Mac & Cheese, no anecdotes

 

Macaroni:

• ▢ 16 oz macaroni (elbow pasta)

• ▢ 4 tbsp (30g) unsalted butter (or 4 tsp oil, but why?)
  

Topping:

• ▢ 1-1/3 cup Panko breadcrumbs

• ▢ 4 tbsp (30g) unsalted butter , melted

• ▢ 1/2 tsp salt

Sauce:

• ▢ 8 tbsp (120g) unsalted butter

• ▢ 2/3 cup flour , plain / all purpose

• ▢ 6 cups milk , warmed (low or full fat)

• ▢ 4 cups freshly shredded cheese, Gruyere best (followed by Cheddar and Colby)

• ▢ 2 cups freshly shredded mozzarella cheese , or more other cheese of choice

• ▢ 1-1/2 tsp salt

Seasonings (optional):

• ▢ 2 tsp garlic powder

• ▢ 1 tsp onion powder

• ▢ 1 tsp mustard powder

Instructions

Pasta:

• Cook pasta: Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Add macaroni and cook per packet directions MINUS 1 minute.

• Toss in butter: Drain, return pasta to pot, add butter and toss until melted. Set aside to cool while making the Sauce 

Topping:

• Mix together Topping. Set aside.

Sauce:

• Preheat oven to 350°F.

• Make roux: In a large saucepan or in an ovenproof skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute.

• Add milk: Add about 1 cup of the milk and mix to dissolve the paste into the milk. Then add remaining milk and mix until lump free (use whisk if required).

• Add Seasonings: Mix in salt and Seasonings if using.

• Thicken sauce: Cook, stirring/whisking regularly, for 5 – 8 minutes until thickened to a cream consistency. When the sauce coats the back of a wooden spoon, you should be able to draw a path with your finger.

• Add cheese: Remove from stove, add cheese and stir – cheese doesn't need to melt.

• Check salt: Adjust salt to taste (if you use recommended cheeses, you won't need more).

Assembling:

• Assemble: Pour Sauce into pot with Macaroni. Stir quickly, then pour back into a 9x13 baking dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumb topping and diced jalapenos.
  

• Bake for at least 25 minutes or until top is light golden. Don't bake too long otherwise you'll bake away the Sauce!

• Serve: Serve immediately!

Cubing in public, and a super cuber in California.

My kids, my wife, my beach cube and I all went to the Deerfield Beach Surfers for Autism event a couple of days ago and we had a fair amount of fun, even though I only did maybe one in-depth cube demonstration for one of the vendors and only one waiting in line with participants. The most important things I learned were:

• If you have an extra Coke, share it.
• If the surf is rough, paddle harder.
• I really like chimichurri on french fries.

I have been doing cube demonstrations fairly often, probably a couple a week, just waiting in line at the grocery store or getting lunch. I did one today at a local sandwich place, where they wanted to see a full-on speedsolve while my sandwich contents were cooking, and I didn't bother with my usual round of explanations. Another patron filmed it, however I'm guessing that I won't see it despite my attempts because I'm always too flustered to say "No Spaces!" when I tell people that my youtube channel is SuperMonkeyCube. If you do a search for "super monkey cube" on youtube all you get is silly Super Monkey Ball results. I was even more psyched than usual because the person at the sandwich place that helped me and wanted to see the speedsolve was so jazzed to show me a prism that they carry around with them in order to demonstrate light dispersion when you look through two sides of it, creating funky rainbow effects. Since at heart, I'm just a person that's super-excited about their hobby, it warms my heart to see other science and math enthusiasts do their thing.

The other day at Publix I did my usual round of demonstrations, only to have a woman tell me "You should put this on Youtube." The one thing that I really want to have on Youtube that I really don't have on Youtube is exactly that thing. I want to have a person casually ask me about the cube, we have a little back-and-forth conversation about what their understanding is and I try to clear up their misconceptions, and I demonstrate what they want demonstrated, and do a solve or two to show them what they want to see. The problem for me is that I can't do that while filming it myself, and adding a cameraperson will likely ruin the spontaneity of the whole thing unless I'm constantly followed by a hidden camera crew (which I'm guessing might run me into trouble with the sorts of retail establishments that these interchanges normally take place in). However, maybe if I let it be known that I'd like a camera operator or two and a demonstration victim shemp fake shemp lovely assistant whatever you call the person you're doing the demonstration for, maybe I will be able to round up some volunteers.

