Tom McMahon

Mugs-A-Plenty: Man Plus Woman Equals Marriage

Man Plus Woman Equals Marriage Mug

It's our Wedding Anniversary, so I thought this mug would be appropriate to-day!

Guess Which One Was On Janet Napolitano's Terrorist Watch List?

Guess Which One Was On Janet Napolitano's Terrorist Watch List?

Obama's arrogance is killing American soldiers. But he doesn't care. (via Grouchy Old Cripple)

Are You With Us?

Are You With Us?

The Bow

The Bow

Two Ways To Improve AM Radio Reception: The Terk Advantage or the Select-A-Tenna

Two Ways To Improve AM Radio Reception: The Terk Advantage or the Select-A-Tenna

Click on the photo to read Jay Allen's terrific comparison of the two. It seems you can find the Terk on eBay for around $40, whereas the Select-A-Tenna will only set you back about $20.

The Man Behind Subway's $5 Footlong

From BusinessWeek:

Stuart Frankel isn't what you'd call a power player in the world of franchising. Five years ago he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price. "I like round numbers," says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.

Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway's performance. "There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them," says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. "It's huge. ...

Frankel's $5 footlong idea illustrates how a huge company can wake up and eventually seize on a good idea that's not generated at headquarters. Frankel, along with two other local managers in economically ravaged South Florida, ceaselessly championed the idea to Subway's corporate leadership amid widespread skepticism. Once it was approved, Subway's marketing team quickly generated a memorable campaign that firmly established the $5 footlong nationwide. The promotion's success spawned imitators and created an unprecedented demand for staple ingredients such as turkey, ham, and tuna. "The whole thing took on a life of its own," says Jeff Moody, CEO of Subway's franchise-owned advertising arm, the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust.

What They Look Like Right Before The Lizard Skin Begins To Show

What They Look Like Right Before The Lizard Skin Begins To Show

Cable TV Lineups Made Solely With Cable Channels With Consecutive Letters

I got this idea while my wife was watching LMN, the Lifetime Movie Network. Here's one example:

Channel	Description
ABC	ABC
DE	How to Incorporate Your Business
FG	The Placekicker Network
HI	Hello From Hawai'i
JK	The John F Kennedy Network (PBS)
LMN	Lifetime Movie Network
OP	The Oprah Network
QR	The Queer Network (Bravo)
ST	The Saints Network (EWTN)
UV	The Tanning Network
W	Our 43rd President 24/7
X	The Big Ten Network
YZ	Wise (History)

Here's another:

Channel	Description
AB	The Exercise Network
CD	Your Money (For Conservative Investors)
E	E!
F	Adult
GH	General Hospital 24/7
I	Women. Sister Network to "We"
J	The Drug Culture
KLM	Aviation Movies (in Dutch)
NO	The Abstinence Network
P	The Urology Channel
Q	Pool & Billiards (Daytime). Star Trek (Evenings/Nights)
RST	The World of Electronics (on Channel 7)
U	Women. Companion Network to "I"
V	Winston Churchill and Space Aliens
W	For Plus-Size Women. Companion Network to "U"
XY	Men
Z	The Sleep Channel. Occasional Zorro Movies.

The possibilities are virtually endless. Add your lineups in the comments section below.

Vegetarian Man

Vegetarian Man

Phony Liberal Peaceniks

Don Salyards:

Two weeks before the 2008 election I took my grandson on a 16-block stroller ride in highly liberal south Minneapolis. I counted over 120 Obama signs and one McCain sign (which had been vandalized several times). There were also roughly 50 anti-war signs (“Get out of Iraq”, “War is not the Answer”, “Peace not War”, etc.). Last week I walked the same 16 blocks and saw ONE anti war sign. The “silence” of our liberal friends in south Minneapolis is both horrendous and hypocritical. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Our young men are dying in greater numbers in Afghanistan today than they were before Obama was elected. Apparently south Minneapolis liberals believe that the political career of their great leader is more important than their (alleged) opposition to war.

I Can't Stand The Song, But I Love This Flowchart

I Can't Stand The Song, But I Love This Flowchart

via Boots and Sabers

Illegal German Seventies Art

Illegal German Seventies Art

People Are Reflections Of Their Five Closest Friends

From The Simple Dollar:

It’s often said that people are reflections of their five closest friends in many ways: behaviors, income levels, values, and so on.

Five years ago, almost all of my closest friends spent money like it was water. They were constantly doing things like playing poker, pushing each other to “one up” the rest with better gadgets and other material things, going out for drinks all the time, making fun of each other for looking less affluent, and so on. To put it simply, if you didn’t show many signs of material affluence, you were made fun of and ridiculed. You felt like less of a person if you weren’t spending money hand over fist.

Today, all of my inner circle of closest friends are pretty happy just spending an evening together playing cards or a board game. Instead of constantly going out on the town, we go to each other’s homes and hang out, watching each other’s DVD collections or playing each other’s games. We’ll make meals together and eat them together instead of going out for dinner all the time. Instead of talking about who has the latest gadget, we talk about who’s developed a better strategy at a well-played game or what sort of things we’ve been doing to improve the property we already have.

In that same time frame, my own feelings about spending money changed drastically. I went from spending rampantly to being careful about my money. I started spending more time at home rather than out and about, focusing my energy on getting good at a smaller number of things instead of chasing the new.

Perhaps most interestingly, I went from feeling pretty awful about myself to feeling pretty good about myself.

Cicada-Generated Prime Numbers

From Neatorama:

Cicadas are winged insects that evolved around 1.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers advanced and retreated across North America. Cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend most of their lives below the ground, feeding on the juices of plant roots, and then emerge, mate, and die quickly. These creatures display a startling behavior: Their emergence is synchronized with periods of years that are usually the prime numbers 13 and 17. (A prime number is an integer such as 11, 13, and 17 that has only two integer divisors: 1 and itself.) During the spring of their 13th or 17th year, these periodical cicadas construct an exit tunnel. Sometimes more than 1.5 million individuals emerge in a single acre; this abundance of bodies may have survival value as they overwhelm predators such as birds that cannot possibly eat them all at once.

Some researchers have speculated that the evolution of prime-number life cycles occurred so that the creatures increased their chances of evading shorter-lived predators and parasites. For example, if these cicadas had 12-year life cycles, all predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, or 6 years might more easily find the insects. Mario Markus of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and his coworkers discovered that these kinds of prime-number cycles arise naturally from evolutionary mathematical models of interactions between predator and prey. In order to experiment, they first assigned random life-cycle durations to their computer-simulated populations. After some time, a sequence of mutations always locked the synthetic cicadas into a stable prime-number cycle.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! THE TEETH!

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! THE TEETH!

via PCL Linkdump

Stick Figure Museum of Western Painting

Stick Figure Museum of Western Painting

(via iconglobe)