{"id":3727,"date":"2006-05-11T06:54:34","date_gmt":"2006-05-11T11:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2006\/05\/11\/random-thursday-3\/"},"modified":"2024-09-20T18:03:46","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T23:03:46","slug":"random-thursday-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/05\/11\/random-thursday-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Random Thursday will commence shortly but first I need to inform you that I&#8217;ve run into some problems with the next installment of Fire Ant Theatre. I&#8217;m in desperate need of a Spanish\/Klingon dictionary, and it wouldn&#8217;t hurt if you could direct me to an audio loop of Red Skelton&#8217;s impersonation of Marilyn Monroe.<\/p>\n<p>Now, where were we?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I see where some folks are proposing random drug testing for members of Congress, using the logic that if it&#8217;s advisable for public corporations, why not for public officials? Well, I&#8217;m not in favor of this proposal. My fear is that our Congresspersonages will all pass the screenings, and we&#8217;re then left to ponder the implications that they&#8217;re doing what they&#8217;re doing with full possession of their faculties. I&#8217;m not sure I can handle the cognitive dissonance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>We underwent &#8220;wellness testing&#8221; yesterday, courtesy of <acronym title=\"My Lovely Bride\">MLB<\/acronym>&#8216;s employer. I dislike the term, &#8220;wellness.&#8221; It&#8217;s one of those new-agey sounding words that isn&#8217;t very good at its job. &#8220;Wellness&#8221; is all soft and formless, not nearly as meaningful as the correct word, &#8220;health.&#8221; Anyway. While it&#8217;s nice that the company pays what is probably a very large sum for each employee and spouse to get this testing done, I have to question some of the methods and results. For example, they had these high-tech cholesterol measurement machines that gave complete readings in five minutes. OK, that&#8217;s cool. But at the next station, where flexibility, <acronym title=\"Body Mass Index\">BMI<\/acronym> and body fat percentage were computed, the tool for measuring height was a tape measure affixed to the wall, with someone eyeballing where they thought the top of your head matched a marking. My wife gained an inch in height via the process, while I lost one (so I guess we averaged out just fine).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>And don&#8217;t get me started about the body fat measurement. I&#8217;ve never in my life measured more than 14%, and this one &#8212; using some little device that looked suspiciously like a Nintendo game controller &#8212; yielded a reading of 18.9%. The attendant said we could probably subtract five percentage points from the reading, which really adds to the credibility of the process. My question is this: whenever these things make errors, why is it inevitable that the error serves to make things seem <em>worse<\/em> than they really are?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>It was interesting that they hid the scale in a supply closet, I guess so nobody had to worry about someone else finding out what they weighed. And I wonder, why are we not equally sensitive about our heights (the tape-measure-taped-to-the-wall setup was out in the open)? I mean, weight is relevant only if correlated to height (so what if you need to be 12 feet tall to justify your weight&#8230;it&#8217;s the principle of the matter!), so logically we should be just as sensitive to the idea of others knowing how tall we are. &#8220;But,&#8221; you counter, &#8220;everyone can tell how tall you are just by looking at you.&#8221; Uh, like they can&#8217;t (and don&#8217;t) decide for themselves how much you weigh just by looking at you? It&#8217;s all very strange and human-like.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Someday, I&#8217;d like to have a mountain bike with a <a href=\"https:\/\/rhinolinings.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rhino Lining<\/a> coating the frame.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>And, speaking of non-mountain non-bicycles, ever wonder what the most expensive motorcycle in the world sells for? Try $150,000, which may explain why <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebikeinsurer.co.uk\/motorbike-news\/industry\/inside-jay-lenos-motorcycle-collection\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jay Leno might be the only guy who has one<\/a>. Sure, it makes 286 horsepower at the rear wheel, but the neat thing is that you don&#8217;t have to settle for a rearview mirror, as it comes with a rear mounted camera with LCD color display (plus side mirrors) so you can see what you&#8217;ve just left behind.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Random Thursday will commence shortly but first I need to inform you that I&#8217;ve run into some problems with the next installment of Fire Ant Theatre. I&#8217;m in desperate need of a Spanish\/Klingon dictionary, and it wouldn&#8217;t hurt if you could direct me to an audio loop of Red Skelton&#8217;s impersonation of Marilyn Monroe. Now,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/05\/11\/random-thursday-3\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3727"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14283,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3727\/revisions\/14283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}