PSoTD

If you are, or have been, married - did the two of you have a song that you saw/see as your "wedding song", either from the ceremony or the reception or the honeymoon or paying the bills later? Here's ours:

Put yours in comments. I will, however, dock five points for any comment of "Macarena".

I'm not sure it's really "free", but somebody's tracking offers.

I bet Chuck Todd is jealous.

Fun little event, 29 different acts performed by elementary school kids. One comedian, one juggler, two magic acts, and a whole slew of singing and dancing performances. Here's the biggest thing I learned last night:

Miley Cyrus owns the elementary girl marketplace, at least around here. There were five - FIVE - performances done to her songs, all different songs, and all girl performers. How do I know they were Miley Cyrus? I knew a couple of the songs, but my daughter told me there were five. She's a fan too, she knows.

Here's what I learned this morning: The official Miley Cyrus websites kinda bother me. I didn't stay to figure out why, but I guess I think it's too "Tiger Beat" magazine of a web site. I know, it's not for me...

I bet this site makes Chris Matthews jealous.

He is the NBA's most undermentioned superstar, but the NBA playoffs series with the Lakers may have finally exposed Tim Duncan's age. Whereas in the past he could carry the Spurs for segments of the game, in the series against the Lakers, he was never really that guy. It doesn't help that much of Duncan's inside help are guys even older than him.

Still, as a big guy, Duncan's longevity is admirable. Even greater: how many 6'11 players have had the consistently great seasons, compiled into an 11 year career? Take a look at his career. That is a model of consistency in the NBA that most big guys don't have.

But perhaps some day I'll stay at the Hotel Kessler.

Harvey Korman passed away today. I wasn't a big fan of the Carol Burnett show, but man, Korman was a funny guy.

Hardly anyone my age has a facebook account. All those old friends for high school that I might actually find entertaining to read about aren't anywhere.

I'm not sure what Facebook can do about this. Maybe they ought to tie in with reunion.com somehow. Or maybe I should just come back and check out Facebook again in a couple of years.

Or maybe I should just accept that the 1970s high school generation just ain't gonna Facebook much.

I used to throw a tank of plus in every now and then (imagining I might get "better performance"). But these days, it's regular all the way!

This has to be a good time to buy stock in bicycle companies.

Apparently there is, or was, a "deep underground of Egyptian Heavy Metal".

Garbage trucks eat a lot of fuel.

A daily gas bill for Kevin and Dawn Wright averages about $3,200.

The couple owns K&D Disposal Inc. in Palmyra, and that’s what it costs these days to keep their fleet of 13 garbage trucks on the road.

Six months ago, their daily gas bill averaged around $2,100. Eighteen months ago, it was about $1,700 — or close to half of what it is now.

“It’s terrible — it really is,” said Kevin, seated in the small office in the back of a giant pole barn at the business’ Garnsey Road headquarters. “That’s our biggest thing, and it is for everybody. It’s the fuel.”

Think the mileage on an SUV is bad? Each of the Wrights’ giant garbage trucks gets a wee two-and-a-half to three miles for a single gallon of diesel, which last week was up to $4.89.

It’s not just the size of the trucks that makes the miles-to-fuel ratio so dismal, it’s the fact that garbage trucks are stop-and-go, stop-and-go. They’ve got 75-gallon tanks, and by day’s end, about 50 gallons have been spent.

I'm curious about this life in Polaroids.

There are pros and cons about population density, and high density is not for everyone. I know, because I'm not one that high density is for. But check out the Comparative Population Density of 49 Cities.

Telecom is spending the bucks in Washington. And here's why.

It is time to call it a career for Lanny Davis and his television punditry or political expertise or whatever he pretends he's espousing when the cameras are live.

I don't think Hugh Laurie's "American" accent is bad, but then I don't watch House.

A Brief History of the Kama Sutra.

In my previous information industry employment incarnation, we had a mantra - no credit for political or campaign entities. PERIOD. Why? Because they are notorious slow, or no, payers. Cash in advance. Those were different times, but this is exactly why those were our rules.

You realize that the "scooter" needs a lot of marketing brainpower, and probably design brainpower, to co-exist with American testosterone.

