I’ve said before that I really like numbers. Numbers seem to give life some sense of order. They give guys like me a way to filter this analog world into a digital view.

I love StatTraq. It’s a plug-in for WordPress written by my good friend RandyPants. StatTraq breaks down my web site stats into easy to swallow tables and numbers. Since 2007 is half over, I thought I’d check out what the numbers look like. For 2007 so far…

The SYNS home page has been viewed over 47,000 times with over 4000 rss feed hits.
The top ten most viewed posts are…

Make note of that Mythbuster’s ranking. Even though the post is two years old it stays at the top and you’ll see why momentarily. The top twenty referrers (pages that link to my site) all come from google images, so the search terms are a better judge of how people find SYNS. The top five things that people type into search engines that end up linking to SYNS are…

In addition to over 600 search engine hits for Scottie, I’ve had about 100 hits from searches for Something involving “Tory Belleci” or “Kari Byron”, especially Kari’s silver bikini stunt. Looks like I’m not the only person out there who likes Scottie best. The Favorite Mythbuster post has been in the top three every year since it was posted.

Here’s a little graph I threw together for the growth of SYNS over the last two years.

If any of you read Arvel’s first post about his cruise from [heck] and asked yourself, could it possible get any worse, shame on you! Because of your casual question, Arvel is now suffering even more.

Read part two, “Shiver me times or How the pirates stole my underwear.”

My boss, Arvel, is on vacation and blogging about the worst cruise ever. Funny stuff.

Despite what you may have heard, I don’t hate kids. I actually love kids… once they’re old enough to keep their bodily functions to themselves and understand physics of sound well enough not to yell at me from two feet away. That is to say, I love most kids by the time they’re thirteen years old.

I just wanted to clear that up before I posted WBQotW #99.

Children are the original sexually transmitted disease.

Next week I’ll be on vacation, but I’m hoping I’ll have net access and can post WBQotW #100. (A land mark event!)

For lunch today, I wanted something different. I stopped of at Jack in the Box where their latest pitch is a burger made with 100% sirloin beef and offers you a choice of cheeses. Sure! That sounds better than plain old hamburger to me plus I get yummy swiss cheese instead of the normal yellow rubber stuff. I decided to give it a shot. As usual, I eschewed the combo and went for the sandwich alone. Fries are fattening and soft drinks are all sugar. Aw, what the heck. I threw in a side of onion rings (not health food, but better than fries).

My first clue that something was amiss was the fact that the paper bag I was handed looked like it came from Safeway. When I got back to the office and settled in with my big mug of water, I was pretty surprised at the size of the burger. It’s big! Really big. Bedaubed with some sort of special sauce, big pickle slices (cut longways) and bacon (didn’t mean to order that, but too late now). I dug in with nescient glee.

Even after taking off the top bun (which I always do), I could barely get my mouth over it. But I had to admit it was toothsome and lacked the drippy greasiness of most burgers. I made it through and soon after began to realize, that burger was just too big.

Hm. “Just how big was it,” I wondered. So I pulled up the Jack in the Box nutrition page. Holy heart attack Batman!!

(Before reading on, I recommend you refresh your memory on the recommended daily dosages of fat, sugar and salt in my original nutrition post.)

This monster (bun, special sauce and all) weighs in at nearly a pound. It’s crammed with a whopping 1120 calories (over half of my recommended 2000 per day) along with:

73 grams of fat (That’s well over the recommended 65g per day.)

2620 milligrams of salt (Again, more than my daily allowance of 2400mg.)

And this surprised me most of all. 11 grams of sugar (Almost half my daily allowance.)

Factor in the half order of onion rings I managed to eat and it looks like I’m having water for dinner. “Ohhh. I can’t believe I ate the whooole thing.”

I found two conflicting white board quips in my quip database. (Seriously, I am that much of a geek. I really have a database set up for my white board quips.) Since I couldn’t really decide which one I liked better, I decided to use them both. I’ll let the commenters decide which is more correct.

Quip A:

Celibacy is not hereditary.

Quip B:

Childbirth is hereditary. If your parents don’t have any kids, neither will you.

…and she thinks she’s my wife!!

What do you know! She is my wife!!

A few recent events that have gone thus far unblogged made me realize I don’t talk enough about Tammy. She is, after all, the most important human in my life and, probably, the most influential. So let me tell you a little bit about my wife.

Tammy grew up in Amarillo, Texas (as did I). Her formative years were not kind. She was never considered attractive by her peers and having a lazy eye didn’t help. She was tormented and rejected all the way through elementary and high school. In college, even after having her eye fixed, the effects of her poor treatment kept her from making many friends, although she did make a few. I was not one of them.

Unbeknownst to me, I had befriended a guy from her high school and church who she associated with her torment. So, she also associated me with her torment and every time she saw me at the Amarillo College Baptist Student Union, she’d hit me in the stomach… hard. Still, through a long and unbelievable series of events, she decided I was an OK guy. Later, when I moved to Colorado to finish school, she followed me. We were married soon after.

