I love the Big Mac sandwich

I remember a time before I ever had a Big Mac sandwich.

I was a kid, eating a Happy Meal at McDonald's. I was eating a flat hamburger. This was a time before McDonald's employed an army of chemical engineers to make the hamburger into the fluffy solid thing that it is today. Back in my day, the McDonald's hamburger competed with a pile of three credit cards for thinness.

This was also a McDonald's without a PlayPlace. So, I slowly savored those delicious fries and the then huge-to-me, yet rather flat hamburger.

While savoring, I looked around and saw a rather large man opening his big mouth very wide and taking a giant bite of an enormous sandwich. I looked at my tiny hamburger that I was holding between my thumb and index finder. Then I looked over at a delicious advertisement for the Big Mac sandwich, looked back at the man, and I wanted a Big Mac more than anything else.

I don't remember how many more years went by before I actually had a Big Mac sandwich. I think I probably blacked out with wave after wave of ecstasy when I finally had one for the first time.

For me, the Big Mac sandwich is a treat. It's like a once a month kind of thing. I'd rather have a Big Mac than a King Sized Butterfinger Bar. They both have about the same calories, and I love Butterfinger, but I love the Big Mac sandwich more. And I'd much much rather have a Big Mac than a 44 ounce Super Gulp of Coke, which also has the same calories.

And here's some trivia for you. The Big Mac Extra Value Meal has been meal #1 at all McDonald's for years and years and years.

I had the Big Carl at Carl's Jr. and it is a superior burger, but I still love the Big Mac more.

And then a few years ago, I saw this billboard on the freeway that had a huge Big Mac sandwich, and it said, "The Big Mac. My first love."

I almost cried. It was true. And I was pathetic. I think I love everything about McDonald's but that depressing advertisement. I even own stock in McDonald's. I boycotted Big Macs for like a month until I went back to my once a month schedule of eating a Big Mac.

If all you eat is four big macs every day and drink a lot of water, then that's only about 2000 calories, which is how much you're supposed to have anyway. Hmm.

It has everything I love that I would put into a sandwich and nothing I wouldn't. I don't mind good tomatoes, but I dislike the inconsistency of tomatoes in all of the other sandwiches, and the Big Mac doesn't have tomatoes. They even wrote a song about all of the good ingredients in a Big Mac.

I guess I've thought a lot about the Big Mac sandwich.

And then they made the Mac Snack Wrap. It's about half the calories of the Big Mac sandwich and it has a little more iceberg lettuce, so I started ordering three of them once or twice a week. It was like they took all of the goodness and tastiness of a Big Mac and put it in a healthy pita wrap.

I realized that more than the Big Mac, I love the Big Mac flavor.

Then I had a vision of the near future. It was one of those clear, lucid, unmistakable, certain visions you read about. The vision was of a few years from now when McDonald's starts serving Big Mac Flavored Shakes™. They're all of the goodness of a Big Mac plus the goodness of milk.

The future is bright today.

Links:

• Paris Hilton's Carl's Jr. commercial
• If I would have bought my McDonald's stock back in 1965
• Someone who's trying to lose weight and eat a Big Mac
• McDonald's wants you to what?

Photo courtesy ParkerDeen, purchased on istockphoto.

Crazy texting aunt bot business idea

Here's a business idea. Please somebody take my business idea, royalty free, and make it happen. I'd totally pay for this service, and I'm sure other people would, too.

I was at a party once. You know one of those parties where you can't leave, and you don't want to talk to anyone, but you want to seem like you're busy, so you text your friends?

I texted all of my friends, and none of them returned my texts. Maybe because it was 2 in the morning. But then I decided to pretend like I was really texting, and so I started texting Google, 466453. And all I could think of doing was asking Google definitions of words I wasn't sure what they meant. like if you text "D ubiquitous" to 466453, then it will text you back, "Glossary: ubiquitous: omnipresent: being present everywhere at once. Source:  wordnetweb.princeton.edu"

But there were only so many words that I only kind of halfway knew that I could text Google for the definitions of, so my dictionary fun only lasted about ten minutes. I thought about texting Cha Cha. But that was before I googled Cha Cha and figured out what Cha Cha's number is.

And, I was super lonely at this party. Even though there were tons of people there that I could have talked to I was feeling antisocial, as far as talking. So, I thought, "What if there was a computer program I could text instead of talking to these people?"

