Daily Paragraph -- thinkThin High Protein Bar Taste Test

I like Clif Bars. I especially like them as a post-lunch dessert to my salad at lunch. But, my supply has run out, and I haven't had the wherewithal to drive over to Costco to restock. So, today I wandered across the street to 7-11 to satisfy my dessert urges. Clif Bars are available there, but I decided that if I was going to spend two bucks on an energy bar, I might as well try something new and different. Enter the thinkThin High Energy Protein Bar -- chunky peanut butter flavor (chocolate dipped).

From the packaging, you can tell right away the target demographic: people who lie to themselves to feel better about eating candy. The good people at thinkThin take this approach from multiple angles. First, the wrapper has the simplicity and the dull monochromatic color palate of an organic product, though nowhere does it actually claim to be organic.

The wrapper goes to some pain to inform of what horrible nasties you will not be consuming in your energy bar -- no sugar and no gluten (heaven for fend!). Personally, I'm completely ambivalent to the gluten-free claims. I suspect a lot of candy bars have no gluten (unless they sneak a cookie there like those clever bastards at Twix), so it's not like gluten-free is some kind of indicator of healthfulness. As for the lack of sugar, I missed that when I picked the bar. I might have chosen something else, had I noticed. Fortunately, the lack of sugar didn't prove to be an issue. They used maltitol for sweetness, and I generally don't mind the reduced sugars as an alternative to sucrose. It's the zero-calorie artificial sweeteners I find to be pretty gross (aspartame, I'm looking at you!).

Once you open the wrapper to peak at the product inside, it becomes pretty evident that you are about to eat a candy bar. It's dipped in chocolate. Dip something in chocolate and it becomes candy. I think Julia Child said that. Or maybe it was Dan Quayle.

And how does it taste? It's okay, but not amazing. Texturally, it falls somewhere between a Powerbar and the concoction Reese's crams into it's peanut butter cups. The chocolate coating is a little muted in it's chocolatey-ness, and the peanut butter bar inside is similarly muted in it's peanut-buttertude. I blame both these issues on the lack of real sugar. Next time, I'll just get a peanut butter chocolate chunk Clif Bar, which has actual chocolate chips and actual sugar in it. At 250, the two products have the same number of calories, too.

An interesting side note on the calorie count: at dinner tonight, I took a peek at the calorie content of the kim chee we were enjoying with our Korean beef short ribs and kung pao Brussels sprouts.The kim chee came from a jar (the ribs and sprouts were prepared by my loving wife), and according the label, one serving of the kim chee provides 15 calories  with seven serving to the container. That means I could have eaten two and a half jars of that of that tangy, spicy, garlicky goodness and received the same amount of energy as the energy bar I had eaten early in the day. Of course, it would have cost at least $10 more...

The Daily Paragraph -- Could We All Please Agree to Use Our Turn Signals?

At times of heavy traffic, I actively dislike driving north on Diamond Street across its intersection with Bosworth. The Glen Park BART station sits on the southeast corner of the crossing leading to an effectively endless stream of idlers and slow pokes, including pedestrians, commuter buses, taxis, Ubers, Lyfts, and various other vehicles that clog up the crosswalks and curbs.  A general absence of city planning resulted in two de facto lanes of traffic leading into the intersection in that direction. Neither lane has a legally-assigned role, but as you might expect, the cars planning to turn one way or the other onto Bosworth tend to favor the lane corresponding to the direction of their turn. Unfortunately, there is always enough oncoming traffic to slow down the left-turners and enough pedestrian traffic to slow down the right-turners. I almost always want to go straight. Picking a lane is invariably a coin-flip for me. It's frustrating enough to endure the delays imposed by poor lane selection, the least my fellow drivers can do is give me a heads-up about their plans. We will all get where we want to go a lot faster if we work together, damn it! Today, the driver in front of me decided to play a game with me. We were stopped at the light, both of us in the left lane. Numbers one and two in line to enter the intersection, neither of us giving any indication of plans to turn. I thought I would get a pleasantly unimpeded trip across Bosworth once the light changed. Nope! The green light lit up, and so on blinked the left turn signal on the car in front of me. Aggh! Why? I would have preferred that the little turd turn left without signalling at all. People who do that are at least committed narcissists or assholes. If you wait until the green light to turn on your signal, you suggest that you really just don't understand what it's there for, but you think you do. That makes you an idiot, and idiots are dangerous. You can predict what an asshole will do, but not an idiot. So here's my request...don't be an idiot. Use your turn signal, and do it in time to be helpful. Thanks.

