Schierer Space

No, this is not the recipe for an exotic (and very large) magical potion or a reference to a new play called the Merchant of Ft. Lauderdale. I am referring to two entirely unrelated random events that occurred today.

First, I heard on the breaking news section of NPR’s All Things Considered that there was a ship collision reported today involving a tanker carrying orange juice. “Huh?” my brain said. I immediately began pondering the environmental disaster scenarios involving a giant orange juice spill a la Exxon Valdez. I’m sure that would be a pretty rough pH change for the local sea creatures, but I can’t imagine it would be terribly catastrophic over the long term. In case you’re curious, ShipTechnology.com (yes there is such a site) has a nice description of the Carlos Fischer, a tanker capable of carrying 37,000t* of orange juice.

Second, today was Red Cross Bloodmobile day at work so I donated my pint of A+ as usual. However, as a publicity promotion, Dunkin Donuts is giving ever donor a coupon for a pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee. As is explained by the old English expression “A pint’s a pound the world around” a pint of water (or essentially, blood) weighs about a pound**. So in one sense this is a pretty fair trade. Of course, several of you readers probably consider coffee more precious than blood, but I don’t generally drink it. It also occurred to me that this is sort-of a reverse divine transformation (apologies to the Roman Catholics in the audience) that my blood, freely given, is transformed into an equivalent quantity of an addictive drink. Or something like that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Life, Strange Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.