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Another post about Saturday’s trip to the zoo – yes, it’s about another sign…

I noticed this sign at the zoo.

I know this one has nothing to do with animals. The zoo has a nice play area for children, in case they tire of animals and just want to run around and do whatever. This sign was encouraging the kids to develop scientific minds have fun while playing in the stream.

It’s not a real stream, but it plays one on TV. This “stream” is the child’s-play-area equivalent to those plastic-liner-and-electric-pump waterfalls that people put in their backyards. Yes, it is a stream, just not a natural stream. But it is fun for the kids, especially those who don’t have access to real streams where they live.

Anyway, back to the sign… It seems this sign is somewhat related to Yoda: “Do, or do not. There is no try“.

Hmm… free marketing advice time, worth the price of admission. Mountain Dew should adopt a new slogan: “Dew or Dew not, there is no try” There are obvious licensing agreement issues with the Star Wars people, but it could work. Or there’s the way I usually remember the phrase: “There is no try, only do.” They could use “There is no thirst, only Dew“.

Anyway, back to the sign… The part I don’t like is “try and block”. If you’re going to try blocking it, and then block it, why bother trying first? Just do it. They meant for you to “try to block” the water.

Remember, never try and do something unless you really want a trial run before the actual event. Try to do something. Or, like Yoda, you could just do something. Even hard things.

“Nor let us try the Lord, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the serpents.”
– 1 Corinthians 10:9

We went to the zoo this past Saturday. It was a good day for the zoo, weather-wise and sign-wise.

First off, this sign, seen inside a new building (“new” as in “just opened about a month ago”).

It clearly states that this particular building does not use any light bulbs. Not reduced use of light bulbs but NO LIGHT BULBS. We are green, but it’s not enough for us to feel good about being green, we have to promote ourselves to you by showing how green we are. Even our signs are colored green.

It’s a zoo. I want the signs to be about the animals. I suppose that “animals” could be extended to “planet”, and “planet” could be localized to mean “building’s lighting systems”. My recommendation would be to put that type of information on a brochure or webpage so that people who cared about it could find it.

I suppose I could have ignored the sign. If all this was about being solarly responsible, I probably wouldn’t have written this post. I might have mentioned it, just in passing, maybe something about do not look directly into a solatube. The building had both skylights and solatubes, and those solatubes are bright. And they worked quite well to light the room.

So why am I rambling about the zoo’s claims of being environmentally friendly? Take a look at this view of the sign.

Do you see the irony? The sign is in the lower right corner. What do you see near the top left? That’s right, a fixture containing 8 light bulbs. And they are lit. In the middle of the afternoon. On a sunny day. You can tell it’s a sunny day because of how bright the solatube at the top left is.

In case you’re not convinced that those are them newfangled electric lights, here’s a closer shot.

Those are definitely powered by electricity. And there were more of those fixtures in this room, so there were at least 16 light bulbs.

So the sign should say “We are green and do not use any light bulbs in our buildings unless we want to highlight a wall with no displays on it.”

Overall, the zoo is great. We are going to keep going back. But the signs could use a little help.

“Therefore their inhabitants were short of strength,They were dismayed and put to shame;They were as the vegetation of the field and as the green herb,As grass on the housetops is scorched before it is grown up.”
– 2 Kings 19:26

Inspired by another blog, I decided to put together my own Room of the House quiz.  The two main things that prompted me were these:

1. The questions didn’t have the options that I wanted to choose, and
2. The comment left by js was more realistic than the actual answers.

So I made up a quiz – I’m tempted to trademark SarcastiQuiz – that has other options and balances the all-positive responses of the other quiz. Plus, the other quiz has only 5 answers: Library, Living Room, Kitchen, Bathroom, and Bedroom. I have not used any of those rooms in my quiz – you get 8 other “rooms”.

So take the House Room Personality Quiz and have fun. Remember that all questions and answers were completely fabricated on a whim and should be taken even less seriously than the professional, psychiatrist-approved quizzes on other websites.

