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I should have timed this post for last week, when the Tim Tebow topic was more prominent before the Patriots game. Oh well.

I see that Tim Tebow has lined up some endorsement deals. However, none of them really captures the spirit of his name. What inspired this post wasn’t an actual endorsement deal. Rather, it was a brewery that named a beer after Tim Tebow, kind of.

I don’t know if that’s the best choice, pairing a beer with a Baptist, but here are some other marketing deals that would be interesting:

1. Tim Tivo: This one should be obvious. Comes pre-loaded with footage of all the Broncos’ 4th-quarter comebacks.

2. Tim Teabow: Not as obvious as the Tivo, but still promising.
   Lipton? No.
   Celestial Seasonings? Close.
   Snapple? Yes – if I have to explain the connection between football and the name “Snapple”, then you’re not going to get it anyway.

   Types of Tea:

   • Rookie Tea – formerly known as Green Tea
   • Golong Tea – Oolong’s football equivalent
   • ??? – what others are there?

3. Tim T. Rowe (Price): financial management company. Not sure what it has to do with football though.

4. Tim Temow: lawn care company. I know the name’s shaky, but I’m running out of steam.

5. Tim Treebow: tree-cutting service. This one’s a stretch too, but it goes nicely with Temow.

I’d better stop there, as I am apparently out of ideas.

Any better match-ups out there?

Here is how things are in my house for most of the month of December:

Transcript:
Hey! There’s no chocolate in the house!

It’s the Christmas season. We need to have chocolate and cookies and stuff.

(make/obtain sweets)

These are yummy. It’s hard to stop eating them.

Oh good – they’re gone. Now I don’t have to worry about self-control anymore.

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
Read the rest of this entry »

Children can be creative. It is my job as a parent to teach them to behave properly without squashing their spirit. It is a fine line between those two ideas sometimes.

Here are some Things Said Recently Around Here:

• Wife: No climbing on the table!
  (This one is common)
• Me: You can’t have your medicine until you eat some more meat.
  (Gamma likes his medicine a little too much)
• Wife: There’s a fly in the house.
  Gamma: Where’d it go?
  Wife: Is it in your nose? (kidding, of course)
  (pause)
  Wife: No! Get your finger out of there…the fly is not in your nose.
• Wife: Do you love me? (sung to the tune from Fiddler on the Roof)
  Gamma: Noooo. (sung back)
  Wife: Boo hoo hoo (pretend crying)
  Gamma: Yes! (he changed his mind)
• Wife: Do you love daddy? (sung to the tune from Fiddler on the Roof)
  Gamma: Noooo. (sung back)
  Me: Boo hoo hoo (pretend crying)
  Gamma: No! (not changing his mind)

As I was strolling through Costco, my eye was caught by a brightly-colored sign on the front of a palette of products. One side of the sign had a product, and the other side had a non-product.

I didn’t know you could bottle up something that’s not something else and sell it.

That got me thinking: what other non-products could I sell?

How about…

• a gallon of water and sell it as non-paint? I’d even mark it half-off and sell it for $5 or $10
• a bag of sand and sell it as non-sugar?
• an old calculator and sell it as a non-iPad?

What would you sell?

Unbeknownst to the general public, Warner Brothers is releasing a sequel to the popular holiday movie, The Polar Express.

I have, thanks to an unnamed source, obtained the title and the cover artwork, and I am sharing those with you today.

But first, here are some of the reviews from the screenings

• “I loved it!” – Seattle Sun-Times
• “One of the worst movies ever” – Seattle Sun-Times
• “Definitely go see this movie” – Atlanta Tribune
• “A horrible movie” – Atlanta Tribune
• “One thumb up and one thumb down” – Siskel & Ebert

Yes, I know it’s no longer Siskel & Ebert, but I can’t remember the new guy’s name offhand.

I wrote about the ban on incandescent light bulbs before, and I’m still against it. The difference between then and now is that now it is affecting me.

The big “downside” about incandescent bulbs is that they produce a lot of heat. But guess what? I already use electricity to heat my house, so it doesn’t matter to me. Can those of us with electric-resistance baseboard heat be exempt from the ban? Now that my light bulbs put out less heat, I have to use more electricity to generate more heat to replace the missing heat.

…and don’t get me started on the demise of the Easy-Bake oven. You’ll be waiting forever to get a CFL to bake anything.

…and pity the poor residents of the chicken coop during the winter, huddling under a CFL that produces no warmth.

I hear incandescent light bulbs being decried as “inefficient”. They are not inefficient – they just multitask. They are good at producing heat and light together. Why is that so bad? What if someone wants both heat and light?

Old-fashioned light bulbs are not dangerous and shouldn’t be regulated by the government. Did the government ban gas lamps to get people to switch over to electric lights? As Americans, we have the right to lights, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Actually, CFLs are more dangerous than incandescents. Does an incandescent bulb contain toxic substances? CFLs do. You can’t just throw a CFL in the trash if it breaks or dies. I would rather use more electricity than contaminate the land with more mercury. But I’m not getting that choice anymore.

The main reason I want to be able to keep buying normal light bulbs is for their dimmability. I have several rooms with dimmers. Standard dimming circuits kill CFLs. I know I could buy new equipment and get dimmable CFLs, but the bulbs are $5 each. That’s over 10 times the price of a regular bulb. Plus I would have to buy a new dimmer switch and install it. All that work, and for what? No tangible benefit for me. (Yes, the CFLs would use less electricity, but the initial cost is so high that we’ll probably move into a new house before we would get the payoff.)

I saw the writing on the wall and started putting CFLs in the house a couple years ago. On my own. Without being mandated.

Why?

Because it made financial sense to do so.

I compared the price of bulbs plus the cost to operate them for CFLs and incandescents and saw that CFLs had to last about 10 or 11 months in order to recoup the purchase price. So as long as they lasted over a year (which they did), I would come out ahead financially.

But only for non-dimmable bulbs.

Next government action: sanctioning the sun because it produces heat in addition to light and is a major contributor to global warming climate change.