A Mother's Value

There's a flower shop I pass on the daily (seriously, who says "on the daily?") that advertises roses for $12.95 per dozen. This is there everyday on one of those sand-filled sandwich boards, except for the days preceding Mother's Day, when roses were running at $14.95 a dozen. My 3 semesters beforing aborting a Math major, and one semi-entry-level Philosophy class thus lead me to the logical conclusion that mothers are worth, in the grand sense, $2.00 per dozen roses. Which is to say 200/12, reducing to 50/3, or 16 and 2/3 cents per rose. The standard cost of a rose is, okay, I'm not going to do the precise math of 1295/12, and instead round up to 108 since my goodness it's just shy anyway.

(50/3)/108 is then equivalent to x/100, so that (5000/3)/108, or 5000/324, or 2500/162, or 1250/81, or 15 and 35/81 so ~ 15.4%. So then, mother's are worth 15.4% of a rose, and it thus takes more than 6 mothers to equal one rose. This assuming all mothers are equal.

But what this really means, is that math is important. Is it more important than mothers? That is so qualitative rather than quantitative, but one thing we can say is that Math helps us understand the value of mothers. They're not quite the commodity that fossil fuels and precious metals are, but they are unique.

So where was this post on mother's day no one is asking. And to this non-question I say: exactly.

In the meantime, have a little fun with Gizoogle (I dug it on the dinky running website I go to too frequently).

Also, I've yet to be blacklisted anywhere, but thanks to someone signing my old email address up at Afroromance.com (albeit with another human's name) I can say I've been biraciallisted. I wonder if it was the same person that tried to register a tumblr account to me. Ah privacy.

The Month of May

Not the month of things you will or won't do, but the month of things you might, or you may, however it is you prefer to say. May is a little more polite. Might is connoted with strength, so maybe more conviction.

You have to think maybe May is May because it may choose to be spring or it may choose to be summer. It may choose to set you up for a great three months of summer, or may choose to crap all over you. Hey, maybe you're into that.

So what am I even talking about? Generally a good question.

Well, one thing I'm talking about since they may be making a comeback, is jump boots. I can't remember the first time I caught wind of these (many years), but I thought they made less sense than rollerblades (which totally make sense in certain situations). The thing is, even when I recall these originally launching, I don't remember anyone actually owning a pair, but that could have been skewed by the fact that the demographic I associated with was one devoid of Venice Beach attendees. According to the link I embedded up there, that is the demographic, and a way better source than the "official" site.

But I suppose everything old is new again. Maybe their advertising has hit the late night TV circuit — I'm really out of the traditional broadcast/late night cable loop. Whatever the cause, just about two weeks ago now I witnessed a man running in them on Chicago's Montrose beach. He was also wearing a black Cowboy hat, black tee, black spandex (the dude was a time bomb). I figured I could chalk up his jump boot use to this attire more than anything else until I witnessed, just a week later, a woman running in them across North Ave, right by the old Second City. While I was experiencing middling dehydration effects from foolishly exerting myself in the heat, she looked the peak of discombobulated leisure moving with the pace of amble if not the relaxed grace through the crosswalk.

Might be time to go ahead and dust off the jumpsoles, brother.

A Mammary of Light

Alas and alack at long last I've finished The Wheel of Time, a time I thought might never come. In fact that time came some weeks ago now and like a lot of long-anticipated things it was a touch anticlimactic. But I mean, hell, even the author didn't live to see the end so I guess there's something to be said for seeing it through. As much as books and movies and TV shows have no ending that might quite satisfy us, they still have definable endings and accessible timelines. It's something that Youtube and Facebook and all are trying to give us for our lives, even if that's not what they're really trying to give us, but the question then is what are they giving us? We've got an easy means by which to create and post video, create and post content and updates on our lives, but to what end? The end? An end? The Wheel of Time turns, assholes come and go, and so on.

And farting dehydrates dehydration, or maybe not, but it is what one Internet searcher wanted to know, and coming in just shy of the top 20 was yours truly, thanks to one of my parody efforts, penned and placed on my largely defunct parody blog. That was quite the near run-on. The internet: weird catalog of once ephemeral moments. Sure, these things are still ephemeral, but they're now accessible, which removes some of the magic. No cameras allowed has a nice ring to it.

Coming back to The Wheel of Time, for as much fun as I've made of it and myself for reading it over the years, it was a good ride. From embarrassing cover art — seriously they try damn hard to make Romance and Fantasy have the most embarrassing covers — to excessive repetition of character thought patterns and descriptions it had a nice familiarity to it. So anyway, RJ and WoT, so long, and thanks for the memories.

French

Sometimes I think of how I studied this language for five years and seem to retain very little of it. And then sometimes I'm looking at the browser entry bar and I see a search string labeled "from age" at the end of a url, but the words are put together so it's "fromage," the French word for cheese.

And hey, sometimes cheese is all I've got. Good thing I love pizza.*




*I'm not crazy (something a crazy person might say).