Tue: I Would Change My Grade in this Stupid Class So I Can Graduate

Religion Class. This was supposed to be a breeze. I knew about religions, and I definitely knew about American religions, which was the main focus of this class. I figured it would be pretty interesting, maybe we’d learn about the early day’s of this country, and how Christianity was the backbone. Maybe later we'd touch on the revivals and some of the interesting things going on there. Also, we could talk about the lore involved in some of the Native America religions and that epic tale of Mormonism. So the class sounded like a good idea.

Sometimes things that seem like good ideas have the potential to be the worst ideas ever (Don’t think about that too hard, it sounds a lot more insightful than it actually is). I should have seen the red flags early on; the fact that we had to buy a syllabus, the test dates that kept getting moved around, the professor who seemed to be a luddite and refused to move into a world of Powerpoint, Blackboard and E-mail and sticking to hand-drawn overheads and a massive “reader” containing articles we needed to study. It turned bleak pretty fast. In spite of the many bad things there was a fantastic simplicity to the class. 3 tests, each 20% of the total grade and a Paper for the remaining 40%. Piece of cake. It started really well, I mean I didn’t really learn anything, but I scored well enough on the first two tests (44, and 43 out of 50). Nothing spectacular but enough to let the class fade to obscurity between test weeks. I felt like the Final went really well also, He changed the format to 40 questions which I was all for, the less questions the better. I turned in my Final paper, an exposition about Catholics in America at the turn of the century, really riveting stuff, but I felt good about that too.

The professor apparently didn’t feel so good about it though. He gave my paper that was worth 40% of my grade a 34……..out of 100. I wasn’t even aware you could score that low on a paper, I kind of figured if I printed out 8 pages with one word on each sheet spelling out “Catholics struggled in early America because of democracy” then I would at least get a 50. Not seriously, but who gets anything less than a 50 on a paper anyway? if you turn in something awful they usually at least give you a 60 for the effort. And like I said, I didn’t think this paper was anywhere near awful.

So if you’re doing the math at home you’ve realized that it doesn’t matter what the Final test score was, it’s now impossible to pass this class. I realized this earlier today at work after crunching numbers 9 ways to Tuesday trying to figure out if I had a shot at all. “Well whatever” I told myself, “I guess I’ll just take a summer class” and started looking into that. But it’s still really disappointing. Really, a 34?!

There is one small possibility however. After staring at my grades screen for close to an hour at work in disbelief at my abysmal score I started to create a crazy theory. What if I didn’t score a 34 on my paper? What if for some reason, the professor (an ace with computers) maybe put my Final exam score in the spot for my Paper score and the paper hasn’t been graded yet. That’s what I’m going to tell myself until they turn me away at the Arena door on Thursday and the reality finally settles in.

I realize I usually use the Tuesday entry to give out great ideas about improving our world, and I can’t help but feel like this world would be vastly improved if I don’t have to go to summer school. I have other things to be doing, important things. Let’s change this.

"Tue": I would change cell phones

I kind of loathe actually talking on the phone. We’ve discussed that before. The weird thing is I do enjoy owning a cell phone. It’s cool to send people little messages, listen to music, take pictures, read the news, or various other things all with this little hunk of plastic and metal. But being the greedy, unsatisfied, fallen being that I am, I always want it to do more. I’m living in an age as Arthur Clarke said “where technology has become virtually indistinguishable from magic”, but sometimes I think we need more magic. Not just more magic, smarter magic. I was reading an article earlier in the week about how with the iphone you can take a picture and then using the phone’s GPS capabilities stamp that picture with the coordinates of where it was taken. So when you upload it to the internet, your pictures can show up on a map based on where you took them. Conversely if you want to see an area of town, you can look it up on the picture map and see all the pictures that were taken by people in that area of town. Honestly it seems like a pretty cool idea, and I’m not sure why it took so long for someone to figure out that you could do that with a phone attached to a camera.

So here’s a few other ideas features I would want added to my cell phone:

Credit/Debit Card

This one is actually happening…well, it’s happening everywhere but the U.S anyway. Instead of having to carry around all those credit cards, and then trying to figure out how to use every variation of the credit card machines, why not just touch your phone to the credit card machine and punch in a code. That’s it! Your done! The phone could even tell you right then and there how much you had left in your checking account, or how much you owed to VISA. Even better what if you could transfer the money phone to phone. If you lose that bet with your friend; you can pay up instantly. It would save friendships.

