Some Blog Site

I was getting dinner ready the other day.  Sitting at the table in the dining room, I could hear the noises of the children playing happily in the adjoining living room.

Just as I was getting ready to wonder what was keeping them occupied so well, I was interrupted by the older child, who told me that it was snowing.  “Such a good imagination,” I thought.  He ran back into the living room and I thought I had better check to see why he said it was snowing.

I peeked in the living room and what I saw was the younger child hitting the seat of an upholstered chair with a ping-pong paddle.  “It’s snowing!” he was yelling as he hit the chair.  All the dust that was being forced from the chair was billowing up from the chair with each hit.  It was not a cloud of dust, but the chair is near a west-facing window, so at dinnertime there is a good stream of sunlight going right by the chair.  The sunlight accentuated the dust and the dust reminded the young children of snow.

We’ll have to vacuum soon.

“And as they were crying out and throwing off their cloaks and tossing dust into the air,”
– Acts 22:23

Since school has started recently, this post will relate an incident from the first day of school.

We took the older child to his first day of school, and his teacher’s name is Mrs. Thomas.  The younger child stayed home.  No, not by himself – someone else was watching him.  After the school day was complete, his brother told him some things about it.  Since the younger one has not yet attended school, and since he didn’t go that day, all he has is a mental picture drawn by himself using his own experiences.

The next day, as they were preparing to go to the next day of school, the younger one was inquisitive.

younger son: “Is brother going to school?”
mom: “Yes, he’s going to school.”
“Is his teacher Mrs. Thomas?”
“Yes, that’s his teacher.”
“Does she have wheels?”
(perplexed pause before answering) “No, she doesn’t have wheels.”

That’s when brother stepped in and sorted things out (laughing):
“No, she’s not Thomas the train.  Her name is Mrs. Thomas.”

The Thomas name and character are trademarks of Gullane (Thomas) Limited.  This blog is not associated with or approved by Gullane (Thomas) Limited.

“Whenever the living beings moved, the wheels moved with them. And whenever the living beings rose from the earth, the wheels rose {also.} ”
– Ezekiel 1:19

Summer is the time for fresh fruits and vegetables, and one of the items in late August and early September is corn.  We were given several ears of corn by a farming family.  The children and I were in charge of getting the corn ready for cooking, and then my wife would handle the actual cooking part.

So I showed the kids the art of proper shucking.  I showed them the tassel and how to remove all the silks from the ear of corn.  Okay, you can never remove all the silks, but close enough.  They left that part to me anyway.  I also showed them how to shuck the corn – pull each one off and you’ll eventually get down to the kernels.

I saw that my demonstration piece had a hole that went through several shucks.  So I put a couple of them back (I hadn’t removed them so they were still attached at the base of the ear) and then showed the kids how the hole went through each layer.  I told them a bug must have eaten through it.  Then we got to the kernels and I showed them that the hole went right through the kernel.  At that point, the older child informed me that a worm was on the end of the ear of corn.  My response was that was the one that had been eating our corn.  So we threw him away (him being the bug, or the corn, as we did dispose of both).

The next day, I got home from work a little late, and the family was already eating dinner.  My son then informed me that there was a caterpillar on the window.  It was actually on the window frame, and it was not a caterpillar but another corn worm.  I assumed it was another worm that had escaped from the bag of corn, but my wife was not happy with the thought that there could be more corn worms roaming the house.  I threw that one away and we have not seen any since.

The Labor Day weekend was a relaxing one. The weather cooperated quite nicely, and one late afternoon I sat outside reading a magazine while the kids played in the large plastic tub better known as a kiddie pool. It was filled with water, of course, which made all the nearby vegetation jealous as they have not received much rain lately and were probably thirsty.

Part of my job as a parent is to ensure that the children share, play together, avoid injury, have fun, etc. So I would take breaks from my magazine to help them with the hose, pick some apples from the tree and throw them in the pool, or whatever. The older son wanted to bob for apples, so that’s what the apples were for. He made me go first, so I tried a couple of times and did get anything. He went next and spun the apple around so the stem was up, then he just bit the stem and pulled out the apple. The younger son didn’t want to play.

A little later, after I had read some more, I heard the older one telling me that his brother had dunked him in the pool. It is not uncommon for one of the two to do something not nice to the other, and then the other comes to me and complains. So when I heard that he had dunked him in the pool, I assumed it was a complaint and started to proceed down the let’s-play-nicely path. But I was mistaken, as they were both in a good mood.