In all these polls about "Hillary Clinton’s Swing-State Advantage" in a head-to-head versus McCain, I have not seen anything about the possibility that the strongest Hillary advocates actually have an incentive to say they would vote for McCain over Obama, regardless of whether they would or not. The Clinton campaign has primarily been ONLY about this "advantage" over the past few weeks, and the most partisan Hillary supporters certainly should have gotten the message that this is what is perceived to be their strongest argument left. If polled, why would Clinton advocates say they'd support Obama over McCain? That defeats their own campaign.

I like instrumentals.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has a nice little calendar application so you can see what is going on, either at ALL of their parks or at one of their parks. I have a suggestion - they should also add a feature to generate a calendar by one of their regions. If you look at their map, you see they break their parks into 7 different geographic regions - it would be nice to be able to generate a calendar by those regions. After all, we might be looking for something to do at some relatively close state park some day, but we don't want to have to do a search on ALL the parks.

It looks like Hillary Clinton is going to beat Rudy Giuliani this November for President.

If there was only a way for me to continually drop bucketloads of turds on Scott McClellan, I might be able to communicate the feeling I have towards him and his book right now.

In fact, if I had the time I'd invent the McClellanator, a perpetual motion machine driven by a community's sewage that used gravity to bucket and then drop the sewage contents on McClellan.

And if I were a Godlike entity, I would make it so McClellan lived forever yet could not move and could not avoid the perpetual turd-delivering McClellanator.

These are the times where I regret the limitations of my power.

I always thought that saying had some sort of hidden meaning, but apparently it's so obvious I really didn't need to look it up:

The slang term 'qt' is a shortened form of 'quiet'. There's no definitive source for the phrase 'on the q.t.', although it appears to be of 19th century British origin - not, as is often supposed, American. The longer phrase 'on the quiet' is also not especially old, but is first recorded somewhat before 'on the qt', in Otago: Goldfields & Resources, 1862:

"Unless men can work [the gold] on 'the quiet', they are not likely to make 'piles' so rapidly as Messrs. Hartley and Riley."

I guess there's more than one way for somebody to "be packing" at Old Country Buffet...

No guns allowed.

The Police Department has been querying businesses to see where people are allowed to carry weapons, and where it is prohibited by company policy.

The query follows an incident in which a dozen customers at Old Country Buffet were questioned by police for openly carrying guns. One person was detained and his gun confiscated.

To Chief Stadnitski’s surprise, the response from business owners has been overwhelmingly against allowing gun-carrying patrons in their establishments.

“And many, they’re not just saying ‘no.’ They’re very vocal about this,” he said. “We expected more businesses to allow it.”

The only Dickson City business that has said it will allow customers to carry firearms to date is Cartridge World, said Chief Stadnitski.

Hey, I don't want any guns in my place of business. Nor do I want any guns where I go to dinner.

I guess Cartridge World must have some printer varmints, so you need some firepower to stop 'em before they destroy the stock.

Seriously, if I, for some reason, worked at Cartridge World and some dude came in carrying a gun, I'd be thinking WTF, I gotta get out of here, unless the guy is wearing a police uniform.

You got yours planned yet?

Every summer, Annie and Duane O'Neil look forward to renting a motor home and hitting the road with their four children to explore the West or visit family in Seattle.

This year, with soaring gas prices and the economic downturn hurting the family's office-supply business, a lengthy trip was out of the question.

So instead of heading for the interstate, come August the O'Neils will pile into a rented RV and drive a whopping 12 miles from their home in San Marcos to South Carlsbad State Beach for a five-day getaway.

“I can't imagine going now on one of our normal trips. It would be outrageous,” Annie O'Neil said. “By staying here, we're still getting a great family vacation, but not spending as much.”

Families unable to keep up with rising travel prices, but unwilling to forgo a break from the daily routine, are opting for vacations closer to home in a trend that has a catchy new name: the “staycation.”

I think I'm going to camp out in PSoTD's backyard and fish in the hot tub!

Not quite as catchy.

Alright, it was a beautiful weather holiday weekend, the kind that makes you think you're jumping right into summer regardless of what the calendar says. Summer means picnics and barbecues and just plain eating outdoors. So what is your favorite "summer" food - the kind of food that you primarily see at these outdoor eating events?

