View high resolution

In response to my last post—which put forth the hypothesis that I’d be more popular on the internet if the internet saw more pictures of me—Annotations suggested that the cheeseballs in the accompanying picture “might be the true independent variable”.

Although that’s maybe some sloppy statistics language, Annotations has a point.  After all, that was indeed the first cheeseball-related post I have made, so who isn’t to say the relative popularity of my previous post was based solely on the cheeseball content?  Perhaps my face has a negative effect, and a cheeseball post without any pictures of me would have been even more popular.

So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, above is a diagram from a 1939 patent for A Process For Preparing Foods, a process which wikpedia suggests may have produced the grandfather of the modern day cheeseball. It should be noted that there is a competing claim to the cheeseball’s ancestry.

View high resolution

The Snickers Ice Cream Cone

Lucky Charms consumption behavior is supposed to divide people into two groups: those who are left with only marshmallow bits and those who are left with only toasted oat-based pieces.  This is too coarse of a distinction, and it fails to capture the way I would eat a bowl of Lucky Charms: judiciously adjusting the composition so that the proportion of marshmallow bits to total bits and pieces increase smoothly and near-linearly.  This meant that eating Lucky Charms (and actually, they were more likely Marshmallow Blasted Froot Loops) required a level of concentration it probably didn’t deserve.

This is to say, I can appreciate the constraints of an ice cream cone.  Start at the top, go to the bottom.  No need to think.  Just need to eat.  But, problematically, the ice cream is better than the cone, yet the proportion of cone increases as you consume your dessert.  So your best bites are at the beginning, and they just get worse from there.

The Snickers Ice Cream Cone, however, is a feat of design on par with the Eiffel Tower.  While tastiness of current bite increases and decreases depending on your position, average tastiness of remaining bites peaks right before the end.  The caramel spine is the axis on which the deliciousness pivots, and that chunk of chocolate at the bottom facilitates this remarkable bite right before you finish where caramel, chocolate, ice cream, and cone combine in a ratio whose mathematical properties need to be examined more closely.  It’s a really important bite and I’m a pretty big fan of Snickers Ice Cream Cones.

View high resolution

Know Your Scenarios:

• A Tribe Called Quest w/Leaders of the New School - Scenario.  Why is it called Scenario?  Because it’s a fucking wonderful song.
• A Tribe Called Quest w/Leaders of the New School - Scenario (Remix).  Why is it called Scenario?  It’s unclear.  It’s not a remix in the traditional sense.  Other than a wayward “Here we go, yo” and a Busta roar, it really lacks resemblance to the original.  Of course, if you throw Tribe and LONS on the same track, what else are you gonna call it?  Also a fucking wonderful song.
• Ruff Ryders - Scenario 2000.  Why is it called Scenario?  The title here seems to merely evoke the Posse Cut nature of the song.
• Lil Kim w/The Beehive - Scenario.  Why is it called Scenario?  Mixtape Posse Cut over Tribe’s Remix beat.  They throw some lyrical references to the original.  I didn’t know this one existed before I started the project.
• Jay Electronica - Scenario 2004.  Why is it called Scenario? Jay takes the “here we go yo” chorus of the original and another line and that’s about it.  Unlike all the other posse cuts on this list, this one only has one MC in physical form.
• Re-Up Gang - Scenario 2008.  Why is it called Scenario?  The Clipse and friends deliver some verses over the Swizz Beatz’s Scenario 2000 beat.  No more of a posse cut than any other Re-Up track, so still kind of a posse cut.
• Das Racist - Who’s that? Broooown!. Why is it called Scenario?  It isn’t, but builds a chorus around the “Who’s that? Broooown!” lines.
• Nicki Minaj - Roman’s Revenge. Why is it called Scenario?  It’s not, and its title has nothing to do with Scenario.  But Nicki builds a chorus around Busta’s “raah raah like a dungeon dragon” line.
• Rass Kass w/Strong Arm Steady, Mistah Fab, Chino XL, and more - Scenario 2012.  Why is it called Scenario?  They change the ‘yo’ but keep the chorus.  I was not aware that this song existed or that several of its performers existed.  The fact that it is a “2012” song gives me great pause and makes me reevaluate certain conclusions I drew about when some of the above songs were released.

If my graph is missing anything important, please let me know.

View high resolution

Were you aware of the existence of Scotch Eggs?  I wasn’t until very recently, but my personal breakfast food dark ages are over.  As you can see from my helpful diagram, these things are fantastic.

