We are currently experiencing technical difficulties

Translation: Something got boned on my computer and I have to fix it. Meh. Will be back as soon as I exorcise the demons.

What's invisible and smells like carrots?

Long day + happy hour after work + tired = another YouTube clip. But hey, it has a bunny rabbit!

Why my son sometimes calls me Dave

My son had finished watching the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie when I had an idea.

"Hey, Brody," I said as I rummaged through the bin of records in the living room, "Check this out." I pulled Chipmunk Punk out and showed it to him. His face lit up as he recognized Alvin, Simon and Theodore on the cover.

We listened to that and then Chipmunk Rock following that. He sat mesmerized, listening to the whole thing. He studied both album covers.

He pointed at Chipmunk Punk and told me, "Those are the old-school Chipmunks." I had to ask him to repeat that because I wasn't sure that I heard him right.

But I had. He seems to prefer the old-school Chipmunk design, apparently.

He can also be heard running around the house singing "I Love Rock N' Roll" in his best chipmunk voice from time to time. It's weird how much like me he is. Kinda scary when I think about it.

For him.

Does this creep anyone else out?

For some reason the addition of a baby to the cast of the Plastic Man cartoon creeped me out as a kid. I mean, look at Baby Plas.

Random thought before bed

A year ago tonight, I was a little nervous. My daughter was to be born the next day, and I had no idea how things were going to transpire.

But a year later, I can honestly say that I couldn't be happier about our addition to the family. Unless, you know, she came out with bundles of money or a PS3 or something.

Or a Slurpee machine. But that might have hurt.

Get the point?

Having just watched the Indiana Jones trilogy the past few nights, I noticed something and thought, well if I noticed it, and I'm pretty slow, someone else surely noticed it as well.

Someone did, but the page has since gone. But since we're dealing with an archaeologist, I thought it fitting that I use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to resurrect it.

Warning: This may distract you the next time you watch a Harrison Ford movie. If you don't mind, then by all means, check out the finger gallery.

Let them eat cake

The birthday girl (technically not till this week) enjoyed her party as far as I can tell. She was very smiley. This picture was just a few minutes before she got a bath.

I'm still freaking out. My son will start kindergarten in another week or so and my daughter is already a year old. Where does the time go?

Hurrrrk.

Now I have to be honest: my grandmother used to work for Golden Grain, so I'll always have a special place in my heart for the company's products. I could eat a box of chicken Rice-A-Roni all by myself.

But this one...I just...I dunno.

Get back, Chococat

My house is slowly turning into a Sanrio store. Hello Kitty's visage is emblazoned on many a decoration hanging up.

We're getting ready for Ramona's first birthday party. Yeah, I can't believe she's 1 already, either.

I'm looking forward to seeing what she does to her cake. Fortunately, we got a deal where if you buy a first birthday cake, they give you a stunt cake for free. That's the small one you give to the kid while everyone else eats the main cake.

There's a joke in there about having cake and eating it, too, but I'm just too tired to bother. Let's just pretend I did, okay?

I'm so jealous of this hairstyle.

I always had a hard time explaining exactly what I wanted when I got my hair cut. I saw this picture, and I wondered, wow...how do you ask for that?

Yeah, it's like if Iron Man modeled his helmet after Wilford Brimley?

Oh, brother

I think I know what I'm going to work on in this writing workshop. And since I can't bring all of you with me, I figured I'd give a brief synopsis.

Two brothers (fraternal twins) decide to go on a road trip in California to get out of their respective ruts. As with many brothers, they're very much alike but very different at the same time.

How far into their journey will they get before they want to kill each other?

My kingdom for a time machine

Seeing this makes me want to go back in time and stay up late:

Group therapy

Well, for the first time in ages, I'm part of a writing group. I'm pretty jazzed about it because we all write different types of stuff, so it will be interesting to see different voices and points of view.

I will always have a love for creative writing classes, though it would take a while for there to be a good reason for it.

When I was in my first creative writing class in the first semester of junior college, I was not exactly inspired by some of the feedback.

I wrote a story about, of all things, a guy going to his 20th high school reunion. Keep in mind that I had only graduated high school a few months prior; heck, I was still 17.

While much of the feedback was positive, the one that sticks out is someone who was in the class to write Literature, and anything that didn't have a deeper meaning was a waste of her time.

Which, I should add, is perfectly fine. Different strokes for different folks, right? However, you can be more diplomatic about your disdain for humor-based pieces.

"The part at the end with the phone call was funny, but the rest was crap unbelievable."

This, by the way, was criticism from someone in her early 30s directed at a 17-year-old. I shouldn't have let it bother me, but it soured me so much that for the remainder of the class, I just used stories I'd already written.

It wasn't until the next year that I took another writing class, this time with a different instructor. While not entirely enthusiastic about my writing--the thing that stuck out to her was that it appeared to be meticulously proofread--the class was inviting enough for me to actually want to share my writing.

At the end of the semester, we could, for extra credit, compile a list of 10 markets to which we could theoretically send our work and choose one to actually submit a piece to.

I just did it for the extra credit and promptly forgot about it. But August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail. Inside was a magazine, a letter of congratulations, and a check for $10.

I fully expected to get the first of many rejection letters. Instead, I got published on my first submission. Score!

So I rested on my laurels until a creative writing class at CSU Stanislaus. The instructor and I didn't agree on very much, but I met a cute brunette in that class, so in the long run, it was time well-spent. I think so, anyway. My wife may disagree.