I'm a sucker for deviled eggs. I know they're not just a summer food, but summer seems to be the eating gathering time, and if you're at an outdoor potluck you just know somebody's going to bring deviled eggs. Or at least they better, or I'm going to be perplexed. Deviled eggs are a must, and none of that "include relish as the filler" stuff, either.

The Superdelegate Transparency Project is pretty useful, developed by Sourcewatch.

And I thought it was pretty close to certain that Obama was going to win the Democratic nomination, that there was a split party out there, and that it was important for the Democrats to replace the Republicans in power in the White House, that I'd have decided that it's time to start writing about reasons that the "fractured Democrats" should consider Obama again, rather than continuing to write articles essentially promoting the perceptions of the fracture.

From The Replacements.

In our neighborhood at least, there's a big cottontail rabbit population explosion this year. In the past week it hasn't been a shock to see 6 or 7 rabbits kicking around our back yard, from babies to mature adults.

Of course, bunny abundance this year means something else next year. Math equations!

I've just begun to look at this site. Can you really get a good price on large ticket items, or do the auctions eventually drive everything up towards the "Buy It Now" price? And are those "Buy It Now" prices really reasonable?

The Middle Earth Journal has now gone inactive. I guess we'll be seeing a lot more of that from bloggers over the remainder of the year.

Restaurants are trying to kill you with portion size.

Not a bad idea - what would YOU like to ask the Pennsylvania Democratic Party?

I do think that the "Bob Barr Effect" hasn't been considered much yet for the November election. Here's a start.

We need more rock songs about how riding the bus is cool. Can you name two?

Wikis in government.

Sunday morning is the perfect time for a maple bacon donut.

It doesn't appear that Orrs Bridge in Hampden Township "made" the Rebuild PA Accelerated Bridge Program.

I bet they have some T-Rex in their record collection.

Every odd-numbered year, my two brothers' families and ours get together for a big family summer vacation. The selection process rotates, and this time it's my job to find the spot. So, I'm looking for input. I've narrowed it down to about 10 different places around the country, and by the end of this summer I need to have the place figured out. Have any suggestions?

One of the places I'm looking at is the Ozark Mountains region. 11 or 12 people total, 5 kids ranging from 8 to 15. Anyone have any experiences vacationing there they want to share?

How will the art gallery survive?

First Fridays at Fusion Art Gallery have been among the most popular events in the downtown Bentonville area since the art supply store and gallery venue opened its doors in 2005. The first Friday of every month, a new exhibition featuring local artists opened - and Fusion's doors opened to masses of art enthusiasts. It was a monthly celebration of not only original art, but local art.

But the First Friday event scheduled for June 6, which will feature every artist that's even shown at Fusion, will be the last. Owner Cindy Suter recently made the decision to close Fusion Art Gallery for good.

"It's going to be difficult," Suter said of closing the business. "When the economy is struggling the way it is, artwork, galleries and art supplies are normally the first to go. People have to buy groceries, put gas in their car and pay their mortgages. We've clearly felt the effect of what's going on in the economy today."

Thanks for wasting my paper:

Ameritoner.com
Health Care Informer, Volume 1, Issue 1. The first edition! WOW!
Some bogus ass health plan. Screw you, Limited Time Service, supposedly and most definitely not an opt-in fax service.
Another Bahamas Cruise offer. Seriously, does anyone ever respond to this?
Alright, Affordable Life Insurance. Apparently they're affordable because they don't pay for voice lines or physical addresses since neither are provided.
Hey, again! I can die twice now!
The Energy Bull. They're just missing the S word.
PremierHealthCare.
And last, the Human Resources Department finally faxed me about Employee Vacation Time. Apparently they're offering some sort of wholesale rate to the entire company! Hey, I thought I was the Human Resources Department. Apparently I've been demoted.

I hear you moan, I hear you moan, I hear you moan.

Bash Hillary Clinton here.

Bash Barack Obama here.

Bash your brain into mush here.

The Australians have something called "National Sorry Day".

They can be annoying things.

