Jump the Shark

I was writing a blog entry today about The Flintstones and needed to do some fact-checking and found a web site about TV shows called Jump the Shark. The purpose of the site is to let people share their opinion on when a TV show peaked (or really hit bottom). The title is based on when Fonzi jumped the sharks on Happy Days (wearing his leather jacket). Some people say shows never jumped the shark, but opinions differ. One funny aspect is that brand new shows quickly get entries. It’s always good to the be so cool that you realize a show is tired before anyone else so people start off pretty early.

One funny observation on Gilligan’s Island (which was only on for 3 years) was that the professor should have confessed that he could have gotten them off the island on the first day but a geek like him would never have had a chance with women like Ginger and Mary Ann back on the mainland.

Anyway, it’s funny to read people remembering the shows although some of it is not for kids.

Flintstones U

On one episode of The Flintstones Fred changes places with a millionaire who wants a taste of the normal life. Fred says he couldn’t possibly run a corporation but J. L. Gotrocks says it’s easy: You just go to the meeting and when they bring something up you say “Whose baby is that?” then “What’s your angle?” then “I’ll buy that.”

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Kangaroos

One of the Georgia’s little known attractions is the Kangaroo Conservation Center near Dawsonville. They have about 200 kangaroos there. The primary purpose of the place is breeding kangaroos to supply zoos, but they run a decent tourist business as well. A tour is about 2 hours. Part of that time is inside and where they introduce you to the different kinds of kangaroos and wallabies they have. They just let them run around an enclosed area with you, but they typically don’t come real close. They are very gentle animals and look a lot like deer when they’re not hopping around.

They also showed off a kookaburra and a very tiny antelope called a dik-dik. Dik-diks are territorial and mark their territory by rubbing a gland under their eye on anything that sticks out like a limb. They told us to stick out our fingers and some of the dik-diks marked people’s fingers with a tarry little blotch (one marked Susan’s finger, but not mine). Here’s a picture I took later of a dik-dik being curious through the pen fence. Their noses are very flexible and they can bend them around easily. They are very, very cute and about the size of small dog.

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Super Geeky iPod Stuff

One problem with the iPod is that it doesn’t store mp3 files by name anywhere. All the mp3’s are stored in hidden directories by numbers. So I was at work and wanted a way I could move songs onto my hard drive there and listen to them. I found a neat piece of open source freeware called SharePod that lets you do just this as well as export playlists or just play songs from your computer that are on your iPod. It does this by running a program that you store on the iPod itself so you don’t have to install anything on the host computer.

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Bought some Delta

Delta went down to around 7 a year or so ago after being at 60 before the crash and 9/11. I thought it had to be a good buy except that it’s earnings at that time were -$15 a share and projected losses were $6 a share. It just seemed like a company couldn’t possibly lose that much money. But they bottomed out and went up to around 15 before starting to work their way down again. Earlier this week they released the earnings which were bleak again and their stock was back in the 7’s. I thought it was interesting but I’d hold back. Today it dropped in the mid 6’s so I bought some. It’s very speculative but hopefully it will go up. As soon as I bought it I wished I’d bought more, but that was the greed talking. I will buy more if goes down 20%, but I’m thinking I won’t sell unless it goes up 40%.