Family Tales

Well, sort of. Granted, it’s still See Dick Run kind of stuff, but I’m so happy that I can’t sleep :-).

UPDATE: He’s reading from Cats, The Sound of Short A by Alice K. Flanagan. Here’s the complete book:

From a religious perspective.

Folks tend to be fairly ignorant about most things, especially when they don’t concern their immediate family.  And that’s probably as it should be; otherwise, we’d all be a nation of busybodies.  Ignorance about history, though, can be dangerous as it leaves you without a foundation upon which to base your assumptions. Living a life adrift from the shoals of previous experience is a good way to end up shipwrecked unexpectedly.  

With that in mind, here’s your 90 second geography/Religion lesson for the day.

I realize that I’m a little late to this party, but allow me to add my hearty kudos to the amazing funtwo as the owner of one of the top 5 videos of all time.  The really neat thing is that he’s utterly humble about the whole thing.  Virginia Heffernan tracked down his identity for the New York Times back in August, but I only found out about it yesterday.  It’s a truly mesmerizing piece of music reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s National Anthem.

This is the story behind Chely Wright’s song, The Bumper of my SUV.  It really did happen and not so far away from my home here in Collierville.

Tennessee is a great state, but like everywhere else it has it’s share of kooks.  I’m reminded of a bumper sticker I saw whilst running an errand once that proudly proclaimed that The Road to Hell Is Paved with Republicans.  Sigh, discourse of this type is so juvenile as to be beneath contempt, and yet it’s out there and growing more frequent.  Just for a moment, enjoy the antidote.

I’m so proud to know that we have folks in this great land who can write such moving tributes to our troops as she.

I’m also ashamed to acknowledge that she is largely the exception when it comes to our entertainer class, which is odd considering that they more so than any other profession have the most to lose if the Jihadis win this conflict.  Sharia law is hardly forgiving towards the pecadillos so common among their ilk.  Ah well, no one ever accused them of far sighted thinking.  More typical would be John Mellencamp’s illogical defense of pacifism or just about anything emanating during a Oscars show of the last few years.

I sure do miss Ronald “We win, they lose” Reagan” sometimes.  Although, it’s hard to forget the bile spewed in his direction back in the 80’s by the self-same crowd of entertainers.

Commenter DemocracyRules’ rant easily takes the cake as the greatest rant I’ve read in my 20 odd years of perusing Al Gore’s internet. Could it possibly start a comedy arms race with Lileks or Dave Barry. The kings are dead, long live king, DemocracyRules!

I’ve uploaded more photos of Eli and his new dog, Banjo, to the flickr site. Just an FYI.

but only if we get to go to the town of Lijiang.

As most everyone reading this blog site should know, Wendy and I traveled to China just about two years ago to pick up our daughter, Betsy Ye. We spent three days in Hong Kong followed by a little over a week in Guangzhou (formerly called Canton). Although I loved Hong Kong and it’s people, I found China proper to be depressing. It felt way too much like a country run by your local department of motor vehicles under contracts negotiated by the UAW.

I know that it’s pretty feeble to judge an entire country based upon a single week’s stay in only one of it’s city, and normally I would withold judgement simply for lack of data points. However, by traveling to Hong Kong first, we gained one very good control group from which to analyze our experience; namely, the stark and dramatic differences between the two cities ca not be laid at the feet of the people themselves because they’re both populated by essentially the same ethnic group, Chinese. There were, in fact, very few Europeans or non-Asians of any kind in Hong Kong at all, much to my surprise. Being a former British colony, I naively assumed it would be populated largely by Britishers with the odd Indian bookkeeper imported for a dash of color. Not so.

To summarize my disappointment, we left Hong Kong (Kowloon actually) by train from a modern, attractive train station where everything worked for a 2 hour trip through the countryside bound for Guangzhou. Trains are a wonderful way to see a place up close, so we had plenty of opportunity to watch the standards of construction decline the further inland we sped along. By the time we arrived in the Province capital, we disembarked into a brand new train station where 3 of the 6 urinals were out of order with one spewing water onto the floor and out into the hallway. Guangzhou is probably the only place that I’ve ever been where there were potholes in the sidewalks, but that’s about what I expect from union work. There’s truth in the saying, “Good enough for Government work”. Lest you forget, dear reader, in China virtually everything is government work. At least they have reminders such as Lijang of a time when their culture could build beautiful towns.

Rant over.

Eli entered two photographs in his local PTA chapter’s photography contest some time back. The theme was “My Favorite Place”, and the rules were that he had to take the pictures himself. Neither Wendy nor I think highly of parents who do their children’s projects for them, so we picked up one of those $5 disposable camers and turned him loose. In the end, he ended up taking 2nd and 3rd place ribbons among K-2 graders at his Elementary school’s judging, which was pretty cool. They told us that any that submissions that placed would be forwarded to the county-wide judging, but we didn’t think too much about it. Until a month or so later, when we were notified that he’d walked away with 1st place county wide for K-2 graders!

Unfortunately, you don’t get the pictures back, and we’ve apparently lost the negatives. Here’s the best that we can do to show you the winning entry; a picture.

Yes, those are his toes nestled into his favorite pair of sandals. That’s the playground slide at his school. The thing you can’t see is the open mouthed look of joy as he rode the twists down to the bottom. Every time.

IMHO, his other entry was better. It was a shot of Wendy holding her arms out in that universal “Come to Momma” stance. The only unorthodox thing was that he had completely decapitated her in the picture, which had the unintuitive effect of making the shot much more powerful. You just couldn’t see it without immediately thinking “In my Mom’s arms”.

Here’s one of my favorite shots from the awards ceremony. For those who don’t know Eli well, it will require a little setup, so please humor me a moment. Eli doesn’t get nauseus …. ever. In fact, asking him about it is akin to asking a dog to do calculus because it’s a completely foreign concept. How do I know this? Besides the fact that I’ve asked him many times, it’s because of how he expresses his excitement — by spinning around in circles. In his early years, we worried that this was a symptom of autism or something along those lines, but no more. He just loves to see things zooming by as the world goes round. Anyway, here’s a shot of him in mid-spin.

What I love about this picture is his intense expression (captured by my new toy). It’s one of those times that I really pine for a magical mind reading device. I’d take one that only applied to my children if that were all that were available, but boy would I love one of any kind.

See the rest of the pics on the album page.

This is a really old post by Michael Yon, but it’s still good to reread it on occasion. It deals with the dangers of speculating on legal cases as well as the dangers of printing news items without their proper context. Please, do go read the whole thing.

Doritos is evidently running a contest where you film a commercial for them and if you win, they’ll show it during the super bowl . According to the Confederate Yankee, these guys filmed the following commercial for less than $13. And it’s pretty funny in much the same way that FedEx commercials used to be funny.

Go and vote now!

UPDATE: They won! I saw the commercial during the Super Bowl, and it was very nice. One of my favorites of the night, in fact.