And then I spent the next couple months thinking through that idea. Here's how it would work.

Summary:
There's a bot, or computerized robot, that simulates a real person, and with whom you can text. You'll text a number, similar to texting a real person, and you'll get a response back from a computer, but it will simulate a real person.

Example conversation:
Crazy aunt: Hey, John, I haven't heard from you in like a week. What's up?
John: oh, sorry, i've had all this drama with my girlfriend. what's up with you?
Crazy aunt. Sorry to hear about that drama. That reminds me of when I was at a play in high school, and I was on the stage and blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: blah blah blah
Crazy aunt: I've talked a lot. Tell me more about what you were saying?
John: well, my girlfriend told me to come over, that she had a surprise for me, so i went over to her house expecting some action and she made me a big bowl of tofu.
Crazy aunt: Oh, wow, what a story! Can I share it with some friends?
John: sure
Crazy aunt: Do you have another story you could tell me?
John: not right now
Crazy aunt: That reminds me of a story where blah blah blah blah....

And then, a week later:
Fred: Hey, Crazy Aunt! How are you today?
Crazy aunt: I'm great, but I was just talking to a friend of mine, and he told me a story. He said, "well, my girlfriend told me to come over, that she had a surprise for m
Crazy aunt: e, so i went over to her house expecting some action and she made me a big bowl of tofu."
Fred: HAHAHAHAH. lol. OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!11!!!!!!
Crazy aunt: I liked that story, too. I think I'll keep sharing it!

Access:
The main value of this is that you can access it when you only have access to texting as an option, such as if you have a crappy phone and you're at a loud party. However, you can also use a web interface, or also an app to access it. If you're texting, then everyone assumes you're texting a person, not playing a game, so this is to simulate a person.

AI:
Because this is primarily a story bot, then the AI can be really simple at first. Most people when they're talking to each other don't really listen to the other  person, anyway. So, the AI would be relatively simple to program at first, but would eventually grow into something very impressive. The database would also be simple at first, but would eventually be insanely expansive, so the bot could eventually say something like, "Hey, your birthday's in March, and you told me a few months ago you like artificial cherry flavoring. Did you know that the Cherry Blossom Festival next year in Macon Georgia starts on March 18th?"

Harvesting incoming texts:
Part of the agreement of texting the text bot is agreeing to have your stories retold. Pretty soon on there will be a conversation like,

Crazy aunt: Is it okay if I share your stories with other people? Anonymously, of course.
Fred: okay
Crazy aunt: Cool, we can have much more interesting conversations now. Log into the website at any time to change your preferences.

How is this different than other bots?
I tried a bunch of the IM bots out there, and within a couple of minutes each of them said, "I don't know how to respond to that. Please try again." The difference is that if you say something crazy to the crazy aunt bot, like, "i eat live toads," then she'll just text back, "oh, that's interesting. that reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who was skydiving in oregon last year. blah blah blah."

Also, because this is story based, then it avoids the problems of other chat bots just recycling a few answers to specific questions. For example, in response to "what is the circumference of the earth?" chat-bot.com cycles through only the answers of  "i know it," "75,075 km," and "what the fuck?" And, that's it. Nothing else, even if you text it the same thing a few dozen times like I did.

Because this texting bot is obsessed with telling stories, the texting bot will almost always respond in a different way to asking the same question over and over again. It will start out with a few hundred different stories, and will eventually have millions of stories to tell.

Also, most chat bots will only respond when you say something to them. They're completely reactive. This texting bot will have the algorithm of a real person's texts, but be a little more forgiving. For example, it will send you a text on your birthday. It'll send you a text when it hasn't heard from you in a week. Sometimes you'll have to text it twice before it will respond. You might have to text it five times at 3am to "wake it up," and if you do, it might respond, "WTF???? I'M SLEEPING??!!!" And then a few minutes later, "That reminds me, did I tell you a story of a friend of mine who was sleeping and..."

Why a crazy aunt?
Everyone knows an older woman who loves people and loves stories. She's not really crazy, but just crazily enthusiastic about telling stories and she really loves the people she talks to. I realized that this kind of person would actually be much easier to mold into AI than the traditional approach of AI chat bots which are focused on teaching the AI vocabulary, and coming up with witty responses to stock questions.