I was getting prolific again at that point, and it seemed like I was churning out almost as much stuff as I was in high school.

But one thing pissed me off, and as typically happens with people like me, I focused all my energies on something that didn't warrant the attention.

I had turned in the first draft of a story in which there's a mention of how one of the characters loves the breadsticks at a certain restaurant. I wrote that shortly after gorging myself on breadsticks at Olive Garden.

The corrected version of my draft came back from my teacher, and he had crossed out breadsticks and written "garlic bread?" I meant what I wrote, and left it as such in the final draft.

Sure enough, he "corrected" me again.

So in the next story, I included a page-long conversation between two characters about the difference between garlic bread and breadsticks.

In retrospect, I think I may have crossed the line a teensy bit with one character asking the other in exasperation, "How the hell can you have lived on this planet for this long without knowing what a friggin' breadstick is?"

The only comment from the instructor was "This is not amusing."

How quaint.

It's funny to see an ad for a video game system that basically has to explain what it is, but that's just how it was in the dark ages of 1978.

I didn't get my Atari 2600 until a few years after this ad; I was only 4, after all. And yes, we had a black-and-white TV (in my parents' room). Do they even make those anymore?

And while technically true, claiming over 1,300 variations is a bit misleading, don't you think? It's not like all those different levels were completely different games.

Admittedly, the Pong version of Combat was my favorite because no matter where my brother positioned his tank, I'd always ricochet a shot and nail him. How many people played the invisible version of Combat? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Because Spanky was already taken, I guess

You gotta love some of the old-school He-Man figures.

Hey, this guy has a groovy beard, a giant armored hand and wears a Speedo to battle. Let's call him ... Fisto!

Yeah, nobody could take that the wrong way...

Great moments in cinema

As a Friday night treat, here is my favorite part of the blaxpoitation epic, Black Belt Jones.

If you're watching this at work or in front of the kids, this was rated R, so be warned.



Here's the trailer:

One of the best things about TV Guide

I recently nabbed a 1984 Fall Preview TV Guide off of eBay, and I noticed that the infamous Turbo Teen premiered that week. I scanned the page so you wouldn't think I was making this up:



"Debut: Teen-ager Bret Matthews turns into a turbocharged racer whenever his temperature rises."

How many times did they have to try to summarize this without sounding like they were on drugs? By using the phrase "turbocharged racer," one could think that he was able to run really fast instead of turning into a friggin' car.

For some reason, ABC debuted its fall offerings this week, while CBS and NBC waited until the following week, hence the teaser ad for The Snorks also on this page.

Even when we were kids, we recognized The Snorks as a shameless ripoff of The Smurfs. Sure, they came in different colors and had phalluses on their heads (yeah, I know they were supposed to be snorkels, but come on), but still, we knew this was weak sauce.

Of course, we all thought Turbo Teen was badass, so maybe we weren't the best arbiters of quality programming...

Just one of those days...

The answers revealed!

So how did you do on the crossword? Too hard? Too easy? Too pointless?

On writing.

I've been thinking about writing a lot lately. That is to say I've been thinking a lot about writing. Aside from the daily posts here, I haven't been doing much writing at all, which kind of bums me out.

Sometimes I like to dig up something I wrote a while back and see how it looks, which, since I'm a little tired today, is what the bulk of this post will be.

It's just the first little bit of a story I started writing for NaNoWriMo back in 2006. I never finished it, so I never came up with a title.

Solomon Cauldar looked at his target and sighed.

Another bank job, he thought, looking skyward at the moon, which, he noticed, was waxing. I live for the day I don't have to waste my time with this crap.

The first couple of times, he used a couple of guys he found to help him, but as time went on, they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. Besides, he tried to keep in shape; he could manage most of the heavy lifting he needed to do.

He checked his watch: 11:37 p.m. Amazingly, this place didn't have much in the way of security, relying instead on surveillance cameras.

Morons.

He cracked the knuckles of his long, thin fingers and headed inside. The cameras wouldn't see him, and no one would know that he had been there until the morning.

He headed down the hall, staying in the shadows. Solomon wore black, as he usually did, right down to his black Chuck Taylors. He could stand right behind someone and they'd never even see him there.

Finally, he arrived at the vault. He pulled a piece of Wrigley's Doublemint out of his pocket and started chewing. Then he went to work.

How many times? he wondered. Solomon tried to keep his mind busy to fight off the pangs of guilt that plagued him during lulls in his heists. He liked to tell himself that the crimes he committed were relatively victimless, but he knew there were people out there who needed his treasure as much as he did.

He was just a little more proactive in terms of getting what he needed, that's all.
Back at his car, a green 1971 Plymouth Duster with deeply tinted windows, he loaded his haul into the trunk. He always knew exactly how much to get; no sense letting greed trip him up. That's one of the reasons he'd never been caught.

His take secured, he closed the trunk gently and slid into the driver's seat. Solomon took one last look at his target in the rear-view mirror and released the parking brake, letting the car coast down the hill a bit before starting the engine.

As the engine turned over, the radio crackled to life. Neil Diamond's "Thank the Lord for the Night Time" was playing. Solomon smiled.

"Amen," he said.

The Franklin County Blood Bank, the only two-story building in the small town of Baileyville, grew smaller in Solomon's mirror until it, like him, was out of sight.

There's a lot more, but I'm just curious if this beginning is enough to make people want to continue reading.