TV Remote

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to find the TV remote. Usually because someone you live with didn’t put it back. Well most everyone has a cell phone, why not just allow those to also operate the TV? You could even personalize and assign your favorite channels to buttons like speed dial. It could be a topic of conversation, “so what channels is your phone set to…..The discovery channel!? Me Too!..Let’s talk about that.”

Garage door opener

I’ve never actually owned a garage door opener, but I’m guessing it’s pretty awesome. Even more awesome though would be not having that ugly, gray block weighing down your sunvisor. I’m sure there’s some security issues to work through, but still, cell phones should be able to handle this.

Car Keys

While we’re talking about cars, why can’t cell phones start cars? They have those little key dongles that start cars that have been around since 1992 yet you’re telling me a cell phone couldn’t just take care of this and free up valuable space in your pocket? Also you could start the car from inside your house that way the A/C already has it nice and cool by the time you make it out to your car.

Translator

One of the weird features on my phone is that it will read my text messages to me if I ask it. I’m not really sure why I’d ever do that, except if I was blind or maybe driving. I can also tell my phone to do things like “call so and so” and it seems to understand most of the time. So if the phone can understand speech and it can read text, why can’t it translate a language? You say something in German to my phone, and my phone explains in English what you said. It would be like a crude version of the Rosetta Stone or the Babel Fish from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, minus the awkward worm inside your skull.

Video Phones

Honestly, I kind of thought that there was absolutely no difference between talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone on a video phone (or video chat). But after using skype a couple times let me tell you, there is. The non-verbal stuff is so huge. So most cell phones these days have video cameras included, I feel like the face to face conversations are really just a few months away.

Projector

How cool would it be once they have the camera thing figured out to be able to throw that video onto a nearby wall? I’m not talking about a building-sized, theatre image or anything, just maybe 9 inches onto the chair in front of you, the wall next to you, or the person you’re standing behind. You could pull up videos you’ve recorded on your phone and project them for your friends to see, instead of doing that awkward crowding around the 2” screen and pretending like you can see what’s going on.

Multiplayer games

If you have tetris…And I have tetris…why can’t we play each other in tetris? Or Nertz, battleship, jeopardy, pool, miniature golf, etc. These things are communication devices, that play games, yet I can only play games by myself. Why is that?

Active Listener mode

I kind of feel like the world of people that have cell phones could be separated into 2 groups, the people who need to call their friends and unload for 30+ minutes, and the people who receive calls from friends who need to unload. I would probably fall into the latter. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part we receivers do enjoy that you call us to share your life, but it can be tough trying to remain “in” the conversation enough to keep encouraging you on with the “oh yea?……..uh-huh…….yep…….mmmm……really?......oooo..”. I feel like maybe we could just create maybe a 60 second loop of that, and then when we get a call that has the feeling of being a doozy, could just turn on that the Active Listener Mode and a remix of that 60 second clip would play……while we listen of course, but just without the pressure of reassuring the caller every 7 seconds that we are indeed still enthralled.

Vibrate schedule

It’s possible some phones already have this, I don’t really do that much research for these things. I have a pretty set schedule, and I’m tired of trying to remember to turn the phone to silent/vibrate, then remember to turn it back on. The phone has a clock, why can’t it just remember to do this itself? Sundays, I’m going to need to be on vibrate from 9-10:30. Monday, Wednesday, Fridays from 10:45-noon, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am to noon. That seems pretty easy to me. The phone should know that schedule and be able to set itself accordingly.

Some of these ideas I’ll admit probably could use a little more time in the oven. But maybe some of them are already way past due. To be honest I’m not really sure which are which but it probably won’t be too long till we’re laughing at the idea of carrying around those “humongous primitive blocks of plastic” which will just make this list even more entertaining and ridiculous. Which kind of fits the part-time goal of this blog.

