~~~

In lieu of another meaningful post to my blog, here's a funny picture.

Invisibility

I'd like to revisit a topic I've covered before: the pros and cons of super powers. As I said, my conversations with my brother-in-law delve into the wacky yet seemingly interesting and once we discussed the power of invisibility. This is a great one. The power of being invisible would be quite a treat, to say the least, and there are many reasons to develop this ability. Of course, I can only think of two off hand: looking at girls and stealing money.

But think about it... what would you really do? There are tremendous ethical problems with sneaking into some girl's house while invisible and every time I do it, my heart is racing so fast she can hear it. I sneak around my house when I'm fully visible but still make so much noise it would wake the dead. Imagine if I knew I wasn't suppose to be there? That just wouldn't work out as planned, I think. You wouldn't feel invisible so why would you think you'd be cool about it? The 'hey baby, you can't see me' thought would vanish as well the second a floor board creaked.

OK, you would rob a bank. How? Banks are pretty well locked up at night. Are you going to open the door at 2:00 pm, while invisible, waltz into the vault and stroll out with a million dollars? I don't think so. First of all, you'd be naked since clothes would give you away. Surely that would make you feel at the very least... antsy. No gloves on so your finger prints would be everywhere. I'm an educated man but I don't know where a bank keeps a million dollars so there would be a lot of fumbling around. Remember, your invisible, not quiet.

Most invisible guys forget that the money would still be quite visible. So all the bank people would watch the money float through the air and what... pop in your car and drive off? Now there's a car flying down the road with no driver. There's an attention grabber. And to top it off, a million dollars is 10,000 one hundred dollar bills. Could you even carry it? What would that weigh? Last but not least, how would you explain your sudden increase is cash while the mysterious case of the floating money made international headlines.

Trust me, being invisible has many perks. I enjoy it. But not the first ones that come to mind. I just use it to take a nap in the guest room so my wife doesn't think I'm home.

This is what keeps me up at night.

Samuel

My son has the attention span of an infant.

I guess that's fitting since, well... he is. Anyway, he has a few of those 'Baby Einstein' videos that are colorful and musical and he loves them. I guess 'loves them' is a poor choice of words. He studies it like the Zapruder Film. Put the thing in, give him something to chew on and he's fine for quite awhile. My wife and I used to discuss that maybe he'll be an engineer or architect since he pays so close attention to the shapes and movement but we've come to realize that he's just got a thing for one of the girls. That's my boy. Development and education take a back seat to girls as sweet as meadow wind with flowing hair:

Every time this girl pops up on the TV he smiles or 'coos' or sometimes jumps frantically in his exersaucer. (if the exersaucer be rocking, don't some knocking). He's out of luck, though. He's the Christopher Reeve guy in "Somewhere in Time". I did a little rough math and by the dates on the video, she's probably 20 years old by now. Older women... that's my boy.

Of course, my endless comparison between us lead me to wish I had that kind of attention. I can't even sit through a movie once anymore let alone over and over. Even if it's a good one. Like "Xanadu."

75% can't be wrong!

Here's a pic of 75% of all the people that read my blog:

Here's the other one:

Endorsement:

We saw these guys again last night. Good times....

Ferdlings endorses:
Seven Nations

~~~

I don't want to use this blog as a platform and I don't want to be a soapbox kind of guy. But I got to get this off my chest:
You know what pisses me off? Coat hangers.

Airplane II (the sequel)

My Dad wanted me to update the airplane story. Before we left to fly back home, he inspected the aircraft. All was well. All systems go, as they say. Oh wait, there was one problem. He had left some switch on and killed the battery. Those magnificent men in their flying machines... we had to jump start the plane so we wouldn't go down, diddy down down.

Hunting for Catfish

I lived in Thomson, Ga. for a while in my twenties. I guess I knew I would one day leave once I got there but decided to make the best of it anyway. I ended up making some really good friends. In the photo, from left to right, we've got Keith, Mark, Me, Alan, and Somebody. The horror show we're hovered over is our "catch 'o the day" of catfish. I discovered fishing whilst in Thomson.

