Losing My Will To Live - Today's Music Lesson

Sorry about the the title, but today's lesson is about Country music. Now I claim that walking through the country music section on my way to the jazz or blues section is always iffy. I don't have that many brain cells left to lose and I can feel them dying as I pass Travis Tritt. But, Ann and I were driving to Pottawatomie Casino on Friday night to blow some retirement savings when a song came over the radio station. I had been searching for a new station as I periodically get tired of listening to NPR, the oldies (can you believe that Dick Biondi is still on the air), and sports talk (Cubs and White Sox both stink and Bulls season is too far away), when I heard this song:    


           

The song is from the only Country album I own, Blue Frontier by the Remingtons. I bought it because the Remingtons were originally a non-Country band from the 70's called Bread. Maybe you've heard of them.    


          


Jimmy Griffiths was the link between the two bands. Now that is pretty much the extent of my country repertoire. I am a fan of bluegrass, but in my mind, that's not country. This is from the Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou, which is on my top ten list.     


              

It stars one of my favorite actors, George Clooney and the always funny Tim Blake Nelson as the perpetually confused Delmar, the shortest of the Soggy Bottom Boys. Delmar by himself makes the movie worth watching. The next video is of the Hobo song Big Rock Candy Mountain, recorded by Harry McLintock in 1928. It's a great song which includes the best line ever: "I'm a gonna stay where you sleep all day, where they hung the jerk who invented work."     


            


I can listen to Ralph Stanley and Allison Krause all day, as long as I don't call it country music. If I think I'm listening to country music, well, that's when today's title kicks in.  

Giving Nature a Helping Hand

The ones released Thursday will get a drink of water, have a little snack and “then start doing mating dances and chasing each other around." That may sound like a quote from a high school chaperone just before prom starts, but it is actually a quote from Nathan's friend Vincent Olivares, who works as a biologist at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. He is discussing butterflies, in particular, Baltimore Checkerspot butterflies. The Daily Herald today had a nice article about the Imperiled Butterfly Conservation and Management Conference being held this week at the museum. It brings together butterfly conservation people from all over the country and ends with a field trip to release the aforementioned Checkerspots which have been grown from eggs at the Museum.     

According to the article,

“This is no-tech,” explains scientist Doug Taron as he shows off his collection of butterfly pupa in chrysalis hanging upside down from scraps of window screen covering an assortment of ordinary, paper Dixie cups. “That's part of the interesting challenge of this work. If we need to do that (secure big money for fancy equipment), butterfly conservation would never get done.”    

This week's Imperiled Butterfly Conservation and Management conference at Chicago's Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, where Taron works alongside fellow biologist Vincent Olivares, attracts three dozen leading butterfly experts from zoos and museums across the nation. They are scheduled to make a pilgrimage Thursday afternoon to the prairie at Fermilab in Batavia to release dozens of adult Baltimore Checkerspot butterflies that were raised from eggs at the nature museum.   

For those of you who are near Chicago this summer, I would encourage you to visit the Nature Museum, which is next door to Lincoln Park Zoo off Fullerton Avenue. The butterfly area is a most amazing exhibit. As you walk into the exhibit area, you are stunned by the sheer number of butterflies flying around you. You have to be very careful where you walk or sit so that you don't injure any butterflies, but you can sit and watch them fly up and land on your sleeve. This is one of my favorite butterflies in the exhibit:

In fact, as you leave, there is a full size mirror so that you can make sure no butterflies are escaping with you. Just remember to wear something cool. It is warm and humid in the butterfly den. There are full color pictures of the butterflies so that the kids can walk around trying to find every different species in the exhibit. Truly worth the trip and we are really excited that Nathan works there and helps school groups to appreciate the outdoors. If you do visit, stop and say Hi to Nate and let him know who you are. The summer is a fairly quiet time for him and I'm sure he would like to meet you.     

Etymology is Not About Bugs

I came across a board game the other day that looked interesting. It's called MooT and it is a game about word origins (etymology) and meaning. Interesting if you are a word geek like me. For example, a question about what the word sibling means: you have the same mother but different fathers - are you siblings? It turns out that the dictionary says that siblings are children who have one or both parents in common, so the answer is yes. I would have thought that stepchildren would not be considered siblings. My bad.    