Tue: I would change the "Feed the Pig" ads

I’m a Marketing major, so when I watch TV one of my favorite parts are the commercials. Maybe it’s cause I have a short attention span, or a primitive sense of humor or something but they just fascinate me. Actually I think they fascinate a lot of people. A good commercial can get more people excited and thinking than a 90 minute movie. And at the worst a bad commercial is like a car accident that you’re driving by, it’s painful to look at but will be gone soon. So when I see these commercial I kind of internally rate them. The Rhapsody commercial where that girl is floating in bubbles = Great, the Whataburger commercial where….well actually every single Whataburger commercial = Terrible. There is a series of commercials I’ve seen lately that just has me absolutely mystified. They’re called “Feed the Pig” ads, and are created by the Ad Council. The Ad Council according to people in the know (AKA Wikipedia) is a non-profit organization that makes Public Service Announcements about…well…everything. Look it up online if you’re bored you’ve probably seen a bunch of them like the fish out of water that’s supposed to educate about Asthma, or the “Buzz driving is Drunk driving” commercials. Generally they put out some pretty good stuff. The “Pig” ads however are just surreally bad and definitely send the wrong message. Well here see for youself:


Financial Literacy- Feed the Pig - The most popular videos are here

I know it’s kind of hard to tell, but the idea is to get people to revive the long lost art of saving money, or at least maybe stop spending money they don’t have. Did you get that? No? I didn’t think so. Here’s why I think that is:

First of all, MAN, THAT PIG IS CREEPY! He’s exactly what I always pictured Napoleon looking like at the end of Animal Farm. If that thing comes up to me asking for money I’m giving it to him. Then I’m running and praying I never run into another cloven hoofed nightmare again.

Not only is he absolutely terrifying, he doesn’t really seem like he’s helping people save money so much as extorting protection money from them. Like some muscle for a farmyard mafia who also runs moonshine and insurance scams. It doesn’t feel right to give him money. There’s no way his intentions are good. And the look on the people’s faces when they see him coming just absolutely cements it. Also the piggy bank should be their friend not the local bully forcing you to “feed” him, especially since he’s already borderline obese. I mean I know he’s a pig but we have an analogy we're trying to create. People aren't saving ergo people aren’t feeding him! That’s why we’re doing the ads, he should be Ethiopian skinny! Also, he’s dressed in a cheesy but expensive looking suit. The pig is poor, he should be dragging himself around in a hollowed out barrel like something out of Bugs Bunny. In this commercial he endears himself further by physically abusing some guy.



I’m thinking they realized the fact that the Pig was wildly creepy because lately they changed him to something a little less creepy, but still rivals the Burger King “King” for top spot of advertising characters who could mentally scar small children . Have a look:


Financial Literacy - Royal Family - Watch the best video clips here

So here’s the change: We keep the Piggy bank idea, it’s nostalgic, universal, relatable etc. We change that freaky pig to something more like HAM from Toy Story, except skinnier.
And follow one character as me makes some wise money saving decisions throughout his day. He eats a brown bag lunch instead of going out with his co-workers then throws some money to the tiny famished pig. He rents a movie instead of going to a movie and throws more money to the slightly less thin Pig. He cancels his magazine subscriptions and throws more money to the normal sized Pig. He consolidates his credit cards and lowers his interest and throws more money to the Pig who is now RIPPED. Then he gets in a car crash, but it’s OK cause the Pig hops out of the back of his car, focuses on the car and magically the car is good as new. The pig is then slightly smaller but the guy can drive off with no worries.

You could do this type of thing over and over, incorporating different tips and using different rewards. Woman forgoes Starbucks, and the pig gives her new shoes. Guy starts biking places and shutting off lights when he’s not home and the pig makes his tiny TV into Big screen TV. A family takes a smaller vacation like camping or hiking, start getting movies from the library and the pig magically turns their apartment into a house. And on and on.

So less creepy pig, more interesting story and even (gasp) education and then I think the Pig Ads will be cool. What’d you think?

Tue: I would add a Siesta

Usually right around 2pm, things start to go dark, my memory is worse then the guy from Memento, and my ability to answer questions with anything resembling intelligence starts to go away. I don’t really think I’m alone in this issue. I’ve noticed my Co-workers just sort of staring at the computer screen hoping that the e-mail would write itself, or sitting in class watching people convince themselves that they listen better with their eyes closed. People are tired. They’re getting upset. They need a nap, and by nap I mean 30-45 minutes after lunch to grab a wink of sleep. I really don’t think there’s even an argument here, but for the sake of interestingness (possibly not a real word) I’m going to pretend like there is.

