All posts by George Evans

About George Evans

I think, therefore I think

100 Words for 100 Days is finished!

George, miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Posts

From September 15th to December 23rd I participated in the 100 Words for 100 Days challenge from goteenwriters.blogspot.com. It’s a website meant to help teens write novels, but I didn’t have any book that I wanted to write at the moment so instead I worked on this blog. The rules were that you had to write 100 or more words every day, but you could miss one day a week and one week in the total 100 days.

I am glad to announce that I finished the challenge and did so with 19,063 words written. Now, over the last few months I haven’t posted anywhere near 19,063 words, but there’s a reason for it. If you had to write 100 words each day, which would you do: start a new post and quickly get to 100-300 word, work on a previous post (which involves re-reading it) and probably get to 100-300 words, or publish a post and get maybe 10-20 words in as you edit stuff and clean everything up? Clearly the first and second one, and more often the first than the second. The result is that I have over 30 drafts waiting to be read over, added to, polished, and published.

The contest is over, but I have decided to continue the challenge. However, I have revised the rules a bit; the new rule is that everyday (with one day a week off) I can either write over 100 words, or I can publish a post. For example, I’ve written this post today, getting 278 words in, and tomorrow I’ll review it, polish it, and publish it. Despite probably not getting 100 words in, I’ll still count the day off because I published something. This way hopefully I’ll be able to start making my way through that mountain of drafts that is waiting for me, and you’ll get more content.

Thanks for reading!

~ George

(p.s. I got 49 words out of revising this the next day, and 24 of them are in this sentence. As I said, not very many.)

Interesting Observation: Happy New Year!

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, , ,

A new year has started! There. That’s a pretty interesting observation if you think about it, so the post must be finished. Sign: ~ George. Done.

.

Not really 🙂 As you probably know, it’s a the start of a new year. You can tell because of all the people saying “Happy New Year!” all the time. I’ve said it myself a few times, but I started wondering what we were actually saying when we said “Happy New Year” to people. If you look closely, it isn’t actually a sentence at all, just a noun plus two adjectives. Saying “Happy New Year!” to people is grammatically the same as yelling “Purple Tin Piano!” at them.

Of course, we aren’t yelling “Purple Tin Piano” at them, and of course we mean something more than “adjective adjective noun”. What we omit when we say “Happy New Year” is the two words “Have a”. When we add those words, we get “Have a Happy New Year”, which is a complete sentence. We just drop the verb to make it easier to say. Furthermore, “Have a Happy New Year” is still leaving out a bunch of words. What we actually mean is “I wish that you may be happy throughout the rest of this new year.” No wonder we shortened it.

Anyhow, as if I haven’t said it enough, Happy New Year! (However you want to read it) 🙂

~ George

Quotable/Interesting Observation – The Cycle of Tiredness

George, Idea Polish Level: 1, My Ideas, , ,

If you run too long you’ll get tired and want to walk. If you walk too long you’ll get tired and want to stand. If you stand too long you’ll get tired and want to sit. If you sit too long you’ll get tired and want to lay down. If you lie down too long you’ll get tired and want to get up and run. This is the Cycle of Tiredness.

~ George

My Fourth Santa Theory: Particular Santa (the best of my current theories)

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, , ,

There are many arguments against Santa being real, so I came up with a few ideas that work out a couple of kinks without being too unrealistic.

So here’s my fourth theory: What if Santa actually paid attention to the rule that if you’re naughty then you don’t get a gift? When I say that this is my “best” theory, I don’t mean that it is my favorite. Instead I mean that this theory fits everything I know about Santa better than any of my other theories and also obeys almost all the laws of physics (unlike almost every other theory), with the one exception being that Santa is immortal. I believe it to be the most elegant and simple of the lot, and it just makes sense to me. As with my third theory, if you received a present from Santa this year then this theory must not true, so you don’t have to continue reading.

Anyhow, what if Santa actually cared whether you messed up? What if the naughty list was actually enforced? No one is perfect, I doubt anyone would disagree with that, so why should we all get presents? We’re all on the naughty list, after all, and even if the list is cleared every Christmas it wouldn’t take too long before we mess up and are back on it. Santa has only ever had to give about 33 gifts in his entire life, and they were all to the same person. If only we could all be as nice as that one person.

~ George

My Third Santa Theory: Sorcerer Santa (doesn’t work if Santa still visits on Christmas)

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, , ,

There are many arguments against Santa being real, so I came up with a few ideas that work out a couple of kinks without being too unrealistic.

So here’s my third theory: What if the gift that Santa gives every child doesn’t have to be tangible? That’s the premise, and it can be turned a lot of different ways. I’ll just show one here. Of course, if you received a toy or something else from Santa last Christmas, then this theory must not be true, and you can stop reading if you want.