I probably have ten books on my shelves that have to do with words and their meanings, I suppose because the search for meaning is a little like solving a puzzle. I am always interested when groups get together to hear the regional differences in how we speak English. One word that popped up early on from my Mom (who grew up in upper western New York state) was what you call the direction across the middle of the intersection from you. She used the word catty-corner to mean diagonally. I have also heard kitty-corner used in Illinois that way. The actual English word is cater-corner, where cater is an Anglicized version of the French quatre meaning four. So cater-corner across meant across the four corners, or diagonally. Over the years it became catty-corner, and then kitty-corner.    

So how can flammable and inflammable both mean "can catch fire easily"? The original word was inflammable, where in- was used like en- in words like enflamed. But there was concern that people were thinking that the in- prefix meant "not", so back in the 1920's, the National Fire Protection Association began using the word flammable instead in its warnings. Once you get that figured out, you can decide whether we are going to bone or debone this chicken I bought for dinner. According to the dictionary, they mean the same thing also.   

Being a Parent

We've been helping Nate get his new apartment up and running, doing some painting and other things and it has turned my attention to the fact that there aren't many chances for us to do parenting any more like this. Mike is living in Portland and Nate has been pretty self-sufficient down in Chicago and our parenting skills have been reduced to the occasional meals or phone calls and the ever present "Be careful driving" or "Tell Tammy we said 'Hi'." They have their lives, which is as it should be. But I was reading a graduation letter written by Dwight Slade to his son.   Slade is a comedian who happens to live in Portland and his letter was published in the Oregonian. If you click here, you can read the whole letter and I encourage you to do so, but the excerpt below I wanted to emphasize. It is overly dramatic - he is a comedian, after all - but the point he is making rang true for me. And I wanted to say this to my kids so they understand why we jump at the chance to help out.    

We will miss you. No, strike that. It's more than that. We will cease to BE without you. For 18 years we have known exactly who we are: parents. Above and beyond everything else. But now, here, in this old auditorium, your school has dressed you up in a polyester gown, stuck a square piece of cardboard on your head and told us we are no longer relevant.

We have one saving grace. As you stand here, the ceremony done, your grad gown unzipped to the belt and diploma in hand, I can still see the baby in you. You can vote, smoke, go to war, get someone pregnant but, thank God, you are still a baby to us. The gentle slope of your neck and shoulder is unchanged from when you were a toddler. The way your mouth hangs down when you read. It's our salvation.

As you launch out of this ceremony and collide with all the wonder and tragedies that life has in store for you, there will always be us, your parents, who won't see you except as the child who needs to be cared for. Paradoxically, your graduation has not aged us but given us immortality. We are forever young when you are around.

You hand me your grad cap, diploma and tassel, then take off with your friends. What am I supposed to do with this junk? I smile because I'm still a parent.

Every moment that you give us to be parents again will be a gift. So don't be strangers. Come and share the couch.

"Ice Road Truckers" is on.

Nathan's mother's day card for ann said something like   

I grew up. I moved out. I got a job. I'm not in jail. Thanks, Mom.   

You've both done all those things. And we need to retire as parents somewhat as you get older. But we do really enjoy when something comes along that we can help with. I remember having my Dad help me just a few years ago build the deck extension that my barbecue grill stands on . I was 55 and he was 85 and it was nice to work with him on a project and ask him what he thought we should do. Dwight Slade is right. You have given us immortality. Thank you.    

Odda and Ends #3

A. Ever considered what birds would do if they had arms? Well, someone has.

2. The Peoria (IL) Chiefs minor league baseball team is honoring the Chicago Bulls NBA Championship teams from the 1990's at tonight's Midwest League game against Wisconsin. According to the Chief's website, "There will be video clips of the Bulls titles along with audio highlights and trivia while the team will take the field to "Sirius" by the Alan Parsons Project."  Team officials were looking for some pregame giveaway that would highlight the evening without adding too much expense. Their solution: LeBron James 2011 NBA Championship Replica Rings. "There seem to be a lot of those available now cheap", they said. In addition, the team has petitioned the league to skip the fourth inning. "We aren't sure if the league will allow it," said team President Rocky Vonachen. "But if LeBron doesn't need to show up for the fourth, maybe we won't either." Pretty harsh, but there is nothing quite like Minor League Baseball promotional marketing. 



III.  The Guardian has posted their choice of the best 100 non-fiction books ever written here, It includes

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (my favorite math book of all time)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau and

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (everybody's favorite physics book.

Fill in your summer reading with a good book today. 



Last.