Nobody’s working or studying after lunch anyway. That hour after lunch is currently the un-official space out time. Take a class that meets at 12pm you’ll see what I mean. Everyone is yawning, the teacher has to pretend like she’s asking rhetorical questions after nobody answers them, and the most effort you’ll see is watching kids do their best to be inconspicuous when they’re trying to look at the big clock on the wall behind them. This is currently a lost hour, nothing is getting done. We might as well stop pretending and use that time to recharge so we can actually do something worthwhile before sunset.

Taking a nap at midday would also help in other less obvious areas:

Less Energy Drinks
I used to drink a lot of energy drinks, at least 1 a day. Over the summer though I lost the tolerance I had built up for them, and now they make me shake….like a normal person. If everyone took a nap, they couldn’t feel that need for a jolt of caffeine. There have been studies that proves a nap is more effective than either an energy drink or coffee. Besides there is no way anything named Full Throttle, or Monster, or even my favorite Kronik should be introduced willingly into your body except under the most dire circumstances. Plus it would hopefully put Red Bull out of business and I won’t ever have to watch another one of their awkward commercials.

Creates Camaraderie
Remember sleepovers, and how afterward you would always feel so much closer to the friend or friends you had over. It would be like that every day right after lunch. Minus the popcorn, and videogames, and telling secrets of course. Well no actually you could probably still tell secrets. Anyway I think it would bring everyone in an office or class closer.

Get to Know the Real You
On the flip-side I believe that there’s a 3-9 minute period between coming out of sleep and actually waking where the true person shines through. Personally I’m not really a “shiner” during this window, and I think that would be valuable information for the people at work or school to know (“You know that Gabe guy, he’s capable of some really dark stuff, we probably shouldn’t plagiarize our portion of the group paper from the internet or else we might have to deal with him……true story). It would make separating the bad apples much easier.

Reduce Car Crashes
Outside of rush hour and super-early Sunday morning the hours immediately following lunch are the most dangerous to be on the road. People are sleepy, they just finished eating, it’s bright outside, it’s a recipe for a 4 car pile-up. If we all just took that nap, lives would be saved.

Go-Green
Did you know everyone in America turned off our lights for an hour everyday the energy we saved would power the great state of Montana for a year? What, you don’t believe me? It’s true, Al Gore showed me a graph. By not taking a naps we are killing this planet. Sill don’t believe me? Whatever, sustainability is a fringe-science anyway.

Improve Dental Hygiene
It’s recommended that you brush your teeth twice a day, which is good. But wouldn’t 3 times be better? Once we started taking naps could it be far behind that everyone discovers they need to brush afterward? How have the people at Crest not figured this out? They could be moving 50% more product, they should have lobbyists down there right now pushing the “Nap Bill” through congress.

I’m tired of trying to act interested in what’s going on around 2pm. Plus I’ve been noticing that this body God created is pretty honest about what it needs, and when it tells me I’m hungry I usually eat. It’s just natural. There’s no reason to ignore that 1pm time cry for sleep. What makes it different? Hopefully one day in my lifetime people will realize this and we can all just embrace the Nap once again.

Tue: I would change The College Bowl System

Being a card carrying male college student, it should come as no surprise that I watch football. I grew up watching the Packers and Cardinals (the 2 teams rooted for in my family) play some just awful football. The Packers with 1990’s Brett Farve eventually put some things together but the Cardinals....well everyone knows about the Cardinals. As I grew older something else also happened, I started paying some attention to College Football. I didn’t really care who won College games, but the crowd was always so into it, and the players were so energetic and spirited that it became really fun to watch. It was kids playing a game because they still enjoyed playing it, not because they had signed a contract and needed to make payments on their Caddy (I realize that’s a really broad generalization). Then I started attending ASU so I finally had a team to pull for, a very inconsistent and frequently overrated team. That’s for a different conversation though. After I had a team I only had one real problem with College football. It has the most convoluted system of picking a Champ. Picking a proper champ of a sport is important, it provides closure, and creates integrity for the sport. College football chose it’s Champion based on a computer formula that crunches a bunch of numbers including some poll results from sportswriters and college coaches. So basically Microsoft Excel picks the Champ, and hey maybe that’s the best way to pick something, I’ve heard of computers being used to make some pretty important decisions. The problem it is so un-compelling to play a sport in hopes that HAL-3000 thinks you played well enough to be the Champ. So here are a couple changes I would make to fix this thing.