It turned out that they were pretending to be at a dunk tank, as they had seen real-life dunk tanks in operation at both a local festival and a local fair. The kids had set a T-ball tee in the pool and a plastic chair next to the pool. One child would sit in the chair and the other would throw apples at the tee. If he hit the tee, the other child would slide himself off the chair and into the pool. So he wasn’t complaining, he just wanted me to watch the operation.

For those who were wondering, I did empty the pool by dumping its water into the closest flower bed. At least some of the plants also enjoyed their Labor Day holiday.

“Please let a little water be brought and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree;”
– Genesis 18:4

Kraft is promoting their salad dressing made with real ingredients. My first thought was “Can there be fake ingredients?” Isn’t anything that goes into a product an ingredient? The only way for an ingredient to be fake is to mislabel it (which is a violation of federal law).

I first noticed the ads in the grocery store. There was a TV playing Kraft ads in one of the normal aisles (as opposed to the TV intended for the captive audiences waiting in the checkout lanes). It’s hard to turn around in public these days without seeing a TV. But that’s off the subject. I saw that the Kraft ads were for their new line of salad dressings made with real ingredients. What does that say about their other salad dressings.

So I captured a screen shot of their ad from their website. It’s an annoying Flash ad, so you have to sit through a bit of it before you see the following screen.

After looking a little closer though, I saw that the ad didn’t really say the dressing is made with real ingredients. It says it is made with the flavor of real ingredients. What does that mean? Fake ingredients but real flavor? I give up. It’s just a bad campaign. I am Some Blogger, and I disapprove their message.

“These things I have written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you.”
– 1 John 2:26

Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Most of the debate, at least here in the USA, centers around do only golds count (China won) or do all medals count (USA won). The seemingly official method is to count by golds, but there are some other ways.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: Panama or India won the 2008 Olympic games

If the official ranking is by gold medals won, the ranking should be normalized by how many athletes competed to get those golds. Some other methods are to adjust the ranking by the countries’ GDP, population, or area.

A country’s economic ranking (by GDP) is the best indicator of how well that country will do in the Olympics. Of the top ten Olympic gold winners, eight of them were in the top ten GDPs. The other two winners were still in the top twenty GDPs.

But I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

I also prefer to use a weighted ranking (gold = 5 points, silver = 3 points, bronze = 1 point) and rank the countries by points, not by gold medals and not by total medals. It is interesting to note that the ranking of countries by gold medal has the same result as ranking them by points. The points system provides a clearer picture of the order, as there are a number of countries that did not win a gold medal. If the ranking is by gold medal only, then those countries receive the same rank. A points system provides for finer resolution of the ranking.

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Olympics, India is the winner. They were the only country to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2008 Olympics Results page.

We received our vouchers from the government for the digital-to-analog TV signal converters. So we went to the store last Saturday and bought a couple converters. I hooked up one of them as soon as we got home, and it is a vast improvement.

I was skeptical beforehand – getting the converters only because we will have no choice in a few months. Since we live on the fringes of some TV stations’ ranges (the analog signal is slightly fuzzy at best), I was expecting that the digital signals wouldn’t be clear enough. Since digital signals are all-or-nothing, you can’t get a fuzzy digital signal. That means you can’t watch a fuzzy station, but then some stations that are on the edge would be gone completely. With analog, a station on the edge could be tolerated for a while.

That’s what I was expecting. But it seems that the digital signals travel a better than the analog signals, because I think we get more channels now with the converter. Some of that is due to the extra channels that each station has (e.g. 7, 7-1, and 7-2), but we are getting other stations that we couldn’t before. And they’re all clear. Which is what I knew would happen, but it is so nice to actually see it. I was surprised how clear it is, after I have spent the last 8 years with fuzzy reception in my rural area.

Occasionally, the digital station will fade out, which means that it just stops, as opposed to getting static-y temporarily. I would rather it get fuzzy for a little bit than just disappear, but there’s not much I can do about that at this point. I am glad we got the converter boxes that allow the analog signal to pass through to the TV still. That way I can still view the old station if the digital signal is not strong enough. That will last until February for most stations, but I will still get to watch CBC over analog for a while.