This is the USB Aquarium, available here.  It runs off the USB port on your computer. Read their description. It sums it up very nicely.

If you're like most geeks, your work environment can be a depressing and sterile place. Designed to crush your soul to squeeze the last few ergs of energy out of each and every wageslave, grey walls, grey carpeting, and anemic flickering fluorescent lighting all combine into something truly evil. Unfortunately, you've got bills to pay, so you punch in every morning and punch out every night feeling a little more dead with each passing day.
You'd love to have some kind of decoration - some bright point of color and light in your otherwise dreary existence, but the cube-police won't allow it, citing some bogus OSHA regulation or something. Something to do with not being allowed to plug personal items into the power outlet. If only there was some unregulated power source - electricity that even they couldn't complain about.
What if we told you that you could have a pencil cup with a nice bright LED light to illuminate your workplace powered entirely by USB? "Boring," you'd probably say, and we would agree. What if we threw in a nice clock and calendar and temperature sensor? "Better," you say, "but still not amazing." Okay, how about if we play soothing sounds of nature designed to calm your frazzled nerves. "For reals?" We're not done yet.
You get all that PLUS we throw in a real working fishtank so you can keep a couple aquatic friends with you while you work. "Whut?" you say, head cocked at a quizzical angle. No, we're absolutely serious. We've found a low-voltage USB fishtank that runs ENTIRELY off of your computers built-in USB power. Plug it in, fill it with water, and drop (gently) a betta or a couple of white-cloud minnows inside, and watch as they swim and dart about, happily frolicking on your desk! (Granted with beta fish there's less frolicking and more floating in catatonia, but you get the idea.)

A must have for your office or den. I'm ordering one now for the computer room before Ann has a chance to see this blog post and stop me. Do they make any sharks that small? Here fishy fishy.

16 On a Scale of 1 to Catch 22

I don't know about you, but I have trouble opening those hard plastic cases that come wrapped around things that I buy. They are tough to pull apart and a scissors is tough to use to cut through the shell without damaging the object inside. So I was really happy when I saw an advertisement for something that would help me open those.  This is what I got in the mail:  

 

Today's Musical Selection - Just For Mike

I expect to hear this song when we visit Mike and Tammy in a month or so - The Theme From Shaft as performed by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.  Start practicing, Mike.  I'll be looking for this group to be on tour this summer at either the Chicago Lyric Opera House or Lollapalooza 2011. Wooooooo!      

And if you enjoyed this, you would probably enjoy the Barbra Streisand - Neil Diamond hit, You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore here at YouTube. As one of the comments says, starts surreal and gets funnier as it goes along.   

Need Some Folding Chairs to Handle a Crowd?

Having a big crowd over and need a few folding chairs? The Flux Chair may be your answer. Developed in Delft, Holland by two interior designers as their college graduation project, it comes as an envelope (not in an envelope - the envelope is part of the chair) with an easy carrying handle and you can stack 21 of them in a space a foot high.   

They come in four colors (this is what they look like before you fold them)   

and cost $199.00 each. They are all one piece, nothing left over after you fold the chair. Watch the video to see it in action.    

Conservative Shouldn't Mean Irrational

Today, according to Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney gave up all hope of receiving the Republican nomination for President in 2012. His crime - he stated that he believed that the world was undergoing global warming and that human beings were partially responsible. Rick Santorum, on the other hand, followed the "conservative" party line and called global warming "junk science" and "liberal hogwash". I put conservative in quotes in the last sentence because not believing in global warming is in no way a conservative position. I always assumed this started when George W. Bush's people required that the Grand Canyon gift shop start selling literature that showed why the Grand Canyon was created 4000 years ago during Noah's flood.  Or maybe the shift happened earlier and I missed it, but it is inconceivable to me that the defense of concepts that are widely held by the scientific community is considered a liberal position. And I don't understand why irrationality should be considered conservative. At a debate in Iowa in 2007 leading up to the 2008 Presidential caucuses, Romney was also one of the few who didn't raise his hand when the large group of contenders was asked, "Raise your hand if you don't believe in evolution." Is not believing in evolution a "conservative" position? No! Not in any way, shape, or form! And it is not a religious position either.  As a member of our local school board, I have participated in a few discussions over the last 14 years in which the teaching of evolution was questioned. In each case (thankfully) our board has shot down the idea of teaching creationism (now packaged as intelligent design). In preparation for the next round I always carry in my Board folder a letter stating that the undersigned believe that evolution does not conflict with the religious teachings of the church and that science and religion can exist together. It is signed by more than 13,000  church leaders from all over the United States: including significant leaders of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths. Read that again; 13000 is not a misprint. But we are told by Rush and his posse that evolution makes a mockery of religion and therefore cannot be a part of a "conservative's" political stance. That's just stupid.   

