Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Rambling!

If you're a Coke fan (the beverage, not the drug), this might be a good thing for you to know: California claims Coke bottled in Mexico has lead - Yahoo! News. Funny how that doesn't make the news.

This morning, I asked Dave if the saying about the gorilla has changed recently--the one that goes something like "that company is like a 1000-pound gorilla," you know. I thought I'd always remembered the gorilla as weighing 800 pounds, but lately everyone refers to the "1000 pound gorilla." He said that indeed, the gorilla had weighed in at 800 pounds for a long time, but recently he seems to have gained weight. I replied, "I wonder if it's muscle mass or if he's developing a pot belly. 'Cause I'd really rather have my gorilla fit."

Then I asked, "Hey, how much does a gorilla normally weigh, anyway?" Because I thought, well, a good-sized black bear can hit 400-500 pounds, and it seemed to me that gorillas weren't as big as bears. So we got into an argument over whether the fiercely ripped gorilla had more muscle mass than your hulking but rather fat bear. Googling it, it turns out I was right; while black bears--which we were using as the example--can weigh in at 500 pounds or even more, male gorillas top out at about 400. Still, while he conceded that bears might indeed weigh more, he didn't want to surrender the point. "Gorillas are ripped," he said. "They've got steel cables for muscles!" He believed that if one were to take nothing but the muscle mass from a gorilla and a bear and weigh them against each other, gorillas would come out on top. But only a black bear. Grizzlies are just huge, and polar bears can swim, so they get the cardio.

In any case, it was really a tangent. I brought us back on topic by explaining that I wanted to know if our 800-pound gorilla was larger than normal, and if so, was it because it was a double-sized gorilla (he thought I'd said "double-sided" at first, so I had to explain, "No, no, double-sized, like what you do to your fries at MacDonald's"), or because it was a porker?

This is why I was late to work.

On a related topic, if you watch the Colbert Report, you might know that polar bears and grizzlies have begun crossbreeding. Isn't that a monster?