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For the family Super Bowl gathering, I made Puppy Chow. That’s right, I made Puppy Chow not Muddy Buddies.

Since I don’t have the recipe memorized, I turned to the internet for help. There were several results, so I compared and contrasted them. They were basically the same, so I went with the one that made the most sense to me.

But in my research, I came across Paula Deen’s recipe for Puppy Chow. It wasn’t much different from any of the others, but I found it not-so-useful. Here it is.

The reason it is not so useful is because it is too vague. “1 box cereal”, “1 bag chocolate chips”, “1 bag sugar”. For the cereal, I saw two options for box sizes. For chocolate chips, three sizes. I didn’t bother checking how many sizes sugar comes in, as I knew this was not the recipe for me.

I ignored this one and went with one that had actual measurements, like 2 cups of chocolate chips (although I bumped it up to 3 to increase the chocolate-to-cereal ratio, per the comments on the recipe site).

If you’re cooking, feel free to improvise and use whatever looks right. But if you’re producing recipes, please use unambiguous ingredient amounts.

If everyone claims to be unique, what good is that? When everyone is unique then no one is unique, to paraphrase my favorite movie quote.

If you want to be unique, don’t claim to be unique, as that will just lump you into the crowd. Go accomplish something. No one ever got labeled as “unique” by doing nothing.

And these stick figures are not using the term “snowflake” in a pejorative sense that is common these days. It just happens to be the object that is most associated with uniqueness.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Work should be more like a video game: if you defeat your boss in battle, you get to advance to the next department.
• No one can say the word “wamt”. It is always pronounced “wampt”. Or “wamut” but that doesn’t work either. And no, it’s not a real word.
• If someone in a work call says “Sorry, I was multi-tasking” that really means they were doing something else during the call. If they really were able to multi-task, they would not have missed the question or topic of discussion.
• With apologies to Margaret Thatcher: if you have to tell someone you’re not afraid of them, then you actually are afraid of them.
• Do not liken your woman to 400-grit sandpaper. Even though it is designated as “extra fine”, she won’t appreciate the comparison.

I was behind a Tesla the other day and noticed it resembled something familiar. So I decided to demonstrate that here.

First, start with the back view of a Tesla.

Second, make it the right color

Next, adjust the color of the glass

Then, expand the glass upwards.

Finally, give it a monocle and a mouth.

Tada!

Anyway, that’s what I usually see when I’m behind a Tesla – the roof rails remind me of overalls. It’s a Minion-mobile.

This is a guide for how to play the game Herd Mentality. This is a game in the spirit of Apples to Apples, but you’re trying to please the crowd rather than one specific person. I like it better than Apples to Apples, because I’m not subjected to the whims of someone else’s mood. Some people may like it less, because they get less of a chance to be silly.

1. How do I win?
By being the first player to 7 (or 5, or 10, we change it depending on how the game is going and how people are feeling) points.

2. How do I get points?
You get a point when your answer matches the majority’s answer.

3. How do people answer?
Each turn, the leader/reader guy will take a question from the box and read it to the group. Everyone writes down an answer. Once everyone has an answer, you read them aloud and compare/tally answers. If there is a majority answer, everyone who has that answer gets a point. Slight correction, it doesn’t need to be a majority, just an answer from more people than any other answer.

4. How do I not win?
If, when the answers are tallied, your answer is the only one by itself, you get the pink cow (pink, because it stands out from the herd). Note that multiple lone answers cancel each other out and the cow does not change ownership. If you have the cow, you can’t win – you can still accumulate points but you can’t win unless someone else earns the cow away from you.

5. How do I let other people know they are taking too long to write down an answer?
You moo at them.

It is a simple game, and can accommodate a wide number of players. It used to be that for family gatherings with more than 10 people, the only game we could play was Apples to Apples. It’s nice to have more options.

There, now go play Herd Mentality.

It is time once again to update Some Blog Site readers on the results of my Some Fun Site project to create a more accurate football prediction method.
The 2022 NFL season is over, and here are the most accurate methods for predicting regular-season game results (wins-losses):

• MPWHFA: 61%
• MYW: 57%
• MPWLS: 56%
• DPE: 56%

The Home Field Advantage factor finally came back into play this year, after still being an effect from the no-crowd games of the Covid era.

If you think you have a formula that can predict the winner of an NFL game better than 61% of the time, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
(For the ideas behind the methods, please visit the Some Fun Site page.)

Okay, okay, it is 2023 at this point, but the results are headlines as 2022 because they match with the 2022 predictions made in 2022 for the 2022 season. Also, the results are not all-haiku, just the predictions were. A more accurate title would be “Results for the All-Haiku Predictions made in 2022”.

Before the bowl games commenced for this past college football season, I made some predictions. Here, for your reading enjoyment, is the tally of those predictions. Note that the results are not in haiku form, in contrast to the predictions.
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