There's this old adage in retail: the customer is always right. However, anybody who's ever worked in any job involving customer interaction knows that this is bull. In fact, it was probably made up by a customer.

Once I was talking with one of my managers about the saying. She too concluded that it wasn't always right; instead, she opted for the more vague (yet more truthful) "the customer is always first." Generalness and fluffiness aside, I like this a lot better.

Case in point: working in a coffee shop. The highlight of my job very well may be when customers mispronounce the names of drinks. Apparently we once had a customer who asked for a large mocha. The "ch" was where she got into trouble; she pronounced it ch as in cheese rather than ch as in chameleon.

I always thought that the joke about a guy asking for a large fa-jigh-ta was just a joke, but apparently I was mistaken.

Over the last few years, I've used Google Analytics to keep track of how many pageviews I get on a daily basis. I should note that I'm not exactly in this whole blogging thing for the views; there are better ways to massage one's ego than that. Still, though, it's kind of interesting to see how frequently people drop by.

Analytics¹ isn't just good for checking on your number of views, though; you can also see what city contributes your most viewers (Iowa City beats Ames 103 to 59), what sort of computers viewers are using (58% of you are on Macs, while 39% are on PCs) and what terms people are using to find your site (13 people have searched for "don't rape me forcibly tito", 9 for ramble away, and a hodge-podge more looking for some variation of "my hat it has three corners").

It's all pretty interesting stuff - well, at least to me - but it's not exactly useful. For one thing, I've noticed that the frequency at which I update this blog has very little effect on the number of viewers I get per day. I've had periods where I've neglected this blog for a week or two and received 20 hits a day.² I've also had periods where I've updated this blog daily and no one seems to drop by.

It's dawned on me that there is some sort of rhyme and reason regarding views on this blog, and that's that views seem to correlate with whether or not you're on a break. When a break or major holiday is taking place, my views drop a little lower than usual. However, once we're in the midst of back-to-school or some mundane day, views range from average to above average.

At first this seems kind of counter-intuitive; after all, wouldn't it make more sense that the more free time people have, the more likely they'd be to check out this blog? And doesn't break equal free time?

Well, yes, but in the case of this blog, no. Think of it this way: it's Spring Break. Chances are, you're more inclined to hang out with friends at home/work or engage in vacational shenanigans than to check out this blog. Conversely, if it's 1:24 on a Monday and you're sitting in your dorm waiting for your next class to start, your odds of diddling around on the internet are a lot higher - and thus it's much more likely that you visit this blog.

But Marty Chang, what about trichinosis, an incurable parasitic infestation of the muscles? Sounds good to me.

¹ Thanks to the magic of Firefox, I can just type in the letters A-N-A-L into my address bar and press enter, and BOOM. Since it's the first four letters of the word, Google Analytics appears. Weirdly, Google's browser, Google Chrome, doesn't work the same way. If I try to do that in Chrome, Google instantly presumes I'm trying to do a search for said term, which is a little awkward if you're in a public place and doubly awkward if you're in a public place and SafeSearch is off.

² I've theorized there could be something going on here: I call it the playing-hard-to-get effect. Theory: the less I update, the more frequently people check to see if I've updated. You know, like "Has he updated yet? No? Oh." But when I start updating again, people take it for granted; instead of seeing if I've updated, they just assume that I have and decide to check it out later. It's a very half-asssed and pessimistic theory, though; I barely believe it myself.

My sister is downstairs with her boyfriend. I feel like harassing them, but the typical means ("Oh, hey, sorry, just needed to grab a root beer - you guys want anything?") has grown stale. I'd like to harass them by interrupting them in bizarre grandiose fashions and never explain afterwards. Brainstorming right now. So far I've got going downstairs with a fake skull and dramatically reciting the lyrics to "Cooking by The Book" from Lazytown, but I have neither a fake skull nor the willpower to act on my bizarre ideas born out of boredom. Plus I probably have better things to do.

So I was recently traversing the interwebs - you know, like you do - and came across this video of a man with Broca's aphasia. Somehow this man damaged the Broca's area in his brain - perhaps in a stroke - and thus his ability to communicate via spoken (and presumably written) language is severly impaired. Frankly, I'm surprised this video isn't more popular; it's only recieved 16,000 views, which is relatively low by YouTube memes standards. Despite the relatively low views, the video's spawned a website called TonoTonoTono.com, which exhibits a tone(o) somewhere between tribute and outright mockery.