One day we someone said something about fishing. My brain immediately clicked: I HAVE TO FISH. You know that feeling? All of a sudden your life revolves around something you've never done? No? Oh well. We spent many Saturday mornings floating around in a boat fishing. Well, they were fishing. I always got stuck in the middle of the boat and couldn't get much done.

One day, someone mentioned catfish. An eerie silence passed over the room and suddenly we all jumped with glee for we were going to catfish! The next thing I knew I had a pole in one hand and a bag of chicken livers in the other. They taught me what to do. Tie a chicken liver to the end of your line, throw it in a pond..... and wait. "They fight, man! They gonna fight ya!"

Yeah, they fought. And they lost! We yanked those cat-like fish out of the pond all day. I bet the water level dropped a foot. It was great. That night we went to Somebody's home and nailed the fish to a tree through it's head and ripped the skin off of it. Then we chopped the head off, peeled out the meat and Somebody's Mom fried them up. It was easily one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.

It was actually one of the best days I've ever had. But not because I enjoyed the meal or that the fishing was fun. I considered these people my friends. They took me in and showed me a world I knew nothing about. It would belittle them to say that they were my friends because I had nothing else to do and knew then that I would soon move on and never see them again. Maybe they're the ones that moved on and I'm the one left behind.

All I know is that I miss those guys. Even Somebody.

Crazy Putty

I found this in the grocery store.

It's called Crazy Putty.
It's just like Silly Putty... but it's crazy.

Strong like Bull!

I've gotten into the habit of bench pressing my son. I do about five reps of ten presses each night. Granted it's only about 18 pounds but I feel the muscle burn. Not a big deal but if I keep it up, what will happen when he's 30 years old and weighs 250 pounds? I can't lift 250 pounds but I can lift 18 pounds plus what ever he eats that day. Where is the cut off? What day will I not be able to lift a fraction more than I'm lifting now?

I guess I should work on my lower body too so I won't look like an upside down pear.

Did You Know?

Did you know that the AC/DC album "Back in Black" is the fifth best selling album of all time? 21 million copies. I got mine. I remember very well. It was maybe 1980 or 81 and it scared me. I was worried it would upset my parents since I was all John Denver and ABBA before that. I'm not sure what prompted me to get it but I'm quite sure it had something to do with Harry Conner telling me it was cool. Heck, I even bought it three times. Album, cassette and CD. (the CD was from the used bin at the local CD shop but I count it even if the guys in charge don't)

21 million is albums sold too. That doesn't even count the thugs at the flea markets selling pirated copies or illegally downloaded music files that I.... ahem, have no recollection of, Senator. Incedentally, the RIAA's website says that they "estimate conservatively that the U.S. music industry loses more than $300 million per year to street piracy alone."

Anyway, my point: I think that's great. It's a great album. It meant a lot at the time, helped to usher in a style of music that I am steeped in (80's metal) and is still relevant today. I'm happy.

One concern that I have is that Shania Twain's album, "Come on Over" is the eighth best selling album of all time with 20 million copies sold. That's interesting since "Back in Black" was released in 1980 and hers was out in 1997. AC/DC had a 17 year head start and only sold one million more? It's also interesting since the guys defined a music genre and she was just another pretty girl singing a pretty song.

I guess music tastes have changed and more people have more money to by CDs. Music has become MUCH more portable so maybe that makes sense. Maybe it has something to do with her not being any taller than Angus Young or that both albums were produced by the same guy. If I were Mutt Lange, I'd dress her up in a school boy outfit, maybe toss on a beret for good measure and bring all of them back on top.

This is what keeps me up at night.

'Nuff Said

Airplane

As I type, my wife is in an airplane flying home from Las Vegas from a business meeting. At least that's what she said.... I know, what happens Vegas, stays in Vegas. I think Las Vegas is Spanish for The Fertile Valleys, but I digress. It's probably Spanish for The House Always Wins. Anyway, as I check her flight status every 10 minutes, I'm reminded of a special flight with my Dad.

One Christmas, when I was living in Nashville trying to be a rock star, my Mom gave my Dad flying lessons for Christmas. He's always been a flying buff and can look up at a plane tell you what it is. "That's an L-1011. You can tell by the engines." or "That's a 747. You can tell by the hump." Frankly, he could have told me it was a flying pomegranate and I would have bought it.

