Thursday, 15 December 2011

Today is my paternal grandparents’ SIXTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary! Wow. Happy anniversary to them. They’ve been empty-nesters now for about six years, and it appears the lack of children in the home has diminished their love for one another. (Yep, that’s right: from 1949 to 2005 they had at least one child living at home at any given time.)

In other news:

A post-pep rally prank at Rosemount High School (the very same high school that I had the misfortune of attending) featured incest. Yeah, it seems the rally’s organizers had this idea of blindfolding students, then having them receive kisses, then try to guess who kissed them.

And who kissed them?

Their parents.

And, no, it’s not just a peck on the cheek – we’re talking full-tilt kissing here. Here’s the video, and you’ll notice that one mom is on the floor with her son. Another mom takes her son’s hand and moves it onto her ass. Yet another mom concludes the kiss by running her fingers through her son’s hair as if she’s this close (I’m holding my fingers really close together) to tearing off his shirt.

Here’s a City Pages article about it: CLICK HERE. As I commented to a friend on Facebook, Rosemount was a lousy school and a waste of time when I went there (my knowledge and skill base would certainly be no worse, and probably be better, if I was just handed a diploma after ninth grade) – and I see the ol’ shit-hole hasn’t improved one iota.

Friday, 16 December 2011
What happened 238 years ago today?
Come on, don’t you remember?
Well, I can’t say it any better than Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins, so I’ll just quote him:

As the ship lay in Boston harbor, uh, a party of the colonists dressed as Red Indians, uh, boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking, even for Americans.

Ha! Hilarious!
But more seriously…most of the colonists were not dressed as Indians. The event took the colonists’ desire for greater autonomy from mere words and academia to actual action. An act of protest, it would seem, used to be the very epitome of being an American.

Also today, Jyoti Amge turned 18 years old today (well, yesterday as far as we Central Time Zoners are concerned).

Who is Ms. Amge, you ask?

Ah, I’m so glad you asked. Up until now, she has held the Guinness Record for shortest teenager. Now she holds the record for shortest adult. She’s not quite 25 inches tall, meaning she barely clears the two feet mark, and she’s even shorter than my one year-old daughter Isla, who certainly isn’t tall, even for her age. Anyway, happy birthday, Jyoti, and congrats on your new Guinness entry!

And, while we’re at it – happy birthday to the most influential musician of all time. Thanks for the melodies!

Finally…if you really want to hear an amateur in action, tune in to AM 950 on Sunday at 9:00 in the morning. I’ll be conducting an interview with author Glenn Kleier. MORE INFO HERE.

Monday, 12 December 2011

I was the last person to arrive to a meeting at work today. Technically, I was late, but I was only about two minutes late and so my status for punctuality remains in tact.

However!

Being the last person to arrive meant that the beverage selection was meager. In fact, there were only two cans left in the ice-ridden bin: some form of Mountain Dew and some form of Coke.

And I just couldn’t do it.

I mean, I was thirsty. And I do enjoy having some sort of liquid to accompany my lunch, but I just can not consume Mountain Dew or Coke.

By way of estimation, I’d say I’ve consumed three cans of Mountain Dew in my life – and zero in the past 15 years. I’ve probably had 100 or more cans, glasses, and bottles of Coke, but none in the past 10 years – unless we count Coke’s appearance in various alcoholic drinks.

I’m kind of a beverage snob, in fact, and I believed I’ve touched on this before, but I’ll spell it out here:

-Water is always fine, in any sort of beverage container.

-If it’s not too late in the day (say, after 6:00), I’ll have iced tea. But NOT in or from a can, and not that Nestea shit. Arizona, Tazo, even Snapple are fine.

-Lemonade is great, too, but any lemonade in can or plastic bottle form is guaranteed to be nasty; it’s like drinking sugar water.

-I do like root beers in all formats – from that high quality organic stuff in glass bottles, to a simple can of Mr. Pibb. In fact, I think root beer is the only liquid I can drink from an aluminum can without practically gagging.

-Anything alcoholic is fine, but of course not at work, or if I’m driving, or too early in the day (like, say, before 5AM). I dislike straight-up hard liquor, drinks that are really creamy or coffee-y, and cheap ass beer in a can. If it says “Budweiser” on it…Yuck!

-No coffee

-No soft drinks (unless we include the root beer varieties, noted above)

There. I think that settles it. Now, feel free to offer me something to drink. As for today’s meeting, I went beverage-less; bolting to the water fountain shortly after adjournment.

Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Click on this: THIS RIGHT HERE, and take this Word Association Study. I had fun with it. According to the site:

On average, an adult knows about 40.000 words. Researchers in psychology and linguistics are interested in how these words are represented mentally. In this large-scale study we aim to build a network that captures this knowledge by playing the game of word associations. You can help us with this project by participating in this short and fun study.

Also: Here’s a photo gallery of protest signs that will be missed if gay rights become law of the land. It includes this hilarious gem:

Ha! Hilarious.

On a completely unrelated note, my wife posted about Isla’s surgery. It uses all the correct terminology that I can never remember, and it includes awesome photos of ureters. HERE’S THE POST.

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

So, today, during Toastmasters, the Table Topics featured a Christmas theme. For those who don’t know, Table Topics is the portion of the meeting where one assigned person has selected a subject unknown to others. He or she then calls on members to deliver 1-2  minute impromptu speeches.

I was in charge of Table Topics about a month ago, and my topic was famous movies. I had the title of popular films written on little cards, and I called on people to come up and pull one out of the hat.

Anyway, today’s topic was, appropriately enough, Christmas. One person got up and pulled out a card that said, “tell us your favorite Christmas gift you’ve ever received.” When it was my turn, my card said, “What is your favorite holiday-themed movie?”

The last person to be called up selected a card that said “Tell us why it’s important to believe in at least the spirit of Santa Claus.”

Yikes. I’m glad I pulled the card about the movie.

Maybe you can ‘blame’ my viewpoint on my Witness upbringing, but I just can not get the idea of Santa Claus. Sure, it’s a cute story, and I don’t mind reading a storybook to my son about Santa, just as I don’t mind reading him a story about the Cat in the Hat.

But I can’t lie to my son and tell him that Santa is real and has all these great powers.

I can’t fathom the idea of purposely transferring the gratitude and appreciation my children have for me onto a pretend character. It would be like if I got my son a bowl of cereal and then he thanked me and I just said, “Hey, it wasn’t me, it was the Cereal Fairy.”

My wife and I make an effort to get Owen to say thank you and to realize the hard work and effort that people put into things – we want him to know that food doesn’t just magically appear on the table and that clothes aren’t dropped down our chimney at night.

But while desiring my son’s love and gratitude may be passed off as selfish, a more insidious aspect is the flat-out lying. Like I’ve heard so many times, you can’t prove Santa isn’t real. That’s true. But like everything else, the burden of proof is on the person making the positive claim. And, just like any other deity, people put forth claims as evidence of Santa’s reality: He’s the one who brings the gifts. He can fit down chimneys. He is the sole owner of a species of flying reindeer. He can make it around the planet – with millions of stops – in a single night. We even know his address: the North Pole, smack in the Arctic Ocean. These are testable, verifiable claims, and as most adults attest, they often had a hard time reconciling Santa’s existence with the facts about the world as they were discovering them.

Why do adults think this is cool / okay / fun for kids? My children are learning about the world, trying to figure out how everything works, and are using the patterns they find to extrapolate even more about the world. Why would I put up a mental road block by saying, “Here’s how the physical world works, but Santa can violate all of that”? Why lie to my kids and stunt their powers of critical thinking?

And for something even scarier:

“He knows when you are sleeping / He knows when you’re awake / He knows if you’ve been good or bad / So you better be good for goodness’ sake”

That is creepy.

On my way home from work this afternoon, I had the misfortune of hearing a radio program in which people called in and offered tips on how to use Santa to get good behavior out of children. Yuck! How about, instead of bribery and lies children, we model the good behavior we’d like to see…starting with being honest.

Why would a parent want their little son or daughter to think some old man watches them sleep at night? Further, why is it his job to reward or punish children according to his standard of morality? Sounds an awful lot like Jehovah/Jesus/Allah/God, if you ask me, so maybe the Santa lie is good conditioning to get the youngsters to buy into the parents’ religion. In any other context, lying like that to one’s children would be considered poor parenting.

Santa doesn’t exist, thank God. Neither do the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or God. My son knows that, and so do his parents. I’m not gonna lie about it to my kids. And don’t expect me to lie about it in front of your kids, either.

[gets down off soapbox]

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Happy half-birthday to me!

(Hey, if you’ve lived my life, you’d celebrate your half-birthdays, too.) Speaking of that life…

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was sitting in the back seat of a car. There were two people in the front seat: one was my friend Ryan, and the other…well…you know how dreams are…I couldn’t quite identify the person. Like Ryan and I, the third passenger was another ex-Jehovah’s Witness male, in his 30s, and supremely intelligent. I think Ryan was driving but, again, you know how dreams are – the driver switched identities a few times.