I've gotta admit: the first time I watched this video I laughed. There's something about it which is at first comical - for instance, why "tono?" Why not "rooster" or infantile babbling? The laughter soon turned to that of the guilty variety, though. The video became tragic very quickly - the fact that this guy probably thinks he's saying words when in actuality he's not is rather somber.

There's another question: is this guy aware that he's only saying 'tono'? At first it doesn't seem so, but later on when he begins counting, he seems totally aware of his condition.

Here is a game I made up - or at least I think I made it up. It sounds vaguely familiar to me; I wouldn't be surprised if I'd heard this before. Maybe in some place like one of those "50 Fun Things To Do On An Elevator" chain letters that I used to get all the time before everyone realized how annoying chain letters are.

The game is called Time Traveler. Here's how you play: you walk up to a stranger and say something that amounts to the following:

YOU: Excuse me - what is the date?

STRANGER: [INSERT DATE HERE]

YOU: And the year?

STRANGER: [INSERT YEAR HERE]

YOU: (incredulously) [INSERT YEAR HERE]?

STRANGER: Yeah.

YOU: (frazzled but polite) Thank you.

The mime show is this Thursday. It has been almost a year since I've been in the presence of a mime show. It has been even longer - 1279 days - since I've witnessed a mime show as an audience member and an audience member alone.

In those days as an audience member, I used to do mini-reviews of the show. You can see one of them here. Eventually, though, I got into the troupe, which made the writing of mini-reviews a little difficult. However, I reached a compromise in my second show and the mini-reviews became sort of a summarized director's commentary. ¹

As you know, I'm not in the troupe any longer, so that makes writing director's commentary-ish pieces a little bit difficult. You would think that this means that I could go back to writing mini-reviews, but that's not quite right either.  Even though I don't have a part in creating the show any longer, I still have too much info on the background process (not to mention too close of a connection with those people onstage) which doesn't quite put me in the same place as an audience member. It's a little like a film critic having to write a review of his wife's film; he knows too much about the process she went through (not to mention that he knows her) to write a compelling and totally honest review.

So for this show, I am just going to watch.

¹ This comparison doesn't totally work, though; after all, readers only got one perspective on the behind-the-scenes stuff. I always wished that others like Jordan or Mary would perhaps write behind-the-scenes chronicles; from what I understand, my little reviews provided some new insight to my fellow mimes, and I wouldn't have minded getting a glimpse of their insight either.

Media Consumption

Books
Finished Infinite Jest. It took me about a month and a half. That's because it is a very long book.

Whenever people would see me with this long book, they would inevitably say, "What's it about?" This is the difficult thing about long books; the longer the book, the harder it becomes to describe it in a nice summarized pithy sentence. Even the description on the back of the book seems to acknowledge this. If I remember correctly, the synopsis throws around the words "comedy", "addiction", "entertainment", "tennis" and "philosophical" in a vague-ish fashion and then doesn't go much further.

So when people would ask me "What's it about?" I'd first try to be honest. "Oh, well part of it takes place in this tennis academy, and part of it is in this halfway house, and there's this movie that when people see it they become brain dead, and all of the years in the calendar are subsidized, so it takes place in the Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment, and..." I'm not sure where it'd go from there, but I would always feel as if I'd just ended a story with "You had to be there."

If you're still interested in what the book's about, I'll just leave it at this: addiction. And not necessarily addiction to drugs - addiction to entertainment, addiction to success, addiction to sex...

If any of this piques your interest and you don't mind being stuck with one book for a little longer than usual - and if you don't mind books where a strong conventional plot isn't the foremost priority - I'd highly recommend it to you.

In celebration, I enjoyed Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants (which felt like Goodnight Moon in comparison) followed by V for Vendetta, which - surprise - is way better than the movie. Currently working through Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, which is cool if you've got an interest in odd mental illnesses.

TV
Watching Season 1 of Twin Peaks with my Dad. The series was created by Eraserhead director David Lynch, who, as far as filmmakers go, is as weird as it gets. Twin Peaks is great - cinematic, funny, compelling, and flat out odd. I find it kind of a miracle that it was made in the first place, especially scenes like this, in which a dwarf dances during a dream sequence.