I find it a little disappointing that more people aren’t sitting around thinking of things to cover in sausage—and then fry.  These scotch egg people are really onto something.

View high resolution

The Chinese spot across the street from me is only the second closest location for me to buy fried chicken wings.  There is a takeout spot next door to me.  It closes at 6:30 every weekday and 4:30 on Saturdays, and is not open on Sundays, so I couldn’t go a lot, but now that I am out of the labor force, I can have Tiki for lunch.  As I did today, where I examined their wings options closely.

On their own, Tiki’s wings are priced far more rationally.  You can buy orders of 3, 5, 8, 10, and 15, at the constant price of 90 cents per wing.  With the other wing option directly across the street, the question of where to purchase your wings becomes fairly complex.  Given all the prices involved, you might be confused where to find the cheapest meal (the wings at both are excellent).  Luckily, if you’re in the neighborhood, I have created a handy guide for how you can satisfy your fried chicken needs, based on how hungry you are.

Notice for nine or ten wings, it does not matter where you decide to go.

——

I’m moving out of my place soon, so if you plan on stalking me, act now.

View high resolution

Hot Investment Tip: Candy Bar Edition.

Hopefully you didn’t lose too much money on my Super Bowl advice, but even if you did, your financial woes are about to be over!

It has come to my attention that there is a crucial gap in the Chocolate Bar market, illustrated by the above venn diagram.  My Hot Investment Tip for you, is to exploit that market inefficiency and fill said gap with peanuts, chocolate, and delicious nougat.

Now, I’m not saying that you’ll be richer than Snickers, which occupies the ideal spot in the chocolate bar nexus.  Instead, as clearly indicated by the diagram, you can expect your Nougat-and-Peanuts-All-Covered-in-Chocolate Bar to dwarf sales of Mr. Goodbar and even the 3 Musketeers, expecting a similar return to the Milky Way (which, I’m sure you’ll concede, is the best chocolate bar there is—for now).

It would perhaps be prudent to include a caveat about the Caramel-Peanuts intersection.  I was not aware there was a Chocolate Covered PayDay until doing some research, and I believe it was a special edition thing that probably doesn’t exist anymore.  There was also the Reggie Bar.  The less than hyper-successful history of the Chocolate Covered PayDay and Reggie Bar should not deter you from this Hot Investment Tip, however.  Because, and you’ll see this in the venn diagram, the new candy bar I am advocating contains nougat.

View high resolution

Because one post on the the relative frequencies of “I’d give my X Y” simply is not enough, here is a (not the slightest bit) handy chart on the google search results when you plug boths sides of several body parts into the expression.  Not only have I helpfully pointed to the body parts (in case you forget where hands and eyes are), but I have adjusted the type size based on the magnitude of results, and underlined the side of the body part that gets more hits, pairwise.  A few notes:

• Aside from a few outliers, when you compare paired body parts, people seem almost equally willing to forego their left or right, but the small preference towards losing the lefty is too consisent to write off as mere noise in the data.  I think we need to abandon my first hypothesis (based on eyes and arms) about people using this expression to connote giving up the paired body part that means more to them.
• A full quarter of the hits for “I’d give my right arm” are actually for “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous,” which I’ll admit I found mildly clever, but I’m more frustrated that it biases the results.
• In general, google counts are pretty suspect, so these totals might not truly express internet usage, let alone non-written speech.  If anyone wants to record the results from another search engine, that would obviously be very helpful.
• It’s probably best to assume the bathroom sign man is facing away from you.  That way, the results on the right side of the chart, which are for “I’d give my right Y,” will correspond to bathroom sign man’s right side.
• This is, of course, a horrible chart.  A table would be much easier to read.  I’m also sorry it’s not quite symmetrical.  There’s really not much excuse for it not being symmetrical.
• What’s up with Butt Cheeks?
• Gil “GuerillaG/TooKranky” Gershman would give the right hemisphere of his brain for the Watersong/Dragonfly 7” by Windy and Carl.

View high resolution

“Aorta” is probably my favorite word for boggle.  There are several reasons for this: it shows up with great frequency; it takes three common right hooks; and like most words where consecutive vowels break into separate syllables, people tend to miss it.  This last point can’t be stressed enough.  Decent players are more likely to find something like “sorta” even though “aorta” shows up slightly more often, merely because nobody is trying to build anything out of “ao”.

Anyways, red nodes aren’t in SOWPODS, blacks are, and triple octagons are personal favorites.  The only five or six letter “orta” word that is missing is “mortar”, which you should probably remember if you bother to learn this chunk, but I didn’t feel like fitting it on the chart.