While we where dating, we both fell in love with rock climbing. The move to Colorado fed this and by the time we got married we were both climbing indoors at least once a week and performing well in amateur climbing competitions. Four months after our wedding, we were climbing in the Garden of the Gods, when Tammy took a fluke fall and hit her head. She was in a coma for about a week and (as is usual with head injuries) she came out of the coma with a major attitude change. She went from being the Tammy the meek doormat, to Tammy the don’t-tell-me-what-I-can’t-do tiger. The good part of this attitude change was that she was driven prove the doctors wrong. The bad part was that we fought… a lot.

Through the years, she’s gotten much better at controlling her emotions but she’s kept the drive. Tammy is a tough girl by any standard. She grew up yelling at the TV when the Cowboys were playing. Now she yells at the TV when Jeff Gordon is losing. She’s no red-neck (She’s still into figure skating and gymnastics), but it sure is cool to have a wife who knows sports as well or better than I do. It’s cool to have a wife that loves camping, four-wheeling, and is working on her confidence and skill at mountain biking. We still climb, though not as much, and it’s cool to have a wife who is a lot stronger than she looks.

That brings me to one of the stories I should have blogged but didn’t. (Now being rectified.)

Our pastor was teaching on the cord of three strands. To illustrate this, he had some small branches, maybe a half inch in diameter. It was supposed to go like this:

“Here is a single branch, see how easily it breaks.” *snap* “But when we but three branches together, they’re very hard to break.” He hands three branches to someone in the front row. They try and try but can’t break the three branches together. “The three branches support each other and are much stronger when they work together.”

Unfortunately, he picked Tammy as the audience volunteer. So it went more like this:

“They’re very hard to break.” He hands the three branches to Tammy. *Snap Crackle Pop* Tammy hands back three broken branches. Everyone laughs. He toss them over his shoulder and says, “So much for that illustration.”

True story.

Oh, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out, Tammy is no longer the unattractive outcast. She’s a total hottie!

Can you believe the elections are still 17 months away?! The way things are going in Washington, you’d think they were next week.

Last I heard the Alien Amnesty bill is dead… for now. The senate rules require 60 votes to bring a bill up for consideration in the full senate and it only got 45. This thing has been so mutilated in committees that some even those who where all gung-ho about it voted to kill it.

The bigger story here is the impact that this bill has had on the GOP. Some have said that John McCain has destroyed his chances for President by getting in bed with Ted Kennedy on this bill. Others say that the divisions among republicans brought to light by the immigration debate have split the party so badly that the democrats have a slam dunk for president in ’08.

The Dems were very successful in 2006, some say, because of their “We hate Bush” platform. Don’t be surprised if Republican White House contenders take up a similar rallying cry to try and salvage their bids for the office.

Speaking of the ’06 Democrats, Pelosi’s posse has discovered that running on a campaign against Bush and Republican corruption was the easy part. Now the proverbial other shoe has dropped and America has noticed that all that promised reform and house cleaning has not been done. Lo and behold, the Democrats are as (or more) corrupt than the Republicans they were supposed to be cleaning out. Pelosi’s congress now has an even lower approval rating that the previous congress. In fact, Pelosi’s congress has a lower approval rating that Bush!! The latest numbers proport that as few as 29% of Americans are happy with this congress. “We hate Bush, but we hate Pelosi more!”

Despite this, the Dems in congress are forging ahead with that left-wing agenda. This week they are pushing through a bill to spend tax dollars on embryonic stem cell development regardless of the fact that private industry is strongly supporting stem cell research and is finding more and more that embryonic stem cells are not helpful. Adult stem cells (donated from the patients themselves rather than harvested by destroying a human life) have proven far more effective. Just last week a study was released in which a team at MIT said they were able to produce useful stem cells with the attractive qualities of embryonic cells by using adult cells.

The push for embryonic stem cell research in the congress is not inspired by science. It is nothing more than an attempt to codify the idea that humans are expendable until their mother hears them cry. The abortion industry needs bills like this to strengthen their position because with conservatives on the Supreme Court, it may soon get much harder to make money killing babies.

This week’s white board quip is influenced by the fact that I attended a middle school youth pool party this weekend. I didn’t bring a swim suit and had not planned to partake eye-burning goodness, but who was I kidding. Thankfully, we have good kids and they took off my shoes before they threw me in.

Swim in the lovely pool while you drink it all in.
– Hotel Ad

In June of 2004, I spent a week in a Microsoft training class being bored to tears. During breaks, and sometimes during the actual sessions, I read through every page of Cockeyed.com, the closest thing to a blog that I’d read to that point. I’d heard of blogs and the whole notion sounded pretty stupid. Who wants to read every joe-schmoe’s on-line diary. But after spending several days taking in the wit and creativity of Rob Cockerham, I thought it might be a cool creative outlet.

On June 9th, 2004, I created an account on BlogSpot. My first post was titled “Surely you’re not serious” because for so long I had bemoaned the blog concept. The name stuck and so did the blog.

Happy birthday, SYNS! Three years and counting.