Category: Random

Tour De Donut (The Donut Race)

Speaking of National Doughnut Day, I just learned there is a Tour De Donut event.  You might be thinking it would be a great idea to have a donut-themed race but that this is probably just referencing some person or place named Donut.  That happens sometimes.  But in this case, there actually is a race involving the eating of donuts!

The Tour De Donut is an annual bicycle race held in Staunton, Illinois, plus a few other places.  It’s a 30-mile race, which is a good ways to ride if you aren’t in optimal fitness.  But there’s a unique twist to this race, which somewhat levels the playing field.  There are two pit stops in nearby towns during the race, and your total race time is reduced by five minutes for each donut you consume during those pit stops.

I can put away some donuts, so I could reduce my race time by a significant amount.  However, there is the issue that eating donuts may make you slower.  So you’ve got to strategize about it — if you eat 6 donuts, it saves you 30 minutes, but will it make you 30 minutes slower?  Of course, donuts also provide extra energy (which would be needed for most of us on a 30-mile ride).

I think this race would be fun to do, in the spring or fall.  Having it in the summer would be disoptimal for several reasons.

Obviously the idea can be expanded, too — how about a Tour De Bacon?  Sounds interesting to me!

There’s probably somebody reading this who is thinking something like “this is so unhealthy, I can’t believe you are promoting it!”  Yeah, well, it’s like this — most people are gonna eat donuts and bacon anyway, so if they will get outside and get a couple hours of exercise and fun, it’s better than nothing.  And they might even burn more calories than they consume.  That makes me wonder — how many miles do you have to ride to burn off the calories per bacon strip?  We could come up with a stat to determine the winner (or at least a secondary winner) — miles per bacon.  🙂  Mathematically that wouldn’t be good for eating the most bacon, but we can work on the formula.  I’m just making this up as I go.  🙂

Feel free to continue developing the idea.  As long as it involves eating donuts and/or bacon, count me in!

gaming for bacon

Getting older doesn’t mean you outgrow video games.  But you do outgrow the tickets that come out of games at places like Chuck E. Cheese (or our local Larry’s Pizza).  Most (if not all) of the prizes are worthless to adults.  But imagine if instead of a ticket, you received a similar-sized piece of bacon…

As awesome as that would be, obviously there are some logistical issues with the machines distributing bacon.  So instead the machines could spit out bacon tickets which could be exchanged for actual bacon strips.  And if you were to break the weekly or monthly high school, you could win other prizes like nachos or pizza or milkshakes.  They could also occasionally give out vouchers for more gaming tokens.

Why hasn’t someone done this?  Of course these prizes are more expensive than the stuff you get now, but they would also be increasing the audience by a large factor.  Plus they get food at cost, so it’s not as expensive as you might think.  More adults would play the games, which would mean more revenue, which would also fund the purchase / renting of games that adults would enjoy more.  It’s a win-win situation!  Someone definitely needs to make this happen!

live-action Japanese Spiderman from the ’70s

Recently I came across YouTube video clips of a live-action Japanese Spiderman TV show from the ’70s.  This is something to see… prepare to be surprised, even if you know quite a bit about Spiderman.

If you watched the video, you might’ve noticed it was from 1978 and it featured a giant live-action transforming robot.  How long did it take before America got transforming robots?  Something like 1984, wasn’t it?  The Japanese have been ahead of us for a while on cartoons and sci-fi technology.

According to this other video (with a different theme song, one you may be more familiar with), Spiderman has a flying car (the Spider Machine GP-7), and the giant transforming robot is named Leopardon and belongs to Spiderman.  The song says he has radioactive blood, and he wears some type of mechanical device on one of his wrists.  I’m really curious about the story now…

On a related note, someone took clips from the Japanese Spiderman TV show and made a compilation video, adding NES-style music from Mega Man.  (NES = the original Nintendo system, in case you didn’t know.)

Spiderman’s pre-fight antics look amusing, plus his voice in Japanese is awesome (“SPYDA!”).  I’m gonna have to watch one of those episodes sometime…

I need a portable incinerator

During a recent discussion on this blog, I suggested that pickles be shot into the sun or at least tossed into a local incinerator.  That got me to wondering if there are any local incinerators open to the public.  Probably not.

So I challenge our Research & Development team to invent a pocket incinerator.  Imagine how handy that would be!  If you have trash while you’re out and about, you just fire up your pocket incinerator and toss the refuse in, and instantly your garbage is vaporized into nothingness.  Then there would be no excuse for littering — and it would be fun to watch things be vaporized.  (I suspect it would be so awesome that people would start grabbing whatever nonessential items are around them, which if at work would include pens, paperclips, staplers, TPS reports, and whatever stuff you think your co-workers really don’t need that much.)

Alternatively, the trash could be teleported to an parallel dimension, but I suspect you’d need a mighty powerful battery to handle that, probably something powered with nuclear power, which you might not want to carry around in your pocket…