Meandering Thoughts: Wednesday Night Surfing

Living in central Pennsylvania has plenty of advantages. The four seasons are unique (winter's cold, summer's hot, fall's crisp, and spring's muddy), the scenery is gorgeous, and the cost of living is quite low. However, there is a distinct disadvantage to my location - ESPN blacks out FOUR different MLB teams. Whenever the Yankees, Mets, Phillies, or Pirates (yeah right) are on ESPN, I don't get to see the game. Instead, I get the never ending, never changing sham of a station they call ESPNews until the end of the game. Tonight, ESPN is showing the Mets/Cubs game, so of course I can't watch it.





I do get the Comcast channel which shows the Phillies game and Fox Sports Pittsburgh which shows the majority of the Pirates games, so all is not lost. I don't get the YES Network nor whatever network the Mets have (if any?) though. However, my High Definition television has turned me into a bit of a HD snob, so I won't even watch Fox Sports Pittsburgh unless my Reds are on because it's only in standard definition. Blech.


Long story short, I found myself watching the Phillies game...which was interesting until the fifth inning when the Braves pulled ahead 9-3. As such, I found myself surfing the internet and paying less attention to the game...and as often happens when you surf the 'net, you never know what you'll find.



Do you know:

1. What do Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", Dr. Dre's "Nuthin but a 'G' Thang", Run-D.M.C.'s "Walk This Way" (with Aerosmith), and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five's "The Message" have in common?

Answer: They are the top 5 all-time hip-hop songs according to the newest VH1 countdown list.

I don't consider myself an expert on hip-hop music, but seriously, Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith make the top-5 all time list? That's the same song that's on the latest Guitar Hero game...just sayin'.


2. What do Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other rust belt cities have in common?

Answer: They are amongst the cheapest cities to rent a place in the United States. According to the Yahoo! article, San Jose, California is one of the most expensive places to rent a place topping out at an astronomical $1,314 a month.

I guess I ought to be glad I'm in PA instead of California...though once the snow starts flying and I'm scraping ice off my car in the morning before work I'll probably be willing to pay a bit extra for that apartment and sunshine!


3. Do you know your personality type? I stumbled upon a Jung Typology Test that proved to be an interesting diversion from the blowout baseball game. If you haven't seen this before, I recommend taking the test (it's quick and free) and seeing how accurate the results are compared to your own vision of your personality.


For me, my results said that I was a type ENTJ. E for extroverted, N for intuitive, T for thinking, and J for judging. Apparently my result is quite rate, wikipedia (blech) has a table stating that only 1.8% of all Americans share my personality type. Keirsey.com appears to confirm wikipedia's numbers, with the write-up for my personality saying:

Hardly more than two percent of the total population, Fieldmarshals are bound to
lead others, and from an early age they can be observed taking command of
groups. In some cases, they simply find themselves in charge of groups, and are
mystified as to how this happened. But the reason is that they have a strong
natural urge to give structure and direction wherever they are - to harness
people in the field and to direct them to achieve distant goals. They resemble
Supervisors in their tendency to establish plans for a task, enterprise, or
organization, but Fieldmarshals search more for policy and goals than for
regulations and procedures.

I found it eerie how close that seemed to match me. The results summarized my personality stating that:

Fieldmarshals will usually rise to positions of responsibility and enjoy being
executives. They are tireless in their devotion to their jobs and can easily
block out other areas of life for the sake of their work. Superb administrators
in any field - medicine, law, business, education, government, the military -
Fieldmarshals organize their units into smooth-functioning systems, planning in
advance, keeping both short-term and long-range objectives well in mind. For the
Fieldmarshal, there must always be a goal-directed reason for doing anything,
and people's feelings usually are not sufficient reason. They prefer decisions
to be based on impersonal data, want to work from well thought-out plans, like
to use engineered operations - and they expect others to follow suit. They are
ever intent on reducing bureaucratic red tape, task redundancy, and aimless
confusion in the workplace, and they are willing to dismiss employees who cannot
get with the program and increase their efficiency. Although Fieldmarshals are
tolerant of established procedures, they can and will abandon any procedure when
it can be shown to be ineffective in accomplishing its goal. Fieldmarshals root
out and reject ineffectiveness and inefficiency, and are impatient with
repetition of error.

Again, that describes me to the proverbial "T" I think. The site listed a few famous people with the same personality; among my "personality peers" are figures such as: Napoleon, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, George Bernard Shaw...quite the class of personalities!

Well, I suppose this "fieldmarshal" ought to go out and lead someone or organizing something into an lean, mean, efficient machine. I've got a lot of work to do if I'm going to be as successful as Bill Gates (though I'm fairly certain I can design better commercials for Windows than he has)!

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