Make it Playoff-esque
So the computer ranks these college teams, and based on those rankings and a couple other miscellaneous criteria those teams are matched and placed into one of 34 Bowl games that vary in prestige. So for the Mathematically disinclined that’s 68 colleges that play in an extra game that for the most part is meaningless. Games like the Meineke Car Care Bowl, Roady’s Truck Stops Humanitarian Bowl, or even the honorable Chick-Fil-A Bowl. I mean it’s cool that we’re trying to get more colleges included but I think if I received an invitation to Papajohns.com Bowl, I might be more insulted than honored. Like “hey why don’t you come out here and star in our 3 hour long commercial in exchange for freezing, grueling practices through Christmas and winter break”. I realize at this point I’ve probably lost a good chunk of my readership so let me just take this time to confess that I really enjoyed the Movie “Just Like Heaven” I can’t even really explain why, anyway I had to get that off my chest. There are 5 games that hold some meaning though. The so called BCS bowls: Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, and National Championship. So here’s the change I propose, instead of 30 meaningless games and 5 somewhat meaningful games depending on who you ask, let's change the 5 meaningful games into single elimination tournaments of 8 teams a piece. So the National Championship tournament would be teams ranked 1-8, the Rose would be 9-16, Fiesta is 17-24, Sugar is 25-32 and Orange is teams ranked 33-40. That’s 40 teams, which is a little less than the 68 we started with but because of the tournament system there would still be 35 games. So we lose a couple of the smaller less talented schools for a couple years, in return we get some really engaging games where all the games matter on some level because even if you’re a team ranked #40 you have a chance to win a BCS title and your school earns a huge stipend (currently it’s around 17 Million dollars). I’d cheer for the #40 ranked Sun devils to win my school Millions of dollars, but I don’t really care if they beat San Jose State in the Eaglebank Bowl.

Less Regular Season Games
This is not really a fix bit mostly just to clean up some of the loose ends, College teams currently play around 12 games a year, between 7-9 division games (games against schools close to them and have some sort of rivalry with) and 3-5 other games which can be anything from playing some small college from Miami, Ohio to Notre Dame. In order to play the possible 3 extra games in the tournaments we talked about earlier we’d have to cut 1 of these “regular season” games. I’d say keep it to 8 division games and 3 “other” games. But I’m flexible if a team wants to go with 9 and 2 or 7 and 4. Whatever, as long as they’re done in time for the tournament and the students can go back to school like normal people come Spring Semester.

Less Neutral Location Games
Anyway one of the other problems with the system is the Bowl games are in random places called Neutral locations, not usually in either of the team’s home state. That takes away a huge part of the appeal of College Football, the amazing crowds. So put the first 6 games of each tournament at the home field of the team with a better record and that last Championship game can be played wherever the bean counters need it to be played to make the most money. It’s just more fun to watch a team play in front of their fellow students and parents, and other people who love the team but can’t blow 3 grand on a trip to watch them play a semi meaningless game in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So there it is, my quasi-thought-out plan for fixing College Football. I promise I’ll do my best to keep my sports ramblings to a minimum for awhile, but I figured I’d knock this out first. I wish I could have tied Christianity in there somewhere with some grand revelation of the how football and the evil computer that chooses the champions is majorly flawed and I’m glad that the God who chose me and possibly you was flawless in his choice (which is sometimes really hard to believe). Oh well, there’s always next Tuesday.

Tue: I would change Christmas

Oh yea, this sounds like a terrible idea, but hear me out. Christmas in the U.S. is without a doubt, the most popular holiday. And why shouldn’t it be? It combines some of the greatest elements from other holidays into a celebration that dominates the last 3 months of every year. You have the gift giving of Birthdays, the food of Thanksgiving, the significance of Easter, and at times the romance of Valentine’s Day. Even though Christmas has become an unparalled success as far as holidays go, I have a few things that I would like to see …….adjusted, to make the Christmas experience a little more potent and not such a mind blowing, scattered, extravaganza.

