When I am King: Buy the By

When I am King...

“Best by” dates will become more realistic.

Recently, I listened again to Jerry Seinfeld’s bit about the expiration date on milk cartons. Unlike milk, that routine doesn’t get old and curdled.

I was reminded of the time that I first noticed the “Best by” date on food products. I was about eight years old, and I noticed a stamp on the Grape Nuts box that said “Best” and then a date that was some seven months in the future.

I thought that seemed kind of strange: what would make a cereal better if used on that date? But being the curious, and apparently stupid, child I was, I had to find out. So I stashed the Grape Nuts way in the back of the pantry, so that nobody would find them between now and that magical date in the future when the cereal would suddenly become more tasty.

I guess I learned the meaning of the word “by” in those seven months, because the next time I took the cereal out, I realized that it meant that it would taste better before that date, signified by the word “by” in the phrase “Best by.” Like the child in Joyce’s Araby, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, except for me the driver was illiteracy. And my stomach burned with anguish and anger.

I finished the Grape Nuts immediately, anxious to avoid letting even more time pass and making the cereal taste worse, although it’s not obvious how that could happen with a food apparently made from wood chips and gravel.

There’s a basic problem here that’s not solved by that helpful “Best by” date: the products do not, in fact, stay in some holding pattern of goodness until that date and then suddenly fall off the Cliff of Yuck. Instead, they start at some mediocre level and get progressively worse as time, staleness, and insects eat into them. That date is nothing more than a point in time when the company lawyers have decided that the potential of food-decay-related illness lawsuits outweigh the corporate benefits of customers overbuying the product and storing it on their pantry shelves. Cereal is not fine wine: you should eat the stuff as soon as you buy it if you want it to be as fresh as possible. Anytime after that, it’s just worse.

Besides, the current “Best by” approach confuses kids. Or at least it confused me. And I’m pretty sure kids these days are dumber, at least based on their spelling over IM and SMS. (That’s my token “grumpy old man” comment – I need to do that to maintain the kind of dignity that Kingship requires).

When I am King, the “Best by” paradigm will shift and we will adopt a simpler approach: all foods will be stamped with the phrase, “Worse after” plus the date that the product is actually made. We don’t want to know when the lawyers would like us to stop eating it; we want to know how long ago the stuff came off of the assembly line. Then we can decide where the hunger-versus-staleness balance lies.

Oh, and by the way: Grape Nuts after seven months? Tasted about the same. That’s the advantage to food products made from inedible substances. But that’s the subject of another blog.

Ode to a Donut

The problems not solved by a donut are few,

And even those problems are solved by two.

When I am King: No Child Left Behind Left Behind

When I am King...

There will be testing testing.

The U.S. government decided recently that the “No Child Left Behind” policy of the former administration wasn’t working. Perhaps it should have been called “Many Children Left Behind” or “No Child Left Behind, but Many Run Over by the Bus,” because it clearly wasn’t making the grade.

Maybe it was the fact that it was a system designed by America’s favorite C-student president (“I pledgify my allegiance…”). Or perhaps the kids in the failing schools are just plain dumb, and no amount of attention focused on those schools can compensate for their willful thickheadedness. Or maybe it’s just time to try something new because that’s what governments do.

But I think the problem is rooted in testing.

In order to judge whether schools are failing, the children in those schools take standardized tests. Schools with enough children who pass the tests are considered okay, and the teachers can get back to work beating some sense into the children. Schools without enough passing children (a.k.a., “dummies”) are considered failing, and the spotlight of shame is focused on the school to inspire fear and educational prowess.

This system of ritual embarrassment is apparently not succeeding. Of course, anyone that was ever ridiculed in school for doing something unusual could have told you as much; taunting only benefits the ringleader and the laughing onlookers, not the victim.

But how can you successfully test all children on what they’ve learned in a systematic and consistent way across the whole country? What tests will you use? Who will create them? Will they need #2 pencils? Will they test the children’s ability to fill in the circles completely? Will they allow for bathroom breaks? Will there be more “C” answers than “A” because it always seems like cheating to have the first multiple-choice answer be the right one?

When I am King, there will be a focus on testing. In particular, we need to make sure that we have qualified testers to create and administer the tests. We need an entire system designed to test the people that write the tests, to make sure that their testing skills are tested. Testers that succeed can go on to give other tests to testers. Those that fail will be mercilessly teased, and can then apply for a job at the local Department of Motor Vehicles.

This system of writing tester tests, testing testers, and grading tests taken by testing testers test-takers, will result in a progressively more refined testing environment with the best testers we can produce. But in the meantime, teachers can get back to actually teaching and children can focus on learning. Or taunting the weak ones and taking their lunch money, which is what school is really all about.

Little Joke for Thursday

I wonder:

Are those people that aren't on some kind of reality TV show called the unwatched masses?

Video: Chet Does Nerdcore

I wrote this geeky music video piece for a recent tech conference about the product I work on. It's about people and product-related things you've probably never heard of, but I'm hoping it's funny anyway.

When I am King: Fashion Tips

When I am King...

Button-up shirts will be tucked into pants that fasten at the waist.

Somehow, while I wasn’t paying any attention, it has become a fashion trend to untuck those button-down dress shirts that men wear. I think it’s supposed to give the wearer a look that says, “I care enough about what I look like to spend money on a nice shirt, but not enough to bother tucking it in.” It also has that casual, slept-in-my-clothes look, combined with a feeling of having forgotten to tuck back in the last time you went to the bathroom. All that’s missing is some toilet paper stuck to the shirttails.