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is not a fringe organization. It is the most widely respected organization of scientists in the United States. According to their website:  

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has reaffirmed the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society.   
“The vast preponderance of evidence, based on years of research conducted by a wide array of different investigators at many institutions, clearly indicates that global climate change is real, it is caused largely by human activities, and the need to take action is urgent,” said Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science.   


But I still hear and read comments from "conservative" talking heads that global warming is not a stance held by most reputable scientists. That is simply a lie. Now as a lifelong Democrat, I understand that my party is pretty messed up. We can be given every opportunity to do well and still mess it up. And we have some pretty bizarre elements to the party as well. But, come on, Republicans. Can't you take back your party from these nutjobs that call themselves "conservatives"? It doesn't surprise me at all that the shift from what I would consider rational conservative thought to what is now crazy as a bedbug irrational conservative thought occurred when a Texan took over in the White House. That state scares the hell out of me. I'm just saying.   

I Should Have Stopped Later (for gas, not to get married) - Today's Math Lesson

I was driving to Chicago the other day to go out to lunch with Nathan, and I noticed as I left home that I needed to buy gas before I got on the Kennedy Expressway. With the weird things that have been happening to gas prices lately, I was trying to figure out when I should stop for gas. What I mean is that between my house and the interstate, there are about 10 gas stations. I wanted to get the best price for my gas, but the only way to do that perfectly would be to drive past all 10 stations, then go back to the one that had the lowest price. I like to save money, but that seemed a little stupid, so the question was, if  I don't want to go backwards, and I don't know the gas price of any station until I get to it, when should I stop? Let's look at a simpler problem. For example, if there were three gas stations and after the fact I could rank them 1 2 and 3 with 1 the best price, when should I stop? There are 6 possible orders that the stations could occur in: 1 2 3; 1 3 2; 2 1 3; 2 3 1; 3 1 2; 3 2 1. Here, for example, 3 1 2 means that I first pass the 3rd lowest gas station (that is, the highest price), then the lowest one, then the 2nd lowest one. If I use as my rule, stop at the first gas station I see, then 2 of the 6 arrangements would leave me buying gas at the cheapest station: 1 2 3 and 1 3 2. Therefore 1/3 of the time I would be buying the cheapest gas possible. I would have the same probability of buying the cheapest gas (1/3) if I always went to the second gas station. Then 2 1 3 and 3 1 2 (but none of the others) would have the cheapest gas at the second station. However, suppose my rule was stop at the first gas station that had a cheaper price than the first gas station I passed. That is, remember the price of the first station, then stop at the next station that is lower than it. The arrangement 2 1 3 would be good here. The second gas station is cheaper than the first, so I would stop here, and it has the cheapest gas (it's a 1!). 3 1 2 would also work - again the second gas station is better than the first so I would stop there and it is ranked number 1. And 2 3 1 would work - the first station better than station 1 (which is ranked second) would be the third station, and it's ranked number 1. I wouldn't stop at the second station because its price is higher (ranked 3rd) than the first station. The other 3 arrangements would be losers. 3 2 1 for example would cause me to stop at the second station - it's better than the first station - but it turns out it's not the cheapest I could get - the third station is. So 3 of the 6 arrangements give me the best price with this rule - 1/2 the time I would be getting the best price. This turns out to be the best you can do with 3 gas stations. So, what about 10 gas stations? Should you stop at the first gas station better than the first one, or the first gas station better than the first two stations, or check the prices on the first three stations, then stop at the next one you see that is better than all three of them? How many stations should I pass before I start my comparisons. Well, it turns out, using some calculus, that the answer to that is that you should let the first 36.8% of the stations go by, then choose the next one that is better than all the ones you passed by. For those of you with some math background, it won't surprise you, since calculus is involved, that .368 happens to be an approximation for 1 / e. So for our 10 stations, 10 times 36.8% is 3.68, which rounds to 4. You should pass by the first four gas stations, then stop at the first gas station better than the first four. If you do this, you will get the best price about 40% of the time and that's the best you can do. If there were 50 gas stations, then 36.8% of 50 is about 18, so I should go past the first 18 stations, then stop at the next one that is better than all of the first 18. (In this case unfortunately I would probably run out of gas before I stopped.) This problem is an optimal stopping problem, but when I used to teach it in my Senior Topics class, it was called the Secretary Problem. It assumes you know how many applicants you are going to interview for the secretary job and it assumes you will offer the job to someone as you interview them, that is, each applicant is either let go or hired at the end of their interview. It also assumes you can't go back and offer the job to someone you had interviewed previously.  I've also seen it called the Marriage (or Fiancee) Problem. Based on our results, it says that if you expect to date 10 people seriously in your life, you should let the first 4 go, then marry the next one who is better than all of the first four. About 40% of the time, you will end up choosing the best possible mate. OK, maybe we'll just use it for buying gas.    

