They're Using Coconuts

Monty Python Reuniting for 1 Wild Night in New York

Best of all is the reunion itself, which brings together the five surviving Pythonites (Graham Chapman died in 1989) for the premiere of Almost the Truth. Following the Oct. 15 screening of the documentary at Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin will take questions from the audience and no doubt bend them into wicked, black-humored pretzels.

New and Improved. Now With More Math!

What I Would Do With This: Groceries

I’ve known this for years: the express line isn’t necessarily the fastest lane at the grocery store, or fastest per item, because of the overhead of the transaction (paying, getting change, etc). I knew this even before Apu spilled the beans (Mrs. Simpson, the express line is the fastest line not always. That old man up front, he is starved for attention. He will talk the cashier’s head off.) but now someone has actual data and done a real analysis.

Check is slower than credit which is slower than cash. Students are sometimes surprised that cash is faster than credit. From my observations, the fastest cash transaction will outpace the fastest credit transaction by a wide margin but there is also huge variance in credit transactions. I mean, some people have absolutely no idea what they are doing with that thing. The same can’t really be said of cash.

I’m secretly amazed every time someone behaves like it’s the first time they’ve ever swiped a credit card at a checkout line, and it’s rocket science to figure it out. Hint: you can swipe the card before the clerk finishes scanning them!

When figuring the transaction overhead, there is a huge penalty for a non-tech-savvy shopper paying with credit. Of course, there is a large overlap with the cash paying “Oh, I have exact change. Let me get my coin purse!” customer, often a senior senior citizen. (That’s not age discrimination, it’s profiling)