Hitting the cut-off man
Finding agreement on a price
I found another thing to add to my list of things where I'm not sure whether I'm envious or dismissive of the person or practice in question -- people with hobbies they are very passionate about. There's the guy who has a very strong interest in craft beer, the guy who follows the local football team more closely than he probably should, the guy who has an intense fandom for a certain comic book, the woman who is more into yoga than dogs are into meat, etc.
On the one cynical hand, in the grand scheme of things, none of this really matters and the obsessions of these people look very petty. On the other optimistic hand, how incredible it is to be able to find so much satisfaction out of something so accessible?
I'm highly suspicious of people without hobbies -- you can't trust those people. But then I think I don't really have a hobby, and I'm trying to discover whether an awareness of not having a hobby counts as a hobby in itself.
A spirit of generosity
Whenever someone mispronounces (but otherwise correctly uses) a word in conversation, I think it's better to politely congratulate and correct them than it is to laugh at their mis-pronunciation. They are reading things and learning words and then trying to use them, which is great.
Counting the overage time
In pre-internet generations I assume parents were able to make up things about the world and pass them off as true with very little risk of being discovered. With Wikipedia now one click away from everyone's hand devices, I wonder if there's more upside or downside from the parenting perspective with this new knowledge.
On the one hand, if your kid wants to call you on something, they have access to a more exhaustive definition or story than you are likely to be able to provide on your own, and thus their ability to call you a liar is supported by a bunch of online strangers. On the other hand, if you want to just say "yeah, I don't know, let's look that up" it's probably a nice opportunity to establish your own humility and learn about a new thing together.
Put it in the lockbox
I think a good prank would be to get a "running bib" with an entry number on it that is not affiliated with any particular race, and then show up at various 5k and 10k road races and run alongside all of the people who are actually registered to run in that race. On close inspection it would be obvious to people that you had the wrong bib, but from a distance you'd probably blend right in.
If you did this often enough and were really patient with it, you'd eventually wind up running next to a person who had the same bib number as you, and that would really freak them out!
Think of all the jobs it would create
If you walk around any decent sized american city with old buildings in it, you'll find that many of the old buildings will spell words with "U" in them by using a "V" instead. This is because the people who built those buildings were really obsessed with Rome and wanted to show off how fancy they were by putting latin spellings on their buildings. Thus, you might have a "MVNICIPAL BVILDING" somewhere in your town.
I think it would be fun to open a Kickstarter campaign to fund the re-chiseling of all old buildings to replace their Vs with Us where relevant.