New Poll Finds Big Shift Toward Obama

A new poll released today in California finds political momentum shifting dramatically toward Barack Obama—and away from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain—in the nation's most populous state. According to a survey conducted over the past 10 days by the Public Policy Institute of California, 59 percent of likely voters here now have a "favorable" impression of Democrat Obama, while a majority view both of the other candidates unfavorably. In a state whose Democratic primary Clinton won in February, 51 percent of voters now say they have an unfavorable opinion of her; 53 percent of voters feel the same way about Republican McCain.

Obama, meanwhile, seems to be making strides across nearly every constituency. If the general election were held today, 54 percent of Californians say they would vote for him, compared with 37 percent for McCain. That gap has widened by 8 points since March.

I wonder if this has to do a lot with public perception of how Obama's dealing with Hillary Clinton at this point. Her campaign efforts are portrayed by the press as a "threat" to Obama, and yet he generally appears calm and controlled under that threat. Her very campaign is now making him appear - dare I say - presidential. What she's doing in the spring in order to try to beat him may actually help him in the fall.

Not sure why anyone uses it anymore, it seems like Yahoo Mail and Gmail are superior products. Here's more fun from Hotmail, the kinds of things that community email discussion lists have to deal with.

Last error: 5.0.0 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help.

It's not spam but discussion from a list the recipient physically signed up for, but Hotmail rejects it because they're not smart enough to figure that out. The intended recipient never sees it. Nice feature!

I never expected to get into another Elvis Costello record but Momofuku is dominating my music player big time. I was a huge Costello fan back in the day (weren't we all?) but haven't connected with anything from him in about twenty years - since say Blood and Chocolate.

When this latest record showed up on Rhapsody, I grudgingly gave it a listen and a couple songs caught my ear just enough to spin it again. Then after about three times through everything was grabbing me. Momofuku could have been a solid follow up to Armed Forces or Get Happy.

I'd point you to some of the cuts but you're better off discovering your own favorites. If you ever were into Elvis, be sure to give it a listen. It's neat to have Elvis back in heavy rotation in 2008.

I'd be curious to see if, ten years later, this has changed.

Next year I'm going to plant a couple of American Persimmons in the back yard. Hell, maybe I'm starting an orchard.

The main reason I'm interested in persimmons is because our family has a LONG tradition (well, apparently my grandmother's mom made it, so that's a long time ago) of making persimmon pudding. I have the recipe around here somewhere, but there are lots of versions of it online.

And in the light of the information marketplace, it ought to be called idiocy.

Its creators admit it is the ultimate in decadence: a $175 hamburger.

The Wall Street Burger Shoppe just raised its price from $150 to assure its designation as the costliest burger in the city as determined by Pocket Change, an online newsletter about the most expensive things in New York.

"Wall Street has good days and bad days. We wanted to have the everyday burger (for $4) ... and then something special if you really have a good day on Wall Street," said co-owner Heather Tierney.

Hey, you want to know what I want? A federal 50% sales tax on any restaurant item that costs over $150. If these people are stupid enough to waste their money like this, at least somebody ought to benefit besides a marketplace that promotes such excess.

When they can't even produce reasonable districts?

Whatshername wrote about it.

From the California Catholic Daily:

Even in the face of an estimated $20 billion budget deficit, a bill that would raise revenues by imposing a 25% tax on earnings of the pornography industry is meeting with stiff resistance in the California legislature, with opponents claiming it would drive a multi-billion-dollar industry out of the state.

The bill, AB 2914, authored by Assemblyman Charles Calderon, D-Whittier, would levy a 25% tax on gross revenues from the sale of pornographic magazines, photos, books, films and videotapes, and on the gross earnings of live sexually explicit entertainment and pay-per-view pornography provided to hotel guests.

According to a legislative analysis of the bill, it could raise up to $665 million a year in new revenues for the financially strapped state.

At a May 12 hearing, opponents testified that imposing a 25% tax on porn industry profits could drive the business out of California, at a cost in jobs and other revenues of as much as $3.5 billion. It would have an especially hard impact, witnesses testified, on the San Fernando Valley, said to be the "porn capital of the world."

Republicans in the legislature have indicated they would vote against the bill because it is a tax increase and they oppose any tax increase of any stripe. Under state law, tax increases require a 2/3 majority of both houses of the legislature.