Ask 5 people what Christmas means to them and chances are you’ll get 6 different answers (there’s always that one person who can’t choose one answer and hedges the bet with a second). That tells me something, the idea of Christmas has somehow become unfocused. It’s easy to see why though; So many ideas have been shoe-horned into Christmas that people can no longer keep all the stories and traditions straight. So Christmas needs to cut some of the fat, starting with Santa and Co. I like Santa, and he’s welcome to set up his own holiday and you know what, he already has. It’s called St. Nicholas day and it's celebrated on December 6th. I’m all for that, celebrating the idea of charity and generosity with some gift giving early in December while keeping the Santa tradition alive. It would allow me to participate with fewer reservations in all the traditions that Santa is tied up in, as I wouldn’t have to worry about diverting my attention from the more important celebration of the birth of Christ.

Over the years some new holidays have also popped up in the same time frame as Christmas as alternatives. That’s fine with me, I can understand that not everyone has the same feelings about the birth of Christ and it would be unwise to make everyone act like they cared if they didn’t. The only problem I have with those alternative holidays is that they decided that one day was not good enough. To adequately celebrate Kwanzaa takes a full week, and Hanukkah takes 8 days! So I figure we bump Christmas up to a 9 day celebration, one day for every month that Mary carried the child. Every day could also focus on a different part of the lead up to His birth with some of the highlights being: the Angel telling Mary about the plan, Joseph marrying Mary, Mary visiting Elizabeth. There could also be a proper well thought out tradition to be practiced on each of these that corresponds with the story. It would take some time to settle on those and they need to be meaningful and appropriate, so I leave that to wiser folks then I.

Christmas also seems to have issues separating itself from Thanksgiving in some aspects. I’m not sure why exactly, but many Americans have decided that Thanksgiving is really just Christmas with no presents and more football. They eat the same foods, get together with the family, and really just create the same vibe. I think it’s really the food that needs to change. Thanksgiving has a valid claim on the Turkey that’s been established through years of Americana lore, so this new Christmas needs a traditional food also. I think that this should be solved on a family by family basis, with a universal avoidance of Turkey, and Ham to avoid infringing on the Pilgrims. My family, and I think most families with some portion of Hispanic heritage eat tamales and menudo at Christmas time. But like I said, discuss it with your family, decide what your flagship meal is and go with that, be it Lasagna, Sushi, Crepes, whatever. Just move away from the turkey, give Christmas a little more originality.

Finally if we’re being totally honest, the birth of Christ is a great thing to celebrate, but really should not eclipse the celebration of what he did on the cross. Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday should really take precedent over Christmas. After all, the Bible only discusses the birth of Christ for 2 chapters but talks about his death and resurrection directly for at least 9, and indirectly for….well, the rest of the Bible really. I think we should put more effort into the celebration of those events, but the specifics of those changes will have to be saved for a future Tuesday.

Like I said earlier, I enjoy Christmas; I just think it’s become on some levels a mess of a holiday that tries to celebrate too many unrelated things. Those things are too important to be sharing the spotlight with each other, so it’s about time we gave them all a proper stage so they can impact us more effectively every year. Really isn’t that the point of holidays anyway? They are a time that is set aside to maximize the impact of an idea or event, not a time set aside cause we really enjoy setting it aside each year. Hopefully Christmas never becomes that, it’s too important to become that; you can’t let it become that.

Tuesday: I would change breakfast

Mornings and I don’t get along. I tell myself it some kind of genetic thing, that I’m pre-disposed to being a “night person”. I haven’t found any genetic studies yet that I can point to for validation, but it’s more pleasant than labeling myself as lazy. Morning really has very few activities to call it’s own, but the most prominent would have to be breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day, and some people even say it sets the tone for the day. I’m not one of those people. To me breakfast is a collection of unusual foods, eaten at what any objective outsider would agree, is an unusual time. Throwing back a plate of unfertilized-baby-chicken-kits after getting out of bed has always felt a little out of place to me. Now, I’m not against breakfast as a whole, just its current incarnation. The foods are too weird to be dealing with while you are still waking up, and the emphasis on the importance of the meal seems a little pompous. Like just because it’s the first meal, somehow it can take credit for more of what’s going to happen in your life that day.

