16 days to the GRE. I feel like the more I study my math review books, the less I understand. For the last hour I’ve been looking at a series of word problems and have had no idea how to set them up, let alone solve them. These next two weeks of studying will not be fun.
Since David Stern clearly payed attention to my suggestions in handing down suspensions yesterday, I’ll offer some more unsolicited advise, this time to ABC. I didn’t say a word about the Monday Night Football intro last week because I didn’t see it. I do think tonight’s broadcast is an opportunity for ABC to make a statement about what happened a week ago and what to expect in the future. My suggestion is a thirty second shot of a gallon of vanilla ice cream sitting on a kitchen counter. It will be a fairly close shot; close enough so you can see the sweat beads on the carton. A spoon and bowl will sit next to the carton. For 30 seconds, jaunty, Herb Alpertesque elevator music from the early 70s will play in the background. There will be no actors or voice overs. After 30 seconds, the director will cut to Al Michaels and John Madden in the booth for the game. No controversy, no tacky cross promotion, nothing to offend anyone in America (except maybe the lactose intolerant). I believe a sarcastic response is the best response in times such as these.
Or perhaps Eva Longoria will drop her towel tonight?
Our digital video recorder was installed this morning. Now, if M. decides to start screaming during a game, I don’t have to miss a second of action. If only I had it last Friday night. Not only could I have reviewed the Pacers-Pistons fight at my leisure, but I also would not have missed the first two minutes of the KU game. We went out for dinner then to the grocery store with what appeared to be plenty of time to make it home. We pulled into a checkout lane at almost exactly 7:30 with only one person in front of us, and nearly all of his items had been scanned. 12 minutes later, he was still handing coupons to the poor kid working the register. This guy was clearly either making Thanksgiving dinner for a huge family or for some other large group. He literally had 30 packages of frozen broccoli. He had managed to load his cart up with nearly every item in the store that was on some kind of special, some of which were not marked. The guy had ten bottles of an Oil of Olay product (Not sure how that fits into Thanksgiving, but what do I know?). Only eight went through at the sale price, which he didn’t discover until some other items had been scanned. So he makes the kid go back through the receipt, confirm two weren’t charged at the right price, then rescan them. After that, he handed the kid a coupon for each bottle. Some of these didn’t scan. Once our fearless hero behind the register got those cleared up, the guy hands him another pile of coupons for some stuffing he had purchased. 16 boxes of stuffing. 16 coupons. Again, a couple of them didn’t go through right, but the kid points out there’s a limit of 5 or something. “Fine, cancel them all out and use these,” the man said as he handed over a different batch of coupons. Once he finally got his ass out of our way, the kid told us he had used $150 worth of coupons.
Now I’m all for saving money. But if you’re going to use $150 worth of coupons, a couple suggestions. First, warn the people behind you that it’s going to be awhile. The store was busy, but we could have gone through even the longest line and been done in the time it took for him to check out. It’s common courtesy to give us an opportunity to find a shorter wait. Since he made no such effort, S. and I stood and glared at him (which he ignored) and my father-in-law, who just happened to be there too, said rather loudly, “What the fuck is he doing?” Second, don’t keep pulling coupons out of your ass every few minutes. Put all of them into one batch and hand them over together. You can monitor them just as easily and you save a ton of time. Four different times our register boy thought he was ready to total out the purchase and the guy would reach into a pocket and pull out another batch. So we went from having plenty of time to get home and get the groceries put away before tip-off to flying into the driveway at 8:05 and S. saying, “Just go watch the game, I’ll put everything away.”