I didn’t do as well as last quarter with Amazon, but still was able to earn $168.41 on sales of 148 items worth $3,825.51. August was a particularly bad month for sales and, for the first time, my Google AdSense revenue exceeded the Amazon commissions (AdSense has been doing really well lately with revenue of $40-$50 a month). So traffic was strong, there just weren’t that many people buying stuff. August probably isn’t a big sales month anyway, plus Apple hadn’t released anything new in a long time. But they did introduce some new iPods in September and sales started doing better.
Category: Uncategorized
Beach Bocce
Two years ago when Dad, Jeb, Grant, and I visited Tybee we were stuck inside due to a hurricane and re-invented Bocce (botchee) where we would roll a small ball (which we called a “pith,” though I have no idea why since it isn’t called that; there is a pith ball that is used to measure static electricity in physics) and then see who could roll a larger ball closest to the pith. When it finally stopped raining, we moved this game out to the beach. That was more interesting than indoors since you had more room, terrain, and different textures of sand (hard wet sand, soft dry sand). We would go all up and down the beach throwing the pith and then trying to land balls closest to it (sometimes the pith gets knocked around, which changes everything). This year the sea gulls seemed very interested in the egg-sized white pith ball.
Netflix Reviews
I think that I will do Netflix for one more month before I stop. One of the neat things about Netflix is they let users review movies, like Amazon does with products it sells. Reading several reviews by normal people you can get a pretty good idea of whether you will like the movie or not. Based on those reviews, I checked out Secondhand Lions, which I thought was actually pretty dismal. So it doesn’t always work out. Because it had gotten such amazingly positive reviews, I thought I needed to write a review and warn people like me away from it. When I went to post a review, I found a link to see or edit reviews I had written previously, including the ones from three years ago. While I have a ton of reviews on my website, I have only written 3 reviews on Netflix and I had to laugh when I read another review of discontent from three years ago for Farewell My Concubine which I gave 2 stars out of 5 (I like the simple Netflix system: 1 star if you hated it, 2 if you didn’t like it, 3 if you did like it, 4 if you really liked it, and 5 if you loved it):
“This might be a well-made movie. I wouldn’t know since I didn’t make it all the way through. It appeared to be a movie about beating and otherwise mistreating orphans before the Gang of 4 comes in and does worse. I didn’t realize that it was primarily about orphan boys learning Chinese opera, in particular an opera called “Farewell My Concubine”. From the title and the description you might be looking for some seductive movie about a love triangle. I was expecting something on the order of The Last Emperor. This isn’t like that and I didn’t care for it, but I could see how the patient or those interested in Chinese opera before Mao with a high tolerance for violence against children could really enjoy it.”
It tells me that 14 people found my review useful. Fortunately it doesn’t say how many did not.
Pluto is a Tomato
Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet yesterday is making all the news. As a follow-up to my comment on Jeb’s post, Boortz’s complaint was even less valid when he said it took 3,000 astronomers to decide on Pluto’s status, since only 300 actually voted on the issue.
Anyway, whether Pluto is a planet or not is like whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Ultimately it doesn’t really affect anything. But just so you know, I looked up the definition of vegetable in my Microsoft Bookshelf dictionary, which says that any plant product grown to be eaten is a vegetable. That includes lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, and I guess wheat. So tomatoes are clearly a vegetable.
Kitty Corner
I remember as a kid that we would say something was catercorner if it was diagonally opposite of something. We must have gotten that from mom and dad, because that doesn’t seem like a word that you learn in school. I think now I probably say cattycorner (apparently a southern thing), but I’ve heard people say kittycorner as well (maybe a black thing). It turns out all of these can be used.
Catercorner is the original version of the word and is apparently not based on cats, but on the French word for four, “quatre,” an old form of which was “cater.” This link says that the word is an example of folk etymology, which happens when people change a word to make it more like words they are familiar with. Other examples are “piggyback,” based on “pick-a-back” and “wheelbarrow” from “wheel bearwe.”