I'm just buzzed

This is short film of Will Ferrel and his daughter. Very funny.

Nappy Headed Moe

For the record I thought that Imus deserved to be fired, and I'm glad that he was. But this made me laugh.

Sokol

The Reverend Horton Heat is playing at Sokol Undergound in Omaha tonight. Unfortunately I'm not going. The whole job, pregnant wife, kid thing strikes again. I think that I should have made an effort to go to more shows before Corwin was born. On the bright side Social Distortion is playing at Sokol on May 1 and I am going to that. If, on the odd chance, anyone else wants to go, me let me know.

Anna Nicole

I was besotted with Anna Nicole Smith in my precocious youth. When she was still young and sexy. Back when she was the Guess Jeans girl and Playmate of the Year. The first Playboy I ever purchased was her PMotY issue. I had cut out several of her Guess Jeans adds from Rolling Stone tacked them to the wall of my bedroom. This was when living in that little house in Ottumwa, dating girls that were no good for me or to me. If only they could have been Anna Nicole.

Unfortunately fame didn't agree with Anna Nicole. In the end she looked like a caricature of herself. I don't know if it was too much plastic surgery or too much hard living. But the past 10 or 12 years weren't kind to her. One of the many advantages of not having cable is that I never saw her reality show, which I have heard was horrible and not very flattering. This makes it easier for me to choose to remember her as the buxom Guess Jeans Girl that I had a crush on.

December

No updates for a while. I've been lazy. What has happened this month?

I've gotten new glasses. Actually two new pairs. We had a lot of money left over from our annual medical flex spending account. Way over budgeted on that. Some day I think I should just get the lasic surgery and have my vision corrected. But the truth is I like glasses. I don't like the part where I wake in the morning and am blind or when they get smudged, which happens all to often with a toddler running around. But I like how I look with them.

I also got a new hair cut. Quite a bit was chopped off. It took a week or so to get used to, but I like it now. In the winter my hair tends to get rather flat with the lack of humidity in the air. I'll grow it out a bit when summer rolls around again. On the bright side, I think I look a good five years younger.

I got to see The Who on December 7. Maurice emailed me that he had been given four tickets to the show by his consulting firm. The Pretenders opened for them, and Chrissie Hynde can still rock pretty well for a 55 year old lady. My only complaint is that they didn't play Brass in Pocket. If you're The Pretenders how can you not play Brass in Pocket?! But I digress, they were good none the less. The only remaining members of The Who left are Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey. These are two talented individuals. Especially Pete who essentially wrote all of The Who's material. It was a good show. It was also nice to be someplace where I felt young. I don't get that too often any more. Tickets were a bit on the pricy side, and I'm glad that I didn't have to pay for them. Thanks Mo and ProKarma.

Corwin was sick on Friday. Anke was sick on Sunday. Scotty was sick today. Corwin's pediatrician thought it was probally the Noral Virus. I'm feeling better now, but still don't feel quite right. We'll see how I feel in the morning, but I think that it may be another day at home for me tomorrow. On Friday I'm supposed to go to Des Moines and visit Eric and his fiance Diana (pronounced Dee-ana, a fine Chicana lass way out of LT's league). I hope I'm feeling better by then, as I'm rather looking forward to it.

TV

The few TV shows I really like, inevitably get cancelled during their first season. This was true of Firefly and the quirky Push, Nevada. Both of these shows premiered in 2002. Push, Nevada was cancelled after only 6 episodes. ABC was kind enough to give them a seventh episode to try and wrap everything up in a rather unsatisfying and rushed way. They put the bloody show up against CSI and it got crushed in the ratings, what did they expect to happen? ABC didn't try working with it at all.

That same year Firefly premiered and it lasted almost the entire year. But it got cancelled with three completed episodes unaired. Fortunately these episodes were released when the box set for series was released. So, firefly was successful enough and had enough of a cult following to warrant the release of all of it's episodes on DVD and the release of a the firefly movie: Serenity.

