Wendell and Lenny

For your viewing pleasure I offer this video from last night. It's Wendell singing with Lenny Federal. Nice back up vocal there, Wendell.

Cardinal Lovers

One of my favorite things about having a bird feeder in my last apartment was watching the male cardinal, from the pair that frequented my feeder for a few years, feed the female. The feeder was situated above a sunken window that had a brick border around it. The male would fly to the feeder, grab a seed and then fly down to the brick wall and drop it in his mate's open beak. It was touching. I found a picture of the act on Yahoo! news tonight.

Birthday Party

Yesterday my two neighbors Jordan and Lisa had a birthday party for Lisa's daughter. They fired up the grill, there was a cake, there was some beer and a big water balloon fight before we all adjourned to the pool.

Serious Kid Talk


Here's the birthday girl having some fun with an attendee


My other neighbor, Eric, brought out his pet tortoises


Here's most of the party


Birthday Girl's Mom, Lisa


A Barbie!


I think she got a little tired of the attention after a while


The Waterfight starts

I have the coolest friends

My buddy, Kevin, up in Michigan posted a great piece on his blog about how similar our Marine Corps experiences were. It's very well done and very funny.

Even though our paths only crossed once while we were in the Corps. We spent a night on the town in Okinawa. I think I showed him around since he was there on temporary duty and I had been there more than a year.

Fun link o' the day

Simpsons Theme song on two guitars. Everyone's a musical genius except me.

Michael Chabon

Last night I finished what will most likely be the most unique book I will read this year. I finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The novel is a murder mystery set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska in 1948. It is set in present day and a down on his luck detective is attempting to solve the murder before the land reverts back to American control. Not only is it all that, it's also noir. And it's got gangsters. Real gangsters, tough gangsters. The kind of gangster that would kill ya just for lookin' at 'im cross eyed. Old school gangsters that have no fear of law enforcement or governments. Those are the kind of gangsters I like. Those that wield true power and don't have to concern themselves with the authorities. Those were the days.

To me as an overall novel this one held up much better that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. That Pulitzer Prize winning novel seemed to lag at the end. This book didn't. It really held my attention to the very last page. This book is going to appear on a lot of year end lists and will be seriously considered for a lot of awards.

Gamers and their Avatars

A photo essay. It cracked me up. I love Metafilter.

What does the president really want?

I love the video I am going to link to at the bottom of this entry. It's a segment from the Daily Show that covers Gonzalez' shameful appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Again these slime bags allow politics to trump anything that may be good for our county as long as it may damage their agenda even slightly. You can view the skewering here.

Sopranos Ending

So, like every other person in America that subscribes to HBO I watched the last Soprano's episode last night. I understand the ending has some people talking. Personally I think the ending, though disappointing in a way, made a statement. It was obvious to everyone that has seen more than two episodes that the pace of the final scene was an obvious attempt to get the viewer to believe Tony was about to get whacked. What they were really doing was showing the paranoia that someone in Tony's position experiences everyday. I think this scene shows why the character is in therapy, the episode had a life-like finality to it. Whatever happened here would be the last statement on the series and I was feeling it. I was feeling that Tony and members of his family could be murdered at any second. They could die. Just like any of us could die each time we step outside the door of our home or a plane takes off at the airport a mile away. The scene was tense and we expected something, Tony may even have been suspicious of the man that went into the bathroom. I was. But nothing happened like most similar situations in Tony Soprano's life. But we really felt it this time. It was as successful of and ending you could expect from a long running series.

There is a good write up about the final episode here.

Colin Powell raises his head and sees reality

Thank god, maybe this will help more people realize how crazy Bush and his cronies are. I still can't believe he even bothered to work with these jackoffs.

What the?

I don't know what this is but I can't stop looking at it.

Babe Ruth quote

I am reading a nice new book about the relationship between Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. It's by Tom Stanton and it's called "Ty and the Babe." I found a great quote by Babe Ruth concerning the intentional walk: "It's part of the game, I guess, but when I'm ready to give that ball a ride and that fellow out there passes me, I want to wring his goddamn neck. I'd rather take a punch in the nose than a base on balls."

Right on

As Stephen Colbert said a couple of weeks ago, congress is a bunch of pussies.

Rarefied Air

I've always enjoyed my baseball statistics and recently I was looking at the leaders for careers wins by a pitcher. Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux have really moved their way up the leader board and the only people ahead of them now in career wins are baseball gods. When the only pitchers with more wins than you that didn't play in the 1800's are Spahn, Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Cy Young then you yourself are a baseball god.

Still not convinced Bush is a failure?

"...Bush's "war on terror" did bin Laden's work for him. Brzezinksi is not alone in suggesting that it was a mistake to treat September 11 as an act of war, rather than as an outrageous crime; in so doing, the administration endowed al-Qaeda with the status it craved. What followed was a series of missteps that seemed bent on vindicating the jihadists' claim of a war of the West against Islam. Whether it was the invasion of Iraq or the early talk of a "crusade" or the abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration fed violent Islamism all it needed to recruit young men the world over. What began as a fringe sect has become, thanks in no small measure to the Bush administration, a global movement able to draw on deep wells of support.

There were ancillary effects. North Korea and Iran, in addition to Saddam Hussein's Iraq the other two charter members of the axis of evil, became more dangerous in the Bush years, advancing further down the nuclear road. That was partly because, with the US tied down in Iraq, they were given a free hand; and partly because the thumping of Saddam had taught would-be nuclear powers a crucial lesson. As Ross puts it, "We attacked Iraq, which did not have nuclear weapons, but have avoided doing the same with the North Koreans, who may have as many as twelve." The 2003 invasion served as a glossy advertisement for the protective power of nuclear arms."

I wish there was some way I could read a history book printed 200 years from now so I could see the evisceration Bush receives from historians from the future.

No more boring e-cards

I came across a fun e-card site you can use if you are tired of the same old Hallmark type cards. These are funny and dirty and creative.

Maybe you have heard

The album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is forty years old this week. I'm sure everyone knows that. This morning I heard a nice story on NPR about covers done of songs from Sgt. Pepper. One really stood out, a version of A Day in a Life by a band called Big Daddy. They do the song as if it's a Buddy Holly song and instead of a long piano chord at the end you hear a plane crash and snippets of radio news stories. It's very eerie and very good. You can hear the story here.

Good News, Everyone

I just watched the new White Stripes video. Great song. Good video.

Screw Rudy

"Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani's heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives."

God help us if that jackass becomes president.

Howdy

I gots a couple of links for you today. How about a contest for convergences of images sponsored by McSweeney's? I especially like this one. I don't usually go to McSweeney's because they are the This American Life of the internets and they rejected the list I sent them a couple of years ago but this is good.

Also the New York Times has a good story on Cubs pitcher, Kerry Woods, written by Buzz Bissinger, the guy that wrote Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August. You can read the article here.