For Thanksgiving this year, The Wife, The Boy, the dog, and I piled into our jalopy and headed out for the wilds of East Mesa, AZ, to visit the in-laws and up the old cholesterol level by a baker's dozen points.

This is not about the holiday experience. Unless there are stories fraught with mayhem and violence and hurt feelings, a family holiday is ( Read more... )

My throngs of adoring internet fan [sic] knows I have little to no patience for political posturing. This modicum of posturing is lessened when combined with abject hypocrisy. And in this spirit I come to you today.

See, there's this thing. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (a combination that should not, by all that is sane, ( Read more... )

I am opting to share some verse written by The Boy. It is about horses.


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This morning at 7 a.m., The Boy was wide awake in his room, clad in boxer briefs and using a scientific device called a Stellarscope. Said Stellarscope looks and functions much like a kaleidoscope except that when you point it at a light source and look into it, you see a projection of the constellations of the Northern or Southern Hemispheres -- ( Read more... )

Another early morning at the gym in my vain attempt to see the right-hand side of 50 (The Comet®, folks... it's coming next year... seriously). As much as I hate working out the place I go to rocks on a lot of levels, the least of which is that I can run on the treadmill and then, if I so choose to do so, can use the phone in the gym to order an ( Read more... )

I was reading The Boy the next in the Harry Potter books and the description of Harry being given "a formidable look by an old woman" came up. I'm just the narrator, so I read it as written ( Read more... )

Here's the thing. Got The Wife a Kindle for Mothers' Day. Two observations ( Read more... )

Dear Targeted Advertising:

Re: this latest observation -- fuck you.

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Yesterday at work I made the mistake of mentioning to a guy I work with that, "I run on the treadmill exactly as fast as the song 'Cool Places' by The Sparks." This led to a discussion about musical cadence and exercise. And then from somewhere in the back of my head I recalled some piece of software that I saw somewhere at some time some place ( Read more... )

My pal Howard pointed me to an opinion piece written by Roger Ebert that discusses The One-Percenters, that is the 1% of the population who earn 40% of the nation's income.

Outrage at the lack of social justice aside, I noticed this bit from the article:
"...One of the challenges facing the One-Percenters these days is finding ways to spend their ( Read more... )