Hurrah for degrees.info!

You may recall my last post in which I expressed some dismay at an advertisement for an online university website offering me a quick degree if I had an interest in "Public Speach". This didn't even take into account the whole idea of getting a degree in "Speach" on the Internet where people don't typically hear you speak. And I didn't even mention the fact that "speech" is a noun and they really meant "public speaking" (or perhaps "speeking").

Well, I'm proud to say that the good folks at degrees.info are continuing to pursue their fine tradition of academic excellence, despite the fact that they're still trying to sell me something using Christmas trees in April.

Popup ads irk me. The fact that the Google ad blocker is such a piece of crap that it blocks almost no ads at all irks me.

However occasionally an ad does make my life easier and brings me some joy. Witness the latest ad that I got that Google failed to block:



Again, you probably can't see what I immediately saw. Suffice to say the "Public Speach" is now not the only thing for which I could pursue a degree via this august institution.

I thought for a bit about a rant regarding this, but I did that before. Upon further consideration, I realized that a picture really is worth the thousand words I could have written.

OK, One More Time: I Have GOT to Get a Hobby

I received one of those e-mail lists of "Fun Facts" today. Among them was this:

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field.

I had to reply. I just had to. I would have been more likely to never breathe again than not reply. My work would have suffered. My home life would have fallen apart. You'd have seen me mumbling to myself beside a shopping cart downtown without the benefit of having a cell phone at my ear. There was simply no way to avoid it. Here's my response, verbatim:

I don't know why I do this, but....

That thing about a flea jumping 350 times its body length being equivalent to a human jumping the length of a football field just doesn't compute.

Assuming the average person is 5 1/2 feet tall, that's 1 5/6 or 1.8333 yards tall.

350 * 1.8333 yards is 641.666 yards.

A football field is 100 yards long.

So the assertion just doesn't match up. Jumping 350 times your body length would be the equivalent of jumping nearly 6 1/2 football fields.

So now I just don't believe any of it.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that this is why nobody wants to play with me. I'll leave it up to your imagination how the sender responded to this.

If the sender should read this, I apologize. Please don't stop sending me lists of fun facts. I promise never to over-analyze again. Really. Although if my head explodes, it'll be your fault.

Thank God people have stopped sending around "Stephen Wright" quotes that are full of lines by Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx. I was really busy there for a while.