Restoring A Forgotten Tradition

After dinner tonight, Ann and I decided to go for a drive. Now that may seem like a minor event, something relegated to Twitter perhaps, but it is much more than that. When we were kids, going for a drive was a big event. It was the fifties and being in a car was a bigger deal than it is now. And there were always two parts to going for a drive: where we would go and what the treat would be. There was always a treat involved with going for a drive. Most of the time, going for a ride meant going out towards the lake. In St. Marys, Ohio, the lake was a big deal. Grand Lake St. Marys was a 13,500 acre reservoir (about 9 miles long and 3 miles wide) dug by hand in the 1840's to supply water for the Miami - Erie Canal. The canal was the principal waterway between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. Lake St. Marys was the world's largest man-made lake until the reservoir for Hoover Dam (I think) was built. When the railroads became big in the late 1800's, the lake became less important for transportation and eventually became a recreational area and state park. There were beaches and boat docks that occupied much of our summer when we were kids. On our way out to the lake (a two mile drive) you passed the Dairy Queen, the Rootbeer stand (a fifties drive in similar to Dog N Suds where the waitress brought your tray out and hung it on your car window), and other places to stop and get a treat. After the treat, we drove slowly through the state park area looking for bunnies, then headed down State Rte 364 past the East end of the lake (the St. Marys end, Celina was at the West end - they were our archrivals in high school sports). You would go past the Bulkhead where my brother Alan and I went fishing. Actually he mostly fished, I walked across the road to the little grocery store and got pop and candy bars. Next up is the fish hatchery; just as it sounds, the newly hatched fish were released into various Ohio lakes to improve fishing. Then a left turn that would lead you past Greenville Road on the south side of town where my dad grew up. And back through St. Marys to our place amid the farms a mile north of town. About 6 miles total, but it would take half an hour. Lots of stories about who lived where and who was married to whom. When we were kids we called that green-shuttering: the adults would start off talking about a specific person, but eventually it would become "You know, they lived in the house on the corner with the green shutters, their daughter married that guy whose dad worked in the press room at the Goodyear factory."    

So today we started over. We drove up through Fox Lake and stopped at the Dairy Queen (a requirement of the drive), then headed up State Park Road. We passed Chain of Lakes State Park, where both Nate and Mike worked for a while in the summer (concessions and boat docks) and eventually got up towards Wilmot, where we used to drive Mike and his friends to go snowboarding. West on Rte. 173 into Richmond, past Hunter Golf Course, which is a very nice place to play (Terry Napolski once drove a ball into the clubhouse off the first tee, a drive of 15 yards perpendicular to his swing). We passed a giant turtle (I didn't believe it at first either) standing alongside 173. At first glance I thought it was a tire, but Ann agreed it was a giant turtle. Down past Anderson's Candy Store which is worth the trip any day. Luckily it was closed at 8PM so we could stay on our diets OK. Then down Rte 12 through Spring Grove past the site for the Illinois Storytelling Festival. The Festival was a major yearly event when our boys were young. A beautiful park filled with the best storytellers Jim May could bring in: Jackie Torrence, Kathryn Windham, Ed Stivender, and Bobby Norfolk came there. We came home every year with new tapes for the boys to listen to as they went to sleep. Unfortunately, hard financial times have reduced the Festival to a shadow of its former self. We haven't been back there since they moved the Festival to September. So we told stories and remembered things as we did our drive and after about 45 minutes, we were home. Where did we go? You could say "No place in particular." But the purpose of every drive like this is to go back in time. And to get a strawberry sundae (with nuts). Feels like old times.    

I Would Have Bought That Groupon, But My Last Name Stopped Me!

