We started Second Grade this week. Then we hung out with our best pal and ate a banana split for $9.00 at Ray’s. What a life!

More details here.

Tony and I took the kids to the annual Slovenian Festival to see his parents, see his step-brother who plays in the Grammy-nominated polka band, and of course to eat fabulous Slovenian food and drink lots of Slovenian beer. It was a blast. Make mine Slovenian!

More pix, and some kid pix as well, right here.

Where’d that expression come from, anyway?

Pretty much one of the best shows ever that wasn’t cancelled in the middle with the main characters trapped in the Black Lodge.
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Hitch Cameos w/ Pix

Snakes On A Plane…finally!

Scientists invent pee-powered battery | The Register

I could have powered two batteries just this morning!

OK, so the Bowling Alley guy overslept and didn’t come in until 10 minutes after the BD party was going to start. And sure, the power went off 30 mins into the party and the kids all had to re-set their bowling screens and we have no idea who the high scorer was. But hey, the kids had a blast, the cake was good, and we have to put an addition on our house to hold all the presents. And her real Birthday isn’t until this week!

Man, has it really been seven years without peace?

You know, until I watched my daughter in this year’s P.R. Synchro Swim 2005 Presentation “Are We There Yet?”, swimming to “New York, New York” I had my concerns about competitive synchro swimming as an Olympic event. But after seeing the skills it takes to do this stuff–the twirls, the diving, the clam, the oyster…well, to be honest, I still have my concerns. But it was a lot of fun anyway, and Maddy had a blast. You can see more pix if you click here.

Have you ever been really stoned? I mean reaaaaaallly stoned, where the most you could do was sit there on the floor, staring into space, concentrating on the smallest speck in the smallest crack in the ceiling, not moving at all, just absorbing the rhythms of the earth? Well, neither have I, and even if I had (say, back in my college days), as a Father of two and EVP of the PTA, I certainly wouldn’t admit it in any kind of public forum. However, that being said, I think the closest you can come to that particular sensation would be listening to dub reggae, and in particular, its most famous practitioner, Lee “Scratch” Perry AKA The Upsetter.

Lee Perry took the tracks from the reggae songs he was producing (classics such as Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves“), stripped away the vocals and additional instruments, and concentrated on the interplay of the justly famous Jamaican style bass and drums. He added echo, delays, metric tons of reverb, then slowly brough back in snatches of vocals or guitar, and before you know it, you feel as though you are inside the song, wandering through the spaces between the instruments. Kind of like being…well, you know… And this was all in the 1970s, all analog, before Powerbooks and Propellerhead software. It is truly something else. So Listen, learn, and become one with Jah.