Category: Random

Wimpy’s burger challenge

We’ve reviewed Wimpy’s burgers before, and in summary, they’re awesome.  Well, now Wimpy’s has a burger challenge for those who dare to attempt it.  It is a burger with approximately 4 pounds of beef and a 10″ bun, with a pound of battered french fries, and a 24 oz. shake.  I saw a picture of it next to a double, and it was HUGE.  When I went, 5 people had attempted it and all had failed.  They have the challenges on Tuesday nights.  I talked with one of the workers about it, and she said it was a good time.

I don’t plan to take this challenge.  I might could’ve eaten it back when I had a metabolism, but not now.  But if any of you would like to take it on, I’ll go along to provide commentary and document it on the blog.

Visiting Wimpy’s website today, I see that someone conquered the burger challenge this week.  I’m impressed.  That’s 5-6 pounds of food plus a shake.  And that’s a lot of beef to eat at one sitting.

teaching students with explosions

I had lunch the other day with the Buffet o’ Blog staff, and we always have some crazy conversations.  (If only more of them made it to the blog… perhaps we need an secretary to keep notes.)  Somehow we got on the topic of those secret messages in spy movies that at the end say:

“This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds.”

What if we applied that concept to learning in school?  Say once a student learning something, the message would explode, whether it was a paper, book, or chalkboard.  That would make learning fun!  Kids would be excited about learning new stuff then!

Obviously public school aren’t going to apply this technique because of “safety concerns” and cost.  So maybe we need to start our own private school where we teach with explosions and cool weapons.  It would be prohibitively expensive, and the disclaimer would be quite extensive (even more so than the disclaimer for this blog!).  But the students would be excited about going to school.

I’m convinced that people enjoy learning if you make it fun and interesting.  (I could’ve worded that “people enjoy learning if you make it enjoyable”.)  School should be more fun, I think.  I certainly learned more with the fun teachers . We would also use video games to teach students — some school is already doing that successfully.  If they can learn something while saving the world, everyone wins.

video of Soundwave breakdancing

Here is a cool video of Soundwave breakdancing — this is what you call doing the robot.  🙂  (If you don’t know, Soundwave was one of the Decepticons of Transformers lore; his Earth disguise mode was a jambox / cassette player.)

Supposedly this was initially put on YouTube in 2005, before YouTube was big, and it got to 15 million hits and crashed their servers.  I saw it back in 2004 on another site.  Think about that — at least 15 million hits, before YouTube was so popular.  That’s a lot of Transformers fans, even before Michael Bay’s “re-imagined”* the franchise for his movies.  Someone said it was made in 2002, and if so, that makes it even more impressive, because CGI was more difficult back then.

* Hey, I just found a soapbox!  I won’t go into the full rant, because I’ve done that before (and I’ve revisited it with video examples of how Transformers could’ve been better), but I will say this — the Transformers universe was very established through hundreds of cartoons and many comic books, and it was a good story with lots of backstory, many great plots, extensive character development — everything you need for a great movie.  Instead of using that, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg (yes, it’s partly his fault, too) made the movie about “a boy and his car”.  In doing so, they made Transformers be more about how a teenage boy has to save the world instead of the huge civil war going on between robots that are more intelligent than we are.  Instead of making what could’ve been one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever, with characters you admire for their principles and a philosophical side that gets you to thinking — while keeping the great action scenes, we ended up with just the action scenes and lots of explosions.  I’m not saying the movies weren’t entertaining at all, but I keep thinking what could’ve been…

how to describe this heat wave

The past few days have been so hot we’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it.  Wednesday it was 110 here with a heat index over 120, with lots of humidity.  I think that goes beyond crazy-mad hot.  Our local weathermen are running out of adjectives and phrases for the forecasts.

So we came up with a new heat scale:

* The day-star, it burns
* That ain’t right hot
* Crazy-mad hot
* Unbelievably stupid-hot
* Is this Arizona?
* This heat is inconceivable!
* Warmageddon
* Heatastrophe
* Hot Attack
* So hot that if someone says “Hot enough for ya?” you’re allowed to punch them.
* Did you replace my sweet tea with jalapeno juice?
* It feels like I’m on fire
* I’m on fire
* No really, I’m actually on fire it’s so hot