popular Culture 8 Responses »

Mar 222008

You know the deal with this eBay crap these days. There are Virgin Mary crullers, and perfectly cervical kidney beans, and Colonel Klink-shaped pimientos. (You know, probably.)

Add to this list a corn flake that looks somewhat like Illinois that’s apparently worth a mortgage payment (and a car payment, in a lot of the country) to some flake (sorry) from Austin, Texas.

Yeah, and this isn’t his first attempted corn flake purchase either.

I would think that an Illinois-shaped corn flake, particularly one with a four-digit selling price, would follow a substantial percentage of the border’s contours. Nope. Indeed, the aspect ratio isn’t even right.

Also, and I offer this kiddingly, but maybe only half so—if some yo-yo’s got $1,350 for a single piece of breakfast cereal, how worried should we really be about the long-term health of the U.S. economy? I know it’s not fun to fill up right now, but, you know, just sayin’.

I remember Johnny Carson having some lady on one night who had saved all these potato chips that looked like things. I remember one looked like a sleeping bird.

So she’s going over her favorites, and Johnny is being super-gracious in that way he had (don’t you still just miss the hell out of him?). Then, his mischievous streak hit (see previous parenthetical comment), and he stuck a chip in his mouth and crunched it loudly. Of course, it was from a bowl of chips he had to the side. The woman’s look, Johnny letting her in on it, and the audience’s reaction all made for great television.

That’s the coolest kind of thing that used to happen to you when you had food that sort of looked like something. Now, it changes hands for four digits, and the new owner thinks he’s going to make a museum full of this kind of crap.

The sad part is that it may be a good plan. I’m certainly not begrudging any transaction participants here. Things are worth what someone will pay, after all. More power to the sellers of this corn flake, as well as the buyer who hopes to eventually charge other people to look at it. But it’s clear, and apparently consistently true over the long term, that many, many people dramatically overvalue coincidence.

I’ve not yet made any concerted effort to launch a BoCo, but maybe the business ideas I’ve been kicking around are all wrong. Maybe I just need to sift through boxes of corn flakes all day long.

A Friday trip to the zoo

Annoyances, Consumption, Family, Leisure 7 Responses »

Mar 212008

“Hey, why don’t you take a day that week off and we’ll take a day trip?”

So came Lea’s request to me for this week of spring break, during which neither Nathan’s school nor Aaron’s preschool are in session. It’s a good idea, yes?

So today was the day. Remembering a previously positive experience at the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere, we decided we’d return. It’s a lovely zoo, it’d be a slam-dunk with the boys (and Aaron’s first trip he’d be old enough to remember), and it’s an hour and a half from our driveway. Sold. We had breakfast at Cracker Barrel, and headed north.

After a painless trip, we made the turn in…and started seeing cars stacked nearly immediately. You know how Long Duk Dong and Marlene park Grandpa’s automobile when they get to the party in Sixteen Candles? There you go (pretty much). There were cars absolutely everywhere, at times with just two feet of clearance on either side to get our van through. One guy had jumped a curb for the privilege of parking his BMW 740iL in a mud slick.

Some substantial portion of the southeastern United States had to be at the Nashville Zoo today. I exaggerate not one whit when I tell you we saw 2,500 cars. I extricated us from the maze—no small feat—and not long after that Lea and I made the call that we were not, in fact, going to the zoo today.

You want to feel bad? No, let me rephrase: you want to feel like complete shit? Tell your three-year-old son he’s going to the zoo, drive all the way there, and then tell him he’s not going after all. Oh, it ripped my heart out. But folks, there was no way. After we got there, we were another hour from even paying to get in, only to share the grounds with perhaps as many as 10,000 other people? Lea does not share my aversion to crowds, and she assured me that bailing on the zoo was a highly defensible call under the circumstances.

Nashville is a large and culturally rich city, but Lea and I were unprepared for an impromptu “entertain two little boys.” So, we’ll, um…

…go to the mall.

I hate malls only slightly less than Wal-Mart, but the boys were enthusiastic, and under the circumstances that was a sufficient condition. And Cool Springs Galleria isn’t a bad one, as these fishbowls go. I wanted to play the unwashed rube in the big city for the first time—”Gosh, that’s Macy’s! Like on TV! Look, Lea, looooooooook!!!!”—but she told me she’d pretend she didn’t know me if I did. The boys rode the carousel; we poked around Brookstone and Macy’s; we sat in the play area for a while. Then we went to Toys R Us, ate at McDonald’s, fueled up, and came home.