The Daily Paragraph -- Baseball is Ruined

So the A's have officially ruined another baseball season for me. They felt like an unlucky, underperforming mediocre team going into their current road trip, but seven losses later they are definitely a bad/hopeless baseball team with little to cheer for this season and little chance of recovering from fecklessness next season. I've been following the A's since 1998, and their worst record through that period has been 74-88; they did that twice. Right now, the A's have to win 23 of their remaining 42 games to reach that pathetic record. That's right, the team that just got swept twice on the road needs to win more than lose just to tie for their worst record over the last 17 years. In 1997 they only won 65 games, and I think they can beat that. My official prediction for their final record is 70-92. The next thing the team has to look forward to is the draft next Spring. This stinks.

The Daily Paragraph -- The Human Canvas Jury

I've mentioned the past that I'm a fan of the reality tattoo competition showe Ink Master. It's overwrought and ridiculous, but the competitors do appear to be genuinely talented artists, and the judges clearly take their roles seriously -- a little too seriously. One element of the show is clearly there just to create tension: the Human Canvas Jury. This is the panel of tattooees who received free permanent art work on their bodies during the challenge (probably after signing a pretty impressive legal waiver relinquishing any right to sue for dissatisfaction with the final product). They gather in an isolated room after all the needlework is done to decide who received the worst tattoo of the day. The responsible competitor becomes eligible for elimination in front of the judges shortly thereafter. This season, the Ink Master production team added a nice little wrinkle to the process. This time around, the "canvas" with the worst tattoo gets to come to the judges' discussion to confront their artist before the final elimination. It's a nice little touch of drama, which always makes for good TV, but here's the thing -- it's totally pointless. The judges don't really care what the Human Canvas Jury thinks. If they disagree with the jury, the selected artist is definitely safe. If the jury truly selects the artist most deserving of elimination, you can bet the judges would have booted him or her anyway. Here's my suggestion of how to tweak the system a little to make the Human Canvas Jury a little more relevant, and I think it would make for good TV, too. Instead of having the judges make the final decision, have them nominate the bottom artists and let the jury decide who packs up shop and leaves. It only makes sense, right? They are a JURY, after all. I think this approach would be great. The judges could make the case for why each bottomfeeder deserves to go home in front of the jury before they're all sequestered for deliberation. What do you think, Dave Navarro? It's a great idea, right? If you use it, I don't even need any money, but some kind of producer credit would be nice.

The Daily Paragraph -- Rock Band Name Scoring

I'm an advocate for aesthetically pleasing band names, but it's hard to define exactly what the criteria are that define that. So here's an attempt at a scoring system that might make the rules a little clearer. Let's see how it goes.

1. Part of speech: 5 points for noun (1 bonus point for being plural), 3 points for adjective, 2 points for verb, 1 point for anything else. 
2. Number of syllables: 5 points for 3 or fewer syllables, 3 points 4 or 5 syllables, 1 point for 6 to 8 syllables, 0 points for 9 or more syllables (a "the" at the beginning of the band name doesn't count in the total)
3. Originality: 5 points if there is no other well-known band name similar to it, 3 points if there are one or two other bands with names somewhat similar, 0 points for unoriginal band names
4. Additional points:
1. Add 1 point for using one of the colors red, black, or white (using two colors does not add more points)
2. Add 2 points for alliteration or assonance
3. Add 3 points good use of rare consonants (q, k, z, v, j)
4. Add 5 points for coolness
5. Deductions:
1. Subtract 3 points for each of the following: pretentiousness, cutesiness (unless properly balanced edginess), and self-importance
2. Subtract three points for obnoxious/incorrect use of rare consonants
3. Subtract one point for puns and nonsense words (sorry Beatles, this means you)

Okay, let's see how this works out with some examples:

The Rolling Stones get a 21 (plural noun, 6 points; 3 syllables not including "the", 5 points; originality is hard to judge here, let's give them 3 points; 2 points for assonance; and 5 points for coolness; no deductions). Pretty good! Seems appropriate.

