Day Five Of Nitpicking The Twelve Days Of Christmas

Fiiiiiive gooooolden riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings.

If I didn't do this one today, I think I'd be ashamed of myself.  It's pretty much obligatory.

Now, there are two thoughts that were bouncing through my mind as I tried to think of a new way of looking at gold rings:

1)  If a circle is filled in and a ring has an empty center, what do you call a square with an empty center?

2)  How could I have not done a Time Lord reference during my Lords A Leaping day?  I'm a terrible nerd.

And beyond that...

I'm tapped.

I can't think of anything clever about "golden rings."  Doughnuts?  No.  The One Ring times five?  No.  The Olympic rings dipped in gold?  No.

Nothing feels right.

So we're hitting up gold ring (disambiguation) on Wikipedia to see what we get.

Day Four Of Nitpicking The Twelve Days Of Christmas

I really want to email these people and ask them two basic questions.

First off, there's an "eFowl?"  Seriously?  eToys went bankrupt, got bought out by KayBee Toys, which then went bankrupt and I think everything went over to Toys R Us.

Secondly, there's really not much point in that first column if you can't buy that many.  Why have it there?

Okay, obviously we're talking about partridges and pear trees.

Okay, the obvious joke is done, let's get to work.

Day Three Of Nitpicking The Twelve Days Of Christmas

At four months old, the cockerel (or rooster) is like a teenage boy with no control of his hormones.  Many species of bird starts the breeding process within the first year of life, but swans are special.  Typically, they start to think about mating some time between the ages of three and four.  They tend to mate in the spring/early summer time, and you can usually expect up to a dozen eggs to be fertilized by the male.

It's not uncommon for only a few of the babies to survive to adulthood, but it's also not uncommon for many of them to survive, depending on where the nest is located and what predators are around.

So, if you want seven swans a swimming (or, depending on how you read the song, forty-two swans-a-swimming) what does that entail?

Well, once again, we have to look at British royalty.

For the record, their babies might not be -as cute- as ducklings, but they're pretty darn cute.

The Queen, at any given time, can claim ownership of all unmarked swans in open water.  A "marked" swan typically has a nick taken out of the webbing between its toes, letting people know "this is already owned by someone else, but it's probably safer to deal with me than be accused of poaching the Queen's birds."   However, swans are serious business in England, where they're considered a native species.  There's even an annual event called Swan Upping that involves doing a census of "the queen's birds."

So trying to grab some wild ones in England can get you in pretty serious trouble.

But what if you want to buy some from a breeder in the United States?

Well, then you might need to pay attention to your local laws.

Day Two of nitpicking The Twelve Days Of Christmas

I had no idea prostitutes, strippers, escorts, hookers, or any other "frowned on by the church ladies" profession for young women were so uptight about declaring their earnings.

You learn something new every day.

Now, obviously, the writer of the song The Twelve Days Of Christmas probably didn't intend for the "nine ladies dancing" to represent "ladies of the night" or anything along those line.  He probably meant some highly respectable ladies who are willing to be bought for four nights (the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth days of Christmas) and perform for the person's true love.

Or maybe he just wanted to hire the Rockettes.

Either way, let's look at some options.

Oh hey, would you look at that, it's December. Time for a song.

Last year I spent the entire month of December nitpicking Christmas carols (I'd try to link to each one, but it would pretty much mean every word in this sentence is a hyperlink and that would just be terrible).

There is one thing that a family member suggested which caught my attention though.  Something I regularly give too much thought to (as opposed to everything else I give too much thought to) is the song The Twelve Days Of Christmas.

This song, every time I hear it, has me questioning so much about its logic and structure.

For instance, if you go based on how the song is actually written, by the end of it your true love gave you just as many partridges in pear trees as he did drummers drumming.  I really, really hope you like pears.  And partridges.

Now, PNC Wealth Management has already done a lot of the hard work and came up with the "definitive" list of how much each item would cost (as well as what it cost back in 2013, they've been doing this for about 30 years now).  It's interesting to note that the price of swans has skyrocketed in the past year.  Something I just happen to know is that swans are rather hard to reliably breed and don't tend to do anywhere near as well as chickens, so the supply tends to vary a lot.   Overall, though, there aren't that many changes, and the price difference total between last year and this year is approximately one percent.

However.

I'm pretty sure we can go deeper into this.

Reaction to the new Star Wars trailer.

On Facebook I recently posted this:

That...really pretty much sums it up.

But I admit, I've been hurt before.  There was a time when the following had me convinced everything was going to be okay and that I was justified in my nerdly excitement.

Yeah, remember those days?  I still do.

Disaster Report

Okay, I touched on this game once before in my look at criminally forgotten games, but I wanted to spend a little time looking closer at this and why I still like to toss it in to a PS2 and play it.