And it goes without saying that I'm loving Lost as always.

Movies
My hopes were incredibly low for Watchmen - that's because I wasn't so much of a fan of 300. 300 looked awesome but there wasn't a whole lot more to it than that, so I suspected the same out of Watchmen.

On the contrary, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Great attention to detail, neat atmosphere, and amazing visuals - but no surprise on that last one. Cons, though: the whole thing doesn't feel quite as "full" as the book. The movie starts to go downhill right after a cringe-inducing sex scene that rivaled Human Growth and Development in 6th grade in terms of watcher awkwardness. The movie doesn't go downhill because of the scene, though; it just so happens that everything after that scene feels a little rushed.

Regardless, it was enjoyable, but I speak as someone who's read the graphic novel. If you haven't, you might be a little lost.

Games
Not a lot of time for these. I've been playing Earthbound for the SNES every now and then. Any game where one of your enemies is a drunk hobo is a win in my book.

I've heard about this game, but I've never actually seen it "in action": it's Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, released for the Sega Genesis sometime in the nineties. I'm a little shocked to say that the game looks like it might actually be a little bit fun, some disturbing gameplay elements aside. Anyone else notice that whenever he saves one of the little children, his little blue bar gets bigger?

The highlight has to be about 1:59 into the video - trust me on this.

In school we learned this song - I think it was a Jewish song or a Quaker song or something - and it went something like this:

My hat, it has three corners
Three corners has my hat
And had it not three corners
It would not be my hat

Which sounds reasonable enough, but upon further inspection there is some really flawed logic going on here.

So here's the songwriter's theory: his hat has three corners and if one of those corners were to be removed¹, it would no longer be his hat. There's a key word there: my hat. It seems the songwriter isn't saying that if the hat lacked three corners, it wouldn't be a hat any longer; he's just saying that if the hat's amount of corners changed, the hat would no longer be his. Like, if the hat had more or less than three corners, he'd disown it.

And I think that's kind of fucked up. As far as I'm concerned, modifying the hat's number of corners is not like removing the bill on a baseball cap². If someone removed the bill on my baseball cap, I would have a pretty strong justification for getting rid of that hat, but I don't see how changing the number of corners on a hat makes it any less usable.

Basically, I don't think it's a good song to teach to the youngins, because I think the song is encouraging kids to enjoy people/things for superficial qualities and superficial qualities alone. In the context of a hat it's not so perverse, but what if we modified the lyrics ever so slightly?

My girlfriend has amazing tits
Amazing tits have my girlfriend³
And had she not amazing tits
She would not be my girlfriend

That's fucking shallow.

¹ Or if another corner was to be added - but that's a lot more difficult to pull off.

² Granted, I lack certain key knowledge and context regarding three cornered hats. Perhaps this was one of the defining features of the hat, like if you didn't have three corners, you were basically a schmuck.

³ In looking at these modified lyrics, we can also see that the line "three corners have my hat" is a trouble area; specifically, it seems the songwriter is trying to imply that our defining characteristics do not belong to us; instead, we belong to our identifying characteristics, e.g. rather than saying "I have blue eyes" we might say "My blue eyes have me." I could go further with this, but for the sake of simplicity I'll just say that this is another logical fallacy; as Yakov Smirnoff's "In Soviet Russia, [noun] [adjectives] you!" jokes prove, switching possessives around doesn't always end nice and tidily.

It has indeed been a while since I've written a post proper. This is thanks mostly to work, but never fear! a post regarding the pros and cons of work is coming soon.

In the meantime, this might be of interest to you: I attempted to combine two songs I love dearly (in different ways) about a year ago. The results weren't so spectacular - I couldn't figure out how to remove the drums in the "added in" song - but I thought it might just be fun for posterity's sake.

A while ago I linked to one of those literal music video interpretations. For the uninitiated: it's when a third party gets ahold of a music video and re-records the song - same backing track, but the vocals are modified to reflect exactly what's going on in the video. The results are always absurd and most often hilarious. Two favorites I've come across lately include this interpretation of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under The Bridge as well as a hilarious version of They Might Be Giants' Birdhouse in Your Soul - coincidentally, the latter is one of my favorite bands/songs/music videos.