“For to this end also I wrote, so that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things.”
– 2 Corinthians 2:9

We read somewhere that families are supposed to have a conversation during dinner, so we tried it. Here is how it went…

The question for everyone to answer was “What’s your favorite fruit?”
I answered “Mine’s raspberry.”

Then it was the 3-year-old’s turn. We guessed a few things, to which he shook his head no. Finally he answered “grapes“.
“What color grapes?” my wife asked.
“Green.” he said.

That went well enough.  Then it was the 5-year-old’s turn.  He thought, then answered “chocolate-malt berries“.

If I had known chocolate was an acceptable answer…

On another day, the 3-year-old and I had this little exchange:
“Eat your peas.”
“Those aren’t peas. They’re little grapes. They just taste like peas.”

Okay.

At a relative’s birthday party, I was pleased to see that the gracious host and hostess had provided other desserts, not just the standard birthday cake. I am a fan of the ice cream candy bars. As I grabbed one, I noticed the marketing hype on the front of the box, claiming that each bar has only 90 calories.

Just for fun, I checked the nutrition information on the side of the box. It did not claim 90 calories per bar.

I assume the nutrition information is correct in listing 80 calories, and perhaps the brightly-colored promotion deal on the box front is outdated. Why leave that claim on there if it’s wrong? Who wants to make something have more calories? Since when is that a selling point?

I just had my second drive with rain-sensing wipers, and they are the greatest thing since intermittent wipers.

Before I bought my first car (at age 21 … my first motorcycle was at age 18, but that’s another story), I used to think that car ads were wasting their space by promoting intermittent wipers. Not only did all cars have them anyway, but even if they did have just off-low-high, the driver could just switch between off and low to handle inconsistent rain.

Then I got my first car. It was about 10 years old at the time, and I think the person who ordered the car forgot to hand in the page with the options checked. If it was optional or a convenience or a luxury, it was not on that car.

As you may have guessed, that car did not have intermittent wipers. After a winter and spring with snow and rain, I vowed never again to mock intermittent wipers (wiper no wiping, wiper no …). Okay, maybe I didn’t vow, but my appreciation of their usefulness greatly increased. Having to adjust the wiper switch every 15 seconds gets very annoying after a while.

Fast forward, umm, a few years to this year and now I’m in a vehicle (no, not mine, it’s for work) that has the rain-sensing wipers. I didn’t know the vehicle had the fancy-pants wipers (someone else was driving, otherwise I would have seen and used the wiper controls). All I noticed was that the driver wasn’t doing anything other than driving (both hands on the steering wheel) and the wipers were speeding up and slowing down based on how much water was on the windshield.

The intermittent wipers were a good improvement over the previous standard wipers, and the smart wipers are just as good a step after that. These days, I notice that I adjust the intermittent speed as the rain increases or decreases or stops. With the sensing wipers, you don’t even have to turn them on or off – just leave them on the automatic setting. When the rain starts, the wipers start going automatically, and when the rain stops, well, you get the picture.

Just do not, I repeat, do not, forget to turn them off when you go into a car wash.

Oh, if you’re looking at a vehicle, make sure that you can turn off the feature easily. If there’s one thing we learned from Wall-E, it’s that automatic features must have a manual override switch.

“When He set a limit for the rain And a course for the thunderbolt,”
– Job 28:26

Previously, I had written how I did not like gas stations that printed your receipt for you at the pump, whether you wanted it or not. That is still very annoying.

I found a gas station that apparently is annoyed at people who leave the receipts at the gas pump.

Because I ordered a car wash at this gas station, I wanted the receipt. So I did not get to see whether this station gave me the option of not printing the receipt.

On the other hand, maybe driving-off-without-paying incidents are rigorously enforced in that town, and the gas station just wants their customers to be protected against mistaken incarcerations.

“Show me a sign for good, That those who hate me may see it and be ashamed, Because You, O LORD, have helped me and comforted me. ”
– Psalm 86:17