All that being said however there are a lot of things I would hate to see go if we altogether abandoned breakfast. I’m a huge fan of the good people at General Mills, Post, and Kellogg’s. I would miss sitting and having a meal in the quietness of morning while people are still waking up, and you can either just munch and read or just munch and think. Most importantly though, I would just be hungry and have trouble focusing on school or work or whatever I’m supposed to be focusing on that morning. So here are a few changes I would make to the traditional, western view of the topic called breakfast.

Give up the title of most important to Lunch
Breakfast doesn’t really prepare you for the day so much as it really helps you recover from last night. Nobody is pointing at the spinach omelette as the key to their success. Food is food, no matter when you eat it. So breakfast needs to stop pretending like there’s some kind of magic going on with any food consumed before 10:30am (the window of time assigned to breakfast by Ronald Mcdonald and friends). Lunch needs to start getting some of the credit it deserves. Not because the food is better, but the whole idea of lunch has just been utilized better. People meet for lunch, they discuss things over lunch, business happens over lunch, pressure free dating happens over lunch, and lunch provides a needed retreat from being neck deep in work or school. Lunch is obviously the most important meal of the day.

Simplicity is bliss
In the spirit of the title of this paragraph, this will be short. Breakfast should be basically a snack; a yogurt, some cereal, a piece of fruit, whatever. All it really needs to be is a stop gap till lunch. Also all these foods are easy to understand even if you haven’t quite woken up yet. This is key to the successful restructuring of breakfast.

Everything else can return at a reasonable time like 9pm
I’m not against eggs, pancakes, and the rest of the IHOP menu. I just think all that has it has it’s place, and that place is around 9pm. By that time, the brain is awake and can fully appreciate the craziness of the omelette, the deliciousness of the bacon, or the fluffiness of the pancake. (that sentence feels weird to me for some reason). People usually get hungry around this time anyway; it’s the perfect stage for the unusual foods that used be part of “team breakfast”.

So in short, breakfast needs to be humbled. Somewhere along the line, someone spent some time stroking its ego and convincing it that people would lose sleep to enjoy it properly. I haven’t seen that to be true. Unless you’re one of those people who goes to bed at 9pm, wakes up at 5am and need something to fill that time for you. Then possibly I can see you being partial to your lone companion in the morning. But for the everybody else, normal people, I hope you see the logic in my argument for altering this bizarre meal.

Tuesday: I would change Heroes

I only watch a few TV shows, and most of them I just catch up with online after a couple weeks. Shows like House, The Office, Lost, and lately Fringe. Out of the shows I follow though, Heroes is definitely my favorite. Or at least it used to be. It used to be that immediately after watching you would want to go back and re-watch some detail that you missed. It used to be that naming all the characters and their powers was pretty simple. But now immediately after watching the show most of the time if you watched it again you’d just get frustrated by the new holes in the story you didn’t notice the first time. And trying to remember the characters is tough, remembering how they’re all related is tougher, and figuring out their powers is hopeless. Yea, it’s kinda become a big clusterhooey. So being the problem solver that ASU has taught me to be, I diagnosed some of the problems (to me anyways), and gave some solutions (cause problems without solutions is just griping, and that’s for Wednesdays). So here’s a brief list of what I would change about Heroes, if you know I was in charge of the world.

Get rid of Nicky/Tracy/Jessica

Initially this said kill off, but that sounded a little violent, so I settled with “get rid of”, maybe with some heavy winking. Why would I get rid of her? So many reasons, the actress is bad, the evil twin thing kind of reeks of bad soap opera, and the missing triplet storyline is even worse. In the beginning she was a single Mom trying to raise a kid in a bad situation, with a power that they never really explained (was she really strong? Why was she only strong when she was crazy? Would she lose her power if she talked with a therapist?). Now she’s a completely different character (but she still kind of has that exhausted single mom look going on) and she has a new well defined power (freezing things) but really nothing to do. None of the other characters have any investment in her, and she isn’t really critical to any part of the story, the only thing she’s involved in is trying to get the Nathan character to obey his father, something he decides to do anyway when He’s 4000 miles away from her. I think maybe the character was supposed to be some kind of conniving, powerful woman, but she always just looks kind of confused, and is usually getting yelled at or taking orders, so maybe it’s time that Nathan realized we’re in a recession and trimmed his staff, starting with the girl who does nothing.

