Picture a guy skating into enemy territory, the puck on his stick. Two defenders close in on him. He skates on. Yet he knows he’s got a teammate behind him, so as he skates into the valley of death he leaves the puck behind. That’s a drop pass. The first guy skates ahead, drawing the defenders, leaving space behind him for his wingman to so some real damage.

Tonight I saw maybe the best drop pass ever. The first guy in didn’t just leave the puck for his buddy, he pulled back and swung as hard as he could — over the puck. Every defender reacted as if he was shooting, crashing toward the net. First Guy’s stick passed harmlessly over the puck and he drove to the net, and his trailer could have set up a picnic in the space left behind.

Happily the bad guys did not score. Still, I give them credit for the best drop pass I’ve ever seen.

It is purely coincidental that the next two links are by the last two people to comment on this blog as of this writing.*

My favorite climate scientist has given us all reason to fight global warming: the supply of chocolate is threatened! This is a must-read, kids.

And earlier today I popped over to a blog and read an article about… blogs. It’s an interesting read about the blog life-cycle, how they grow and why they die, to which I can add a few musings. Muddled Ramblings is an outlier in blog taxonomy, I think; it lies outside the regular life-cycle, in a place where many blogs die. It’s a blog without any clear theme, and without any real growth in readership. The bloggcomm is small but strong; the comments provide a huge lift in value for everyone. But gone are the days of the Millennial Office Holder and similar hijinks, and no insider silliness has grown to replace them. Still I blog along, more than eight years and 1800 episodes worth. It’s a blog that will not die — a blog zombie!

After reading that article I’m pondering ways to better foster community here at MR&HBI. I don’t want to lose what we already have going, or to diminish in any way the contributions of the faithful, but it seems like there’s more stuff we could do together. I think the collaborative writing experiment It Goes Without Saying was on the right track, but the barrier to participation was a little too high – you had to know what was going on. Something collaborative that people could just drop by and toss in a contribution without too much effort would be really cool. (The Fantasy Novelist’s Scoreboard awaits your input!)

The writers of Web comics often have events where they write episodes for each others’ strips. That would be fun, to have guest posts from other bloggers here, while I blog there. Fun for me, certainly, but would it be compelling for readers? In the comic world, the guest artist borrows the characters from the strip and puts a new twist on them. It would be pretty hard for someone to take such an unfocussed forum as this one and put any sort of twist on it. Then again, since when has ‘not fun for the readers’ stopped me before?

I enjoy writing challenges; Elephants of Doom was the most elaborate response to one such challenge, and just a few days ago I cranked out The Secret Life of Sporks. That was a hoot, and I wouldn’t mind a bit if there were more challenges like that. I’d formalize something (“Wacky prompt Thursday!”) but I’m petrified that no one would suggest anything and the sound of crickets chirping would be embarrassing.

Also, I need to get the Muddled Calendar back up and running. Maybe we can finally name all the holidays.

But now I’m rambling far, far off the “post a few links” intent of this episode, staggering around the blogosphere like a drunken beachcomber with a broken metal detector, looking for answers but really too lazy to find them.

You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

* Actually, that’s not strictly true.

surging demand for egg-frying advice

This is the number of loads of a single episode on my blog: my tutorial on cooking eggs over-easy. That episode has been around a long time, but you don’t need an advanced degree in statistics to see that lately its popularity has been gong through the roof.

The blogger’s lament: “If only I could figure out how to turn those visitors into regular readers!” Still, I can console myself that perhaps out there a few more people are experiencing delicious egg breakfasts.

I suspect Google’s +1 has something to do with the precipitous rise in popularity; if a few people have endorsed the page, Google’s going to move it closer to the top of its rankings. It is a pretty damn good tutorial, I have to say, even if the promised video is currently AWOL.

I’m a little surprised, because I suspect the +1 thingie at the bottom of each page doesn’t work for everyone. The code tries to load a script in a way that violates the security policies of my browser (and should violate that policy on all of them, though obviously it doesn’t). I’ve found another, no-script button set that I could use instead, but in my naïvety about how that all stuff works, I don’t know if I’ll lose my current mojo if I switch. Will Google see the next + the same way? I’m probably fretting over nothing.