Future growth:
This will start out with just one bot, the "crazy aunt bot," but would eventually expand to a bunch of different computerized personalities you could text. It will start out with a simple database of stories and only a few pieces of information that it records about you.

Eventually this will have a really flushed out story database, that won't need to be maintained by humans, because it will ask people for feedback on if stories are actually any good.

Crazy aunt: Did i tell you a story a friend of mine told me, "dsakjj sakdj#@@#J@#J j@#JK#@J#K F****&D*&*"?
User: Auntie, that's not a real story
Crazy aunt: Are you saying that I shouldn't tell anyone else that story?
User: Yep!
Crazy aunt: Okay, I'll purge that story entirely then. Did I tell you a story of a friend of mine who was on the toilet and..."


Revenue:
Here're the ways to generate income with this idea.

• Website advertising
• Premium add-ons, such as being able to have the text bot
• Premium sex text bot, which is where I imagine most of the revenue will actually come from. SB: Give it to me big boy. BB: How about I text you a 5?
• Pay for the ability to change the bot's name, signature, and phone number. That way you can pretend to your friends that you have a real girlfriend when you really don't.

Cost:

Now that google has made Google Voice available for free for everyone in the US and Canada, one programmer could create a prototype of this idea for free. Eventually this would cost as much as a company wanted to spend on it.

Longevity:
This idea would have been best about a year ago. Eventually people will go away from a text message being a primary method of communication, with texting being replaced by some kind of iPhone app. But this should remain viable in the texting/website form for about 5 years, and then when another method of communication emerges, because of the extensive back end database, it should be easy to merge to a new method of communication.

Also, this could integrate almost all future AI advances into its logic, so this business potentially could be around for about 100 years.

Links:
Check out these links, and get a Google Voice account if you don't have one.

• http://www.chacha.com/ , ask questions and get answers
• http://sms.google.com/ , learn definitions and get flight times
• http://www.chat-bot.com/ , an online chat bot
• http://voice.google.com , send texts to the US and Canada for free
• http://macotar.blogspot.com/ , top 10 inventions by my cousin

Photo courtesy of PhotoVic, purchased on istockphoto.

I really wanted really good real Chinese food

Last week, I walked into a Chinese restaurant in Salt Lake a few minutes before they closed.  Here's the exchange I had with the server, as closely as I can remember.

"Are you still open?"

"For take out only. What you want?"

"What's your favorite thing on the menu?"

"My favorite thing? So many things, depends. What you want?"

"Well, I want what your favorite thing is."

"You like chicken, pork, or beef?"

"Chicken"

"You like deep fried or not deep fried."

"Not deep fried."

"I like kung pow or Szechuan chicken."

"What do you like tonight?"

"You like spicy or not spicy?"

"Spicy"

"You sure?"

"Yes"

"You trust me?"

"I trust you."

"Okay, Szechuan chicken. That will be $8.34"

She smiled, and I could tell by her smile that I had, by that sequence of questions, actually stumbled upon what her favorite Chinese dish actually was.

It might not be immediately apparent why this was such a super significant conversation for me. But, I was at a Chinese restaurant yesterday, and I tried to have the same conversation, and I ended up with breaded, deep fried, sweet and sour chicken, which was okay, but not great, and definitely not the server's favorite. It was just what she thinks Americans like. So, the conversation last week was a once in a lifetime conversation.

This wasn't regular Szechuan chicken. It was Chinese-style Szechuan chicken, the kind real Chinese people eat. Not just a pile of chicken with a little Szechuan sauce, but all these great vegetables, perfect seasoning, and just a little bit of chicken, just like they have in China. And the server gave me a little cup of spices on the side. Not just powdered spices, but cool spices that looked homemade. I think maybe she made it just for me, just like she would make for herself.

While driving home, I kept stopping and eating the delicious meal.

I'm really not sure how to have this conversation again, even though I will probably spend my life trying to replicate it. Because I don't think there's a way to say in Chinese, "I have this suspicion that your favorite dish will be the tastiest thing I'll ever taste. So will you please tell me what your favorite thing here is? I will order it!"

Photo courtesy fishwork, purchased from  istockphoto

Semi-related links:

• A recipe for Szechuan chicken
• Another recipe for Szechuan chicken
• Another, more informal recipe for Szechuan chicken
• Chew, a comic book where there is no chicken

I drive like a grandma

My grandma taught me how to drive.

