Some Blog Site

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• I think you could take the debate from when any particular state decided to start or stop making motorcycle helmet use mandatory (for those riding motorcycles), replace “helmet” with “mask” and “motorcycle rider” with “person in a public space” and you’d get a pretty close approximation to today’s Covid-19 transcripts.
• I see the NFL players can get paid for sitting out the season due to reasons of coronavirus. Good for them, but what about us NFL fans? Can I get something if I sit out the season?
• Why does no one ever have to do something goodly? It’s always along the lines of “I need a chocolate bar real bad” or “I have to go potty really badly”. If “badly” indicates a substantial desire, what would “goodly” indicate? Side note: there are small children who do a bad job of going potty, but that’s not what they meant.
• One thing that annoys me is that any paperwork that asks for my health insurance information never uses the same wording that’s on my insurance card. The paperwork will ask for policy number and account number, but I have group number and subscriber ID. Or vice versa. There are so many terms that they rarely line up. I would like a standardized format. On the other hand, I’ve learned it doesn’t really matter which number I put down, as long as it’s on my card.
• The best Blizzard at Dairy Queen is the French Silk Pie. They took it off the menu a while ago, but the good locations will still make it if you ask.

Now it is time for another PSALM.

This time, however, I did not make it. Gamma did. This one was titled “Taking Out the Trash” by him. And it was done on an iPhone 5c, I think. It is slightly wobbly, but pretty good considering he made the iPhone holder also out of Legos.

Now only 145 more to go.

Here is a series of book titles and cover art that I’ve put together for what would happen if a famous boy wizard were an old-school pen plotter instead.

Book 1: Harry Plotter and the Sources of Toner

This is the most technically-incorrect title of the series, as a pen plotter does not use toner. And astute readers might notice that Harry Plotter is trying to catch containers of ink, not toner. But you get the idea.

And this is the book for American readers. British readers get “Harry Plotter and the Philosopher’s Toner”, which is not an engaging a plot as his search for the sources of toner. Spoiler alert: there are rivers of toner under the school, hidden under a trapdoor and guarded by Fluffy.

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In science class, you should have learned about the conservation of energy. Or the conservation of matter. Or both – they’re connected anyway.

Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Same for energy – it can change forms but that’s it.

For some reason, I got to thinking “why?” Science can answer the “how” question quite well, describe it with equations, but the “why” is iffy at best. Most of the answers are along the lines of “that’s a fundamental/basic law of physics”. Science describes how things are, and can answer “why” questions that are really more a form of “how” questions.

I did come up with a reason why energy and matter have to be conserved – because only God can create. That might be more of a theological answer than you were expecting, but when scientists say “that’s just how things are” then theology is all that’s left. Of course, theology applies before that point too – it’s not mutually exclusive with the rest of science.

But if it were possible to create matter or create energy, then people could consider themselves creators and that would reduce the honor and glory due God as The Creator.

And of course, a number of theological discussion of why some things are they way they are also end up the same way as the scientists’ questions of why – because that’s how God set it up. The non-Christians might use a term such as “fundamental law of the universe”, but doesn’t that really mean the same thing as “because God said so”?

An interesting rabbit trail related to this is one’s soul. If a person does not have a soul until he physically exists, then at some point (i.e. conception) his soul must be created. But since the soul is neither matter nor energy, no laws of conservation were broken.

My earlier post had been about a new chocolate cereal. We found another chocolate cereal that has joined the breakfast game: Chocolate Life.

Officially, it is chocolate-flavored Life. I think that sounds better than other cereals that bill themselves as chocolately, since chocolately makes it sounds like it’s fake chocolate. I think both terms (chocolate-flavored and chocolately) mean the exact same thing though, as they both have cocoa as an ingredient. Probably the best way around it is just to call your product cocoa-whatever, as that is both true and doesn’t sound fake. In this case, Quaker went with chocolate instead of cocoa.

It doesn’t really matter though.

It doesn’t taste like chocolate, or cocoa, or chocolatiness. It tastes pretty much like regular Life cereal does. Which is not a bad thing, but don’t pay extra for this just because it says chocolate.

Still, it’s better than Special K with Chocolately Chunks.

Take a look at this shot from Google street view and tell me what you notice, or rather what you think I want you to notice:

I had never heard of a lottottery before, but apparently there is a convenience store that can meet your lottottery needs.

Curious, I tried to get a better view of the store.

It turns out that Google was just trolling me with some deepfake image. I thought it was pretty well done, after I compared the two images. All the other views of the convenience store showed they sold regular old lottery tickets, not the fancier lottottery tickets.

Not the most interesting thing on Google street view, but it’s something.

I was inspired to modify a song to fit with recent news about President Trump. Imagine Frank Sinatra’s voice before you peruse the following image.

Note: if the image is too small to read easily, click on it and you should be able to zoom in better.

For those of you not keeping up on things, the Huawei company has been banned from doing certain business in various countries. Trump has weighed in on things, and around that time I saw a comic of Bucky Katt singing his version of I Did It My Way, and the two things just clicked. I left a bit of the song out, keeping just the most memorable and applicable lines to the situation.