Happy Valentines Day. Do try to be romantic the other 364.25 days of the year will you? It can sure help get you practiced up and prepared for the one day of the year that Hallmark expects to be paid for it. Oh, and the jewelry store called and said that the earings you ordered won’t be in until Wednesday, sorry about your luck. I guess its back to foot massages and being nice. 😉
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Race Card Drivers
No, the title is not a typo. In fact its a play on words. If you read this site normally that will be as surprising as waking up in the morning and discovering that your breakfast cereal has indeed not changed into a leprechaun. My friend Robin just sent me a link to a new reality series called “Black. White.” wherein families of (wait for it…) black or white ethnicity go under the not so careful eye of makeup artists to look the opposite color. What the heck? Why do we need this on television? Why do we need to see if people can cope with being in a different environment? Who is driving this issue of racism and segregation so that it will not die?
Sure, it is convenient for marketers to be able to use demographics to discover white or black or hispanic or Hawaiian or Japanese or Chinese or purple dinosaurs [with inordinage influence on children] neighborhoods so that they can sell racially targetted products, but do we need to further the concept of American inequality? This is just more postmodern drivel wherein we will discover that many people don’t know what other people go through and that someone somewhere is putting us all down so that we can be in perpetual victim mode. But not me, I’m done. I’m not going to watch this show or any of the other shows that make a big deal out of race. In fact I will go so far as to say that if more shows come up I may start writing the networks and let them know that the only thing that is real about reality television is that it really stinks.
Know Thine Sausages
Today at lunch Abby looked up at me with her beautiful blue eyes and said with such excitement, “Dad, masali tastes like pepperoni.” Which might as well have been French, Russian or any other language besides some dialect of English at first. I didn’t know what she was talking about until I realized that she was talking about salami, which is a completely different kind of sausage, but at least it was close. Salami doesn’t taste like pepperoni to me, but it is a good tasty sausage, and therefore I enjoyed it during my lunchtime meal.
Jumping the Shark
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Jumped the Shark?” Just in case you haven’t its a reference to the TV show “Happy Days.” In the show the Fonz is water skiing and jumps over a shark. Thus the phrase was used to describe a show that had reached the limit of ‘reality’ and switched to the crazy in an attempt to continue churning out plot lines and story boards.
A couple weeks ago Abby was watching Dora the Exlorer and Dora was on a boat with her friends the map, backpack, boots and Hitler. OK, not with Hitler. They came upon treacherous waters with sharks in them. The whole boat jumped over three sharks.
Wow. I totally lost all respect for Dora. Wait, I don’t think I had any in the first place.
I Finally Get It
Growing up my dad would tell the story of my first time to a movie. He took me to see “The Fox and the Hound.” I heard the story of my explanation towards the climax of the movie possibly 50 times or more in my life. I never understood why my dad told that movie so often. Friday night I learned why. We took Abby (and Evie, but she slept the whole time) to see “Curious George.” For the record I think they should have called it Curious Jorge the Intrigued Monkey, but they didn’t because apparently this is based on a book series that I found completely mind numbingly boring as a child and that book series was not called Curious Jorge the Intrigued Monkey. But I digress.
Abby just glowed and glowed throughout the movie. As event took place she would exclaim various things. She smiled a lot, but she sat still on my lap through the whole movie. It was wonderful to see her excitement and enjoyment of the rather goofy cartoon. And, in the end it was way better than the books.
One Hundredth
I’m watching Olympic luging right now (commercial break+computer recording=breathing room). I can’t imagine that many parts of my life are critically evaluated by one hundredth of a second. At work we’re glad when computers operate relatively closely performance wise and we never focus on hundredths of a second by itself. Sure, when you’re iterating through something that has thousands of lines or hundreds of thousands of lines you have to think about one hundredth being multiplied into seconds and eventually into minutes, but I won’t be getting a gold metal – just a “Wow, that’s fast.” verses a “It gets the job done.”
I don’t know that I do anything in one hundredth of a second, but it sure is nifty to have that sort of accuracy when measuring luge speeds.
UPDATE: They actually were keeping track of things to the thousandth, but the difference between racers was hundredths of seconds at times.
Lina Loves Her Lettuce
I have a friend in Texas that was having a strange conversation via Instant Messaging with another friend in Texas, Lina. Lina loves her lettuce. But not in sandwiches. So here is the MP3 of the song inspired by Lina’s love for lettuce.
Yeah for White Powdery Stuff!
No, I’m not talking about cocaine, sugar or baby powder, I’m referring to snow. We got some last night and its still falling ever so daintily from the sky as I type this. Abby can’t wait to play in it, and I can’t wait to drive in it. It always makes Jessica nervous when we have snow, but I quite enjoy the fun of the challenge. As I wrote before: drive carefully!
You Can’t Say These Aren’t Some of the Cutest Pictures. Ever.
Abby and Evie had their pictures taken today. Check these out:
Unsuper Bowl
I used to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. This year, they stank. This year I was actually watching the superbowl for the athletics and physical abuse that is the National Football League. However, the two teams really didn’t deliver on the intensity that I had expected. I’m just glad that in the end I got to have fun at our friend’s house and that we got to eat smoothies.
I actually had to drop Evie off in the kitchen with Jessica because she was too distracting to watch the game. No, not because she was being awkward its just that she’s so darn cute. I had to have Jessica hold her so that if Craig asked, “Randy, did you see that?” I would be able to answer, “Yes.” Instead of hoping John Madden would talk over an instant replay. Of course he might say, “Could you feel that [insert football player’s name] was going to do that as the play started?” Or maybe, “Well, you know you’ve got to be a good quarterback to be called a good quarterback.”
To that I say, “It’d have to be a good game for it to be called a good game.” It was an OK game, but it was surely not as exciting as playing the drums in High School while the home team got beat to smithereens by anyone and everyone that came to play us. When you play the drums you’re cool, and you never lose because people want to hear you groove.