Buckeyes: Thems Good Eats!

As I sit watching the BCS Title Game between the Buckeyes and the Gators, I started to reflect back on how little I knew of the Ohio and western Pennsylvanian region before meeting my wife. Coming from Canada, American college football was foreign to me since hockey in Canada is king. Even more foreign were the customs of the hillbillies who call Appalachia home.

When I visited my future in-laws for the first time out in western Pennsylvania, I was asked if I wanted to eat some “buckeyes”. Knowing that my wife’s family are avid deer hunters, I assumed that they were being literal. Since I love food and embrace every opportunity to try food which is different, I was really looking forward to the experience. In my defense, before this moment I have visited quite of few exotic countries and enjoyed much stranger food. Still, I was looking forward to trying some fine Appalachia eats.

Patterns of Annoying Flyers

After traveling by air for many, many years, it’s hard not to recognize those flyers which are just plain annoying. The following list are some of these people that I have seen and continue to loathe:

• The Princess – people who put their jackets and / or their tiny bags in the overhead bin instead of holding onto their jacket and putting their bags under the seat in front of them. Oddly enough, most of these offenders are middle-age business men who carry man-purses around.
• The Lazy Sherpa – people who sit in the back and decide to put their roller bags up by the bulkhead. Although these offenders won’t have to carry their already over packed bag as far, it forces people near to front to check their baggage OR they will need to go further back and tick off those people seated there.
• My new best friend – perpetrators are usually old, lonely, or just nervous of flying. They like to tell you everything about themselves, even if you don’t ask. Sometimes they will continue to talk to you even when your eyes are closed and you’re sleeping.

“Hello, World!” – Again and again…

During the good old Dot-com days, it was really exciting to head over to Geocities to create your own “home page” and impress your family and friends in the process.

The aspiring web developer of yesteryear would:

• overload the web page with lots of colors and pictures
• writeup uninteresting text (possibly ALL IN CAPS) that only a few people would care about or understand
• put some copyrighted MIDI music playing in the background
• provide enough personal information that someone could either stalk or steal the identity of the web developer
• create a “guest book” so visitors could read / write comments to know / say how great the web developer was
• provide a virtual “shout-out” to their friends by having links from their home page to their friend’s – after all, there is no harm inferring that you have lots of friends

At some point the aspiring web developer would place a web counter on their home page as a way to revel in their own successes – bonus if the counter didn’t track unique visits.