Maybe they're not using base 10.

After donating blood (apheresis) this past weekend, I asked for some juice. I received a box of Hansen's Juice Slam, "Totally Tropical" flavor. The box claims it contains 100% juice in at least two different places. Here, then, I offer the ingredients list (in italics) and my comments.

100% fruit juice, (filtered water [so much for 100% juice] sufficient to reconstitute apple, pear, white grape or pineapple, lemon, mango, cherry, pineapple [in case you didn't get enough the first time], orange, lime juice concentrates), natural cherry flavor [why not use more cherry juice?] and other natural flavors [it's that "other" that worries me], citric acid, dicalcium phosphate (source of calcium and phosphorous), raspberry essence [I guess "essence" is different than "flavor"], magnesium phosphate [source of magnesium and phosphorous], vitamin c, zinc citrate [source of zinc and... citrus?], vitamin e, copper gluconate [source of... you get the idea], niacinamide [source of niacinnamon?], vitamin A palmitate [vitamin A from palm trees?], calcium pantothenate [parthenon? pantheon?], vitamin D3, pyridoxine hydrochloride [and to think my chemistry teachers told me hydrochloric acid is bad for me], riboflavin [I prefer pork rib flavor over beef rib flavor], thiamin [it's none of your business whose thigh flavor I prefer], biotin [I'm almost afraid to ask what that is], vitamin B12 [the B-52's will be playing at the Isleta Casino on July 4], potassium iodide [source of...].

By my count, there's a lot more on that ingredients list than just juice.

A Special Kind of Supermarket

I see that Gatorade is now marketing itself as just "G". Would you call the store where it can be purchased "The G Spot"?

If it were a pint glass of dark beer, I'd change my attitude.

I told Tweety today that she's a "the glass is half full" type of person.

Me? I'm a "well, at least the glass isn't broken" type.

The Right to Bare Arms

I wore a tank top in public this weekend. It has been years since I've done so, but I think my arms are decent enough to be seen again.

On Saturday afternoon, I walked to Scoopy's for some frozen custard. (Yes, I thought of President Clinton jogging to Burger King.) It took me 21 minutes to get there and 17 minutes back. (Guess which way I'll walk if I do this again?) Add to that 16 minutes to eat my sweet, creamy goodness, and I was in the sun less than an hour. Still, my shoulders were red that evening. I thought of the song "A Horse with No Name", which contains the line, "After two days in the desert sun, my skin began to turn red." Two days? It took me less than an hour.

On Sunday afternoon, I washed my car -- and I want to keep it looking good for my trip to my mom's next weekend, so I won't be parking it under the trees this week. I had already taken off my shirt and gathered my supplies when a neighbor's girlfriend pulled into the parking space next to where I was going to wash my car. I began pondering that my neighbor is going to think I never wear a shirt. After all, I had my shirt off when her girlfriend came to pick her up, I had my shirt off when the neighbor saw me the last time I washed my car, and I had my shirt off one time when she saw me tending to the plants on my veranda. It's not like I want to show off my belly; it's just the timing of everything.

Oh well, at least I don't resemble the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, like the guy who lives below me.

I laughed. I cried. I blew snot out my nose.

Okay, I didn't cry, but I thought this was pretty funny.

This picture and the following text appeared in "The Year in Stupidity" in the February 2009 issue of Reader's Digest. (I only wish I could make up something this good.)

Days after posting a bilingual traffic sign in Swansea, Wales, officials were alerted to a problem. The English half was fine, but the Welsh, which had been e-mailed to the translator and returned minutes later, read, when translated back into English, "I am not in the office. Send any work to be translated."

Say 'ah'.

I had my annual physical yesterday. You should be pleased to know that I will be around to bother you for years to come.

Whatever I've done in the past year seems to have worked. My weight dropped twenty pounds. My total cholesterol dropped sixty points. My blood pressure, which has never been a problem, was nearly the lowest I've ever seen it. (Of course, that may be because I had a book to keep me company in the waiting room, rather than stewing about waiting an hour and a half.)

The only thing the doctor would like to see better is my ratio of HDL and LDL cholesterol. I'm not sure how I could improve it any more, short of buying a bunch of celery and using it to scrub the inside of my arteries clean.