This is kind of a strange tax issue. One of the things that concerns me about what government entities choose to "special tax", for whatever purposes and whatever special rate, is the investment by that government into the success or failure of the subject of that tax. I know that there are some that speculate that such a tax in California would squeeze the porn industry out of California, but I think there's just as great of likelihood that the porn industry would receive special business benefits from future government policy once the state government got a taste for the tax revenues.

In other words - governmental protection. I don't care either way if California would do this, but I think that those looking at this issue ought to realize the potential. Looking at a tax policy as a way to drive an industry away might actually backfire because of a government's need for revenue.

And the people have spoken. Either I don't have a good "moustache face" or I don't have a good "face moustache" or both. So I have rotated the whisker acres once more, and am clean shaven.

But to haunt your dreams, the floating stache!

Here's something I find interesting about Kentucky. In a primary where Obama was hammered by Clinton, on an election day where a U.S. Senate seat and several US House seats and several state legislature seats had primary races for election in Kentucky:

Obama received more votes than all the Republican candidates for President in Kentucky.

Are Republicans in Kentucky really that disinterested in this primary? Are they lazy? Or is it a sign that Republicans are THAT disorganized and distanced from their national party at this point?

And where's the media on reporting this?

Superficiality reaches a new level. We're ridiculing unattractive produce!

Uppity blind people are causing trouble.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal appeals court says paper money discriminates against blind people.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has upheld a ruling that could force the U.S. to redesign its money so blind people can distinguish between values.

Such changes could include making bills different sizes, including raised markings or printing oversized numbers for people who see poorly.

The appeals court ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the U.S. didn't explain why such changes would be an unreasonable burden, especially since many other countries have done so.

Sure, they're down nationally, but they must be up at repossession auctions.

I promise this will be my last post about Monty Python this week. (No I didn't!) If you'd like a giggle the scripts are online to read here. Here's a random bit from the second season:

Linkman (very excited): Hello and welcome to 'Election Night Special'. There's great excitement here as we should be getting the first results through any minute now. We don't know where it'll be from...it might be Leicester or from Luton. The polling's been quite heavy in both areas... oh, wait a moment...I'm just getting...I'm just getting a loud buzzing noise in my left ear. Excuse me a moment. (he bangs ear and knocks a large bee out) Uuggh! (cheering from crowd). Anyway, let's go straight over to James Gilbert at Leicester.

Shot of returning officer in front of a group consisting half of grey-suited, half of silly-dressed candidates and agents. The silly ones are in extraordinary hats, false noses etc.

Voice Over Well it's a straight fight here at Leicester...On the left of the Returning Officer (camera shoes grey-suited man) you can see Arthur Smith, the Sensible candidate and his agent, (camera pans to silly people) and on the other side is the silly candidate Jethro Walrustitty with his agent and his wife.

Officer Here is the result for Leicester. Arthur J. Smith...

Voice Over Sensible Party

Officer 30,612...Jethro Q. Walrustitty...

Voice Over Silly Party

Officer 32,108.

Cheering from the crowd. Cut back to studio.
Linkman (even more excited) Well, there's the first result and the Silly Party has held Leicester. What do you make of that, Norman?

Cut to Norman. He is very excited.

Norman Well, this is largely as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won. I think this is largely due to the number of votes cast. Gerald?

Anything written about the actions and sentiments of the dreaded "creative class".

Just more proof that being "blogtrendy" can also mean being intensely partial to the newest shallow cliches.

For years - maybe 20 years - I rarely have dreams that I can recall. I don't know if this means I'm not having any dreams, or if I just NEVER wake up at a point to remember them. I guess I should be happy that I don't have nightmares.

Anyway, somebody sent me this link to The Curious Dreamer the other day, and I figured that some of you that actually have dreams that you can remember might want to check it out.

Most of the suggestions listed in the article "How consumers can cut their grocery bills" are painfully obvious to anyone who spends more than a couple of times each year doing grocery shopping, but at least the writer didn't recommend going to more restaurants.

There's no shortage of articles about how people should spend, and are spending, their rebate checks.

Greek Festivals happened all over the country this past weekend. We went Sunday to the Camp Hill festival after the rain finally passed. We try to do this every year because we love the food. Very low attendance at 2:30 on Sunday, they were actually selling desserts at a 2 for 1 price. If only they would do that with the gyros and souvlaki!