Imagine Dragons get a 3 (1 point for being an imperative sentence; 3 points for 5 syllables; I don't feel like the deserve any originality points; 2 points for assonance for the long a sounds; minus 3 points for unbalanced cutesiness). Maybe a little harsh, but I agree, Imagine Dragons is not a good band name.

Here are some more, just for kicks:
The White Stripes  -- 19 points
The Jam -- 21 points
Hootie and the Blowfish -- 7 points
Nickelback -- 10 points
The Red Hot Chili Peppers -- 10 points

Well, I dunno. I wish Nickelback got a lower score because the suck so bad, but maybe the band name itself isn't entirely to blame.

I think the system could use some tweaking, but it's a start.

The Daily Paragraph -- What am I watching?

TV. I like it -- probably too much -- but it can't be helped. It's so much better now than it was in the 1980s, and I watched a lot of TV then, too. I can't imagine myself anxiously anticipating new episodes of Night Court today, and yet I loved that show 30 years ago. Loved, loved , loved it! Or maybe I just had the hots for Markie Post. But since that time, actually funny shows have kicked the tar out Night Court humor-wise. And action dramas? Holy crap! I used to get charged up over Knight Rider. It's embarrassing just thinking about that.

So what am I watching these days?

I try to keep my Reality TV limited, but I do indulge. I favor skills competition shows, and these days I watch would-be special effects make-up artists conjure up cool creatures on Face Off, and I watch testosterone-addled tatooists permanently alter people referred to as "canvases" on Ink Master. When Top Chef rolls around, I watch that, too.

With the finales of Breaking Bad and Mad Men in the past couple years, I'm down to one serial drama -- Better Call Saul. I have to keep these type of shows to a minimum, though. They're too stressful. I literally lose sleep over them. I think watching The Wire may have speed up my male pattern baldness and taken a year off my life. Season four of that show? Torture! Anyway, I've decided I'm not going to get sucked into Game of Thrones or Walking Dead. My heart can't take it any more.

Half-hour comedies are really my bread and butter, and the ends of shows like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and How I Meet Your Mother have left me looking for replacements. I can't tell if Community is really over, but I would definitely watch more if Dan Harmon decided to make more episodes (or a movie). As far as I know, New Girl is coming back for another season. I like how that show transitioned from quirky cuteness to occasionally raunchy wackballitude. God bless Tina Fey for picking right up where she left off with 30 Rock by creating The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. And Will Forte has definitely earned my attention with The Last Man on Earth (and good for him for hooking up with January Jones in the process).

Apparently, I'm also a sucker for cartoons with title characters voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, too, as I enjoy both Archer and Bob's Burgers tremendously.

The internet age of scripted television has brought out some other good stuff that I'll watch as long as no one tries to charge me too much to see it. Duckie and I are both happy that The Mindy Project has apparently found a post-Fox home on Hulu, and if Mitchell Hurwitz decides to make more Arrested Development for Netflix, I'll certainly watch it. I also really like Catastrophe on Amazon, and I look forward to more of that, too.

Comedy Central always seems to have something worth putting on your DVR, whether it's Key & Peele, Inside Amy Schumer, Broad City, or Drunk History. I'm even thinking of giving Another Period a second look (I like the cast a lot).

See, there's plenty of good stuff to watch, and I'm always hearing about new shows I want to check out. But in the end it doesn't matter. Ultimately, I know that I'll watch whatever is on -- except maybe the reruns of Rules of Engagement that WGN America is always playing. I don't even understand why that show got airplay in the first place.