The anonymous guy sitting next to Ryan had his window rolled down and his arm resting on the frame. Ryan was driving extremely slow. This was appropriate, since we were on the top level of a parking ramp. The parking ramp was unfamiliar to me, but I instinctively knew that we were in downtown Rochester.

Being an former Witness, the town of Rochester brings to mind one thing: the yearly 3- (and occasionally 4-) day conventions. After 20 years of driving down to Rochester and staying in a downtown hotel for four or five days while I and my fellow Witnesses devoured the town like locusts…well, it’s gotten into my psyche.

Anyway, as Ryan is driving slowly across the parking ramp, a pair of Witnesses (a man and a weaker vessel) walked by, and the man leaned into the open window and asked, “Do you guys know what time it is?”

Ryan responded with the witty retort: “It’s later than you think!” I’m not gonna bother explaining this (unless someone specifically asks), but to an ex-Witness, this is positively hilarious. I instantly joined in with Ryan’s joviality, leaned forward and shouted out to the Witnesses, “They just declared peace and security!”

Ha!

Again, if you know Witness culture (you sad, sad, sap), then you know this is quite funny.

But here’s the real kicker: I said that line – “They just declared peace and security!” – out loud. Yeah, my real self, lying in bed here in St. Paul, said that aloud at four in the morning.

Or did I?

My vocalization caused me to wake up. I was half laughing at how funny my unconscious self is and half worried that I woke up my wife and now she thinks I’m a dork. Maybe I didn’t say anything aloud, thought I. Or maybe it just came out as a bunch of mumbling.

But, no. As my wife confirmed several hours later, I did indeed speak out loud and clear. She thought I was having a nightmare, and that she’d have to rouse me out of my sleep from a disturbing slumber. Instead, she heard me laugh, as well, and concluded that I was having a grand old time in my quasi-conscious state. Or, to put it another way, she feared I was dreaming that it was the end of the world as we know it, but it turned out I felt fine.

Anyway, damn…I even think of funny things to say in my dreams. Also, damn…I am a supreme nerd.

08 December 2011

Today I visited Owen’s first grade class. As I mentioned earlier, I gave his teacher a brochure about having chemistry students from the U of M come to elementary school classes to give a demonstration and, well, today was the presentation.

I arrived at 1:00 and sat in the back in between Owen and a classmate. The presentation lasted exactly an hour, with the grad student spending most of her time demonstrating melting, boiling, and sublimation. She quick-froze flowers using liquid nitrogen, and walked around with a sample of dry ice. Before explaining the reasons and properties for the things she was demonstrating, she asked the students what their ideas were, and it was very interesting to hear the way off base and the spot-on explanations the various six and seven year-olds offered.

The coolest (pun intended) demonstration was when the grad student heated up some pop cans, and then quickly flipped them over into an ice bath. The cans crushed under the rapid pressure change. The kids were amazed and asked to see it again. Fortunately, she had the wherewithal to bring spare cans.

09 December 2011

I have now finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality. I gotta say, it’s my favorite Dawkins book (though I’ve only read three or four of his books total).

His decision to call the bible stories ‘myths’ certainly did not bother me. He refers to other contemporary beliefs as myths as well, so it’s not as if he’s singling out Christian or Jewish myths for special ridicule. Dawkins begins most chapters with the retelling of myths from around the world. Some are funny, most are bizarre. In some cases, Dawkins actively wonders why specific details were included in a myth (e.g., “Why did the goddess cry for 22 years?”). I wish Dawkins would have stressed more that, at the time they originated, these myths were sincere attempts to explain the world. The book obliquely states this, I guess, but I would’ve preferred a more explicit explanation.

Nearly every page has illustrations by Dave McKean. I’d never heard of him before, but his work in the book is phenomenal; Owen sure liked looking at the pictures. I was a little disappointed to see the same old boring periodic table and the map of the world with Britain at the center…but other than those two lame cliches, McKean’s drawings were a lot of fun to gaze upon.

Speaking of Britain, Dawkins’ English might confuse some American kids. For one thing, he talks about treacle – a word I don’t believe I have ever heard said aloud. In fact, I’m not even sure how to pronounce it; I assume it rhymes with ‘fecal’…? Regardless, I doubt any American kids under 10 years old will have any idea what treacle is. I wish Dawkins would have used honey or syrup or some other viscous liquid to convey his point instead.

Worse, he twice talks about a football. The first time he talked about a football, I pictured this:

…and that was just fine, since Dawkins was simply trying to convey the difference in size between an atom’s nucleus and its electrons’ orbit (he compares it to a football and a stadium).