I could make a fortune.

All I need is some land and some up seeds.

You know how people are always telling other people to "grow up"? Well, I figure there must be a huge market out there for up. People would come in droves to buy it, rather than grow it themselves, and I am a horticulturist, after all. I'd be providing both a product and a public service!

If I grow it organically, I could charge more, and people still would buy it up. Then, of course, they would eat it up. (I wouldn't want to grow excess, or else people would get fed up, and they would tell me, "Up yours!")

I could market to cannibals as a food product, like Soylent Green. Perhaps it's just a flavor enhancer. I could call it Up with People.

Now about those seeds...

Do your thighs go thubba-thubba when you walk?

I have noticed something disturbing about Sub and Ob. They are in worse shape than I thought.

The other day, I thought I heard heavy breathing behind me. I turned and saw Ob had entered the room, like the fog, on little cat feet, but he was panting and sweating. (Note: he always sweats, even just sitting down.)

The past couple of mornings, I've heard Sub breathing heavily when he arrives for work. This is a guy who drives to work, parks right next to the building, in the spot closest to the door, and has to walk maybe 100 feet to his desk. (By counting the floor tiles, I see that it's just 42 feet inside the building.)

Add their utter lack of stamina for the lightest form of physical exertion to their obesity, and I'm surprised they haven't keeled over yet.

If I ever get that bad, leave me out in the desert for the coyotes to eat.

Quick! Somebody call Guinness!

And, while you're up, pour me a Guinness.

Tweety and Thing One insist that that young woman on campus today was checking me out. I think she was merely wondering why I had two women in the cab of the pickup truck with me. After all, why would she be interested in a balding, fat-assed man twice her age?

I must admit, though, that her cutoffs fit nicely, she was tall with long legs, and that particular tint of blonde (be it natural or not) suited her well.

The Thingy in my Pants

I have diagnosed myself again. My lack of sleep this week is job-related. It took a while to figure this out because it's completely different than my job-related lack of sleep when my previous job went south. (Well, not completely, since they both result in a lack of sleep, and since my previous job was in The South, it couldn't have gone much farther, but I digress.)

In my previous job, I fell asleep thinking about work, woke up in the middle of the night thinking about work, and woke in the morning thinking about work. Now, I'm having trouble falling asleep, waking up two hours before my alarm clock, and having trouble falling back asleep -- and none of it involves thinking about work.

This morning, I woke up just a half hour before the alarm clock because of a nightmare. I, as my adult self, had been doing something with the children in my elementary school. Then I was in the backyard of the neighbor next door to the house where I grew up. I took refuge in an unfinished building in their backyard, along with a man, a woman, and a young boy. We were trapped by a poisonous snake with a black head and forepart, a narrow yellow/gold band, and a blue-gray rest of the body. It wasn't a cobra, but it spoke to us like the snake in Riki-Tiki-Tavi. At some point, a small dog that was with us went outside to fight the snake and got wrapped in its coils, but the snake let it go. It wanted humans.

The man with me used an easy reach to put the snake in an old soup can, but it escaped. He managed to trap it again, and throw the can and snake behind the building. I grabbed the child and ducked down to get out of the building. (Did I mention that the building I called "unfinished" had walls that were 7/8 complete from the top down but were still open at the bottom?) That's when I heard a distinctive rattle. I swore loudly, heedless of holding a young, impressionable child in my arms, and stood back up. I also woke myself up because no dream involving a second poisonous snake could possibly get better. (Well, unless you're a snake.)

It was just half an hour before my alarm was set to go off, so I figured I could go into work early. I'm not doing much these days, mainly moving papers from one side of my desk to the other. I also had to use a memory stick, to transfer files from one computer to another, but I didn't want to drop it or misplace it with the papers, so I put it in my pocket and reminded myself about the thingy in my pants.

I realized that, if I'm having trouble remembering the thingy in my pants, you'd better check me into an assisted living facility. Except that I wouldn't want to leave my kick-ass condo, so send me a nurse. Any one will do. After all, if I can't remember the thingy in my pants, it's not like I'd be able to use it on a cute nurse, would I?