She taught me a lot of crazy stuff that I never use, like always drive in the middle lane when there are three or more lanes, and signal about a minute before you need to turn.

But the most important thing she taught me about driving was conservativeness.  I realized from Grandma that it's a lot more important to avoid accidents than it is to be right when driving. I think Grandma and I are in the minority. A lot of people have a lot of road rage.

I was driving on 8th North in Orem, heading toward the freeway.

A little ahead, I saw a car pull out across the three lanes of 8th North traffic to make a very dangerous left turn. By the way that car was driving, I could tell that they were just looking for clear westbound traffic, and were just hoping that eastbound was clear.

Another car from the other side of the road did the same thing, but in the opposite direction. So at this point, there were two cars in the middle of a very busy road trying to do synchronized turns.

A third car appeared, and they were all crawling around the middle a the road where they didn't belong. And I was leading a pack of cars driving sixty miles an hour toward this conglomeration.

A bunch of red flags go up in my head, and I slow down. Really, really slow, so I have no chance of hitting them, or being part of the huge impending conflagration if they get forcefully hit by someone on the other side of the street.  Eventually, the crazy cars all cleared out of the road, but I still drove slowly for ten more seconds.

This event was significant. Utah has some really bad drivers, but these were three of the worst drivers here, stuck in the middle of the second biggest road in Utah County at the exact same time.

It warranted an extra ten seconds of extreme slowness, in my opinion. I think most crashes happen in the aftermath of someone else doing something stupid. I'm trying to avoid accidents, not be right.

The guy behind me honked at me, flipped me off, swerved around me without signalling, passed me, and stopped at the stoplight on 8th North and State Street. A couple seconds later I got to the stoplight, too.

We waited there together for two long minutes until the stoplight turned green.

Photo purchased from Rendery on istockphoto.

Semi-related links:

• My somewhat lengthy goodbye to my grandma 
• PDF of the Utah Driver's Manual
• Red-Green colorblindness test online
• A blog about another cool grandma

What is this? Some kind of joke?

I walked into a bar in Idaho. It was one of those locals only bars where I stick out like a sore thumb. Actually, I stick out like a sore thumb in any bar, but those're a few other stories.

In this particular bar, I stuck out like a sore thumb because I didn't have a mustache, because I was under seventy, and because I didn't drive a truck into the bar.

The guy I sat down next to was drinking a can of Olympia. Now, Olympia is the cheapest, wateriest beer in the whole world. Even more so than Natural Light, but they make it out of tasty Washington water, so you don't mind the watery taste so much.

I asked the bartender, "What beers do you have?"

She said, "Um, Bud, Bud Light, Corona, Natural Light, Keystone Light, Keystone Red, um, um, um. How about you tell me what you're looking for, and I'll tell you if we have it."

That question severely perplexes me, because I can't say, "Well, I'm looking for Bohemia, New Belgium Skinny Dip, New Belgium Mothership Wit, Chang, Lion Stout, or any non-wheat beer imported from Germany."

We're in Idaho, remember?  And she just rattled off the five cheapest beers I could get at the gas station a block down the street. It would have been rude in that bar to request a high-falutin' beer.

I say "Keystone Red," because I've never heard of Keystone Red, even though I was almost sure she meant Keystone Ice when she said Keystone Red.

To my surprise, she returned with a red Keystone. Hmm.

"$1.50" she said.

I fished three bucks out of my wallet, in accordance with my tipping philosophy, and put it down deliberately on the counter, and loudly said, "Thank you," kind of indicating she should keep the whole three bucks. Because a buck fifty tip is a whole haul in Idaho, and I was trying to be kind of a big shot.

Now I should probably go back and describe the personality of this super ditsy bartender, but I'm sure she had a good heart, so I'll get on with the story.

The next thing I see is that she drops one of my dollars on the floor, and then she reaches down to pick it up. She brings me back my change, but it's only fifty cents.


Then I look up at one handwritten sign, and it's in Spanish, warning Mexicans to not come in if they're under 21 años.

Then I look over at another handwritten sign, and it says Keystone, $1.25.

Hmm.

This whole instance left me with a ton of questions.

• Was the real price of the Keystone $1.25, and she overcharged me a quarter?
• Did she think that I mistakenly gave her an extra dollar, and she stealthily pocketed the extra buck?
• Does she think I'm a cheap ass because she thinks I only tipped her fifty cents?
• Is my extra dollar still on the floor somewhere?
• Did every single one of the above happen?