The next Easter... maybe, that seems really close to Christmas, he had the chance to fly to Nashville with his instructor and fly me back home. So they buzz up driving this little puddle jumper and I hop in feeling like Kiefer Sutherland in "Flatliners".... "Looks like a good day to die."

It was an experience I will never forget. Many details have been lost, of course, except one memory sticks in my mind. Sometime over the course of the flight, I asked "Where are we?". Dad said: "I don't know where I am, but I know where I'm going." I think about that a lot. Literally and figuratively. I only hope to have the confidence that he had when he said it.

Flight status update: Arrived in Charlotte. Departs to Greenville at 22:35.

Samuel

Happy Eight Month Birthday, Sam!

Perpetual Motion Machine

I mentioned earlier that I sometimes invent things that I soon find out, much to my surprise and chagrin, are already done. When I was in college I invented a perpetual motion machine. As I understand it, there is no perpetual motion machine so I figured I was really on to something.

You take a big metal box, probably quite sizable but future technologies would enable it be be reduced, and you fill the bottom of it with water. The water is then heated to a boil and as it turns to steam, the steam rises into a metal tube set at a 45 degree angle. The steam reaches the top and since is away from the heat it transforms back into water through a process known as condensation. The new water then flows down another pipe and feeds the water that is boiling and the process starts all over again. Perpetual motion. Sort of... it was very rough, you understand.

My design never saw it's fruition. I discussed it with my Dad and he congratulated me on inventing the radiator. I was then saddened two-fold since not only had I been beaten to the patent office, I hadn't invented it a perpetual motion machine after all. If it were true perpetual motion, someone would probably have told the first radiator guy.

The irony in this is that I was the guy who put crayons on the radiators in the dorm hallway. That was great fun. Who knew such tom foolery would lead to such a magnificent invention.

Samuel

If I had just one wish... only one demand. I hope he's not like me.

I hope he understands that he can take this life
and hold it by the hand and he can greet the world
with arms wide open...

Big Fish

Yeah... sometimes I wish I hadn't eaten this fish.

Morzart

I understand that if you play Mozart's music for a developing baby you will aid in his getting smart. I want to give my son every advantage so I thought why not give it a try. It probably won't hurt anything and it's better than Barney. I made a copy of a Mozart CD, a 'Greatest Hits', and we play it while he's doing smart stuff like eating, playing... spitting up.

I couldn't help but see some irony in my attempt to point my son in the right direction when I labeled the CD "Morzart".

Now, obviously, everything I know about Mozart I learned from Rock Me Amadeus by Falco, who killed himself in a car wreck in 1998, but I digress. I figured I could at least spell it. (Mozart, not Falco)

I wrote it out... looked at it and thought I might not need much more than a Morzart CD to make my son smarter than I am. Maybe we should stick with Barney.

Wolfgang Amadeus Morzart
1756 - 1791

A Celebration

I would like to celebrate my blog through haiku:

This is my new blog.
I hope that it is groovy.
Refrigerator.

Hmmm...

I discovered that I can click on interests of mine in my profile and find other folks with the same interests. In the '80's that was called networking.... now it's called creepy, but that doesn't apply here. I found this on another blog...

I often wonder if people just never take take the time to appreciate the inherent humor that is the universe, or if they just don't get the joke. Everyone goes through life setting up the greatest joke ever told, but they never listen hard enough to hear the punchline.

I was clicking through ad nauseam and found that. I highlighted it to save and immediately closed all my windows for some unknown reason. You know that thought in your head while you're slamming your car door shut, "My keys are in there!", but you can't stop? That's it.

I love that. I assume he wrote it but it could just be from Calvin & Hobbes.

Maybe I'll luck up and find the guy again. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe we're just supposed to click in and click out and never really connect. Maybe someone will say something that they half stole from a motivational speaker they saw at a conference while waiting to go to the bar and someone like me will ponder it for days. I'd like to think I just found a profound statement. Maybe I just didn't get the joke.

This is what keeps me up at night.

