Fireman dresses as Spider-Man to rescue boy.

This guy rocks in my book:

Fireman dresses as Spider-Man to rescue boy - Wonderful World- msnbc.com

OK the really slow return :)

Yeah, yeah, yeah I know. You can save your comments about procrastination, I prefer to think that life has intervened.

Its been crazy the last few weeks. Amaryllis and I are heading to Minnesota next month. We we be gone for two weeks. My mother in law will be watching the kids. It's kind of rough because we are leaving on Gabe's birthday. We'll have to think of something really cool to do for him.

In the meantime, we just keep on trucking. Short post, but hey, at least its something. In the meantime, enjoy this link (Why you shouldn't shoot a high calibre rifle at a piece of steel only 100 yards away):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn0MFqP1js0

The slow return.

Ok... I realize I haven't posted in a long time. Work and home life have been a bit crazy. I suppose I'll get my feet wet again with a couple of Kateisms. Over the last several months Kate has been a font of funny (if only we could find a way to tap that without leaving her psychologically scarred or in rehab by 13). A couple of recent fun ones:

Kate is a Hellboy fan. Don't ask why... some things are better left unsaid. When cute little girls pick up their father's quirks let's just say we are grateful Daddy doesn't chew tobacco. Knowledge of the Hellboy series isn't critical to understanding this anecdote, but it might accentuate the chuckle. Anyhow, Kate was being a little ornery the other day. I asked her, "Is someone being a princess? If you are, I might just have to lock you in a tall tower until some handsome prince rescues you." Kate looked at me with the wide eyes and without skipping a beat said...

"Oh, crap."

Another tale:

Kate and I were going shopping with Jonathan, and Jonathan asked me what I was getting his mom for Valentine's day. I had already ordered her I-pod nano so I told him we didn't need to get her anything. Kate got a big smile and said,

"I know what would make mom happy for Valentine's Day.... ...a baby. A baby with a new outfit!"

I had to clarify, "do you mean a baby doll with a new outfit, or a real baby that cries?"

"A real baby that cries."

I told her, "Kate, we're not going to have a new baby because you're the baby, you just grew up."

Kate was emphatic though, "Mommy would love a real baby in a new outfit. A baby that cries."

It was time for Jonathan to pipe up, "You cry." It was on.

"No, I do not!"

"Yes you do!"

I let them go on for just a few seconds more then intervened. Classic.

Ok... now there's something you don't see everyday.

I've tried to think of so many different spins on something cute to say here, but it just defies imagination. It is what it is. Here is a link to a man playing Angels We Have Heard on High on an ocarina made of broccoli.

YouTube - Big Broccoli Ocarina:Angels We Have Heard On High

Yeah I know...

If they develop one that impacts Mobwars I'm up a creek.

Just a quick note for friends and family that Facebook. Aparently the leet haxors of the world have decided that you were having too much fun, and that no internet experience is complete without someone trying to steal your credit card info:

BBC - Newsbeat - Technology - Facebook users hit by virus

It never gets easier :(

We had to say goodbye to some good friends of ours today. They're moving to Grand Junction... new job... their first house. We've known it was coming for a while, and I'm sure everyone has had that surreal moment when you realize that a group of people you hung out with every weekend just pulled out of town and if you're lucky you'll see them once a year.

I was a military brat. I had scores of friends come and go over the years. When you're a military family you learn to make friends quickly, and never take them for granted, because in a year or so they could be anywhere from Korea to Minot, ND. Being a brat I'm not usually a big one on goodbyes. I've made the promises to write, and that we'd meet up stateside somewhere. It's happened with a few friends, but most simply vanished (until they suddenly add me to their Facebook friends list ;) ).

This was the first hard goodbye in a while. Tears and all. Gabe was really stoic until the truck pulled away, then he bawled harder than all of us put together. Just goes to show you, you never know who the sensitive one is.

Hopefully she's not the next Sarah SIlverman.