So to sum up, I took a day of leave, we spent $35 on gas, and by the time we purchase the carbon offsets for the trip, we’ll have spent more than (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Sorry, couldn’t quite get that out with a straight face.). Yeah, so what we did was go to all of the logistical trouble to be 100 miles away, and then when we actually got that 100 miles away, our activities were all things we could have done in our hometown.

Note for next zoo trip: be there when the doors open.

Plus, we can yodel

Menagerie 2 Responses »

Mar 192008

I recently read an opinion that the most profound thing separating human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we can pursue truth.

Does that sound right to you?

I think that’s too nuanced, myself. To me, the biggie is that we can conceptually identify self-improvement, whether within a physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual framework. We’re able to measure our shortcomings and set goals above them. You don’t need to mess around with the epistemological hornet’s nest that is “truth” in order to pursue self-improvement.

I think “I can do better” is high profundity in phylum Chordata. What do you think?

I’m sorry, the governor can’t come to the phone right now…

Current Events, Politics 5 Responses »

Mar 182008

I’ve never had even a slight interest in entering politics, but I may have to reconsider whether I might want to be a governor.

Public service, civic responsibility, all that shit, but apparently the kink factor is unbelievable. I mean, you got Eliot’s four-digit hookers, and now this:

Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey claims he and his wife Dina Matos McGreevey used to engage in sexual threesomes with his ex-aide and driver, Terry Pedersen. It allegedly started when they were dating, and continued after they got married. The “hard-core consensual sex orgy” was the second part of what the three of them allegedly called a “Friday Night Special.”

The first part of the ‘Special was allegedly at “TGIFriday’s,” which is “laughably banal” and “rather pathetic.”

Nothing like some extreme fajitas and a draft Michelob Ultra to put you in the mood for a little hot boy-girl-boy action.

The governor confirmed the claims after Pedersen made them. Dina Matos McGreevey denies them.

For my part, I’ll just say that as long as these accusations are going to fly around, it’s important that the alleged participants not be disgusting when imagined in the scenarios described. So far, so good.

Hey, do you governors take requests? How about something with Jennifer Granholm next?

Environmentalists: hyperbole is bad for business

Annoyances, Consumption, Current Events, Politics 8 Responses »

Mar 162008

I’m watching Asia’s Deadly Dozen, about sharks and snakes and such, on National Geographic HD. Good stuff. I just heard a claim that stopped me cold:

“We kill an average of 36 million sharks every year.”

That’s exactly what the narrator said. I rewound it to verify it. (DVRs are neat.)

All righty, then.

There are millions of people who think species conservation is a worthless pursuit. There are millions more like me, who are pretty sure there’s some public value in it, but find the details highly debatable. But anyone who considers the claim even for a moment knows that the human race doesn’t kill 36 million sharks every year. It’s absurd enough to fail just on logistics. That’s more than 98,000 sharks every single day. That’s one billion sharks every 28 years.

No way in hell.

The last thing like this that gave me this kind of pause was a claim concerning the effect of plastic trash on our oceans. Did you know there is a mass of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean that is the size of Texas? There is an expanse of plastic in the Pacific that stretches for more than a quarter of a million square miles.

Some of the claims are “twice the size of Texas,” and a commonly cited weight is “3.5 million tons.” I’m not going to attribute this claim, because it’s all over the place. Google it.

Get your brain around that. I’ve illustrated the massive pile of plastic to the right. See it?

Hmmm. Seems like there’d be a picture or seven of such an impressive expanse of plastic, don’t you think? Are there any? I certainly couldn’t find one. Yet I can see my dogs on Google Earth.

Legitimate environmentalists (as opposed to those with ulterior agendas) of all causes, listen up: you folks badly need to sell your concerns with facts. I understand and respect your passion. But if you really wish to effect change, you need to persuade intelligent people who, convinced of a genuine problem, might let go of $20 once in a while to help you.

I’m one of those people, but I don’t like the taste of shit, and I’m not swallowing any. You do your entire movement a huge disservice when you float absurd claims like this, because people get disgusted with the entire idea of helping you. Is it any wonder, when you’re delivering nonsense like this and expecting to be believed?

I’m certain the actual problems are grave enough. Stick to the facts.

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