I’m having a hard time dealing with this development. For one thing, I can’t get at my pockets anymore because they’re covered by these shirt tails hanging around like last month’s cold. But even worse, there’s this loose feeling of my clothes not being completely on that I just can’t adjust to. The shirt is wafting around, open to the elements, and I’m not liking it.

Then I realized; the men’s shirt has become a blouse. Maybe if we wore bras, things would feel more secure and cozy in there.

Meanwhile, the pants have become looser and ride lower than the waist, showing a part of the body that is only attractive on about 2 people in the world.

The strangest thing about it is the disparate origin of these fashions. Untucked shirts come from the world of Large. Instead of tucking in shirts, men trying to hide their gut would untuck and let the shirt fall straight, like covering a nuclear arsenal with a camo tarp. Instead of seeing who could stand to miss a lunch based on the size of their middle, you’d just have to look for the untucked shirts. This worked like a charm until this new fashion trend where everyone seems to be untucked. Maybe it’s a conspiracy by the Large-ish Association of People (LAP); by forcing the trend on the rest of us, they can now hide in public.

The low-riding pants fashion, conversely, comes from the usual place: the world of Thin. This fashion mistake is brought to us by supermodels who haven’t fully digested a single meal in years. The pants look great on them because they add a third dimension to an otherwise 2D body. But you put them on a real person and everyone looks like a plumber in mid-repair.

Shirts that hang out, pants that don’t come up to the waist: It’s like a married couple going through a midlife crisis. They’re having a trial separation and playing with their lifestyles. Maybe the shirts are going to start seeing other articles of clothing, maybe even other shirts. And the pants are just sinking lower into depression. I just want to shake some sense into them, “You’re shirts and pants! Get ahold of yourselves! And each other!”

When I am King, shirts will tuck in again. And they’ll do so into pants that cover all of those parts of the body that should never have been seen in public in the first place.

When I am King: Hello, My Name Is...

When I am King...

Everyone will wear nametags. Always.

You meet someone at a party. You introduce yourselves, you shake hands, you exchange meaningless conversation about the weather and the essential pointlessness of human existence, and then you return to the buffet table to add more guacamole directly onto your waistline.

A week later, you see them again. You say hello and realize that you haven’t a clue what their name is. It’s not the right situation to ask them, so you get by without it, just avoiding any sentence that requires using their name. If you’re with someone that you should introduce to them, you rudely forget so that you can avoid admitting that you don’t know their name. If they’d forgotten your name too, it would have been fine. But they said your name right off the bat, so you couldn’t launch into the proactive, “I’m Bob – we met at that party?” and hope that they’d pay you back in kind.

You see them again the next week, and then frequently after that. And you never remember their name. Years go by and you now know them pretty well, seeing them at local barn burnings and gun rallies, yet you still never recall their name. You just get by with such timeless phrases as, “Hey, you!” and “Hey!” and the classic “Yo!”

Meanwhile, there are other people that, no matter how many times they’ve met you, consistently forget not only what your name is, but that they’ve ever seen you before. There are probably people that you know at work like this. They sit near you, they work on a related team, and you pass them several times a day around the department. Yet eventually they will end up talking to you and will say that you haven’t met and they’ll kindly re-introduce themselves. It’s not so bad having your name forgotten, but to have completely passed through their consciousness without registering a blip is a bit of a letdown. Especially since you slept with them. Twice.

When I am King, we will all wear permanent nametags. In fact, given the current trend for tattoos (a trend that follows a 40 year cycle, which is the amount of time it takes for a tattoo to turn the color of bile and sag that pretty butterfly design into a cobweb of horror), these nametags will be tattooed onto our foreheads. This will prevent the awkwardness of not knowing someone’s name because you can always look straight into their eyes, or slightly above them, and read it. It will also prevent the embarrassment of you being forgotten by people. Not that they won’t still forget you as soon as they blink, but at least if they can read your name they may skip that awkward re-introduction that otherwise inevitably ensues.

That’s my plan. My name’s Chet, by the way. And you were…?

Little Jokes for Thursday

I wonder:

If “fat intake” is what you eat, does that make puking a fat outtake?

Why do pregnant women drink “virgin” mixed drinks? Isn’t it too late for that?

Is incorrect use of lower case a capital offense?

Things I Believe

The apple may not fall far from the tree, but neither does the bird poop.

Cruel and unusual punishment sounds bad. But cruel and usual punishment sounds worse.

Sunset: A Haiku. Or Two.

I was pleased to see Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's former CEO, tweet a Haiku as his resignation letter:

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

It's brief, it's to the point, and it's probably all that the Oracle lawyers would let him say on the subject.

Given his exit package, I figure that resignation is worth about a million bucks per syllable.That's probably more money than all poetry has earned total since Early Man rhymed "Oog" with "foog" in a sonnet to his love, before clubbing her on the head and dragging her back to his man-cave.

But somehow, this CEO-poet's final words didn't quite do it for me. I feel the need to amend his Haiku with some of my own:

Customers all gone,
Sun blames the economy.
Oh excuses, excuses.

Economy downturn
Causes Sun to get acquired?
That's not the whole tale.

High tech implosion;
Old business plan gone awry.
Time to get acquired.

Sun needs umbrellas:
Employees must weather the
New Oracle reign.

Sun disappears in
Clouds of ruin and despair.
Rain, Oracle, Reign.