Thank you sir, may I have another?

I just read a news story about an Arkansas woman who gave birth to her 18th child. TLC airs a program about this family called "17 Kids and Counting", which they'll now have to rename.

Apparently, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar really like the letter J (I bet it's Jim Bob's idea), because all their children's names begin with it:

• Jordyn-Grace
  
• Jennifer
  
• Johannah
  
• Jackson
  
• Justin
  
• James
  
• Jason
  
• Jedidiah
  
• Jeremiah
  
• Joy-Anna
  
• Josiah
  
• Joseph
  
• Jinger
  
• Jessa
  
• Jill
  
• John-David
  
• Jana
  
• Joshua
  

I wonder if there's an endorsement deal with Jack Daniels (or another aptly-named sponsor) in the works. It would be ironic if it were Jack Daniels, because the oldest child, Joshua, is 20 and therefore may not yet be of drinking age!

It's bad, but it could be verse

I'm eating tacos in a mental fog
While contemplating writing in my blog;
something short, direct, compact, and terse,
and then I thought, I'll write it out in verse!
But what to say? What subject shall I choose?
Which format, style, or structure will I use?
Pantameter I chose to utilize
(which English geeks would surely recognize);
Ten syllables in rhyming pairs of lines
Would do the trick! (He does this while he dines?)
The story still eluded me; my plan
To fill the vacant start-to-ending span?
Deciding first upon the ending text
And working on the part before that next!
A proper narrative it's not, I know,
But lunchtime's over and I have to go.
And if you've made it to this point, you see
There's no point to this piece of poetry!

On the hoof

Q: What's Mooyah?

A1: A web portal specializing in cattle farming.
A2: The new no-nonsense burger joint in town.
A3: The battle cry of the Bovine Liberation Front.

While you ponder, some cow humor:

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Interrupting cow!
Interrupti (MOO!)

Anyway, Mooyah is the newest burger joint in town (well, my town anyway, I don't know about your town), and it's pretty good!

First, a little history: About a year ago, someone decided to build a restaurant on one of the major intersections near my place of employ, and they decided that what the local economy needed was ... a wine bar, and from the looks of it, it was a hoity-toity snotty nose-in-the-air one at that. At the time I thought, good luck to you, you're gonna need it. I did eat there once, and as I recall, I had a plate of steamed mussels with a side of pretentiousness.

Apparently I wasn't the only one who wasn't gracing their doors, because they closed some months later, leaving a building on some prime real estate. It sat vacant for a couple of months, and then I saw signs of remodeling and the hope of another lunch option. Finally last week, the signage went up declaring to the world that this building would henceforth be a Chipotle!

And I thought to myself, well, crap.

My experience with Chipotle is that the food is OK, but the atmosphere is more of the hoity-toity snotty nose-in-the-air ambience that I can do without, especially when there's a better alternative: Freebirds! Better burritos, no pretention, and more body art than you can shake a Montblanc at!

So yesterday as I'm driving by YuppieBurritoLand, I see some other signage toward the back of the building, and I'm straining my eyes to read "Mooyah" and "burgers", and I'm thinking, I gotta check that out tomorrow. Today I had my first Mooyah.

The menu is interesting in that there's not much on it to get in the way of burger excellence. Burgers, fries, shakes, drinks. (Luckily, the soda fountain has Coke Zero, which I can handle if there's no diet Dr Pepper around.) No salad, no chicken. Cheese and bacon are extra, but the sauteéd mushrooms and grilled onions (as well as the normal fixings) are free.

I'll be back, and that's no bull.

Stupid Friday jokes

A brazen band of theives stole the toilet from the local police office's restroom. They are trying to solve this case, but as of yet they have nothing to go on.

A male porn actor starts a fight with another one during filming and the second sues, and the matter ends up in court. The judge decides to take the "jury of one's peers" literally and orders that the jury consist of other male porn actors. The court manages to seat such a panel, and the case begins. After two days of testimony and a surprising seven days of deliberation, the judge was upset to learn that no decision could be made for they were a hung jury.

A local hair salon reported that a masked man entered and demanded the money from the register and all the day's hair trimmings. The police were called and gave chase but were thwarted when the robber thew the trimmings from his vehicle, blinding the officers. The police have not yet relocated the suspect, but they are combing the area.

Counting on it

Among my hobbies, I include mathematics. I know, you're thinking, "what a dork".

Many people can do math, but fewer understand it, and even fewer enjoy doing it. I'm one of the ones that do. No, I don't sit around and contemplate the meaning of "four", but if I see an article about a new largest prime number or minimal surface, I'm gonna read it. I consider textbooks on differential equations to be "light reading". I stare at fractals. I own a slide rule, and I can use it. I can entertain myself by deriving an algebraic formula for the Fibonacci sequence.

Fibonacci seqeunce? I'm glad you asked! Suppose you have some rabbits that grow from babies to breeding adults in one day, always give birth to one male and one female each day, and never die.

• On Day 1, you start with one pair of baby rabbits (male and female).
  
• On Day 2, you have one pair of adult rabbits.
  
• On Day 3, you have 2 pairs: the adult pair and a baby pair.
  
• On Day 4, you have 3 pairs: the original adult pair, the new adult pair, and another baby pair.
  
• On Day 5, there are 5 pairs: three adult pairs and two new baby pairs.

And so on, and so on.

This is the Fibonacci sequence: the first term is 1, the second term is 1, and every term after that is the sum of the previous two terms. So, F(1)=1, F(2)=1, F(3)=1+1=2, F(4)=1+2=3, F(5)=2+3=5, and so on, and so on.

Now you're thinking, "he's a dork with a rabbit fetish".

Anyway, the point, such as it is, is that as we as a society rely more and more on calculators and spreadsheets to do our math for us, the less we care about the theory behind it and the less able we are to teach it to the next generation, which is a vicious locus of points in a plane that are equidistant from a given point, er, circle. The other day I saw a news article (well, a Yahoo news article) that said that some math teachers are as little as just one chapter ahead of their students, and I'm not terribly surprised.

I stop at Sonic for two sausage breakfast burritos nearly every morning. It costs $3.88. One day all I had was a ten-dollar bill and some change, and not wanting to use a credit card for such a small purchase, I thought, I'll give the person $10.13 and I'll get back six dollars and a quarter, no problem. The carhop could not process this bit of mathematic manipulation, and instead proceeded to give me back the 13 cents and then give me 6.12 change from the ten.

After this, I looked more closely at the receipt, and printed right on there is "CTND .12". That's "change to next dollar, 12 cents". Really. Apparently, some people need a slip of paper to tell them that 3.88 from 4 is 12 cents. Now, I always pay for my breakfast with a credit card, and I don't feel awkward about it.

In case you're wondering, F(n) = (((1+√5)/2)ⁿ-((1-√5)/2))ⁿ)/(2√5).

Hassenpfeffer, anyone?