The four year old just shared this bit of logical gymnastics:
Sharks are fish. So you could call all fish sharks.
I’m going to pass on doing that. I’m also not going to bother her with the explanation of why that is not logically consistent.
Category Archives: The Obvious
10 Useless Things in Order of Importance
- Calamari
- The Clapper
- Paper Chinese Take-out boxes
- The phrase “angels on the head of a needle”
- The Book of Norman
- Sensationalistic Media
- The Home Shopping Network
- Bright Spandex workout clothes from the 80’s
- Urinary Tract infections
- Robert Tilton
Sledding
I did some AWESOME sledding this last weekend. The awesomeness was in the fact that I forgot I wasn’t 17 and crashed into the snow. Do you know what is under snow? Solid ground that the snow has landed and accumulated on. My shoulder still aches a bit from the crash, but the good news is that while I’m 15 years past 17, my kids still think I’m awesome for doing stupid stunts 🙂 Maturity indeed.
On Being Herod the Not So Great
One of the things that’s fun about being part of a church body is that for some reason there tends to be a propensity for church plays around Christmas. I don’t blame the Baptists, but I think that somewhere along the line, they got really good at bigger and bigger productions. If Steven Spielberg wasn’t a Jew, he’d be a Baptist pastor of drama or some such thing. I’m not here to talk about Baptists or Jews, but tonight I got to play the brief part of Herod. I was asked to be Herod, the nasty ruler of the Jewish part of Rome who ordered lots of dead infants and children and generally was not a good guy.
It turns out that I’m too jovial and happy. Herod was probably selfish, egotistical, and much more middle-eastern. I’m probably selfish (but less so), egotistical (but less so), and I’m rather white and northern European. Between those similarities and differences I can tell you that I pretty much did NOT embody the persona of Herod. I could not pull off mean and angry. Not a bit. I was too much of a grinner [I was told]. I wasn’t even trying to grin, thinking about grinning, or even aware that I was grinning. But apparently I grinned my face off. Apparently the order to destroy all the males two and under was not convincing despite my best effort.
I’m totally OK with this. I’m glad I failed at being nasty. I will sleep well tonight knowing that I stink at being wicked and evil in an overt way. Of course that means I’m probably just a quieter, more devious sort of bad guy, but we knew that already, too. Ever since elementary school I was good at scheming bad things for others to do. I rarely got in trouble because its hard to get caught when someone else is doing the dirty work. I don’t blame the Baptists for this either. Be stinky at being little Herods, its probably better for you anyway.
Filters & Feathers
I am not lying to you when I say I have bought a new filter for my shop-vac. That’s right, I have a shop-vac with a new filter and I am ready to use it. I am ready to make that filter wish it was never born. It will be like so many washed up Hollywood starlettes wishing that it had stopped sniffing in the powder that I am about to rub off of my walls in an attempt to make them look nice. The walls will be drywalls, but the shop-vac is a wet-dry shop-vac so I could in theory saturate the walls with water and the vacuum would still work! Of course a house with saturated walls is not a house, its a home for Sponge Bob Squarepants. Given the past owner’s penchant for hacks, shortcuts and setting up electrical situations that are sure to start a fire, I think I’ll keep the walls dry.
I’m trying to wrap up the wall work so that when my in-laws come next week for Christmas festivities we all enjoy time together and not working to wrap up the wall work. In some countries this is unheard of, but mostly because they have not knocked the non-existent wall out from between their non-existent two rooms. With that in mind, be like congress and stimulate someone’s economy like Cash for Clunkers, only because there are folks in need of chickens we’ll call it Cash for Cluckers. Take some time to look around the World Vision site and buy a goat, some chickens, sheep, or even help fund a well. I’d much rather have water be able to get into their lives through a well and have the problem of needing a wet-dry vac.
Speaking of which, does Dyson make a sand sucker? Because I’m thinking in some of the places I’ve seen pictures of they need that. Wait, they don’t have electricity… ZAP!!
I Learned Something Today
During my lesson I was teaching in adult Sunday school I said, “I was talking to this lady on the phone. I don’t know she was a lady, I don’t know about her personal choices…” yeah, what I learned was that you shouldn’t say that out loud no matter what you’re thinking IN your head.
TMI: Where’s My Filter
Jessica is in surgery right now. Or is probably in surgery. They kicked me out of the pre-op room. My brain is full of inappropriate humor right now. I know that’s an odd response to my wife being in surgery but I find that in emotionally tough situations I’m drawn to humor because as I’ve said before, “If we’re all laughing we’re all OK.”. The problem is that we’re not ok, but we are laughing.
There’s a lot of stuff that is funny in the hospital. People, situations, protocols, policies, consent forms for pretty much any person to talk to you. Consent to address your spouse (I was right there!) in case of emergency. Consent.
I have read of people having sharpie markers writing, “this leg!” on the appropriate leg for surgeries. Given the internal nature of Jessica’s surgery I’m glad no sharpie markers were present. Unless of course they should have written, “neither leg,” on her. Since her doctor doesn’t do leg surgeries I’m feeling pretty confident about the scheduled surgery not leaving her a double amputee.
There are a few good things about this surgery: I’ve gotten to spend some quiet time with my wife, I’ve made her smile, and when this is all said and done we’ll be able to move on past the miscarriage. The prayers and encouragement from folks has been a tremendous blessing. We could open a lemonade stand with the sweetness that has come along with the tough time. Yes, that’s a lame joke, but I mean the sentiment behind it 🙂
Thanks, everyone for being so supportive, you rock the casbah!
Tracking… Tracking… Broken… Fixed!
My trackball, which I’ve been using instead of a mouse for several years now thanks to a push from my friend Dave O’Hara and my chiropractor bill started to go on the fritz this week. It wouldn’t click correctly and sometimes would register a double click (a few times causing me frustration). I ordered one to come from Amazon to replace this broken device. This afternoon it seemed toast. It wouldn’t click, it would just make clicking sounds but fail to actually send the correct signal.
In desperation as the replacement hadn’t arrived I cracked it open and blew it out with a compressed air can. After replacing the batteries this thing is humming along and working like new. Except I still have a new one on order. Anyone looking for a trackball? 🙂
Donuts
I am listening to a podcast about donuts. As if I need to cram more food into me. Drat… sugar, oil and flour… and none to be had.
Missed the Toilet
If you want to see why some journalists don’t get their work to print, such as Newsweek, look no farther than the short-sighted work of Dan Lyons here. You would think that the change of having the last Mac World Expo speaker be Phil Schiller would be OK, and not expected to be the second coming of Steve when the first Steve was gone. Nope. It is as if the rest of 2009 does not exist and that Apple is waiting until 2010 to tell us anything more about what they’re working on or releasing. Just because the Expo keynote didn’t involve some new gadget or some new computer that is mind blowing doesn’t mean that it was bad, it means that people who go to a trade show for one event are probably going to be disappointed.
Apple’s last days are not going to be 2009 or 2010. They’re not out. Instead they have made it clear that they’re going to announce products on their own timeline and not right after Christmas so that employees are whiped out during the holidays. Imagine that: niceness to employees. Dan Lyons is probably a nice guy to some of the people in the world, but this is not his proudest moment and I hope that he learned from this web only publication that actual journalism is not speculation and taking a one-off event and reading into the bones of the carcass of the event.
I hope that Apple invites Dan to their next press event and Dan eats his toupee because he realizes that he’s been horribly mistaken. I can write drivel like that because this is a blog and not the public facing website of some new source. He’s supposed to be a journalist while I’m a snarky non-journalist. Two different things, but he’s making them look similar. What a sad day Dan had.