Having had a birthday recently, I got a couple of cube-related things, but those will have to wait until another post. Another bit of cube news is too timely, and takes precedence.

Max Park - shown here at the OCSEF Open 2017 in Costa Mesa,CA - breaks the world record average by .06 seconds. Prior to this event, Max was ranked 6th in the world for average time at 6.92 seconds, with a personal best of 5.92 ranking him at 29th in the world for single solve. Also, prior to this event, Feliks Zemdegs held the Ao5 average record for the previous seven years.

If you check out the analysis by BrestCubing on reddit, you can see that Max doesn't really solve like Feliks does.

Feliks tends towards a variety of a lot of very advanced techniques - XCross (eXtended Cross - solving one or more of the four corner-edge pairs while solving the first four edge pieces that are typically referred to as the Cross.) ZBLL (Zborowski-Bruchem Last Layer which has algorithms for all possible last layer cases where the edges are already oriented) and some other freestyle block-building methods borrowed from the Roux and Petrus methods. This means that Feliks is trying to optimize what he's doing for many different kinds of initial positions and find something that's the most turn-efficient for what he sees. Felix's best competition solve of 4.73 seconds was only 43 moves.

When you review Max's solves, what you see is that the only solve where he tries to do something fancy (solve 2 where he does a partial cross before bringing in the first corner edge pair) is his slowest solve (7.26 sec) and second highest move count (68). His other solves are very straightforward, and just plain fast. Max's fastest solve, a competition best for him, was a 5.60 with 62 moves - just over 11 turns per second.

This does make me wonder about the number of algorithms that someone can have memorized and be able to execute them solidly. It's not necessarily worthwhile to have a multitude of algorithms under your belt if a few of them are going to be a little slower than the other ones, and the more different things you have algorithms for mean more cases that you have to be able to recognize. One of the reasons that there are more CFOP solvers than other methods is because it's less abstract to explain and easier to identify cases.

Well, maybe I'm going to have to practice with a metronome more. (Bass and cubing.)

The perils of innovation. In a can.

I was reading the other day about the forces that hinder companies from real innovation and I was a little bummed out by the idea that most companies have become so risk-averse that it creates very few actual improvements. It got me thinking - what would happen if Edison had worked in today's economy? How long would they let Edison tinker with finding a commercially viable solution for the light bulb before they fired him and defunded his project? Would we have looked at William E. Sawyer vs. Thomas Edison and seen the same things that we see with Apple and Samsung now fighting over the finer points of their respective technologies?

Now, I do see the point of incremental technological improvements. We are always improving our computing capability by making new processors that can do more with the same or less power. We work on improving the cost to manufacture solar cells, so that it can become a technology with wider adoption. Chemical improvements are being made with batteries to make them larger and more reliable. These things can go on as planned, and we eventually reap some small reward from it, but it would be nice to see some real innovation once in a while. It's also possible that real innovation is going on behind the scenes however slowly, but thanks to the protective nature of companies and new products we don't see it particularly often. They're scared to hint at anything that might turn out to be a failure. About the only time we see high-profile failures any more are movies, cars, and food - but these failures are more failures of fashion than function. You may not want to drive an Aztek, but the car failed in the marketplace because it was ugly, not because it had rampant mechanical problems. I was going to cite a movie example here but Ben Affleck has taken enough heat about it already so I don't want to pile on. (Correction: One of my editors said that with Ben's recent Academy award win for Argo, maybe I shouldn't make an obtuse reference to Gigli. After all, Ben didn't write or direct Gigli anyway. ) So, I'm going to skip straight to the beverage part.

In an attempt to try to get soda drinkers to resist the temptation of drinking coffee in the morning, Coke and Pepsi have tried to find ways to leverage their own brands. Coke's last attempt at this was in 2006, with Coca-Cola BlāK which was discontinued by 2008. Pepsi had taken a swing at this a couple of times with the regular flavored but more caffeinated Pepsi AM (1989) and the coffee-flavored Pepsi Kona (1995?). Both of Pepsi's attempts were just as short-lived as Blāk was. So by now, Coke and Pepsi may have realized that the real holdouts that don't drink coffee in the morning are people that drink energy drinks, people who drink juice in the morning, and people that drink Mountain Dew. Both companies make energy drinks now, and both companies have had major juice brands in their portfolios for a long time. But, Pepsi can't help but feel that they still have an untapped market, so their new innovation is Mountain Dew Kickstart.