Interweb

You know, I remember getting my first Sony Walkman. It was about the size of a VHS tape and slapped around on my hip like some type of medical device. I felt like I was living in the future. My cousin Lee commented on it saying: "It's so small. I can't believe that." I can only imagine my son will one day laugh at my having an iPod. "It was huge," he'd say, "and it only held 30 gigabytes!" Hmmm... strange days indeed.

Life

I've figured out why life speeds up as you grow older. I thought I was really onto something until a quick internet search proved, much like everything else cool in my life I've thought up, someone has thought of it before me. But as the Antichrist Bono said, "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."

Life speeds up as you get older since you have increasingly less of your life to pass through from point to point. Say you're five years old and you live one year to become six years old. You have added 20% of your life. But when you are 50 years old and you live one year to become 51, you have added only 2% of your life. If you graph that, as H.G. Wells described in "The Time Machine" saying that time if put on paper like width and height can be traveled, it's easy to see that one should traverse 2% of his life much faster than 20%.

That's why when you were young you couldn't wait for Christmas. It was never going to get here. But once you're older you find that if you only had a couple more weeks you could get everything done.

We used to live from point to point. School, summer, school, summer... and so on. Now there's no point. That sounds negative... I should say that now is what we used to not be able to wait to get to. The paradox is that now, we just want to get back.

My wife's grandmother died this morning. And I stand here looking at my seven month old son sleep. Why do I wait and wish for tomorrow? John Lennon said life is what happens while you're making other plans. Al Pacino's character in Glen Garry, Glen Ross said "We spend our lives looking forward or looking back. Where is the moment?"

Ain't it funny how time can fly when you turn your head and blink your eye.

This is what keeps me up at night.

~~~

One day I'd like to be important enough to be assassinated instead of just shot.

Samuel

Don't know much about you. Don't know who you are. We've been doing fine without you but we could only go so far. Don't know why you chose us. Were you watching from above? Is there someone there that knows us, said we'd give you all our love?

Will you laugh just like your mother? Will you sigh like your old man? Will some things skip a generation like I've heard they often can? Are you a poet or a dancer, a devil or a clown? Or a strange new combination of the things we've handed down.

You may not always be so grateful for the way that you were made. Some feature of your father's that you'd gladly sell or trade. And one day you may look at us and say that you were cursed. But over time that line has been extremely well rehearsed by our fathers, and their fathers in some old and distant town. From places no one here remembers come the things we've handed down.
-- Marc Cohn

Please God, make me a bird. So I can fly. Far, far away.

I shall use the power of my blog for good. As I type, my finger tips are electric with the sense of future generations coming to grips with their existence through my words. Or I could just tell jokes.

You know, my brother-in-law and I used to discuss super powers and list the downsides. One of my favorites is the ability to fly. We'd all like to be able to fly, right? I know I would. Go anywhere you'd like as the crow flies (so to speak), zip around under the cover of darkness, be anywhere in the world very quickly (we assumed we'd fly pretty fast), fun stuff like that.

But what about the reality of it? Bugs in your teeth is the easy one. Fonzie taught Richie that one the first day on a motorcycle. I'm talking about the real drawbacks. Like for instance: what would you wear? A cape would probably beat you to death. It would be very cold up there so you'd have to bundle up and the next thing you know you're in sunny Florida dressed up like Nanuck of the North. Uncool. Would you be able to carry a suitcase?

Who would you tell? "Hey man, long time no see. What have you been up to?" "Oh, not much, same ol' same ol' but I can fly now." "....Ok, great. Take care."

Would you be too small to pop up on any radar? Probably. But sooner or later, someone would see you and word would leak out about the flying guy. You'd almost certainly get arrested and if news got out that you could actually buzz around like Superman, I bet all the news crews would bug you to death.

Scientists would want to study you and you'd end up a lab rat held in a bunker in some mountain somewhere on the business side of a one-way mirror with only the smell of bleach and listening to a clock tick. There would certainly be military interests. They'd love to have a fellow that could zoom into an enemy camp and peak about. (I wonder what that might pay... hmmm)

So the next time you find a bottle in the sand and some Genie wants to bestow three wishes upon you, take it from someone who's been there... think twice before you speak.

This is what keeps me up at night.

Lorem Ipsum

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Hello World!

My first post. (I hope it's a good one)