Mild Amusement

For some reason, I find the "pick your top three" discussions pretty interesting. Heck, I wrote a whole blog post about having a new top contender in the dessert category . For me, the fun part about it isn't so much in hearing the actual decisions, it's in hearing the reasons why something is either in or out of that top three. Do you pick the item that you could eat every single day without ever getting bored of it or do you pick the one that's a delicacy that you almost never consume? Being forced to pick just three of something usually forces some interesting decisions about what you like (and don't like). Incidentally, that's also why I dislike sub-categorizing the choices. Your top three American desserts is no fun, I want you to actively consider about whether you like apple pie or kanafeh better. It's even more interesting if the items are nothing at all like each other. Is cold, creamy ice cream a better choice than a warm, gooey brownie? W...

Have you ever looked everywhere for your cell phone only to find that it was in your hand the whole time? Or hunted high and low for your keys without any success because they were snugly in your pocket? I have a feeling that this is a near universal phenomenon, only because people can be thrown off pretty easily. From what I understand, your brain optimizes so that it doesn't have to recall or process every last piece of information, and it's possible for things to fall into the blind spots as a result. If you've ever seen someone in front of a new laptop or computer, you've probably seen some variation of this. It's probably the same basic stuff, but it looks and feels different. That's just enough to throw off the mental optimization, and things grind to a halt. Well, I'm no different than everyone else. I generally know where we keep the cereal, for example, so I look for the box of cereal in the usual spot. If I don't see it there, consternation...

I have enough of a quirky sense of humor that I appreciate shenanigans and a little light mischief. I don't want anyone to get hurt or for things to break, but if there's a laugh to be had after an impish grin, I'm usually in. Heck, one of the reasons I like being around little kids is that they tend to do this sort of thing naturally. One might, hypothetically speaking, jump on sofa cushions that he's not supposed to . It's all pretty amusing to me. I've known this about myself for a while, but the Mild Wife has had enough time to experience it to intuitively understand when my sense of mischief is about to kick in. What's more, since she experiences this as a spectator, she can notice little tells that I've never really noticed myself. Specifically, there is a little giggle/laugh thing I do that tips her off that some shenanigans are about to go down. It surprised me when she mentioned it, but it also made me crack up that I giggle to myself about th...

One of the recent posts about movies (and the Mild Wife's reactions to watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time ) reminded me that I have a very particular quirk when it comes to watching movies. Basically, I always try to guess the plot. I'm not entirely sure why I think this is fun, but at the end of the day, I do. I think it may have something to do with my propensity for engineering brain , because plots seem like things that have to fit together in a particular way. So if I can understand what the author/screenwriter is trying to accomplish, I can try to piece together the way the movie might unfold. If you want a happy ending, make sure the knight rescues the princess. If you want a horror film, the princess was actually a demon in disguise and kills the knight at the end. The other thing that probably leads to this guessing game is the fact that I try my hand at writing every so often . I imagine it's sort of like a chef who goes out to eat...

Let's pretend that you're at work and you're on a teleconference call with a bunch of people. Since you're on a conference call, that means that there are folks in different physical locations. It doesn't really matter whether you're in two different rooms in the same building or in two different countries, the important part is that you're not actually in the same room. The other salient point in that first sentence is that it's a "tele"-conference call, meaning that you're mainly relying on the audio, and there may or may not be video. For the sake of argument, let's say it's one of the older pieces of technology that doesn't include video conferencing. So, you now have a situation where you've got at least two physically-separated locations, and you have people on either side who can't actually see each other. This is not an uncommon situation, and there are decent odds that you've been in a situation like thi...

As I've pointed out before, the Mild Wife is amused by the fact that I am nerdier than she is. Her short-hand for it is, simply, that I " like Star Trek ." Of course, she still encourages this particular habit of mine, although sometimes she does so unintentionally . For one, it doesn't really do any harm, and for another, she's just encouraging me to partake in my hobbies. Now, that isn't to say that she doesn't appreciate this particular fandom at all. For all that she teases me, there are still things that she wants to partake in. One good example of this is the movie, " The Matrix ." She knows full well that it's one of those movies that has a bit of a following, so she has some interest in watching that movie (it certainly doesn't hurt that I've talked it up a bit). So, we've resolved to watch this movie so that she can partake in that particular bit of nerdom (for the record, the Internet says that's a word ). The ot...

A little while back, we were hanging out with some family friends. As it so happens, we've gotten to the point in life where a lot of our friends have kids, so this particular outing involved some little human beings (side note: this is quite possibly my favorite description of children). In this case, the little human beings involved weren't that little, as they'd already started elementary school. Still, the fact that they were little will become relevant, and hilarious, in a moment. Over the course of the afternoon, we eventually started watching some television. I don't think everyone was watching, but the television set was on, so a few folks were paying attention. I want to say it was set to sports of some sort, but I don't honestly remember. Basically, people were generally involved in conversation with each other, but those that weren't actively speaking had something else to distract them. One such distracted person was one of the smaller humans, an...