Which is worse: loss of thumb or loss of speach?

I was looking over our life insurance policy yesterday and I came across some interesting percentages. It seems like someone calculated the statistical significance of an intense round of "Would You Rather."  You get a certain percentage of your life insurance if you loose certain parts of your body. That have figured out what they worse thing is to lose and assign it a monetary value. Here's what I found out by reading the small print:

• You know, of course, that with loss of life you get 100%.
• But you also get 100% if you lose two members (hand, foot, or eye), or if you become completely blind.
• If you lose one hand, one foot, or one eye, you get 50%.
• If you lose your hearing or speech, you get 50%.
• If you lose both your thumb and your index finger, you get 25%.
• If you lose only your thumb, you get 10% (except if you live in Maine or Vermont. I guess thumb-loss is a common enough occurrence in those states that they don't even consider it a problem.)
• If two limbs become paralyzed, you get 25%, but only if you live in Washington or New York.

 ...

So let me get this straight. If I lose a foot, I get 50% of my policy. But if I become paralyzed in both of my legs, I'll only get 25% ... if I live in Washington or New York.

And If I lose all my fingers except my thumb, I get nothing.

I also have a hard time thinking that loosing a foot and and eye is the same thing as dying. I mean, that person can still contribute a lot, right?

So to answer my original question, loss of speech is TWICE as bad as loosing your thumb.

Belt Loops

Do you remember P.E. in elementary school? I do. I didn't like it. Especially when we had to do sit-ups and I wore jeans that day. The belt loop cut into my back and made me want to cry.

So I usually ended up doing this weird move that was kind of "side-up" to avoid the belt loop.

Or a "bum-up."

I hated sit-ups with jeans.

Bitter Taste

Have you ever been really nervous and you lose your appetite? It happens to me every time I'm anxious. A few weeks ago I was having interviews with different schools for getting into optometry programs, and I could never eat breakfast the morning of the interview. I had this nasty taste in my mouth--kind of like raw cocoa and pennies. I had never really noticed it before, but I recognized it as taste in my mouth that only happened when I was nervous.

I thought that this bitter taste might adrenaline. I only realized this when Katie quoted that line from The West Wing when that therapist said "It was the bitter taste in your mouth..."

Anyway, so now that I know that about myself, I can eat when I'm nervous.

...

I just tried looking up other sources to verify this claim that adrenaline tastes bitter...and I couldn't find any. Some people said that adrenaline has no taste. It's a hormone that circulates in your blood and binds to receptor cells. The bitter tastes comes from the fight-or-flight response because your salivary systems momentarily shuts down. I guess that makes some sense.

But tasting adrenaline sounds cooler.

Toxie

If you want a good explanation of the financial meltdown, watch this video made by NPR's Planet Money. It's pretty good.



And Alison says "hi." I'm helping her with her homework and tests because I'm the nicest guy. And she gives me chocolate milk.

EDIT: Here is a picture I fixed up on paint. Enjoy.

**GASP!**

Simplifying the Fine Print

Last week there was a book that shot to the Number One spot on Amazon's best sellers, but only for that one day. It was Machine of Death, written by a collection of many people and edited by Ryan North (creator of Dinosaur Comics) and some other funny guys. It's about a machine that predicts the way you will die. It looks pretty interesting.

Anyway, I was looking around on their website and saw that they are offering a PDF version of the book for FREE. No joke. You can download your own free copy of the book here. They explain their decision to do so this way:

Please find below the entirety of Machine of Death as a free, downloadable PDF.
Why are we doing this? Aren’t we worried about hurting our book sales?
In a word: no. You have proven time and again that you are willing to pay for content that you find valuable. You have shown that you are driven to share material that you fall in love with. And we are committed to ensuring that you can experience our work whether you can afford to buy a book or not; whether you live in a country that Amazon ships to or not; whether you have space in your life for a stack of paper or not.

I think this is awesome. I'm all about collaboration and sharing. I was looking at their website and the things these guys are doing are pretty cool. For instance, this book is not copyrighted, but are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. This means you are free to share this work in anyway you want (email, photocopy, print out, etc.) just as long as you attribute the work to the author, the manuscript remains unbroken, and it's used for non-commercial purposes.

You know how I was able to figure that out?

Because this is what their license agreement looks like:

Isn't that so refreshing? It's so simple, so clean. You can see it for yourself here.

(I'm letting that screen shot count as my Paint artwork of the day. I copied and pasted into Paint, after all.) 

Great Joke

I told Katie this joke this morning and it was really funny in my head, but I don't think Katie thought it was all that funny. I don't know why--this thing is comedic gold. Just like Ziggy. (That was a joke. Ziggy is not funny.)

Here's the joke:

There once was a woman named Patricia Whack who was a teller in a bank. One day a frog came in and asked Patricia about a small business loan. Patricia was a little skeptical about the credit history of the frog, so she asked for some sort of collateral against the loan. The frog said that his father was Mick Jagger. Patricia totally didn't believe this and she was about to go get her manager to deal with this obnoxious frog, when all of the sudden the frog pulled out a little ceramic elephant and tried to give it to Patricia as collateral. This was the last straw. She got her manager and told him the situation and held out the ceramic elephant and asked him what to do.
The manager said, "It's a knickknack, Patty Whack, give the frog a loan! His old man's a Rolling Stone!"