Nerd jokes

Here's one for all you mathletes.

This moment of nerdiness was inspired by a T-shirt sold by MathSoc. It had the slightly more straight-forward

That's math for ya'. Full of hidden messages. It would be fun to look for satanic messages like the credulous do when they listen to audio recordings in reverse.

Evangelical Pastafarian

Happy Halloween. Here is the costume I donned for a party over the weekend. Can you guess what I am?

Here's a hint. Though you can't see it in the pictures above, I'm actually wearing a name-tag.

That's right. I was dressed as a Pastafarian, a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Arrr matey!

Aggressive Door-to-Door Sales: National Water Heater Scam

Last night after dinner, there was a knock on our door... great, salespeople. Two young guys. One introduced himself, and said the other was a trainee. He said they were from National Home Services, and were in the neighbourhood replacing outdated rented water heaters.

We had someone similar at our door a few weeks ago, but I can't remember the company. After that encounter, I looked online and decided that I was happy with our current arrangement with Reliance Home Comfort.

That's what I said to the two guys from National... "Thanks for coming by, but we will decline."

Apparently, that wasn't sufficient to send them away. As I was closing the door, he kept talking, "But we're a Canadian company..."  I re-opened the storm door and said, "Do you even know who we rent our water heater from?"  To which he answered, "It's either Reliance or [some other company that I can't remember>]."  I retorted with, "See, you don't even know what we have. Thanks for your visit, but we will decline."

As I proceeded to close the door again, he had a stern facial expression and maintained eye contact with me. Think about it. That's highly unusual, and struck me as aggressive. At this point, I experienced a twinge of fear that these guys could possibly go beyond a sales call, and get nasty... I pictured them vandalizing my property or harassing my family.

I opened the storm door again and said, "OK, I don't want to be rude. I told you we're not interested. Thank you, and good luck."

I finally closed the door.

Try googling "national water heater". Most of the hits are warnings about scams.