The astute among you will see a period last year when no visits were logged at all. I address that issue in an episode about getting my cloud and my protective systems working together.

Way to go green, semi-governmental entity! While I’m at it, should I make stacks of tear-off sheets for this blog, so people can save what I wrote in a filing cabinet, too?

* He’s the guy who inspired this screed. He fought his way past the guy with the ball to get into open space so the enemy could get a basket. Don’t ask me who he was; he’s not exceptional. This is how they play the game.

Side note to Memphis: Your yellow shirts and dark green shorts are the Worst Uniform Ever, in any sport (except maybe the Padres and Astros in the ’70′s). The awfulness is amplified by your total disregard for your team identity. Grizzly? Hardly. How much did you pay your marketing team? I’ll do better for half as much.

While recognizing that the number is little more than a wild-ass guess, I find myself wondering as I plod along, “Just how much does 500 Calories weigh?”

Well, of course it’s not that simple. Calories are a measure of energy, and while I haven’t done the math, if we apply M=E/C2 we end up with a very, very small number. But we’re not annihilating matter to produce energy, we’re oxidizing organic molecules. So, let’s think about the weight of the fuel required to produce 500 Calories.

Since we’re only dealing in wild-ass approximations anyway, let’s round things off to make the math easy. If all the molecules used to produce that energy were fat, we’re talking about 50 grams. That’s something like a shot of vegetable oil.

Not bad! If I burn off a shot-glass of fat each time I exercise, I’ll be skinny in a month!

Alas, even after many months, I’m not skinny. First problem, only a tiny fraction of those 500 Calories come from fat. Fat is long-term storage and my body hangs onto it tenaciously, saving against the month when there’s no food. For most of the history of our organism and its ancestors there have been such stretches, and the ones who held onto their fat when times were good survived when things were bad. So, when energy is needed, the first to burn is the short-term storage.

But hey! Great news! The sugars and other carbohydrates used for short-term storage weigh even more! Instead of burning 50 grams of fuel, I might be burning more like 100g.

Which are quickly and efficiently replaced by the food I eat. And while my body is at it, if I’m going to insist on burning all that energy, it’s going to build up muscle mass so I can burn the fuel more easily next time. Which increases the dense muscle tissue and makes me heavier — but healthier. Ahhh! It’s all so complicated! But I’m digressing here.

Regardless of the source of the fuel and whether I actually lose weight, I metabolize something like 100g of hydrocarbons while I exercise.

Where does it go?

The answer is pretty simple, but kind of cool. A lot of the weight I lose goes right out my nose. We breathe oxygen in, and, through a ridiculously complex system of events, that oxygen gets mixed up with hydrogen and carbon from our food. The carbon atoms, now hooked up with oxygen, are carted back to the lungs and exit each time we exhale. Food in, CO2 out.

The hydrogen atoms from the food also hook up with oxygen to form water, which leaks out of our bodies in a dozen different ways (mammals are live-fast-and-squander-water creatures). There are some other byproducts of our metabolisms, like nitrogen from burning protein, that make their way out in our pee.

But most of the mass (and hence weight) oxidized due to my time on the trainer flows out my nose. When the gentle chime tells me my travails are done, I’ve exhaled enough carbon to make a 500-carat diamond*. And each time, it’s a little bit easier.

*The mother of all wild-ass guesses!

This is apparently a pretty common problem for people to have, and there are instructions telling just what to do about it. Much of the time the instructions are not very helpful, however. After a day of futility I decided to so whatever it took to gat a human on the line.

Easier said than done. For instance, the “Schedule a callback for another time” feature invariably returns with the message “No immediate callback available. Try again later.” I thought maybe the more-secure settings in Safari were causing a problem, so I tried again with Firefox. Same result.

Finally I connected by chat with a nice guy who was not empowered to execute the obvious, simple, and immediate solution to the problem. We had to do it the hard way.

Somewhere during my latest futile rummaging around on the site (“Click here for instructions”, then the instructions saying to go right back where you were, and so forth), a window popped up asking if I wanted to answer some questions about my experience.