There are two flavors, "Orange Citrus" and "Fruit Punch". I opted for the "Fruit Punch" only because I found that most of the Mountain Dew flavor variants that I have had over the past several years that said "citrus" on the label have been a little bit too tangy for my taste. (I liked LiveWire, and they discontinued it, so I figured that it wasn't going to go my way.) It did not really taste like what I expected, as what I had heard previously about this drink was that it was "Mountain Dew + Juice". While it is true that there is juice in it, there is much less sugar in it. The 16 oz. can is 80 calories, while 16 oz. of regular Mountain Dew or juice would be easily 220 calories. After a cursory check of the label, it would appear that the sweeteners include HFCS, white grape juice concentrate, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose. There are some B vitamins in it, as well as the obligatory inclusion of glycerol ester of wood rosin without which I presume it can't have a Mountain Dew label on it. It does not have the thick mouth feel that Mountain Dew usually does, it was like a low-calorie sports drink in that regard. It might be useful to note that my wife described the beverage on first taste as "Mountain Dew + Gatorade". Coca Cola's sports drink Powerade adds B vitamins, Gatorade does not. I'm not entirely sure how much the B vitamins or the potassium contribute to the taste. There is also 92 mg of caffeine, 20 more than you would get in 16 oz. of Mountain Dew. Would I drink it again? Probably not - and certainly not for breakfast. It's cheap caffeine, but I could easily get cheap caffeine that I actually wanted to drink in other ways, and at the correct dosage.

Disclosure - I typed this entire post under the influence of most of a can of Kickstart. I had to backspace a lot more than usual.

A little weekend cubing, some gaming nonsense, plus Bonus Taco Content!

Well, I was quite pleased with my cubing over the weekend - I started a little tiny bit early because the band was playing a local 80's night and I did a couple of table solves for listeners between sets.  The downside of the cube solves at a loud musical establishment is that it might as well be mime. It's so loud in there that everything has to be done with facial expressions or hand gestures.  Add to that the fact that I'm dressed a little like a guy that should be playing turntables circa 1988, and it's quite surreal.

I got to do a little more cubing on Saturday at the local Surfers for Autism event - it's both a way for me to keep the kids around us in line occupied, and a a way for me to break the ice with the vendors there and various other people I haven't talked to before. I used to worry about dropping a cube in the sand, but I take one that has springy enough action that a few grains of sand in the mechanism doesn't matter that much. A couple of the high-functioning kids that I hadn't talked to before were very interested in the cube and talked to me about it in line, and when we weren't in line I gave demonstrations to a few of the vendors.  I also got to demonstrate to one of the volunteer groups that were working with my younger son, since yesterday was pretty chilly out and #2 son needed long breaks to catch his breath.

I picked up a few games recently, one of which was Hulk:Ultimate Destruction. I was hoping that it would be the perfect game for #2 son since he seems to hate the structure of some games so I presumed he needed something more open-world. He's the one that figured out how to control the chicken in The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess because he delights in goofing around in the open areas more than doing the dungeons. (I was also thinking about the Toy Story 3 game for Wii but the PS2 hulk game was only $9.) The down side of the Hulk game is that even if you're just wandering around the city, learning the streets, you will still get shot at.  I didn't remember that happening in Grand Theft Auto 3 until after you started doing bad stuff.  I guess walking around while green is enough to get you shot at.

Well, I promised bonus taco content, so here it is.

We want cake! Where's our cake?

By this time, I would presume that everybody that had preordered “Portal 2” has had a chance to start digging into it. I really liked the original “Portal”, but I'm not sure what to do about the sequel.

“Portal” places you in a testing facility under the supervision of the Aperture Science Corporation. They are trying out a new handheld device that allows instant teleportation between two surfaces. The device shoots two different colored portals, and only one portal of each color can exist at a time. Your entrance velocity into one portal is your exit velocity out of the other portal, although the relative direction of gravity will sometimes change on the transition between portals. For example, you see a deep chasm below you that you can't jump across. Shoot one portal on the floor of the chasm, and another on the wall above you, and jump down into the chasm. The acceleration due to gravity increases your velocity, and your exit out of the other portal flings you across the chasm that you wouldn't be able to jump across. Granted, this may not be the only way to proceed, but it's nice to have those kinds of options.