Hmm. I drank and I left, feeling like I got ripped off, but it's super weird because it was only three bucks, and I was going to give it to her anyway.

Photo purchased from Marina_Ph on istockphoto.

Semi-related links:

• Another blogger who also got a haul
• The titular joke
• Cheap tipping
• Church of the Living Water in Olympia, not related to beer

People are zombies too, or "I thought you spelled jugs with two g's"

You know when you're a kid and you get so insanely nervous about something that you contort your hand behind your back and grab on to your other arm also behind your back?  And then your shoulder goes all crooked, even though you're trying really hard to stand up perfectly straight, and then old ladies tell you to stand up straighter and it makes you even more nervous and more lopsided?  And then the old ladies angrily bring out a ruler and then you lopsidedly run away?

Well, that's probably not you, but that was me. Picture my gangling self as a kid running away from those old ladies a lot.

In my apartment complex, everyone goes to bed at 9pm. Everyone but me, that is. It's very bizarre actually.

Late one night a few weeks ago, I arrived home at around 11pm. I noticed a tall, very slim figure in between a couple of cars. I watched this figure and noticed one shoulder protruding oddly higher than the other shoulder.  I stopped my car and watched some more. She carried two gallons of milk in her arms, and a bunch of groceries, too. Her awkward, lopsided appearance probably came from attempting to hold way too much.

I should have been chivalrous and offered to help carry the groceries, but instead, I just watched from the safety of my car.

Another of these tall, slender figures emerged, again carrying two jugs of milk and other sundries, again lurching and hunching awkwardly.  And she looked strangely similar to the first woman.

As they walked toward their apartment, all I could think about was how carrying way too much weight strangely contorted their bodies in interesting ways.

After they disappeared into the darkness, I thought, "hmm, those sisters were cute, I should have looked at their faces."

I've never seen those women before or since. I'm not sure exactly where they disappeared to in such a mystical way.  I was left with a ton of pressing questions, most notably this, "What do skinny chicks do with four gallons of milk?"

Photo courtesy of TomFullum purchased on istockphoto.

Semi-related links:

• Video on how to improve your posture
• How to survive the zombie apocalypse
• Amazing Amy, the 55-year-old contortionist
• The comic that inspired the title of this blog

Solve it all with Tea!

LahTeaDah and I are guest posters on each others' blogs today. Here's her post, and check out my post on her excellent blog, lahteadah.blogspot.com 

Bad Flu, Bad Hair, Bad Break-up, Bad Attitude - anything adorned with the word “bad”, could easily be cured with a simple sip of Tea, as my mother tells me.  Tea and course a side dish of her mothering “tell me everything that happened!?”

Growing up as a teen many “bad day” stories graced my mother’s ears and of course the world ended every time one of these days would show its face in my life.  From "he said, she said" rumors to Math Class Drama (seriously, when am I ever going to need to know the square root of a circle's circumference) to the famous questions I got at least once a day while petting my hair….. “is it real?”. They say Life can sometimes gives you Lemons and if it does to make Lemonade. Well, I never liked Lemonade; so instead, I’d would use Lemons as sour crocodile tears which my mother could always stop.

As I try to get to the root of how she could work her magic like that, I was beginning to worry that maybe I would need to know how to find the square root of something. DAMN IT I’m screwed! I analyzed every “world ending” drama I pulled…..and I started to see a pattern! We’d always start with a cup of Tea. A dash of Cream and a small sprinkle of Sugar for her and a stream of Cream with a dumping of Sugar for me.  I believe Tea, is the absolute cure all for anything.

• Stomach Aches? Warm and Soothe it with Tea!
• Break-Up? Comfort yourself with a cozy cup of Tea!
• Credit Card Debt? Wash your Stress away with a sweet sip of Tea!
• Work Over-load? Take a break, visit your happy place and Calm yourself with Tea!
• Bad Hair? Sip from your finest china, you’ll feel like a rockstar!
• Cheating Spouse? Make some Tea – extra hot, throw it in their face…you’ll feel a millions times better about the situation!

Tell me something that can’t be cured with a warm, cozy, calming, comforting, eye scolding cup of Tea?

Photo credit probably of the author's mother. This is a picture of the author as a kid, presumably right before being comforted by tea.