Well over a year ago, a group of us sat around the lab and talked about making some goofball ads for bogus products we’d like to see. Like most of our ideas, it fell by the wayside, victim of a lack of resources to produce the ads for the most part. During that evening, it was my wife who came up with the idea of frozen alcoholic freezer treats, to which she aptly dubbed them “Icy Spikes”.

Flipping through a magazine today, my wife came across an article about how a couple out east have started up their own business and are about to launch a frozen alcoholic product called “Spiked Ice”. There was even a picture of the product which resembled pretty much exactly what we had conceived of over a year ago. The article is predicting sales of the spiked ice treat to be considerable.

What were some of the other ideas we came up with that night? Hmm,… well there was the Bag O’ Meat. It was a grab bag of assorted meat, some dried, some not, each bite would be an adventure. Then there was Bubblenut, the only chewing gum with a crunchy peanut center.

Ya know, it’s just so stupid it could work…

Warning: DaVinci Code movie spoiler:
So my wife and I attended a showing of Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code this afternoon. Unlike my wife, I had not yet read the book,… I should correct that, to say that I have not “yet” read the book would be to give you the impression that I plan to read the book some day and to be honest, it ain’t on my list of things to do.

I went in knowing that to follow this movie, I was going to have to pay pretty close attention to alot of religious and historic mumbo jumbo that was going to be fired at me fast and furious. I tried to follow the complex storyline, but alas I grew weary. What didn’t help was that practically everyone in the movie either had a French name, or quoted important names or clues in Latin, sometimes wrote such words backwards and made reference to ancient orders. I had a hard time figuring out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, only to eventually discover that it wasn’t intended to be that clear cut. I think this is one of the reasons I liked Star Wars, at least Darth Vader wore black, although I never did figure out why the stormtroopers wore white, but I digress.

I should point out that I’ve never been good with names, at least not at first. Once I can associate them with a particular someone they do sink in, but until that time, people are known to me by associations. I once played on a friend’s company’s softball team and although I was introduced to everyone more than once, whenever my friend spoke to me of his coworkers, I had to get him to refer to them by the position they played. “You know him”, my friend would say, “third base?” With all of this in mind, I present to you an exerpt of a conversation I had with my wife as we exited the movie theatre and I tried to wrap my mind around this DaVinci Code flick:

Me: “Ok, so the ultimate bad guy was what’s his face? Gandalf, right?”
Wife: “Yes.”
Me: “Ok, so who’s side was Doc Ock on? He was one of those carpe diem guys right?”
Wife: “You mean Opus dei. Yes, he was.”
Me: “Ok and that weirdo Master and Commander albino doctor dude with the white hair worked for Doc Ock, right?”
Wife: “Yes, kind of, he was also a pawn of Gandalfs, but then Gandalf was using both him and Doc Ock.”
Me: “And Gandalf wasn’t an Opus dude, or even a Simple Simon guy, right?”
Wife: “Priory of Sion, no he wasn’t.”
Me: “Ok, so wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If Doc Ock was a carpe diem guy..”
Wife: “Opus dei.”
Me: “Ya whatever, and so if Leon the Professional was an Opie dude too, why did he acuse Doc Ock of using him when they were both on the same side?”

And so the discussion went. Half an hour later and with a few furrowed brows received from fellow movie-goers I believe I got it all figured out. Oddly the discussion felt like I was studying for a history exam and now find myself very much looking forward to seeing X-men 3 this weekend and taking in a movie which might actually be entertaining.

The most common and readily available forms of caffeine are soda pop, tea and coffee, “energy drinks”, chocolate, and finally, pills. Now, I realize that people have their own preferences, but do they realize how much their caffeine is costing them? Comparing all these items with 2 cups of reasonably strong coffee yields some interesting results.

Soda pop, at $1 a can is not a very good deal. Cost there is about $2.50 total. Chocolate doesn’t have enough caffeine to make a comparison fair as you would need to eat about 10 bars to get the same buzz as 2 cups of coffee. That’s not to say I haven’t tried to eat 10 bars but by that point I’m so pukin’ sick that the caffeine buzz becomes irrelevant. Most home brewed teas and coffees are a pretty good deal which puts them at second cheapest at about 50 cents. Starbucks’ coffee is up there in price which makes it a lousy deal, but to its credit, buying their coffee is also a status symbol so there is some extra value there. Also, you can order a varying amount of caffeine in your particular cup of coffee. I have saved the best and worst for last. On a caffeine per cost basis the worst offenders are “energy drinks” like Red Bull. It has only about 80 milligrams of caffeine per can and yet costs about $3 per, making it ridiculously expensive. By far the cheapest deal is pills. One 200mg hit costs a measly 10 cents! So you see, 2 and 1/2 cans of Red Bull at $7.50 total has the marketing people at Red Bull lining their pockets with your hard earned cash. I suppose there is more glamour to being seen drinking a can of Red Bull than buying a bottle of caffeine pills in the drugstore but boy are you paying for it.

Now, in the style of tabloid ambush I promised you dirt on Bitterman and here it is. His caffeine addiction has gotten so bad that he has been feverishly working on converting an old insulin pump to deliver a steady dose of medium roast directly into his veins. Personally, I feel it might mellow him out and he will stop throwing things at me.

Caution: Statements made about Bitterman may not actually reflect the truth.

I hope you’re all enjoying the Lab’s all new game “Name that Movie but you probably can’t because we didn’t use movies anybody actually watched nor scenes any of the movies would be famous for“….

I actually get up to 4 correct before Old Speary comes to kill my game.

If you’ve tried the game, you’ve most likely seen him. Fellow with a spear stuck in him. My favorite movie…probably won an Oscar…

I’m working on a new game where I pick a number from 1 to 65,000. In your head you guess what number you think it is…somehow we’ll know if you’re right…

Today at work, I counted all the pixels on my monitor, the max resolution of which is 1280 x 1024. At first I thought it was off by 7 pixels, but when I recounted they were all there, all 1310720 of them…