As it stands, I could just get the PC version of “Portal 2” at some point over the summer if I think that I will have time to really dig into it, and it wouldn't matter so much when I play it. I'm not that worried about spoilers. I can hold my ears, or not – it won't matter so much since I heard the internet meme of “The cake is a lie” for so long before I actually played “Portal” that I wasn't even sure what it really meant by the time I played the game. It's like when you look at a familiar word too long and start to break it down into letters, or like when Vizzini starts second-guessing himself endlessly (to his peril, I might add) in “The Princess Bride”. Was there really a cake, or did they want me to think that there was a cake? But if that's what they thought I was going to think, then was there any need for an actual cake? Or perhaps there was a cake but also a specific reason for making me think that there wasn't a cake, making me want the cake more knowing I couldn't have it?

Needless to say, I played “Portal” unencumbered by the thought of cake – trying to think in portals was challenging enough. I had even played the predecessor to “Portal” - “Narbacular Drop”, but that game while sharing the basic mechanic of a portal gun, doesn't play that much like “Portal” due to a less interesting set of physical rules. I am looking forward to returning to the world of “Portal”, even though GlaDOS, the computer that runs the testing facility in the game scares the crap out of me.

(Side note: I answered the phone at work one afternoon about a month ago, only to find that I was being robocalled. Not just a crappy recorded message to tell me to refinance my mortgage – but high quality voice synthesis, and an adult female voice just a little too close to Ellen McLain's, the voice actress who played GlaDOS in “Portal”. I hung up the phone and had to get up and walk around to shake off the feeling of dread.)

The real problem for me is that of the expanded game this time. No, I'm not talking about all the new game elements, because any series of games will always add or subtract elements as it progresses. I expect that. I'm talking about the cooperative mode. It would be one thing to just wait for the right moment to play the single player game and immerse myself in the experience, but now I fear that if I wait too long to play it, I may rob myself of the opportunity to play the co-op part of the game. I hear that the console versions have split screen local co-op. Maybe I'll have to teach my older son to think in portals.

Cheese or Twinkies?

I may have a problem with food.

I say this in particular because this morning I was madly searching my office for a cheese stick that I, in fact, had already eaten minutes before and have no recollection of.

Certainly, this is not as serious a problem as anorexia or bulimia, and I don't expect there to be a telethon for cheese amnesia anytime soon. Also, I'm calling dibs on "Cheese Amnesia" as an album title or a song name. It makes me think of how I fondly recall some things from the 80's until I actually see how bad they were.

But, back to the food thing. So I realize that while large portions of the world are undernourished because they don't have the sort of land that's conducive to farming, or don't have the resources to farm on the sort of scale that would actually feed the citizens, in America we tend to have the opposite problem with a similar result. We have so many food choices, and they are wildly stratified by price. What tends to happen is that inexpensive foods are consumed because we feel hungry, but the actual nourishment is a little secondary to price concerns. Who wants to go through the bother of cutting open an avocado - if it's even ripe enough to eat in the first place - if there are some perfectly formed Cheetos in that bag over there? Who wants to make a hummus wrap and take it to lunch if you can get tacos easily in the drive-through? Why would I want to have Lipton Brisk that tastes like instant tea instead of real tea?

Now if it's been shown that we're willing to forgo a lot of things to gain convenience, why hasn't someone made really healthy eating more convenient? Oh yeah - there's no money in it. The most important things that most people could do to improve their heath are quitting smoking, moderate exercise, and eating less. Not less butter, not less red meat, not less soda - just less anything. Figure out how many calories you normally have in a day, and pick a number a little less than that, and see if you're losing weight. Think I'm crazy? Check out Mark Haub's Twinkie Diet.

Taco Bell news, hot off the packet.

Our regular trio of taco sauces Mild, Hot, and Fire (although that's a stretch since the only difference I can discern between Hot and Fire is Hot has more water added to it) now has two new partners in the condiment bins - Verde and Fire-Roasted. The astute among you will notice that the packets are the same size as the other sauce packets, but say Border Salsa at the top instead of Border Sauce. Verde is in a green packet, not unlike the color of Kermit the Frog. Fire-Roasted is in a maroon packet, or maybe garnet. (Not ready to go out on a limb and say that it's purply-brown.)

Taco Bell has had "Green Sauce" for as long as I can remember, but they have always done a poor job of letting customers know that they have it, so it led a meager existence on the steam table with a small ladle in it, getting baked half to death. It was mostly a green chile sauce, and didn't really have much in the way of a tomatillo flavor. The Verde Border Salsa has tomatillos as its third ingredient, after water and green chiles. While most of you that have had real Mexican food will look down your nose at this packet with its soy additives and preservatives, this is a real leap forward for salsa verde in general. I think that if the public warms up to this newly accessible flavor, it will mean great news for tomatillo growers and aficionados (except for the if-you-like-it-now-because-I-liked-it-before-then-it-sucks hipsters).

