Se7en blogging legalities
This post is brought to you by the number seven. Here are the "Original Seven" Mercury astronauts. From left: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Photo credit: NASA. Click for larger image.
Disclaimer: This post is made to satisfy statutory requirements under the Blogger Legal Obligations With Meritorious Excellence, Sub Chapter 1, Section 7734, Article 42.666.
On Feb. 21, 2010, I received two awards from the most excellent Teri’s Blip in the Universe blog.
As a recipient of the Kreativ Blogger Award I’m bound by the following rules:
1. Thank the person who awarded me the award, and link that person’s blog on my blog.
2. Identify seven things about myself.
3. Award seven bloggers with the “Kreativ Blogger Award,” post links to their blogs, and leave a comment on each of their blogs, to let them know of the honor.
As a recipient of the Sunshine Award I am required to “pass it on to a bunch of other bloggers.” For the sake of simplicity I’m going to assume this means seven, too.
On a side note, I also explored the concept of exponentially passing along awards to seven people, who then do the same thing to seven more blogs each, and so on and so on. Based on my calculations I discovered that the awards are actually a plot to increase the mass of planet Earth to the point that it collapses in on itself and creates a new black hole in our solar system. I estimate this event will happen in about 60 days. Now that will be fun to watch!
Yeah, I know I’m late on this but as you can see I had so many excellent blog ideas that had to be fleshed out first. Ha! Good one. I crack myself up.
Seriously, though, I am quite honored to receive these awards from such a great person and I will gladly pass on these awards.
Responsibility #1 was done immediately on my awards page, the layout of which was ruined by receiving an actual award. The page had been carefully laid out with feng shui in mind with absolutely no thought given to receiving an award which was previously considered impossible. 🙂 Sadly the receiving of an award shattered the carefully sought after balance of the page.
Responsibility #2 is clearly a recipe for disaster, but I seemingly have no choice. Seven things about myself? Hmm. I was going to say stuff like “I’ve never been in outer space” and “I’ve never earned a gold medal in the Olympics” and “I’ve never won a Nobel peace prize,” but somehow that felt like cheating and going against the spirit of the awards. Believe me when I say I’m just as uncomfortable with this rule as you are! So here goes:
- My first kiss happened at church camp with a person who went by the name of Tex. Yep, pardner. You heard that right. We literally never saw Tex without a cowboy hat made of straw, which I imagine is where the nickname came from. Young people are clever that way. Tex and I were like peas and carrots and one day Tex just grabbed me, pulled me into the bushes and planted one right on the kisser. It’s hard to imagine a better first kiss. And, oh yeah, almost forgot – Tex was a girl. 🙂
- I’m a certified open-water scuba driver. Did you know scuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus? Anyway, my dad was a very active scuba diver and I had my own 10-minute air tank from the time I was a wee child. I would scuba in nearby lakes and rivers when I was a kid. I’ve also dived in oceans off two different countries.
- Once I passed out on the dance floor of Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada, Mexico, after drinking too many off their powerful margaritas. It is still unknown if I survived that night or not.
- In seventh grade I opted for “Home Economics” rather than “shop.” I was making and eating chocolate chip cookies in a class where I was the only male while all of the rest of the seventh grade males made electric lamps out of wood blocks. Being the only boy in a class full of girls is the only way to go. I guess I did have some smarts when I was a lad.
- I played trombone in elementary school and went on to concert band, stage band and marching band in high school. A month before a statewide solo competition I broke my hand and quickly had to learn the baritone (which is a valve instrument much like a small tuba). I went on to the statewide competition on my new instrument and received the highest possible score (superior) for the performance of my solo with piano accompaniment.
- In high school I aced the final exam in “elementary radioactivity.” The teacher said I was the first student in the history of the school to ace the exam and then accused me of cheating.
- The books I’ve reread the most are, by far, “The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy and “Dune” by Frank Herbert.
To break up the enormity of this task, the outgoing awards will be issued in the weeks ahead in separate posts as time permits. Be on your best behavior or I may pick you. Mwuhahaha!
Keyboard potpourri
Regularly scheduled blog post interrupted due to keyboard groping
This was not supposed to be my next post. Oh bother.
I just spent some serious time working on my “pay it forward” post regarding some awards I’ve received where the rules state I have to pass on awards to se7en other bloggers and reveal se7en things about myself.
Spoiler alert: Victoria’s Secret. That’s all I’m sayin’.
It turned out to be a lot more work than I was expecting to do that sort of post. I had to think and stuff and everything! So, rather than try to push the post out before its time, I’m switching to keyboard-monkey-mode so I can get something out tonight while I’m still awake.
Here are some random things from my brain. Whatever.
Bear Jamboree
My wife and I ran into another bear today. That’s two bear encounters in three days. Pretty good, huh? I was able to grab this photo.
Television Graveyard?
We parted ways with our Panasonic television today. To recap: We paid $2,400 for the thing over three years ago. It worked about 14 months before it died. When waited over a year and finally took it into the shop earlier this week while on our vacation. The repair estimate came back at $550 which is more than it would cost to buy a new one, so I guess the darn thing is a disposable item. It is pretty sad when repair costs exceed the replacement cost for a completely new item. The repair shop said they’d “recycle” the TV for us so we didn’t even bother to pick it up. I’m sure that means they’ll fix it cheaply and sell it for a profit. I couldn’t help but notice they had used sets for sale in their lobby.