Just a short update for a quick story.

Kate climbed into bed with us Thursday morning, and while she was cuddling and bouncing on her mom she passed gas. Amaryllis was teasing her about it, and made the comment, "That was a real firecracker," to which Kate responded, "More like a buttcracker."

Amaryllis and I laughed hard for a good few minutes...

And with that, kids around the world decided they don't want to be astronauts anymore

Hmm... even knowing a little bit about wastewater reclamation, this just sounds wrong:

BBC NEWS Science & Environment Urine passes Nasa taste test

Sky diving... oh and a wedding.

We just got back from Dan and Wendy's wedding. It was an incredible vacation, and probably one of the best we've had since we've been married.

The ceremony was simple and beautiful. It was the most touching profession of love I have ever seen. I stood in as the groom's witness/best man. I was so honored to be there. Of course I wish someone had given me a head's up about when to genuflect, and how ;)

My brother and sister-in-law went out of their way to fill the days with fun activities, from Dan teaching the boys how to shoot (and buying them their first rifle), to launching rockets, and jumping on the trampoline. Kate loved her shopping trip with her mom and aunt.

Of course the big kids had fun too. My brother took me on my first tandem skydive. It was SO AWESOME. We jumped from about 14,000 feet, giving about 1 minute of freefall. Of course there were nervous moments. Hanging your feet out of the door of a moving airplane was definitely interesting, and it weirds you out a bit when the instructor starts adjusting the harness (and unclipping a couple of things) after the canopy opens. The first second as you have the sensation of falling, after that it's just a thrill ride.

Bending the tandem rules a little bit, my brother and I met up in the air, "bumped" knuckles, and spent a moment grinning at each other. Per her request, we also dispersed my mom's ashes. They were folded up in Dan's chute. My tandem instructor timed our canopy opening so I got to see my brother deploy his chute and release the ashes. It was an incredible addition to an already thrilling moment. I hope mom was watching, and enjoyed it as much as we did.

I'll post pics later...

My wife has only killed me in Mob Wars

For those of you fervent Facebookers, you might want to remove your homicidal estranged spouse from your friends list before making profile changes. See link below:

BBC NEWS UK England London Man killed wife in Facebook row

Not dead yet...

Amaryllis has been nagging me that I haven't posted in a while. It's been pretty crazy at home and at work. We had a family member in the hospital, and election season has practically made City Hall a "Stop!" "Go!" "WAIT!" war zone. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go in tomorrow to find out that bathroom trips need to be vetted through the mayor's office.



We took the boys to a tae-kwon-do tournament a couple of weeks ago. Jonathan took third place in the patterns competition for white belts. It was really cool, except he beat his older brother to do it. There were some tears, but in the end everyone enjoyed themselves. They test for their next belt in a couple of weeks. It will be nice to see a little color in their uniforms. They started sparring last week, and I sewar Gabe has been wearing his mouth guard to school.



Kate is doing ballet (a consolation prize for being too young to do tae-kwon-do, which is what she really wanted). She goes with one of her little friends. It has some tumbling and body awareness thrown in so every once in a while you will see her drop and do a forward roll. Every once in a while she asks me to pick her up so she can practice "jumping." Perhaps someday she will be the only member of the American Ballet Theater with a knowledge of lightsaber combat.

The world, and Brazil, is full of surprises

I know its three posts in a day, but this one was too cool to pass up:

BBC NEWS Science/Nature 'Lost towns' discovered in Amazon

Basically scientists have discovered evidence of "urban" human habitation that predates European settlement in what was thought to be virgin rainforest. Just think of what you'll know tomorrow...

Flyman might have kicked Spiderman's butt.

For those of you knocking down the last of these before fall sets in (well those of us north of Colorado) the following is interesting:

BBC NEWS Science/Nature Fly's brain 'senses swat threat'

Forget "spider sense" the article indicates that a flys brain and reflexs kick into gear pretty much instantly. No wonder spiders use webs. Even they would tire of chasing the little guys.