The Daily Paragraph -- Unwanted Bills

For the second time in about two and a half years, we received a single greasy dollar bill in the mail in an envelope with no return address. Last time I didn't think much about it, but Duckie was pretty freaked out.  My rationale was that a friend sent us the money to compensate us for feeding a parking meter on his behalf.  Receiving the second dollar in the same fashion pretty much put a knife in the heart of that little fantasy. I decided not to take any chances this time. I opened the letter in the backyard wearing a pair of disposable nitrile gloves, and once I confirmed the contents (one dollar, no note) I crumpled everything up and tossed it in the trash. If this whole exercise is a joke to somebody, I don't get it. If it's a game, I don't know the rules, and I don't want to play. If it's a mistake, well, it's weird and I still don't get it. The final option is that we're the beneficiaries of the oddly generous actions of  a nut job. In any case, I'd like it to stop.

Daily Paragraph -- Some Dogs Names

Some dogs I have known: Squeaky, Whiskey, Kahlua, Phoebe, Belle, AJ, Barney, Fletch, Bailey, Nugget, Cooper, Toby, Meekah, Dilan, Murphy, Kaya, Puff, Duke, Archie, Eliza, Eddie, Jasper ...wow! I'm really surprised that's all I can think up. I know there were lots of others, but I just can't think of their names. I guess friends' pets' names are just one of those things you lose as you get older.

Daily Paragraph -- Ending Up in Stitches

By the time you've reached your forties, chances are good you've had stitches a few times depending on how accident prone or unlucky you've been. I can think of four sets of stitches I've had in my lifetime. I think that's a pretty low number, especially for someone who spent a number of years being a teenage boy.

My first set of stitches resulted from a yardwork accident in 1989. I was trimming some hedges with a set of electric clippers that had once belonged to my grandmother. It wasn't equipped with any of those fancy-schmancy safety switches that folks are so fond of these days. If you turned on the clippers and then let go with one hand, they just kept running. They were generally indifferent to what you then did with that free hand. And the clippers didn't come with any of them protective guards, either. If you recklessly let your free had drift toward chattering blades, you wound up with a chunk of your index finger popping out of the skin like a lump of bloody meatloaf. And that's what happened to me. A mostly pointless trip to the Penfield Volunteer Ambulance followed by an off-hours trip to see Dr. Nazarian later, and I had my first set of stitches.

My second set of stitches resulted from my wisdom tooth extractions when I was 19. I had all four taken out at once, and per standard practice, the gum holes were sewn up afterward. I think those stitches all dissolved, so maybe they don't count.

My third set of stitches were needed to close up a slice in my forehead I received by bumping into jagged wall of rock in a gorge in Ithaca one summer during college. I was edging my way up a waterfall when it happened. It was shocking at the time. I thought I gently tapped the wall, but when I reached up to check on it, I ended up with a handful of blood. The total stitch count was low, but I was still surprised that I needed them at all.

The last set of stitches came from a lab accident at Exelixis more than a decade ago. It was classic glassware handling mistake. Any smart chemist will tell you never to use too much force to connect two pieces of glassware together or pull them apart. I forgot that one day and ended up with a nice little laceration in my thumb. Again, not a lot of stitches but enough to drive the lesson home. It could have been worse, though; I knew I guy in grad school who severed a tendon with a similar lapse in caution.

All told, I've been lucky, stitch-wise. I'm not going to tempt fate by speculating future sutures (hey that rhymes!).

Daily Paragraph -- Rumplestiltskin Redux

The following is a story I told my son today. He made me tell it three times, each time interrupting more frequently for different embellishments. The bedtime version was fundamentally incomprehensible. Anyway, here's a moderately coherent telling for your perusal:

Theo was five years old, and he rode the bus every day to kindergarten. One day, Theo met a small man in a green suit on the bus. The man told Theo his name was Rumplestiltskin and that he was a leprechaun.

"What do leprechauns do?" asked Theo.

"We hide treasure," Rumplestiltskin answered.

"Can you tell me where you hid some?" asked Theo.

"Oh no, I can't do that. That would be cheating," Rumplestiltskin answered.

Theo decided that he was going to try to guess where Rumplestiltskin might have hidden some treasure. He noticed that the little man had pamphlet from the Upper Noe Recreation Center in his pocket and that his shoes were covered with sand. Theo connected the dots and said, "I think you buried some treasure in the sand box at Upper Noe Rec Center."

"I can neither confirm or deny that," said Rumplestiltskin. "But I can tell you that if you find some of my treasure, you have to share it, or it will disappear."