Chef, control thy ingredients!
Lastly, we had lunch today and we’ve finally learned an important lesson about being vegetarians. When placing an order in a restaurant, it is not good enough to simply say “no bacon” or “no ham.” I say this because my wife’s omelette the other day contained some small bits of bacon which is kinda sorta a no-no for vegetarians. Then today her salad had pieces of chicken in it.
My wife picked out several pieces of chicken and showed them to our waitress and boy, did she really care about that. She even said, “Will you be wanting any dessert?” My wife says that place is on her list now. 🙂
You’d think that restaurants would control their ingredients better. No mandarin oranges in the clam chowder, no anchovies in the ice cream, etc. Alas, that seems to be too hard.
So from now on in addition to saying “no bacon” we’re going to add: “We are vegetarians. It must be a vegetarian preparation.” No more confusion and no more accepting anything less than what we order. Dammit.
Fancy Bakery / Four on the Floor
On our recent trip to the big city we visited a special kind of bakery. It is called a patisserie which, of course, is Francais for “fancy bakery.” And at that bakery they served something called petit fours which, of course, is Francais for “cake at $1 a bite.”
Klingon Spring Rolls
Also in the big city we visited a P.F. Changs. For those unfamiliar it’s a “China bistro.” Part of the shtick is that they mix your sauce table-side. Ooooh. I ordered the spring rolls that had the little vegetarian symbol on the menu. My wife, who knows these kinds of things, noticed the outside of the spring rolls were barely warm and the insides were completely without heat. I had to flag down our waitress and ask if the spring rolls were Klingon? She didn’t grok so I elaborated, “You know. A dish best served cold?” Unlike the other restaurant, however, they cared about what we said and brought us hot ones and when we received the bill, they’d taken them off which they certainly didn’t have to do.
Se7en blog awards
I’m sure a question like this will sound extremely familiar to a lot of people who have been around the block a time or two.
If you were offered $1 million dollars or a penny doubled every day for a month (30 days), which would you choose?
The $1 million might sound like the best deal, but it’s not.
On day 1 you’d have a penny. On day 2 you’d have two pennies. Day 3 would be a whopping four cents. And it turns out that by day ten you’d have $5.12.
After that, however, things quickly begin to change.
Day 15 would be $163.84.
Day 20 would be $5,242.88.
On Day 28 something extremely interesting happens. You’d have $1,342,177.28, which is $340 thousand more than $1 million dollars.
On Day 30 you’d finally be done and you’d have over $5 million dollars. $5,368,709.12 to be exact. If you chose the sneaky penny doubling deal you’d end up approx. 5 times as happy. 🙂
Now all you have to do is sit around and wait for someone to offer you that deal.
I think a lot of us have probably heard some variation of this sort of thing before. The point is not subtle: Things that grow exponentially can get big very quickly.
I recently won a blog award and that got me thinking about this sort of thing. You see, the blog award has a rule that as a recipient of the award, you are asked to pass the award along to seven more bloggers.
See where I’m going yet? This is the exact same math problem, only instead of doubling per day it grows by seven times per interval.
Some assumptions we’ll make: The award will be passed on weekly to seven people. The following week each recipient will then pass the award on to seven more people. And so on and so on and so on. To keep things simple we’ll also make a rule that no one can receive the award more than once.
Week One starts with you and your award. Let’s assume you’re the first. Perhaps you invented the award and this silly little “chain letter” ruling in the first place! 🙂
Week Two you give the award to seven awesome peeps you know.
Week Three those seven people pass along the award to seven more people. That is 7 x 7 which means 49 people now have the award.
On Week Four those 49 people each give out 7 more awards. That is 49 x 7 or 343 people.
By Week Nine it would be about 9 million blogs.
Week 11 would be about 282 million blogs. It is interesting to note that as of Feb. 2010 WordPress estimated there were about 22 million blogs using WordPress software. That includes those hosted on WordPress.com and stand-alone software installations on other web servers.
Week 12 would be about 2 billion blogs. Week 13 approaches 14 billion blogs, which almost twice the people on planet earth. Week 14 is about 97 billion blogs. By Week 16 there would be about 5 trillion blogs to receive the award.
Going any further is just too darn silly, but I can tell you that by Week 30 the exact number of blog award winners under this scenario would be:
22,539,340,290,692,300,000,000,000
That’s a number so big I don’t even know how to describe it. My best guess would be 22,539 trillion trillion. Another way might be to say 22.5 septillion blogs. (A septillion is a 1 followed by 24 zeros.) For comparison it is estimated that the Death Star would have cost about $15.6 septillion. That’s about 1.4 trillion times the U.S. national debt. Meh.
I can say this much, though, with 100 percent certainty. Some people have clearly not been fulfilling their obligations to forward these “pass it on” type awards like they are supposed to! 🙂
Shouts from the Abyss 
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