Quick update

The trip tot he University of Utah wa snice. It was a chance to spend some time with the wife as well. My father came along, and was able to see the grandkids when we got back. For right now no news is good news. The EMG came back as normal. The next step will be for me to get a muscle biopsy to fully rule out a metabolic muscle disease. From there we are following the inflammatory disease route for the time being. I see a rheumatologist in October. I wish I got two months to give an answer on development proposals :)

Uno and the Undead

Amaryllis and I went out with some friends for a date night last night. We saw the Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It was OK for what it was, a popcorn flick with a kid in a candy store special effects budget (In comparison to subtler CGI effects films like Iron Man, it looks like they might have stretched the buck a little too far).

Brendan Fraser is an interesting one. I missed him in Encino Man, and was introduced to him though more serious works like School Ties, With Honors, and Gods and Monsters. So for me, I have this illusion that he has been slumming for 2/3 of his career, when in reality he has a handful of solid films among some interesting box office fare (Blast from the Past anyone?). The Mummy series seems to suit him, by allowing him to be quirky without downright goofy. For me this entry into the franchise falls somewhere between the first and second. The general story concept is better than the second, but not as good as the first.

What really hurt the film was the absence of Rachel Weisz. Once she decided that she wasn't going to be involved they should have written her part out of the script. That way poor Maria Bello wouldn't have tried to play someone she obviously wasn't, and the movie wouldn't be forcing you to swallow Brendan Frasier having a son old enough to be a college drop out. (Word of advice: the appearance versus actual age difference works for Sean Connery and Harrison Ford. It doesn't for Brendan Fraser and Luke Ford. Maybe Brendan Fraser should have grown a beard.).

Jet Lee and Michelle Yeoh were wonderful, and their fight sequence was too brief for the build up. The sequence is over American quick as opposed to the 5 minute intensely choreographed affair I dreamed of.

INSERT RANT:

Ok I have one real beef with a lot of CGI films these days. Can we have some CGI without the little humorous asides inserted into nearly every sequence? Yes we get it, an animator's life is hell, and director's love the new toys. It doesn't mean that every film has to have a Charlie Chaplain slap stick sequence in it, or that CGI animals have to poke out of every nook and cranny acting like teenagers on an MTV production.

Sometimes I long for the days when CGI was so expensive that if an animation team blew a million dollars making the zombie in the third row pick his nose, someone was getting fired.

END RANT

The highlight of the evening though was picking up the kids from the babysitter. We walked into the door to see Kate in the middle of a very serious game of Uno with Gabe. We watched her play a handful of cards, and she was doing really well without prompts accept for the more complex action cards. A guess soon we'll walk in to find her displaying a full house and raking $5 dollar bills across the table.

Marks of manhood

I went paintballing yesterday. For those of you who know me, it's probably not one of those activities you would imagine me participating in. Although I am not Ganhdian in my pursuit of nonviolence, I do have a habit of avoiding pastimes which involve the use of camouflage. A friend of mine caught me at a weak moment, and with my health I figured, "What the heck, this might not come my way again for a long time."

So I was outfitted with a basic mask and gun, and turned loose on a ranch boneyard that had all kinds of fun nooks and crannies. We played teams, with a kind of kill the other guys objective, which suited me fine. In each match we were granted a certain number of "lives". The first time around I died gloriously by being shot in the head (right between the eyes), my kneecap, and the rear end (we got flanked).

The second time around I was a lot more cautious, and even managed a couple of kills (Ha ha, nothing like pegging someone in a bright shirt who thinks he's being sneaky in the grass. Oh and desert cammo only works in... never mind, it just doesn't work.). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself, though I will probably never pick it up as a hobby. My friends gun, which shoots something like 10-15 balls a second (at what point do you just start throwing cans of paint at each other) ran him $600, and I'm told you can shell out quite a bit more. You might catch me out there a couple more times though.