Santa is a powerful sorcerer who can cast a spell over the entire world in such a way that when it’s midnight wherever you are, you receive his gift: the gift of a good feeling. Or maybe it’s a good dream that he gives you, and if you aren’t asleep then Santa “won’t come”. Or maybe it’s a brief feeling of love for all. It could be all sorts of things, but those are the three that I thought of first. Either way, it would be very hard to quantify what it was that he gave you and whether or not he give you anything at all. Plus, Santa still gets to give everyone a gift.

~ George

My Second Santa Theory: Business Santa (my favorite of my four theories)

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, , ,

There are many arguments against Santa being real, so I came up with a few ideas that work out a couple of kinks without being too unrealistic.

So here’s my second theory: What if Santa doesn’t have to give the gifts in person? So long as the gift makes its way to the child, why should he care if he’s the one credited for it? Whether by the parents, a random stranger, or the child finds it lying on the ground, it wouldn’t matter for him. With that, now the gifts no longer even have to come on Christmas! With that, the gifts don’t even have to be free! Getting rid of the when and how the gifts are delivered frees Santa to actually do his job without killing himself when his multistory tall bag falls on him due to a small mishap.

Most kids get toys for Christmas. Since Santa is immortal (or not, if he has children as in my first theory), he has had plenty of time to build himself an empire of toy makers all over the world. He is indirectly in charge of every major toy manufacturer in the world, and has been for long time. Almost every toy a child receives can be traced back to Santa and his unknown monopoly on toys.

As for the kids who don’t get toys for Christmas or have never gotten a toy at all, Santa didn’t want to leave them out. So he worked and worked put himself at the top of every food, charity, hospital, schooling, and clothing operation in the world. In fact, Santa has expanded his empire to almost every product that is made so that he is continually giving “gifts” to every child in the world. What a nice guy.

~ George

My First Santa Theory: Many Santas (the least realistic of my four theories)

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, , ,

There are many arguments against Santa being real, so I came up with a few ideas that work out a couple of kinks without being too unrealistic.

So here’s my first theory: What if there wasn’t only one Santa? The rest of the population grows with time, so Santa’s would to. Santa has had children, his children have had children, those children have had children, and so on. At this point in time, each city has many Santas who are in charge of their own small group of people, and the rest of the Santas are scattered throughout the world. Each Santa is precisely located so that they can get as many people as possible with the given time. They would still need magic so that they wouldn’t get caught, but they wouldn’t need the millions of tons of presents  for billions of children or to go at the inane speeds that one Santa would need to go to give all of those gifts. He wouldn’t even have to be immortal, because his children would be able to continue his work.

Another benefit of having lots and lots of Santas is that all those movies that show Christmas being saved by one person or the other could all be true. Every year some of the Santas would get caught by police, fall off the roof, get shot out of the sky, etc., and some group of kids, animals, and/or adults manage to save Christmas despite Santa being incapacitated in some way. Who knew all those movies were true the whole time?

~ George

The Customer is Always Right Bonus

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, ,

My family and I were eating at a high-quality restaurant today and my Dad wanted a straw. Because our waitress wasn’t in sight, he tried asking one of the clean-up ladies for the straw and was surprised when she actually brought him one. He said that usually when he’d ask someone who wasn’t going to get a tip from him (and thus had no interest in his happiness) to get something, they’d say yes but never be seen again. As I said earlier, this was a high-quality restaurant, so I suggested that maybe they were paid something like what I on-the-spot called a “The Customer is Always Right” bonus.

A “The Customer is Always Right” bonus would be small cash incentive to make any customer happy and not just the ones that are going to tip you. The idea is that if everybody is paid the same flat sum of let’s say a $10 bonus everyday/week (this’ll be cash and not part of the regular salary), they could spare up to $10 worth of time to help customers with random thing like getting a straw for them. This way, those who want to be helpful and give the restaurant a good reputation can be helpful without worrying that they are wasting their time on something that won’t benefit them.

Of course there would still be some who would just pocket the money and still not help customers, and at some point all would start to consider the $10 as part of the salary (not a bonus, just a given), but I still think the idea has promise. For those who just keep the money, perhaps have someone make sure they at least try to do something to help customers sometimes. As for the others, maybe the bonus would be changed each week. It’d retain a constant value of about $10, but what the $10 was spent on would be different from week to week, with things like putt putt tickets or candy or whatever. Since the bonus would change, the employees wouldn’t get used to the bonus and start to ignore it.

~ George

101st Published Post!

George, miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Posts

This post gets us passed the landmark of 100 posts!!!!! Whoo Hoo!!

It’s fun to write these, and thanks to whoever is out there reading these for, well, reading them. I write in hope that someone else finds what I have to say is interesting, so even if it was fun I might not write if I didn’t think there would be readers. Of course, I’m not the only one writing posts. My dad (Steve) also writes, despite not being able to commit as much time as he would prefer. Nevertheless, this whole site is thanks to him. Thank you Dad! Now we just need to get my sisters and mom writing… 🙂

Up Next: 201 posts!

Merry Christmas!

~ George

(BTW, if you could post something in the comments it’d mean the world to us. A special occasion like this deserves a comment, right? Right? Right????? Good, I thought so 🙂 )