Theories

There are some great outdoor basketball courts near our office building, so in the spring and fall, when temperatures permit, we play basketball during our lunch break at work.

One of the software engineers who plays nearly everyday frustrates me to no end—or at least he does when he’s not on my team; otherwise he’s a great guy. You see he’s shorter than I am, balder than I am, has a bigger “stummy” than I do, and yet somehow he manages to be quicker than I am, and jump higher than I do. Consequently he steals the ball from me on a regular basis, blocks my shots when I try to shoot over him, and gets rebound that he shouldn't.

And did I mention he’s a software engineer? Where does he get off breaking out of his stereotype and being good at basketball!? I mean it was okay when he beat me at Halo despite the fact that it was my game/xbox/projector we were playing with. He’s a software engineer! They’re supposed to be good at video games and computer stuff…but basketball? Isn’t that a little unfair? You can’t be good at everything.

I could never understand how he managed this until recently he revealed his secret to me. It’s a technique he’s been perfecting for some time now. It’s based on what he refers to as his “Theory of Fluid Dynamics.” Now I’m not sure I completely understand all the technicalities and subtle nuances of this theory, but the basic gist is that you use the “fluid nature” of your own body to your advantage.

For example, when you’re about to jump, you give a quick downward squat to send your “stummy” (this is Ben’s technical term) downward. Then, as your “stummy” reaches it’s lowest point and begins to rebound upward, you straighten your legs and jump with all you’ve got. The upward momentum of all your “stummy” mass carries you higher than you would normally be able to jump. See diagram below for clarification:

Evidently, this smashes a theory of my own. I called my theory the “Ice Princess Movie is Complete Bollux Theory”. My wife made me watch this movie (and then go ice skating which was more fun). The premise of the movie is that a science-geek girl becomes a champion ice skater by studying the physics of ice skater movements. I thought this was ridiculous, but evidently a strong understanding of scientific principles coupled with a little practice can lead to phenomenal results. I stand corrected (and sometimes blocked :( ).

Maybe in another post I’ll explain Ben’s other, less-scientific, basketball theory. I’m not sure if he’s named it yet, but I call it the “Theory of Fouling Really Hard When Your Opponent is About to Score Over You and There’s Nothing Else You Can Do About It.” It’s a pretty long name, so Ben probably calls it something better.

Hey Crackhead!

I ran across this post in the rants section of craigslist. I would link directly to it, but there's some swears, and I think my baby sister reads this blogs so I've edited it for content down to a PG-13 rating. It made me laugh really hard. Enjoy:

HEY CRACKHEAD!

Yes, you. You sick freak. On Wednesday morning I emerged from my girlfriend's building by U.N. Plaza to find that you had sawed the tops off both the sparkplugs on my motorcycle. At the time, I had no idea why anyone would do that. Other than the sparkplugs, the bike was untouched. Some kind of bizarre vandalism? A fraternity prank gone awry? I had no idea. All I knew is that I looked like a huge douchebag riding the Muni to work in a padded motorcycle jacket and helmet.

Because the bike was immobilized I got a $35 street sweeping ticket that night. Thursday I had it towed to the shop ($45) where they replaced the sparkplugs and the boots ($50 including labor). They explained to me that "people" - I use the term loosely here - like you break off the tops of spark plugs and use the porcelain tubes to smoke crack. As an engineer and former MacGyver fan, in a way I think this is kind of cool. But then I remember that I just paid $100 for YOUR crackpipes, and I get angry again.

Crackhead, it was really good to have my bike back though. I rode home from the shop with a couple of spare sparkplugs and a smile on my face. I figured the next time I parked at my girlfriend's place overnight I would have to buy some crackpipes and tape them to my bike as a peace offering. Overall, I wasn't that upset. Despite having to ride the bus for three days and dropping a hundred bones at the shop, I had gained some fascinating knowledge, a new set of sparkplugs, and a pretty funny anecdote about how f-ed up you are, and how our paths once crossed briefly in the night.

But you couldn't just let sleeping dogs lie, could you Crackhead. You couldn't just stay in on Friday, watch Letterman through the window of a home electronics store and then call it a night. You couldn't rest on your laurels. Two porcelain sparkplug crackpipes just wasn't enough for you, was it Crackhead? You just had to come back for more.