The Fire-Roasted salsa has a smoky flavor, like what you might expect from a sauce that said "adobo" or "chipotle" on it somewhere, but the ingredients seem to indicate that the tomatoes are fire roasted. This isn't a bad flavor, but it's not for everyone. If you have inclinations for barbecue sauce and hot peppers, you might see if this is for you.

Unfortunately, between this newness of the sauce and the general popularity of Taco Bell on a Friday at lunchtime (especially the store in question), it was difficult to decide whether drive-through or walk-in was the better bet, but I took my chances with walk-in so that I didn't leave the car running. The drive-through line was backed up well past the speaker, but I also saw once I got in that they were similarly backed up inside the store. I saw six or seven people standing around by the counter and a couple more at the soda fountain. As it turned out, only the person in front of me had not ordered yet, and he tentatively went up to the counter to order shortly after I got there. He kept looking over his shoulder the whole time, like the Feds were watching him and he was just waiting for them to close in. I can't hear what he orders as the store is quite loud, and the man in front of me is ordering in broken English. I also can't make out what the cashier is repeating back to him, since she speaks a different variety of broken English.

Then, the source of the backwards looks appears - the man's wife walks into the store. He goes to talk to his wife for a second, away from the cash register. The talk, nod heads, and he turns back to the cashier and starts walking away, with an open hand that he waves as if to say "No, no, forget my order, we have to go". This is the part that I am most surprised about. The cashier gives him the most exaggerated "No, you didn't" look, including the side-to-side head move. Somehow, she calls him back to the register to make him finish placing the order that he has not even paid for yet. After watching him be bullied by the cashier in front of his own wife, I decide that perhaps I should go to my safer neighborhood Taco Bell and order through the drive-through.

I did grab a couple Verde packets before I left, though.

The radical fetishization of game cases.

On my usual Friday trip to Wal-Mart, I added a CD organizer thingy to my shopping list - not like the big Rubbermaid photo&CD organizer totes that I have been getting, but one that just has little sleeves in it for the discs. I took 2-1/2 bins of PS2 games and condensed them down to something the size of a large hardback book, with 1/3 of a bin now being taken up only by what game manuals came out of that stash. A success overall, as it now allows me easier access to a lot of games that I don't always go digging through the bins for - and I even got so crazy as to alphabetize them. I had a couple of games that I couldn't bear to take out of the cases - no, they weren't Street Figher Alpha Anthology or Capcom Fighting Evolution - actually they are R-Type Final and Mister Mosquito. Too wacky to mess with, I suppose. I was surprised by a few things - I forgot that Death by Degrees had a demo disk for Tekken 5 in it, I forgot that Ribbit King had a second disk of bizarre movies on it, and I forgot that Barbarian was made by Titus, the same people that made that awesome Xena:The Warrior Princess fighting game for N64. I have no idea what has kept me hanging on to plastic cases all this time, but I think that part of it is how fragile the first era of CD's were.

At some other point on Friday, I wandered into out local Gamestop with the kids in tow. #1 son and I looked around in the Wii games, and we were looking at Sega Superstars Tennis as a light and fun way to break up our overly serious Okami adventure. I was a little annoyed with the employee on duty - it was a middle-aged woman. I don't mean to be ageist or sexist, my annoyance stemmed from the fact that she gave off no 'gamer' vibe at all. As a matter of fact, that particular store has had, in the past, quite a number of female employees that were gamers - and even one female general manager that was rather knowledgeable about intricate details of Final Fantasy that were even a little scary (in a good way). In general, I have found female employees a little easier to deal with largely because they tend to be a little more professional. Also, you would think that a store staffed with female gamers would be sure to attract the attention of the predominantly male gaming audience and be a little less off-putting to moms of gamers when they have to make a trip there to ask an employee something about a game. I'm sure that Gamestop's rigid rules and procedures will continue to produce their desired employee churn and anybody good they ever have will leave as usual. We bought nothing and left - we may consider the tennis game later, but it's not going anywhere.

By the time I have all of the games out of their plastic cases, I was starting to think that just putting them all in the recycle bin was the wrong move - so I called Gamestop to see if they wanted them. I got Middle-Aged-Non-Gamer-Woman on the phone, as I had suspected that I would. I pleaded my case for not throwing out cases, and suggested that they could make good use of them. She plainly stated that she got all of her game cases from corporate.