Looks like weather played havoc with their crowds, but it has to rain harder than that to keep us away.

No cheating. I'll know if you look at the source.

A few weeks ago I snuck Monty Python and the Holy Grail into our NetFlix queue. This is one of the silliest movies of all time, and also one of my favorite comedies, and it had been quite a while since I had watched it, and I thought our oldest would enjoy it.

Of course, she was not happy that I had knocked some other movie she wanted to see back further in the queue, so she started with a chip on her shoulder. Plus, it was an old movie. 1975? Was it black and white? C'mon, Dad.

I shot back: C'mon, you like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Time and they're from the same time frame. She was barely mollified, but she and I and her brother sat down with some popcorn to watch MP on Saturday night.

I'm not going to deny it. I laughed out loud several times. Still. I had to skip the final part about Sir Galahad and Castle Anthrax, but it took me until the spanking scene was about to begin to remember what was coming wasn't really appropriate for the kids. Our son laughed out loud several times, at predictable times. He loved the killer rabbit, and the Black Knight. Oh, and the French throwing the cow. And I heard him say "Knights that say Ni!" a couple of times.

Our daughter? Begrudging at best. She liked the Bridge of Death Scene. "Blue. No YeAAAAAAGH!" she laughed a couple of times. And she also wanted to watch the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog scene over, which we did. But at the end, she said she didn't really like it.

I'll be listening these next few weeks for her to repeat some of the movie's lines. That's how the Monty Python infection starts, and then it builds. We'll see.

Everybody know about this? If you have kids with phones, you probably do. They record their message to sound like they're actually answering the phone and talking to you. Then you get "Ha ha ha ... what are you talking to my voice mail for?"

Very annoying. I'm putting one on my phone tomorrow!

Who is the most famous person you have ever kissed?

Best answer scores a pair of well-fitting khaki pants!

There's a BIG opportunity to make motorized bicycles cool in America.

Every odd-numbered year, my two brothers' families and ours get together for a big family summer vacation. The selection process rotates, and this time it's my job to find the spot. So, I'm looking for input. I've narrowed it down to about 10 different places around the country, and by the end of this summer I need to have the place figured out. Have any suggestions?

One of the places I'm looking at is Mackinac Island. There will be 6 adults, all in their 40s, and 5 kids, from 8 to 14. I'm a little afraid this place will be lacking in the kid interest department, but feel free to convince me otherwise.

Not sure this is the right economic time for it, but it would a cool business for Central Pennsylvania.

7:02 PM - The Grille of Hampden

"What is your vegetable du jour?"

"Oh, that's the vegetable of the day!"

It's a great song, period. Interesting version of it.

Jonah Goldberg calls the idea horrifying and says it would send cold shivers down his spine - if he had a spine.

I'm sold. Attorney General John Edwards it is!

Is that really a way to charge for air transportation?

I agree with Lone Wolf. The government should make fat people pay more for gasoline. Since they weigh more, it takes more fuel to move that person from point A to point B than a person in good shape like myself. If you make fat people in America pay say $6 a gallon, that would inspire them to walk or bike instead of drive, and then maybe they can lose some weight. At least then I can respect that person.

I assume that the author of that comment would also agree that children should be charged less than adults, and that jockeys should be charged less than basketball players.

This probably would be a boon to commercial scale manufacturers.

I'm going to have to take The UPS Store up on this for our mailbox service.

Call-in MailCheck® Save time. Save a trip. Call us to find out if you have mail.

It's just not worth going down there if the mailbox is going to be empty.

I think I'm going to go 2 for 2 on the baseball front with our kids. I, having been raised in a household of sports fanship, of playing organized baseball until late teens, had been a bit concerned. Was baseball going to be too boring to our kids?

Our daughter proved it not to be for herself, at least at this point. She loves the big league ballpark experience. She loves playing softball. She'll play catch if you ask. She seems to be... invested, at least as much as a 5th grader can be.

But after one year of tee-ball, the youngest wasn't so sold. After last season, he told me he didn't want to play baseball, that he had "already learned it". I explained that he was going to play SOME spring sport, and it was probably a choice between baseball and soccer.