This morning, a scant fifteen hours after I rode it out of the shop, I found my motorcycle violated once again. This time you only took the right one - maybe you were having an off night. At least this time I had a spare sparkplug and the tools to fix it - or so I thought - having ordered a 73-piece toolset from SEARS.com last week. But no, the sparkplug socket in my new toolset was for American sparkplugs. So I had to go down to the neighborhood Ace hardware. They had an 18mm socket that would fit over my sparkplug, but it was for a 1/2" drive ratchet. My toolkit only has 1/4" and 3/8" ratchets. So I had to buy a 1/2" ratchet along with the socket. Even though the clerk took pity on me and gave me the senior citizen discount (I'm 25) it still cost me $22 all told. Now, you might say that I should have just gotten a 3/8"-to-1/2" drive adaptor instead of springing for the whole ratchet. And to that I say "Shut the hell up, Crackhead, I'm not finished. And besides, I was eventually going to buy a 1/2" ratchet anyway so it's probably not worth it to take it back now."

OK, now I'm rambling. But the point is, Crackhead, that you have done me wrong. Now, I get that you love crack. That is totally understandable. I've heard it is really fun, at first, and quite addictive. What I don't understand is,

YOU ARE A CRACKHEAD. WHY DON'T YOU OWN A CRACKPIPE?

I am an engineer. Do you ever see me shaking down bums in the Loin for a calculator and sliderule? No, you don't. Because engineering is the main thing I do, I went and bought myself a calculator. The main thing you do is crack. How do you get by without a crackpipe? The other crackheads must clown on you non-stop. I mean, the freakin’ saw you used to saw off my sparkplugs is probably worth five or ten bucks. Why not sell or trade it for a crackpipe? You really haven't put much thought into this, have you?

Please, Crackhead, please don't tell me you sold your crackpipe to buy crack. Even a stupid crackhead such as yourself couldn't possibly be that stupid.

I've decided that taping crackpipes to my motorcycle would be tantamount to appeasement. You have crossed a line, Crackhead - specifically California Street. You have come onto my own street and you have desecrated that which I hold dear. You have stolen from me, and you have caused me to spend the last half hour writing this post instead of engineering stuff, and it is conceivable, if not likely, that my boss could find out about this and fire me. I am hella pissed at you dude.

Here are my options as I see them:

1. Write a note saying that I have coated both of my sparkplugs in rat poison and tape it to my bike at night. You can thank Tim for that one, it was his idea.

2. Don't write a note, but just coat both sparkplugs in rat poison. This is probably closer to a punishment that would fit your despicable crime. I'm sure this is super illegal and stuff, but it's not like anyone is going to miss you, Crackhead. Don't fool yourself.

3. Wait in an alley near my bike armed with my new stainless steel mirror-finish Ace Professional brand 1/2" drive socket wrench, my 18mm sparkplug socket, and my searing rage. It's pretty heavy and well balanced. I am not a large man, but I am angry.

In conclusion, Crackhead, why don't you just do both of us a favor and buy yourself a crackpipe? It will both enhance your crack smoking experience and save me a lot of time and felony assault charges. Think about it.

Sincerely,
Matt

*** If you are not the Crackhead that took my sparkplugs, please disregard this posting ***

Good thing my scooter's spark plugs are hard to get to. With all the crackheads milling about in north Orem, I'd probably be walking home as many days as not if they could get to Hidalgo's plugs.

A Close Call

It's starting to get a bit chilly riding Hidalgo (my scooter) to work in the mornings, so this morning I decided to wear my thermals that are usually reserved for snow boarding. Boy did that make for a nice ride! Cold air meant less bugs to the face but the thermals still kept me nice and cozy.

By 10:00 AM I’d had my cup of Mormon coffee (hot chocolate) and put in about an hour and a half of hard labor, or in other words I’d checked my email and replied to a couple of them.

All the hard work and warm chocolate in my belly was making me uncomfortably warm, so I headed into the bathroom to take off the thermal underwear.

It went pretty well to start out with… I followed all the right steps: 1) Take off shoes. 2) Take off pants. 3) Take off thermals…

But somewhere in the re-dressing process I messed up and skipped a step without realizing it. I had both my Doc Martens on my feet and all the way laced up before I realized that I hadn’t put my pants back on.

I musta looked pretty funny standing there in my underwear and Doc Marten boots, but it wouldn’t have been so funny if I’d walked out of the bathroom like that.

Maybe from now on I’ll skip the thermals and just let the cold air flow through my clothes. Maybe that way I’ll actually be AWAKE by the time I get to work.