After a subsequent phone call, I think that one of the local Play-N-Trade stores has warmed to my idea. Where's the sense in putting game cases out for recycling when they could just be re-used directly without all that processing?

Also, Cherry Crush is awesome, and so are Ketchup flavored Pringles. I would advise, however, having them separately.

Food, Food, and... almost food.

I have three things to report in the food arena. Two of them are undoubtedly, unquestionably, food. The third thing, I'm feeling like it's not really food, even though it's something I write on the grocery list on a regular basis.

On the way home from work the other night, I asked my youngest child what he wanted for dinner. Typically, there are only two answers. On weekends, he seems to ask for macaroni & cheese with SPAM in it. The other answer is "Hangurgers". Yes, that is how my three-year old pronounces it. I am going to have to call Steve Martin about that and see if that gag in the sub-mediocre "Pink Panther" remake was his or the other writer's gag.

In an effort to appease both the adults and the children, I did the unthinkable in this economy, I applied the "separate but equal" treatment. It was not my original intention, but I didn't really think that I wanted plain old greasy french fries, and I spotted something in the freezer section that made me think that doing a separate dinner for the adults would work.

Alexia spicy sweet potato fries.

They were good by themselves, as long as they were just crispy enough (don't kill them in the oven, though). They were also good with mayo. The chipotle flavor doesn't make sense with ketchup, though. The kids had tater tots instead - sweet potato fries are 'weird' and chipotle is too spicy for them anyway. These fries I will definitely get again.

The second thing I would like to report in the food arena is Taco Bell Shrimp Tacos. Six shrimp, lettuce, mayo, and pico de gallo. Overall, the flavor was very balanced - the shrimp worked very well with the pico sauce. There was nothing spectacular about the shrimp, but they also were not as small as I had heard from initial reports from elsewhere on the web. In this particular instance, it make the steak soft taco that I had with it not seem as good. The person I was eating with commented that he had steak soft tacos from that same location a few days before and they were better, so maybe we just got a bum part of the cow, making for an unfair comparison. I don't know if the shrimp tacos are going to be a limited time item or not, but it may limit my ability to go to Taco Bell with my steak-loving wife, as there are lots of allergy warnings about shellfish and my wife is one of the afflicted in this case. Most of the time we don't have cross-contamination problems unless it's someplace like Long John Silver's where everything ends up in the fryer. OK, enough with the allergy talk. To sum up - not bad, not good enough to make up for the potential inconvenience to my spouse.

The third thing, and arguably not a food thing although I consider it so, is -
Metal Gear Solid Mountain Dew Game Fuel.

You will probably notice that most of the writing on the carton in the article I linked to is in Japanese - who knows if this promotion is coming to the states? Maybe everyone here will still be too busy with the God of War III promotion. The number of people that I know that have played the Metal Gear games is few, and the number that own a PSP is even fewer. I can only presume that this is an attempt to bring stealth action to a new generation. Since there are several collectible cans, and I only see one color, I assume it's only one flavor. Judging from the can, it's the one I wasn't as fond of from the World of Warcraft promotion. I guess we will find out sometime in June?

More Proof that I don't understand Marketing

(As if anyone needed it...)
Today's marketing anomaly is about the "Tie-in". This is where you take product and create an association with some other product, in hopes to generate some excitement about both products.

For example, 7-Eleven is frequently doing special Slurpee flavors or collector cups as a tie-in to various movie releases. (The last Superman movie and the new Transformers come to mind.) They have big window stickers on the storefront that advertise both the products and the movie, and the radio ads for 7-Eleven and the movie include some soundbites about the promotion. Presumably the movie website might have some info about product promotions as well. The idea is that people just going for a Slurpee get some information about the movie if they didn't know about it, and the people that buy Slurpees are people they want to go see the film. Also, people that were already going to see the film get reinforcement of their choice, making them feel better about wanting to see the movie and having a Slurpee. 7-Eleven figures that people going online to the Transformers website might want a collector cup, driving some business to their store. In theory, the tie-in works for both parties, if done correctly.

In thinking that I understood how this works, I am baffled by the current Mountain Dew Game Fuel tie-in to World of Warcraft. The flavors have been out for a while, but the only reason I'm even aware of them is because I went through one particular line in Walmart where there happened to be a poorly lit drink case with some 20 oz. bottles of the beverages in question. Based on spotty data on youtube, the new flavors have been out for two months and I haven't seen a stitch of marketing anywhere. To be fair, I don't play WoW, so maybe that's why - but I don't think that is a good reason.

