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Episode IV: A New Dope

So. It’s been a little while.

There was a time when I was writing every day here — come rain, shine or plagues of locusts.

(To be fair, the plagues of locusts never actually happened. Though I do remember walking home one day and having a ladybug fly down the back of my shirt.

And I wrote an entry that day, dammit. Granted, I ran around my yard for twenty minutes first, screaming ‘Get it out, get it out, GET IT OOOOOOUT!!‘

But I wrote. That’s what you call “commitment”.)

Then I moved to an ‘every weekday’ model, and then ‘two or three times a week’. And now, finally, I appear to be on a schedule that has me writing once every… well. Once every twenty months, apparently.

At that rate, let’s hope there are no ‘two-parters’, eh?

“Finally, I had an epiphany. Or a seizure brought on by watching a tight loop of ‘milky minutes’ in slow-motion one too many times.”

Actually, I can explain my prolonged absence. You see, there are times in a person’s life when a question of Great Importance presents itself, and commands full and undivided attention until it can be fully resolved. All other endeavors — sleep, food, work, sex, hobbies — take a back seat to the unwavering desire to answer one of life’s great mysteries, to unravel a riddle that could offer a glimpse into the very nature of being, of existence, and of our place in the universe.

That’s what happened to me. One warm summer night in mid-June ’09, as I sat innocently drinking with a couple of friends in a local bar, one of them posed a query that simply couldn’t be ignored:

“Hey, that mom character in those rollover minute commercials — you think she’s hot? Or not?”

So began a nearly two-year odyssey of relentless research, aesthetic evaluation and self-discovery. Is ‘hotness’ defined by objective criteria? Can we comprehend the true nature of beauty? If the commercial isn’t in HD, does it still count? And how many rollover minutes are we talking here, anyway?

Finally, I had an epiphany. Or a seizure brought on by watching a tight loop of ‘milky minutes’ in slow-motion one too many times. Whichever. The important thing is, I answered the question. Rollover minute mom is, indeed, ‘hot’.

As opposed to ‘not’. With a 92% confidence interval and a p-value within the bounds of sampling error.

So, there you go. Statistics don’t lie. They just take a couple of years for a doofus like me to sort out on a calculator. So nobody fricking ask me about the Orbit gum lady, or that goosebumpy chick who seems to enjoy Peppermint Patties so much, and maybe we’ll get some updates around here for a change.

In the meantime — what did I miss?