You’re damn skippy I wanted to answer some questions. When my latest exercise in circular navigation was complete, the survey came up. “Neutral third party,” I was assured. “No specific identity info recorded.” I took the survey, being sure to give credit in the few places it was due. I answered the essay questions with specifics. In the end, I clicked ‘submit’.

“System not working at this time,” the message said.

But the main thing I did was read. I could have spent the time writing or working on any number of projects, but instead I opened up a book and settled in. When that book was done, I opened another. And another. Perhaps in the next few hours I’ll compose a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. I certainly have a few things to say about them.

More likely, however, as we wend our way up the coast on the Pacific Surfliner, is that I’ll open up a book.

It started when I moved overseas. I sold my house and disencumbered myself of most of my stuff (so much stuff!) but there was a nucleus of belongings that I thought would be useful when I started my next home in the US. So I paid a monthly charge to have someone else store it. Door-to-Door was awesome because they brought a big box to my house, I packed it, and the they took it away. Because they can store the boxes efficiently in a big warehouse, it costs less than a self-storage place.

Over the next few years I would visit my stuff now and then, and the people in San Diego were friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I never had an issue with them (except the one that was totally my fault, and they were cool about that once we got it worked out). But I don’t live in San Diego, and there’s a Door-to-Door facility up here, less than five miles from my apartment. Eventually my sweetie and I decided it was worth the considerable expense to have the big box of stuff moved up the coast to Silicon Valley.

And then the nightmare began. Before the move I agreed to a new rate based on an annual contract, and made sure that there was nothing else I needed to do. Nope; money was paid, contract was set up, and the box with most of my worldly possessions was loaded on a truck and hauled up to San Jose.

Two months later, I wanted to visit my stuff in its new home. It’s a pretty simple procedure; you call in and make an appointment and they make sure that the box is pulled from the warehouse and waiting for you when you arrive. I called to make an appointment. Confusion ensued.

The system didn’t show my box in the San Jose warehouse. I spent some time on the phone with a very friendly guy in the national office. He determined that the box had been properly recorded leaving San Diego, but had never been checked in in San Jose.

Well, crap.

After a few more days it was discovered that yes, the Big Box of Stuff was indeed in the San Jose warehouse. Hooray! As a way of apologizing the corporate guys gave me two months free, based on my annual rate. After all, my annual contract was in the system. (We actually had an extended discussion about the contract based on a misunderstanding on my part.) At that time there was no doubt at all that I was paying an annual rate.

So, finally, I made an appointment to get into my Big Box of Stuff. The day arrived and my sweetie and I went down to the facility. There wasn’t much in the way of signage, but we found the office and the woman recognized my name. She told us how to get to where the BBoS was waiting.

It wasn’t there. We checked and double-checked, and the BBoS was not there. We spoke to the guy who moves the boxes. He flipped through all his work orders and there was nothing about our BBoS. At the front of the building they knew my name; at the back no knowledge of me had penetrated.

There is obviously a computerized system that manages where all the various BBoS’s are. Just as obviously, the people in the front office of San Jose’s Door-to-Door storage don’t know how to use it.

Anyway, the fetcher of boxes left and some time later returned with our BBoS. The only catch: it was still sealed shut from transit. Usually (according to the very friendly box-fetcher), boxes are sealed with two or three screws. The San Diego Boys had used maybe seven, all clearly marked with spray paint, and Friendly Box Fetcher didn’t have the proper tools to unseal the BBoS.

Our man persevered, and eventually we got to our stuff. The important takeaway here is that Door-to-Door San Jose took more than one try for every single operation.

And then the invoice arrived, charging us at the monthly rate, rather than the annual. Twice as much, even as it showed the initial “incompetence credit” (my phrase) for two months at the annual rate.

It has taken months to get this straightened out (if it truly has been – I got a call the other day that I didn’t pick up). In that time I dealt with friendly and competent people at the national level (email replies in minutes with useful information, with a real feeling for personal attention), but the errors made by the San Jose folks took a long time to erase.

I’m hoping they’re erased, anyway.

Message to Door-to-Door: I like you guys, but your San Jose franchise is awful. Do something about it.