Use Mohinder as the non-power having observer we can all relate to

In the beginning and even now every so often, the Mohinder character narrates the episodes. Why? I think it has a lot to do with his accent, less to do with the actual storytelling of the show. But it really should. See the thing is, I don’t have super powers, you probably don’t have super powers and you know who else doesn’t have super powers? That’s right Mohinder. That should make him easier to relate to, and he can guide people through this fictional world using that silky accent. Maybe being a psudo scientist he could also explain some of the characters actual powers also so we’re not just guessing and surprised all the time.

Change Hiro to a harbinger of past and future

Hiro is everyone’s favorite character. And why not? He’s funny, has a cool power, and generally really likeable. The only problem is that to use his power pretty much always screws things up. Plus he’s always using it for trivial things like stopping time to create 1000 origami cranes, or teleporting to the waffle store (seriously?). He should just be a nomad in time, traveling back and forth slowly taking notes and trying to gently shape the world into a better place by gently encouraging the other characters to do this thing or that thing. Basically everytime you see Hiro, you should be thinking “O something awful is about to happen in the future, and here comes Hiro to tell us what”, keep it that simple. Because as anyone who saw “Primer” knows explaining time travel is way too confusing.

Forget about all this giant conspiracy stuff with the “older heroes”

They keep introducing these old people, or parents of the characters and alluding to some old organization they had where they talked about how best to use their powers or something. But no one really cares. All these old people have had powers for upwards of 40 years and they still haven’t accomplished anything? I’m thinking if you can’t accomplish something in that time span, you might not be smart enough to pull off some crazy giant conspiracy later on in life. Let’s move on from the senior citizen generation and just pretend like this is the first generation of people that are “special”.

Give HRG his own show, where he discovers and tracks down heroes

My favorite character on this show is Noah Bennett. I think it’s because he has the most identifiable priorities, family and work. He just wants to be good at both of them. He also has no powers yet a lot of the other characters are afraid of him, based solely it would seem on past experiences. So do me a favor, give him his own show. Have him and his quiet and wise Haitian partner track down people with powers and either stop them, or help them get help. That way if there were any really good ideas for characters they could just use this show as a natural introduction. Also the underlying ongoing problem of the show could be Noah and his partners chasing after but never quite catching Syler. I’d watch it.

Go back to having the Heroes do normal day to day stuff while dealing with being different

I hate to use a comic book as an example of where the show should go, but I’m going to anyway. So in all the best stories ever told through comic book, the best characters always struggled with trying to do normal stuff that you and I do, while trying to still fulfill their duties as superpeople. For example Spiderman always felt like he was neglecting his Aunt and had trouble keeping a paycheck, most of the X-men wanted to be normal people and lead normal lives, Stupendous man always had trouble finding his cape and getting stuck in the closet or locker (don’t worry if you don’t remember that last one). The point is, the story feels more real when we see signs of our reality in it, like when Claire was going to school and dealing with being the outcast, when Peter was becoming a nurse and dealing with losing patients, when Micah was using his power to get money to help out his struggling single mom (whatever happened to that kid anyway?). These were all examples of regular everyday things you and I understand, and enjoyed watching them be effected by the extraordinary, which really should be the whole point of the show.

So there’s a couple suggestions about what I would change if I was in charge of the world, or at least NBC. There was so much potential there, I hate to see this thing go down in flames and the only thing left to watch is one of the 9 CSI’s, 5 American Idol-esqe shows, and sitcoms about stupid husbands that don’t understand their much smarter wives (what is that about anyway, this is going to come up again I promise). I guess only time will tell, though recently it has been looking up, that last couple episodes were much better, and the guy who used to write for “Pushing Daisies” is taking over so there is a light at the end of this super confusing tunnel.