Okay, soccer.

So I explained a bit further - you run a lot in soccer. A LOT.

Okay, baseball.

So, he's now in his second season, and this year, he's into it. The coach gives baseball cards out to the kids who make outs in the field. He's not a bad fielder for his age, so he's been loving that, and I'm enjoying his reading of the cards on the way home. Are 89 BBs good? This guy had 89 in the BBs column. Is that good?

Is he a pitcher or a hitter?

He plays outfield.

That's pretty good, I explain.

He now likes playing catch, just about anytime. Game days he wants to put his uniform on. He keeps asking to do it, usually ends up with it on at least a half hour before we need to go. Then he asks if he should put his cleats on. Over and over and over. He's ready to go.

It's all cool. He wants to play the game, and that feels good to me.

There sure are a lot of her supporters out their claiming she'd help make a "dream ticket"...

I still like the idea of choosing her for Supreme Court Justice.

Web developers have to make sure their code works for the Firefox browser. I must admit to being surprised, in the past week I've run into two sites which don't work on Firefox, and that's really not a good idea. After all...

Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops

and...

So, based on XiTi and IWS’s statistics, roughly 1 in 5 Internet users prefer Firefox, assuming Internet and web usage are correlated.

Had to bump that freaky hot tub picture down. Although this is kind of freaky, too.

This is a permanent ban violation at our house.

by bobby__emm

I hope so. Not that he's not useful for the Reds, but they need to clear some salary to build for the future.

Alright, this blows me away.

I wanted to look up the place where we lived in Muncie, Indiana, in the last 1960s - the first house my parents bought. There's something on Google Maps I haven't checked out before, Street View, so I try it. And there it is, our old neighborhood. As if I were standing on the street. I turn east, walk down the street a bit, and there's our old place.

Amazingly, the giant oak tree on the east side of the yard is still there. All the little trees - they may have been dogwoods, I don't remember - that were on the west side yard are gone. The house looks about the same from the outside, nearly 40 years later. The back yard now looks tiny. For most of the time we lived there, our back yard came up next to a woods, but with the development now there, it really was tiny.

I took a virtual walk around the neighborhood. Much of it I don't remember, because it wasn't there when we lived there. I can see our friends' houses. I decided to retrace the bike ride to the old Rexall's Drug Store and Village Pantry stores that we'd go to on Saturday to buy candy and baseball cards. There's our park to the left and what used to be a soybean field to the right - still some sort of farming field, but can't tell the crop. I don't remember a sidewalk being on Eaton Avenue but it's there now. Past the stop sign where Terry and I picked up the dormant water moccasin and threw it - 11 year olds can be SO stupid - only to find out it had slithered away later when the sun had warmed up the ground that early spring day.

It's a bit longer of a bike ride than I remember, but I get to where it used to be... and there are the buildings, right there on Memorial Drive and Eaton Avenue, both of them. I can't tell what they are now. But they are businesses.

Just an amazing little trip. Thank you, Google Maps.

Yes, there's still a lot of local government in Pennsylvania not using the Internet.

In analyzing the quality of e-government services among municipal governments (including boroughs, townships and cities), the most striking finding was how little local governments in rural Pennsylvania use the Internet at all, as measured by the availability of a website. The exception, a county with a strong tourism economy, had a high-level Internet presence.

Lack of broadband is a big part of the issue.

THEY WILL DESTROY!

Apparently the Clinton campaign and their supporters believe that she's still the inevitability candidate in November, if she can just overturn the current status of delegates for the primary races. That's the only sense I can make out of the "Obama can win, Hillary will win in November" argument.

However, I think that campaign theme has been discredited already. Why would somebody buy that as an argument for the fall when the same argument has been so clearly destroyed in the spring?

A relatively big lobbyist in Pennsylvania - and not a client - sent me an email inviting me to join him in a "professional" social networking group (not FaceBook, in case you were wondering). I have a theory that it's really an effort to try to build some internet buzz about the company providing the software/framework, because I don't do any work with this lobbyist but I suppose I'm known to the community for our web development.

So... I guess I'll refrain from joining.

I just wanted to promote this very early piece of web design art. Dole was still a candidate back in those days!