When the Halo 3 Game Fuel tie-in promotion started, they were stocking 12-packs of it in the game sections of stores (especially Target), along with McFarlane miniatures of a bunch of the characters. Even though I didn't buy Halo 3, there was no way I could have missed the promotion. As I just said, I also don't play World of Warcraft, so this certainly begs the question as to why I'm even talking about this. There is a point to this - I drink Mountain Dew. Surely I shouldbe made aware of new flavors, if the marketing people are doing their jobs? Or perhaps, this is a one-sided promotion where WoW fans get served Mountain Dew ads only, and WoW has no interest in attracting other overcaffeinated persons to their game. Just more proof that I don't really understand marketing - or I'm doing exactly what the marketing people want me to do.

Mountain Dew and some reviews

I had to run to the store early Tuesday morning for milk. CVS had stuff on sale, I splurged and still made it out the door for under $10 - milk, some cereal with raisins, a 2-Liter of Coke for my wife, and a cold 20oz Mountain Dew Voltage.

Voltage now tastes a bit more like Game Fuel than it used to (although it could be argued that it was the closest to begin with), and the ginseng aftertaste has been toned down from what I remember when I tried this before. Why do I still know what Game Fuel tastes like? Because other MD aficionados have carefully horded some, and I managed to have a can of it just last week.

Also, I just got my son Super Mario Sunshine for GameCube (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that most of you know about Mario?) - I'd never played it, and I didn't even play Super Mario 64 (gasp!) but #1 son had been playing it at a local McDonald's that still had it set up on a kiosk. Julian said that the version we got was slightly different than the kiosk version - the kiosk version resets when you die and starts in a slightly different place, according to #1 son. As I recall, not everyone liked it when it came out, and I don't know why I passed on it at the time. I never got around to playing it, so I skipped from Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island on SNES straight to Super Mario Galaxy. Now that I'm playing Sunshine, I see a lot of things that they re-used for Galaxy. In fact, there are a lot of things in Galaxy that I like better. There are some places in the game where you can just walk around before picking a level to go to where there are almost no ways to lose lives, but plenty of places to practice some of the tricky jumps and hover maneuvers particular to this game. In the hub world in Super Mario Galaxy, about the only thing you can practice is one type of wall jump and (super-late spoiler alert) flying. There aren't too many open areas of ground in the Galaxy hub world so if you get too crazy, you fall off and get reset to the nearest platform. In general, I can only assume that this game was poorly received because it wasn't what fans of Super Mario 64 wanted to play, but I am finding it fun, and my son is enjoying it as well (even though he needs just a little bit of help on this one part... and then this part...).

The other thing that I picked up recently was Arcana Heart for PS2. (I got it as a small self-reward for finishing my taxes.) It's a fighting game full of Japanese schoolgirls with mystical powers associated with supernatural forces called Arcana. Again, I am late getting to this as it has been out for almost a year in America. The only thing that I can say about it is that it doesn't appear to have made any major errors that I can detect on a first playthrough. It's a 2-D fighter like the old Street Fighter games and Guilty Gear. The music is not as engaging as Guilty Gear's metal anthems, but nothing is so bad as to detract from the gameplay experience. Even using a cordless controller, the game is snappy and responsive. I had read other reviews complaining about how floaty it is, but since I get the idea that they are playing on rather large backgrounds and have figured out that you can press a button to dash over to where your opponent is rather quickly, it only feels floaty if you try to do jump-in attacks like it was Street Fighter. The controls are a little simpler with only three attack strengths and a special button, which is a big help in an unfamiliar game. Each character has some of their own special moves, and they get other special moves based on which Arcana they use so it is possible that the game could feel like there are 121 different characters. However, the game's storyline implies that certain characters are normally tied to particular Arcana. I guess I'll find out later if it's possible to play against the computer using a non-standard pairing of character and Arcana. This is likely to be the one of the last fighting games on the PS2 unless they decide to put out Arcana Heart 2 or another Guilty Gear on PS2, and it's a somewhat disappointing end to the PS2 in that regard. If you're a fighting game fan that has to play them all, it will be amusing for a time. If you're an anime fan that's all geeked out about the schoolgirl part, you might enjoy this game more than the fighting game aficionados.

A sample week of cubing in public

I really enjoy cubing in public. I don't just enjoy it for the occasional bonus, like a free hour of diagnostic time at the mechanic's shop, or the rare employee discount or free meal. Those are fun when I get them, but it's not really the reason. The reason I really like it is when I can give someone that moment where the light goes on in their head, and they get a glimpse of real understanding. That is not the universal reaction, however. A lot of the time it's just amazement or disbelief.