Scooter Glamour

A few days before Labor Day, gas prices broke the three dollar barrier and made up my mind! I simply couldn’t pay over $300 dollars a month on gas so I went out and bought a gas-powered scooter with a 125cc engine. With a tailwind and a downhill stretch, it can hit 65 mph, but more importantly it gets almost 90 miles per gallon.

Now I know that when you hear the word scooter you probably think one thing: Glamour. Yes, the word scooter itself is usually enough to conjure images of movie stars, supermodels, and the otherwise rich and attractive cruising costal, palm-lined highways in the sun. I mean, that’s what I always thought about when I thought scooters. And for a while, I was living that dream…

But last Tuesday, the magical vision of scooter riding lost some of its glamour for a while, perhaps forever.

I don’t know if it was the temperature or the atmospheric pressure or just some sort of regularly scheduled mating time, but for some reason, the cities of Eagle Mountain (where I live) and Lehi (which I pass through on my commute) were suddenly and completely full of bugs last Tuesday.

My scooter has no windshield, I had no goggles, I didn’t even have a decent pair of gloves. However, none of my evident unpreparedness seemed to stop the bugs from getting in my way. It was almost as if they tried to swarm even thicker in my path just to experience some sort of suicidal ritual of splatting themselves against my sunglasses, helmet, clothes, and flesh.

The worst part of it is that when you’re on a scooter, you have to maintain a speed of at least the speed limit of the road you’re driving on or you’ll end up like a bug yourself, splatted on the grill of some dump truck who just didn’t see you in the waxing, pre-dawn light. This means that for most of my commute, I’ve got to give my scooter all it’s got and crank it up to 55-60 mph. When a bug hits your face, or hand, or eye at that speed, not only is it gross, it’s also really quite painful.

I had to stop thrice at service stations to clean bug guts off my sunglasses just so I could see to keep driving. What a rude awaking, both literally (as it was quite early and I was still groggy), and figuratively (as my scooter glamour dreams were squashed like a million bugs)!

When I reached the border of American Fork (another city I pass through on my way to work), the swarms of bugs magically disappeared. It wasn’t like they thinned out; it was more like the bugs somehow knew the actual city limits and just stayed out of American Fork. Perhaps there are some sort of anti-swarm laws in American Fork that I’m unaware of, but whatever the case it was weird to go from so many bugs to absolutely no bugs just by crossing a city border.

Nevertheless, I was glad to be free of the bugs and prepared to enjoy the rest of my commute. So what if people looked at me funny for having all kinds of orange bug guts covering my helmet and body. I was getting 90 miles per gallon. Those suckers, while safe in their SUV’s, were probably getting 20 if they were lucky. I chuckled a little mocking chuckle (though not with an open mouth as I didn’t want any bug guts to slide from my lips into my mouth).

My malicious joy, however, was short lived. As I passed from safe American Fork into Pleasant grove I also passed into what seemed to be a sandstorm reminiscent of the movie Dune or the recent flop Hidalgo. “Strange,” I thought, “how can I be driving through a sandstorm when there are no sand dunes for miles?”

At speeds of 55-60 mph, sand is also very painful, and to the ungoggled eye, very dangerous. Through careful and squinty observation, I soon surmised that the sandstorm was not all-enveloping, but seemed to be emanating from a source directly in front of me.

As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I quickly changed lanes, pushed the scooter beyond its natural limits by crying “Run Hidalgo!” (which I decided to name my scooter in that moment), and managed to outpace the sandstorm in the left lane.

A mix of rage, sand, and tears filled my vision as I discovered that the source of the sandstorm was some idiot towing a flat, uncovered trailer of sand behind his truck.

“C’mon buddy that’s illegal!” I yelled forgetting what was on my lips and inadvertently ingesting some sand-coated bug guts.

I decided to really let him have it. I laid on the horn button to tell him what I thought of him. “Meep, meep.” said Hidalgo sounding much like Warner Brother’s Roadrunner.

Amazingly, the idiot-hick in the truck heard my feeble horn and turned to look at me. I can only imagine what I must have looked like: a bug-covered, sand-coated mess on a tiny scooter shaking my fist at a lifted Ford F-5million. Sadly, I have to admit that I probably would have laughed as hard as he did.

It was at that exact moment, watching idiot-hick with an IQ of 7 laugh at me, that the last flicker of the scooter-riding glamour flame went out.

But by then it was too late. I couldn’t go back to driving my gas-guzzling SUV to work everyday after dropping $2800 on a scooter without even consulting the wife. So I got to work, cleaned the bugs out of my ears and off my clothes and resigned myself to a long friendship with my faithful Hidalgo.