But later, he discusses how gravity pulls everything into the shape of a football. And that’s when I realized I had been picturing the ‘wrong’ football. Dawkins, of course, meant this:

…which is quite a different shape than the kind of football that the Minnesota Vikings catch one or twice a season. Again, too bad. I wish he would have chosen to use a baseball, basketball, volleyball, or something more universal for young English-speakers.

All in all, though, a tremendous book. I want to discuss it in an upcoming episode of Atheists Talk. So, if you’ve read it, and you got kids, let me know. We can critique it on stage together.

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Today, while at the gift-wrapping event, someone mentioned a fascinating gripe they have with the classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark. He said an aspect of this film that always bothered him was that even if Indiana Jones did nothing at all…the outcome would have been the same.

SPOILER ALERT!

In a way, this is true. Despite Indy’s efforts, the Nazis still capture the Ark. The still ferry it to a secret locale. The power of the Ark is what ultimately kills them. Indy, meanwhile, is cowering in the background with his hands tied and his eyes closed. If the movie was edited so as to remove all indications of the character Indiana Jones, how would the outcome have been different? I suppose the Ark would have languished there on the island instead of being boxed up by Dr. Jones and taken to Warehouse Gargantua, but that hardly is critical.

Another attendee at the gift opening noted that Indy killed several Nazis, and surely that counts for something.

I, meanwhile, was merely listening in on the conversation from across the table. Had I been an active participant in the discussion, I would have noted that it was Indy who correctly used the medallion, thereby revealing the location of the Ark.

I don’t know. I think that counts for something. Either way, awesome flick.

Tuesday, 06 December 2011

This evening, we removed four sets of mini-blinds from their respective windows and washed them in the tub. I did most of the blind washing, actually, while Jennifer dusted, washed, and oiled the window sills. We washed all three windows in the kitchen and the dirtiest (according to Owen) one in the living room.

It’s amazing how dirty they were. Owen held the shower nozzle while I held up the blinds, and the water shooting out the other side was positively gray. The bathroom smelled like dust. We then laid the blinds down on a towel and the rags we used to wipe them off also turned gray. When I brought the blinds back downstairs, Jennifer’s work on the windows yielded immediate significant improvements.

Coupled with the three windows in the office, and the two windows in Owen’s room, we have now finished washing nine windows + their treatments. This leaves eleven more windows + blinds, not counting the small windows in the doors, dining room, and basement.

In other news: Here’s my review of John Rawles’ opus The Matter With Us.

Wednesday, 07 December 2011

Today, the cafeteria staff at my place of employment treated all the employees to their yearly free holiday meal. About an hour before the luncheon began, they sent out a site-wide email to everyone reminding them about the complimentary lunch and providing a menu. The menu listed chicken as the main entree, but noted there was a vegetarian option. Other items listed included mashed potatoes, vegetables, desserts, and a beverage.

So, at lunchtime, there I was waiting in line. The line moved pretty fast so, when I got to the front of the line, I requested the vegetarian option. The server placed some sort of tortilla-wrapped cheese on the plate, then filled over 50% of the plate with veggies. As she handed me the plate, I asked, “Can I have the mashed potatoes, too?”

She answered, “No, sorry.”

What the heck is with that? Did they think vegetarian = only eats piles of corn and peas? Why couldn’t I have veggies and potatoes, just as the chicken consumers were also having veggies and potatoes? And even if that’s not their standard practice, why not just do it for me? After all, my vegetarian option was undoubtedly cheaper than the cost of a chicken meal, so it’s not like I would have been costing them extra money. What I should have done was just taken the chicken meal, then taken the chicken off my plate and just set it on the counter. But hindsight is … (oops, almost delivered a stupid cliche’ there). Anyway, the meal was free, so it’s not like I could piss and moan that much.

But I notice this at other restaurants, too. I say, “I don’t want chicken or steak on my salad, but can you add extra guacamole?” And they say, “Sure, for $200 more.” I think, the next time some restaurant pulls that cockamamie reasoning, I’ll respond by asking if the salad (or whatever) will be cheaper since I don’t want the steak or chicken.

In other news: If you look to the right, you will see I’ve added a new link category titled “People I Know in Real Life.” These are links to the blogs or websites of friends that I actually know in real life (and I don’t mean the Reallife Church). If your site isn’t listed here, let me know and, if you’d like, I’ll add it – as long as I know you in real life. The links are listed alphabetically, so no whining about where your site is positioned in the list. If you don’t like it, change the name of your website to AAAAA.com. Conversely, if your site is listed to the right, and you’d rather it not be, just let me know. I’ll remove it; no problem (though I will laugh at you when you’re not around).