Let's compare a few scenarios. Last weekend at the fair I went to all of the usual vendors, and a few new ones. #1 son always likes to find one particular Ty (Beanie Baby) vendor at the fair because she's always got some that he didn't find elsewhere and he has a serious jones for stuffed animals. (They're so cute!) We have come by her booth at least the last four or five years. She remebers who we are because of the cube, even though she does dozens of fairs and shows a year. This year, she shows me off to the guys selling baseball memorabilia across from her. It's the standard bit where I hand them the solved cube, encourge them to mix it up, and I knock it down in about 40 seconds or so. They shake their heads in disbeleif and go back to their business. Later, I go look for one of the other booths by myself, and run across a local solar power vendor. I am interested and look over the booth, and I get the usual question.

"Have you ever gotten that thing?"

The guy in the next booth over starts watching and comments that he had solved the cube a couple of times, but didn't really know what he was doing. I explain a few more in-depth things that I don't normally bother with, like explaining the difference between an edge piece and a corner piece. These are guys that probably could solve it if they really wanted to, and perhaps I managed to turn some lights on in their heads. I tried to relate the edge and corner pieces of the cube to the perimeter pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now the difference is that in a jigsaw puzzle, you can move all of the pieces independently, but at least they got the idea.

Thursday night out at a fundraiser, for the elementary school that #1 son goes to, I had the cube with me and managed to catch the eye of a couple of kids two tables over. Their older sister was unimpressed - as it turns out she could actually solve the cube, given a few minutes. I came over and sat at the end of the table for a few minutes and gave them a more though demonstration. I showed them the usual corners-first method that I do, and showed them what two-in-ones are (where you turn two adjacent faces in succession with a single hand motion). It felt like I was doing table magic, but without the intense pressure that comes with working closeup. I had nothing to conceal, and it was amazing all on its own. The youngest was a little older than #1 son, and #1 son came over to talk after a while, as the topic had turned away from the cube and over to school. After a little more chatting, and #2 son barrelling into the conversation, it turned out that the youngest kid had seen my wife and the kids walking to school a lot. So, we ended up turning the light on in a different way, by networking.

This past weekend at McDonalds, I sat between two groups of teenagers and #2 son took great delight in playing peekaboo with one of them. I'm not sure if #2 son was that hungry, though. After I finished eating, I went back to cubing, and got noticed. Oddly enough, the two guys behind us were semi-hanging out with a group of girls over on the other side. Once I had the guy's attention, they called the girls over. As usual, I hand off the solved cube to one of the girls to have them scramble it, so they don't think I've rigged it somehow. What is the greatest danger to solving a cube in McDonalds? French fry grease is. I still managed to solve it fast enough to be somewhat impressive, but I'm sure I could have done better. I lost control of the cube twice, but managed to reverse my mistakes quickly. Stage fright? Grease? All of the above? Maybe I'll have to film it sometime. Until then, I won't really know. Big thanks to Alex and Emily and their friends for indulging my crazy cubing skills.

Orange Mountain Dew!

I managed to obtain some Mountain Dew LiveWire on the way back from Thanksgiving - even though I don't really like being in the big box stores on Black Friday. I hope that the person I got it for appreciates it. I had some myself, and it wasn't exactly what I remembered. I'm sure that the problem is what I remembered was the frozen concoction that Target had a couple of summers ago in their ICEE machine, which usually is a little more hi-test than the soda itself.

Shrinkage on the Beverage Aisle

What does Pepsi do when they have a bad quarter? They start shrinking their package sizes! I was at the local Wal-Mart for some must-get items, and figured I would pick up some caffeine for the week while I was there. No Mountain Lightning, so I figure the real thing must be on sale. When I look at Pepsi's portion of the shelf space where the 12-packs would be, there were 8-packs. In place of the 24-packs? 18-packs. That way, they don't have to move the price point as far, and they ship a smaller amount of product. Since most people aren't bringing a slide rule to the store, they don't know if the new package size is a good deal compared to before or not! Additionally, Wal-Mart typically doesn't offer particularly good prices on name brand soda on a daily basis since they're pushing the house brand most of the time. Every once in a while, they'll put something on sale, but it's usually the 24-packs of Dew or Pepsi. Luckily, that was the case. I also noticed that several people had put their 18-packs back on the float that the sale-price 24-packs were on.