After school, Theo convinced his dad to take him to the Rec Center, and they started digging away in the sand box. All the other kids in the playground thought they were crazy, except for one boy who decided to help.

After a few hours of digging, Theo heard a clunk as he jabbed his shovel down into the ground. He and his dad and the other boy cleared away some more sand and uncovered a big wooden box with the name Rumplestiltskin written on it in gold. Anxiously, they opened it up and found it was full of Rescuebots!

Theo was thrilled, and he wanted to take them all home for himself, but then remembered what Rumplestiltskin had said and realized he needed to share the toys so they wouldn't disappear. So, he gave one Rescuebot to the boy who helped him dig up the treasure, and the next day at school he gave most of the rest of the Rescuebots to his friends, keeping only one for himself.

Sure enough, the Rescuebots never disappeared, and Theo found that sharing them with others was more fun than hoarding them and playing alone anyway.

The End

Daily Pargraph -- Dubious Video's for Three Year-Olds, Volume 1

Recently, Theo has gotten attached to a new song that has been getting some play on the radio stations we play on our commute to preschool/work. The song is "Ex's and Oh's" by Elle King, and it's actually a rocking little pop tune. I like it. Of course, as a child of the internet era, Theo craves visual stimulation when listening to music, so we have also watched the video on youtube at home. It's right on the border of what I think is okay for him to watch, mostly because he is unlikely to understand it. If he could wrap his mind around the actual contents, I would probably try to steer him away from it. The song and video have a thematic link to Olivia Newton-John's early 80s cheese-pop classic, "Let's Get Physical" -- lyrical innuendo accompanied by images of beefcake. Olivia wanted some fella at the gym to let her hear his "body talk, body talk", while Elle croons that her pumped studs "always want to come, but they never want to leave". The lyrics are sure to fly over my three year-old son's head, but I'm not sure how to think about the beefcake. I suppose it's not really that different from watching Katy Perry parade around the jungle in an animal print tube top and a grass skirt in "Roar!", another favorite Theo jam from a couple months ago. Meh, they're all better than Barney.

The Daily Paragraph -- Seveneves and Wet Hot American Summer

Yesterday I finished reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel  Seveneves, and I also completed a weekend long binge-watching of the Wet, Hot, American Summer reboot series. Two pretty impressive accomplishments for one day. I'm really struggling to come up with some parallel that will tie both achievements together in one tidy little bundle. It's a stretch. Seveneves is a 860 page novel about the survival of the human race in space after the moon randomly blows up, breaks apart into millions of little asteroids which crash to the earth setting the atmosphere on fire over several thousands of years. Seven billion people die. It's a real pick-me-up. The Wet Hot American Summer reboot, is a goofy cheesy absurd series in which a collection of A-list comic acting talent in their late thirties and early forties reprise their roles as teenage camp counselors which they were too old to play when the original movie came out fifteen years ago. Silly, silly, silly. I admit it. I laughed...out loud...a bunch. In the end, the only thing the two things have in common is me.  I have a long-standing history as a Neal Stephenson fan. I think I've read every novel he's written, and I don't know the last time I read a book of fiction that wasn't his work. Ten years, maybe. I've also been following much of the cast of the Wet Hot American Summer for years as well. The creators of the show were on the early 1990s MTv sketch comedy show The State, which I loved and own on DVD. So in the end, the connection is devotion on my part...and the fact that I happened to express it at roughly the same time for both. Yep. That's pretty weak.

The Good Guys Beat the Worst Guys 4 to 1

On Saturday, my family finally made it over to O.co Coliseum (or OcoCo, for short) to catch our first, and potentially last, A's game of the season. You see, Major League Baseball games are not events scheduled with preschoolers in mind. Day games fall right at nap time, and night games, well, they're night games. Anyway, Saturday's A's game had a start time of 1 pm, and we decided to take our chances.

The A's were facing their rival, the dreaded Los Angelheim Angels --easily my least favorite team. These days I've taken to calling them the Porsche Cayenne of baseball (ie, they're expensive and high-performance, but they're also ridiculous, ugly, and fundamentally pointless). The day before, the Angels had managed to come back from a 7 to 2 deficit to beat the A's 12 to 7, so I was actually not very optimistic about our chances.

