the customer said this is really what he told him when the cashier asked for his name.

Most football color commentators on TV are useless. I wish I could have only the audio feed from the stadium PA to hear who just made the last play, yards gained on the play and any penalties resulting from that play.

Even parents are guilty of this. I was at a friend’s local junior high football game this weekend and the parents were shouting from the stands “Get The Ball Back!” and “Stop Them Here!” I think the team is supposed to be doing that on every defensive play, no? As if the they were not planning to stop the ball but somehow your motivational words from the sideline will remind them why they are really there.

who broke my window?

i remembered this video the other day. i don’t know why, but maybe it’s better that i don’t know. this commercial played a hundred times while watching afterschool cartoons growing up. now that i saw the video again, i can’t stop humming this damn music. i wonder how i can remember a lot of the lyrics to the song but then have trouble remembering the difference between cabbage and lettuce while at the grocery store.

everytime i see this picture it puts things in perspective of where we stand in this world of ours. carl sagan says it best:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

after getting the volt, i wanted to see what the real cost savings is compared to regular gasoline. PGE offers some great nerdy stats on their website if you are on the ev-a tiered electric plan. my household is in the lowest tier ($0.09/kWh) most of the time. this is especially remarkable considering i live with a family that leaves lights on in empty rooms, uses high-energy devices like hair dryers and curling irons, and a pool pump that runs a few hours a day. the hair dryers and curling irons have a positive impact on female appearance, so i consider that an acceptable trade-off.

after digging into the hourly stats and using my best estimation based on time-of-day usage like running the clothes dryer and that aforementioned pool pump i came up with this:

ED: 50 miles of driving back and forth to work is $1.00
ED: 250 miles for the week = $5.00

compare this to wife’s car at about 20mpg, and assuming gas is $4.00:

WIFE: 50 miles of driving back and forth to work is $10
WIFE: 250 miles for the week is $50

for the year, that’s $250 for my car vs $2500 for her car but this number reflects the best case, and there are plenty of things that could affect that number, such as:

• using electricity all the way back and forth to work. currently, i have to dip into about .2 gallons of gas on a couple days because of traffic flow. my range actually increases when i am in stop-and-go traffic because of regenerative braking.
• gasoline is priced at $4/gallon. currently, you can find it at ~$3.80/gallon if you look. in the midwest, the electric car advantage wouldn’t be so great because gas prices are below $3.50/gallon, but i think there would still be considerable savings.
• whether it’s me of the wife driving the car. she tends to have inefficient driving techniques while on electric power along with using the AC at all times. i only use the AC when the temperature runs into the 90’s or i have guests in the car.
• summer electricity is cheaper than winter electricity.
• west coast vs east coast geography since i believe that natural gas powers lots of our electricity here in the west but some electricity on the east coast is still powered by coal and is more expensive. also battery efficiency drops in cooler temperatures, such as in the northeast. here in california, it’s 70 and sunny for half the year.

i’d still like to get solar panels for the roof to offset my monthly electric charge by selling my electricity back into the grid. how cool is that?

make sure you’re in HD and maximize to fill your screen. i hope to get a drone soon so i can take really epic videos of, um, fremont, i guess. anyway, you get the point. my friend jeremiah took some videos of sexy clovis using this one:

when considering a new car, i had originally planned on getting a bmw 550i with a beastly 5-liter, 8-cylinder engine producing 330+hp. It was a step down from the 400+hp 10-cylinder M5, but still fast enough to meet my power requirements. after some thought, i got a chevy volt, since it was neat to have an electric car and to also get the green carpool stickers, which would super valuable during my daily drive to san mateo. to put things in perspective, the chevy volt has a 1.4-liter 4-cylinder engine making 84hp.

I get daily satisfaction when I cruise in the carpool lane passing all the traffic on 880 and 92 and haven’t looked back about the choice I made. but, in the last few weeks i’ve noticed a lot of 550i’s driving around. twice in the last week I come out to my car in the parking lot and there’s a 550i parked right next to me, taunting me and questioning my decision. STOP!

just give the money

fremont schools made the news with their new sex-ed book. i think it’s great that kids learn about things like comparing a flaccid penis with a hard penis, vibrators, bondage, orgasms, masturbation, double-penetration and threesomes. kidding about the last two, but they might as well cover it. kids learn all this stuff online and they might misunderstand what a ball gag is. the parents who are complaining are setting their kids up to learn all this from their friends, who, as we know, can be a trusted source of this kind of information.

some parent is complaining about the book showing a diagram of the fallopian tubes. really? one problem is that a lot of kids in fremont are nerds and will probably graduate high school as virgins. the parents believe that this book will be the first time their kids have seen something like a limp penis.

i am behind the board about introducing their kids to this material.

[cbslocal.com]

…one (or more) of them might even be me

i like how half-breeds can make fun of both of their own races. both key & peele are half-black and half-white so they can actually make slavery videos.

it’s been a while since i’ve really added my usually useless commentary on mundane things i have stumbled upon while browsing. maybe this is why i like seinfeld so much, which is really a show about nothing. let’s watch the safety dance video to get things warmed up again.

pope francis is my kind of pope. who would come down to shake hands and take a selfie?

he might piss off the hard-core catholics with his stance on homosexuality, but i think he is just speaking his mind, which is very refreshing to hear [the argus online]

who is this new guy? he sounds good to me. the catholic church can often be too old and crusty, which explains the rise of more progressive churches and increasing number of people leaving churches altogether.

here’s a picture of pope benedict, and his ‘processions’

see the difference?