UAlbany makes Princeton Review

Well my graduate Alma Mater made the Princeton Review. I'm glad the quality of the academic program distracted me from the fact I was supposed to be miserable the entire time :) Here's the link:

Top 10 Schools with the Least Happy Students - MSN Encarta

I think part of the problem is that the UAlbany campus is pretty isolated (even with the free bus service), and the tower dorms are pretty bleak. For an undergraduate without cash or a car, you have to be creative to keep yourself entertained. The campus itself is a modernist concrete creation, so it lacks some of the warmer charm of a more traditional campus with ivy and quad. The challenging layout spills into the student center, where even high traffic areas like the book store and food services feel, "out of the way."

Still, I loved my time there. The academic programs are excellent. The faculty in my program would bend over backwards to help and work with students (Which was especially impressive given the size of our program and number of candidates). The adjunct faculty were knowledgeable practitioners, and my fellow graduate students were a fun eclectic bunch who knew how to work and play hard. I grew attached to the campus architecture, even though I could never give anyone directions to anything other than the student center and the library (UAlbany alums now what I'm talking about, though while I was there they made a handful of attemtps to distinguish a couple of the central buildings from each other.).

My kids liked the fact that, unlike certain stuffier institutions, playing in the fountain was allowed and encouraged.

New York Times covers Sheridan

Oh... I almost forgot. The New York Times did a piece on Sheridan. Actually it was a historic piece on the attempt to create a new state of Absaroka in the 1930's, but there is some multimedia coverage (check the left hand side of the page) that covers the rodeo and street dance. Here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/us/24wpa.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1216908557-HGNsxO0yyE8L9kTKAh1BdA&oref=slogin

Hellboy Redoux

I finally got a chance to see Hellboy 2 last night. If you enjoyed the first one, you will more than likely get a kick out of this one as well. The movie is both funny and thoughtful, and the visual presentation is nothing short of fantastic (Makes me excited for Del Toro's take on the Hobbit.) Luke Goss is certainly a scene stealer as the prince of the elves, and is one of the few recent tragic villains that I actually felt empathy for (SPOILER: His last lines to Hellboy were delivered with such polished grace that I found myself less moved by the relationship tragedy they had been building up for half the film.)

Although the bulk of the movie is safe for the young teen or squeamish, the auction house investigation was pretty gruesome, and I found myself catching little macabre details that showed that somewhere (probably a dark warehouse in California) the are CGI animators desperately in need of psychiatric intervention. I will never be able to think of the "tooth fairy" in the same way again.

Get in touch with the inner geek.

Amaryllis and I spent the last several evenings drilling through episodes of Firefly. For those of you not familiar, Firefly was a space western that didn't even make it through a full season on Fox. A lot of it had to do with running up against the nascent reality TV craze, where execs questioned spending 10 million an episode for a sci-fi show when they could get idiots to provide more dysfunctional drama than you ever saw in high school for free (Yeah sure, I guess someone technically wins a prize, but we all know the "entertainment" comes from the psycho that makes it 75% of the way through the show. That or you get to marry Joe Millionaire).

The sad thing was that Firefly had one of the best ensemble casts I've ever seen (when you compare to Star Trek spin-offs and Sci-Fi channel fodder where there is always one or two characters whose acting completely gets under your skin, and you wish would just put on the red shirt and DIE ALREADY!). Considering there were only 14 episodes made, its telling that you actually cared about the characters at key dramatic moments (Spoilers: Jayne betraying River and Simon, and how Mal dealt with it; Inara deciding to leave the ship; etc...).

The show also catered to my quirky style humor, and the timing was dead on. After the series was cancelled they made a pretty accessible feature film called Serenity (named after the ship). It's one of my favorites in the genre.

Amaryllis and I have very different tastes about some things, but share some interesting likes that highlight what eclectic people we are. One of our shared likes is Firefly, but I will also pop a bowl of popcorn and watch the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with her (ironically, because I like Colin Firth).