From Kurt Carlson of Georgetown University and Jacqueline Conard of Belmont University comes an interesting study that shows a link between how consumers buy and their last name. It's called the last name effect and has to do with the way that alphabetization in elementary school has an effect on you for the rest of your life (other than making you think grilled cheese sandwiches have to come with tomato soup).  "The Last Name Effect", published in the Journal for Consumer Research, says that people whose last names are later in the alphabet tend to buy more quickly than those whose names are at the beginning.    

Carlson and Conrad carried out four experiments to test their hypothesis and found a person named Anderson would wait 25 percent more time than a person named Zimmer to buy a hot-ticket item.

In one experiment, Carlson and Conrad randomly emailed participants from social networking sites and told them they had the chance to win four tickets to a championship basketball game. Participants were asked to reply via email. The researchers found that people with last names starting with R-Z responded five minutes faster than those starting with A-I.    

The researchers hypothesize that "Those with names late in the alphabet apparently become frustrated and traumatized with always waiting till last and choosing whatever is left over. As adults, free from the tyrannical alphabet system, they overcompensate, jumping at a chance to go early."   

Reports about the study cited previous research showing a similar effect in academia: "Previous research into how names impact academic success found that economists, all else being equal, with last names falling earlier in the alphabet were more likely to gain tenure at a top university. The reasoning for this is economists often publish articles together and authors with surnames falling at the beginning of the alphabet come first in the citation." It's tough to get recognition when a citation lumps you in the "et. al." section.   

Both researchers indicated that they were surprised at the strength of the last name effect in the data they collected. They also found that the effect was tied to a woman's maiden name and not her married name. Life really is all about elementary school.    

The Dangers of Cell Phone Usage

We were inundated here in Chicago news last week by reports of a scientific study about cell phone usage. The headline read   

Experts Say Cell Phones Possible Cancer Causing Agents   

then proceeded to explain that the headline was misleading at best, and intended mostly to cause fear in the readers and listeners, which they hoped meant that they would watch the news a little longer or read more of the paper to get to the advertisements. What actually happened was that several previous studies were analyzed, and while the vast majority showed no link at all, a couple did. According to the science blog Discover, “the graph showing the results from several tests investigating the links between cell phones and cancer  shows that any connection is very weak, and cannot be statistically distinguished from no connection at all. Of course, it is impossible to rule it out, so there’s that word ‘possibly’.”   

On Wikipedia, you can find a list of other things that are classified as Type 2B carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The list includes being involved with carpentry, the use of gasoline, talc based body powders, and coffee. Yes, that’s right: coffee. Those of you that fill up your tank while on the cell phone drinking coffee should just curl up now and wait for the "Bring out your dead" call.    

I loved the John Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity last summer. It showcased the idea that the use of fear in reporting was causing more problems than the supposedly evil stories they were reporting.  This story last week was another prime example. I guess I’ll continue to get my news from The Daily Show.   

The real dangers of cell phones continue to be that people I don’t want to talk to can reach me more easily (that doesn’t include those of you reading this blog), that I have to listen to inane cell phone conversations at the grocery or book store that no one should have to listen to, including the people on the other end of the conversations, and that these morons still think they can drive safely while talking on the phone, when their attention spans are so short that driving itself is a challenge for them. If I had a Taser, I could fix these problems in a hurry.   

My New Retirement Song

I have run into this song a couple of times over the last week and felt that it hit just the right tone. With my wife officially retired - as of last Friday - I have worked pretty hard for the last week around the house. We built a twelve foot long cedar raised vegetable bed and a new 8 foot long garbage can platform for the back yard last Saturday, then spent Sunday hauling bags of dirt for the vegetable bed - 42 bags in all - 48 cubic feet of dirt. So now we have tomatoes, beans, peppers, and squash to enjoy later this summer (we hope). This weekend is clean out the garage weekend. And I think on Monday, I'll start playing this song every day at home, lobbying for a couple of lay on the couch and read my Kindle days (and maybe get to the comic book store for the next issues in the new Flashpoint series). The singer is Bruno Mars, who has been a fast rising star the last couple of years and won a Grammy in February for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Just the Way You Are". The song in the video is called "The Lazy Song" and begins "Today I don't feel like doing anything. I just wanna lay in bed."   

There is an alternative version of the video for this song that can be found here.  It has a very famous geek celebrity in the starring role and is seriously funny. Enjoy!