Well, there are a couple of shows that I like that seemed to have done OK: Boondocks on Comedy Central and My Name is Earl on NBC. Carnivale made it through two seasons on HBO. I've only seen a couple of episodes of Deadwood, but I think I would really like it if I had the opportunity to see them all.

Anyway, what this leads me to is that I saw a really cool TV show on NBC last night (Monday nights at 8 central time.) Heroes. It's about average people developing superpowers. My favorite example is a wageslave in Japan- named Hiro appropriately enough- who stares at his clock until he makes the second hand go backward for one second. He then jumps up and goes running down the rows of cubicles celebrating and yelling about how he has altered the time space continuum. Later in the bar, his buddy thinks he's nuts and tells him if he can really alter the space time continuum why doesn't he teleport into the ladies room. As he goes to the bar for another beer he turns around to see Hiro getting drug out of the ladies room and thrown out by bouncers. As the bouncers are throwing him out he is yelling "Yahoooo!". Another good story line in the show deals with two brothers. The older successful brother is running for congress and always casts a huge shadow over the younger health care provider brother. But he thinks he can fly. He'll finally be the special one. He tells his brother this and his brother thinks he's nuts. So he jumps off of a building to prove to himself and his brother that he can fly. As he falls to the ground the older brother- the successful one, the one running for congress, the already "special" brother- ends up flying to save little brother. The writing was good, the acting was good. Its more of a good drama with funny parts than a superhero show. I really hope there are enough geeks out there like me who watch it to make it successful.

Wet as a drowned Rat

Saturday night after Corwin went to bed, I walked down to Memorial Park to catch the free Bright Eyes show that Omaha was putting on. Most years they have past thier prime rock bands like Three Dog Night or the Beach Boys sans Brian Wilson. But two or three years ago they had 311 with Grasshopper Take Over opening. 311 was good, but I thought GTO was better.

This year Mayor Mike Fahey arranged for Bright Eyes to play. Bright Eyes is basically Omaha native Conor Oberst and whoever is playing with him at the moment. They are nationally known and recognized on the Indie scene. The music isn't really accessible the first time you hear it, but is very good if given a chance. Some of thier music is conteporary rock, while other is really folk or country inspired.

Bright Eyes played from around 8:10 to 9:40. It rained heavy and steady from around 8 to 9:15. Cell phone cameras suck, but here is a picture of soaked Scotty just as the band started. I have to get me a pocketsize digital camera at some point. The show was really great despite the fact that I was cold, wet and blinder than usual for most of it. I should have worn contacts and a rain parka. But the crowd that stuck around was good (but rather young, or I'm getting rather old.) Some people created a mud slide on one of the hills. And who doesn't love girls covered in mud?

Conor Oberst and crew are talented. They sounded great live and have a violin in the band. There is a serious dearth of modern bands taking advantage of the violin/fiddle. If I weren't so lazy- and lacking of any musical skill what-so-ever- I'd learn how to play violin.

Puzzle

Last week at work we put together a 1000 piece puzzle as a *cough* team building exercise *cough*, that happened to be laying around the office. No one will fess up to whose puzzle it actually was. Anyway, compare the box to the actual puzzle. Yeah, thats right! They aren't the same! But they are both by the same artist and have the same trees at the top. It took us about a day to figure out that the box had the wrong puzzle in it. But we perservered on like fools or perhaps, programmers and analysts looking for anything else to do but actual work. Ok, we actually got some work done. It did take us three days to finish.

New TV Movie proposal

The Dukes of Hazard Invade the Lost World! Starring Hunter the Evil Looking Yet Cowardly Water Dragon and A Hot Wheels Wannabe General Lee Car From My Youth. Which is incidentally a Challenger not a Charger. I'm ashamed to admit as a seven year old I never noticed the difference.

Hunter is an extremely impressive looking dragon, but he is also rather skittish. That makes it difficult to work with him as a model. Our Green Water Dragon, Loki, is much calmer. Unfortunately she has been rather sick this year, and she doesn't look as impressive as she has in the past. So she isn't the model for today. The good news is that she is going to live; hopefully she regains her past beauty.

I'm rather looking forward to when Corwin is older and he has toy knights. We will be able to stage wonderful battles against dragons.