We arrived early, which made sense for two reasons: 1) we were likely to leave early to accommodate  a potential very sleepy three-year old, and 2) because the first 15000 fans to the game were to receive a Sonny Gray gnome with a solar-powered glowing baseball (I'm not going to try to explain that --it's too much). After we got our gnomes and checked out our seats, we went straight to the A's Fun Zone, the children's place space on the second level behind the concession stands. It's not much of a place space, really. It has four coin-op mechanical rides (two were broken for much of our time there), a small mediocre play structure, and some random toddler toys (mostly lawnmowers, for some reason). I would generally rate the space as inferior to our local playground, but I think Theo considered about a hundred times better than actually sitting in our seats to watch a baseball game. We spent a lot of time there.

I went off to buy us lunch, and we were back to our seats before the first pitch. I forced Theo to stay there for two whole innings, during which the A's manufactured a run. Then it was back to the Fun Zone for us for the next two innings. Theo spent much of that time running to the play structure for a trip down the slide and then climbing up on a broken coin-operated elephant, because, hey, why not?

I convinced him to head back to our seats by the top of the fourth inning. He still wasn't into the game, so Duckie got out her phone and turned on Netflix. Theo watched Curious George instead of watching the A's and Angels fail to score any runs for the next couple innings. Arguably the right choice.

Then, in the top of the sixth, Angels superhero Mike freaking Trout, tied the game off a single by Erick Aybar, and I was expecting things to get ugly. But A's pitcher Jesse Hahn locked things down, and no more damage was done. And better than that, the A's strung together some hits in the bottom half of the inning and ended up with a three run lead. In fact, they hit three consecutive doubles -- the first with a man already on base. It was pretty great. Theo even managed to clap along with the crowd  and give us high fives.

At the end of the 6th, we decided it was safe to leave. I didn't want stick around to watch the Angels come back, and if the A's blew the game open later I wouldn't have felt bad for missing it.

Theo watched Duckie's iPhone pretty much for the whole walk out of the stadium to the car. He once yelled at the crowd for being too loud because he couldn't hear his videos. We stopped by a souvenir stand on the way out so I could buy a new A's cap (a more traditional one, this time), and we drove home. Theo fell asleep in the car, the iPhone blaring away in his hands.

As it turns out, no further runs were scored that game. Somehow, I was at my seat every time a runner crossed home plate, despite missing two full innings hanging out in the Fun Zone and leaving after the sixth. I rarely get that lucky when it comes to watching sports.

My Athletic Achievements

So I'm 42. It's time to face facts; my athletic peak is in the past. I don't have any chance of impressing anyone with my competitive accomplishments without making use of the phrase "in my age group". It's time to look back on my athletic life, such that it was, and examine the highs and lows. Let's start at the bottom.

In a moment of stupidity during a full-on dorm-to-dorm snowball fight in my Freshman year at college, I decided to make a one-man charge across the frozen tundra between Mary Donlon Hall and Helen Newman Gymnasium. I don't exactly what I expected. Glory? Cathartic validation of my manhood? What I got was ice-pelted testicles, a black eye, and bruised ego.

Later in college, my friends and I assembled an inner-tube intramural water polo team. We were handed a fast exit  in the single-elimination tournament in which we participated. On personal level, I had mistaken an ability to swim for competence at paddling awkwardly around a pool and throwing a ball into a goal. Not the same thing.

In graduate school, I had the privilege of playing on a really terrible intramural basketball team. We had at least three guys who wanted to point guard, but zero guys up to the task. I played the role of the lunky big man (lunky is combination of lanky and clunky) with no particular ball-handling skills and absolutely no touch. We played three games. We lost the first one badly, and that was our best performance. That pretty much represented my last attempt make use of my height to my advantage in sports.

I was also on a really terrible Berkeley Chemistry Department softball league team in grad school, but I kinda liked playing on that team. I also played on the league champion team one year, and that sucked.

All in all, I don't think that's such a bad list. Embarrassing? Yes, but it's not like I missed the game winning field goal wide right at the Super Bowl twenty-five years ago like Scott Freaking Norwood! I'm not bitter. Anyway, I'll get to the top moments in another post.