Brandon Notices

I reached the peak number of hours I spent in front of the TV about a year and a half ago, when the TV networks came out with five great, funny, exciting shows: Samantha Who, Back to You, American Gladiators, Million Dollar Password, and best of all, Pushing Daisies.

These shows were all cancelled. Back to You and Pushing Daisies were both cancelled mid-season, and were not allowed more episodes to allow plot lines to reach a conclusion. This is not a satisfying way to tell a narrative.

Unfortunately, TV networks these days are in it all for the money, and this requires them to continually air new shows in the hopes that they'll be huge hits. If one show quits doing so well in the ratings, another potential hit takes its place. When the number of viewers die down, so does the show.

The networks consider their viewers only as a huge mob; they give little consideration as to how their various individuals feel. I tuned into each of the above shows every time they aired, but I alone wasn't enough to keep these shows going. What else can an individual do? After seeing all my new favorite TV shows cancelled, I don't think I can trust the TV networks anymore. I don't want to invest my attention and devotion in new shows that I might fall in love with. How can I trust that the networks won't cancel them?

This is my current keychain collection. I have more than 200 keychains. You can click on the picture to zoom in. Let me know if you have a bunch of old keychains you want to give me! I want to have many more!

I'm at Bartell Drugs, looking at birthday candles. Why oh why are the nines a different color than all the other numbers? What could have brought this about?

I've noticed an annoying speech pattern lately. What it is, is people are using superfluously wordy noun phrases which usually result in the speaker saying "is" twice in a row. The previous sentence is an example of such a pattern. Here are a few more examples I found on the Net:

"...it is not a self help book. What it is is a sampling of what makes people happy and why." (Amazon review)

"Tell us exactly what happened this morning" — "What it was, was that the Beetle and the suspect in the car came and pulled in..." (KCAL 9 news report)

"The Cosmic Game comes across as fresh as a debut and surprisingly indifferent toward being the in thing. What it is is music for music's sake, all laid out with the utmost care..." (Music review)

I've seen it with and without the comma. These clumsy constructions likely come about because people lead themselves into their sentences before they know what they're going to say. It's redundant to include all those words. In most cases I see or hear, a simple noun would fill in rather easily as the sentence's subject. Usually, "What it is, is" can be simplified to "It is".

In the word game Quiddler, players are dealt a hand of cards, each with a letter or two, and the goal is to rearrange the cards so that they form words. On Saturday, I was playing the game with some relatives: Carla, Shelly, and Russell. In one round, Shelly played the word "ad." Russell challenged her play of the word, pointing out in the game instructions that abbreviations are not allowed, and that "ad" is an abbreviation of "advertisement."

We turned to the electronic Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (our family's agreed-upon dictionary—we use it for Boggle and other word games) and found it in there, of course. Russell, however, referred us to the entry in a large print dictionary for "ad," and pointed out that next to the word was an indication that the word is an abbreviation. He then referred us back to the point in the Quiddler rules that abbreviations are not allowed.

I understood his point, but my argument for allowing the word ran along the lines that while being short for "advertisement," "ad" has become a word itself through common usage. It seems that we all discussed this for no less than ten minutes, and Russell didn't seem to care that the word was present in the Scrabble dictionary because it's an abbreviation either way. It got to the point that Shelly withdrew the word herself and asked to just take the 7-point penalty. (The word wasn't even worth very many points!)

Phone reception at Fort Ebey State Park on Whidbey Island got bad at times. This is the strange message my phone gave me when it failed to make an outgoing connection: "Call failed please !!! Try again". This made it only more frustrating that I couldn't get a signal.

Jelly Belly regularly comes out with new flavors every now and then. Their newest flavor is Chili Mango! It is being added immediately into the Official 50 Flavors (no rookie stage!). I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but Jelly Belly describes it as "fresh mango with a sprinkling of spicy chili." Considering that Mango is one of my least favorite Jelly Belly flavors, as well as the fact that I don't really care for very spicy food, I don't expect myself to enjoy this bean very much. I'll reserve commentary until I've tried it myself, though. Jelly Belly has, however, posted a picture of the bean online. It looks to be a dirty orange color, which might be hard to tell it from some other orange beans, but it also seems to have some dark specks of color too.

Along with Chili Mango, Jelly Belly is adding four other established flavors to the Official 50 Flavors mix: Pomegranate, Sunkist Lime, Mixed Berry Smoothie, and Sour Cherry. Mixed Berry Smoothie, I recall, is very good, and very smooth, and happens to be my favorite of the Smoothie Blend mix. Sour Cherry is also pretty damn good, and it's my favorite of the Sours mix. When Pomegranate was first introduced as a rookie in 2007, I originally dismissed it as Jelly Belly jumping on the health-consciousness bandwagon, but when I tried it, I was pleased by its sweet flavor and slight tartness. (Açaí Berry, which is also based on one of the healthy fad fruits, won the recent flavor vote, and Jelly Belly will be making it a rookie flavor too before long. Sigh, I voted for Honey...) I'm unfamiliar with Sunkist Lime, since I haven't tried the Sunkist Citrus mix but I bet it has a strong, sweet flavor.

To make room in the Official 50 Flavors (Why stop at 50? Variety is the spice of life!), Jelly Belly is retiring five older flavors. Jalapeño is being hurled out, with the door slamming on its butt. Good riddance. Grape Jelly is also gone, which might sound like bad news for the grape crowd, but as long as Jelly Belly keeps making its Soda Pop Shoppe mix, Grape Crush will pass as an alternative. Peanut Butter is also being retired. This is fine by me. For some reason, it reminds me of the Bertie Bott's Ear Wax Bean. I wonder if the peanut-allergic community is celebrating this bean's retirement. Café Latte is gone too. It was hardly one of my favorite flavors, mainly because I'm not really a coffee person. For the coffee aficionados, Cappuccino is still in the mix. Lastly, Caramel Apple is gone, which isn't a huge hit, since Jelly Belly also already has Green Apple, Red Apple, Pineapple, Sour Apple, and Cold Stone Apple Pie. Uh, cross out Pineapple. But still, my Jelly Belly Carnival won't be the same with only Cotton Candy and Caramel Corn...

I am recalling some older flavors Jelly Belly experimented around with. Cinnamon Toast was the most delectable bean I'd ever had. It was sweet and sugary, and even tasted better than the real thing (trust me, I did a taste test—it wasn't a blinded test, though). C'mon, Jelly Belly, please bring this bean back!

I signed into Twitter a few minutes ago to see what was new with all the people I'm following. One of my friends posted about an Amber Alert, giving a brief description of the suspect's vehicle and license plate number. Twitter's a great tool to quickly spread urgent information like this, especially because it takes little effort to help propagate the information. All you have to do is copy and paste!

But I've read online that some people will post false information in such an alert on Twitter, either to see how fast a fake report might spread, or for more deceitful means, such as linking to a website to sell junk or spread computer viruses. I decided to check my friend's tweet against the Amber Alert information posted on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) website. I found information on the site which seemed to match my friend's description, but the license plate was off in one place!

It's great that Twitter allows for fast distribution of information, and I applaud people for passing along information which may turn out to be very helpful in rescuing these children. However, this is a clear example of how social networking sites like Twitter can also assist in spreading misinformation. The license plate number became a Trending Topic on Twitter, which means that it was among the most-tweeted terms on Twitter. People need to make sure to double-check information against a credible source (the NCMEC site for example) before reposting it.