Our Christmas Music Video

We won funniest video last night at the Calvary-Church-high-school-group-"White-Christmas"-Christmas-party.

Feel free to laugh at my running man dance moves.

Good Article

Everyone should read this article by Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Cal State University Board of Trustees, even if you are not a CSU student.

The Fifth of November

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd (or by God's mercy*)
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring. (Holla*)
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!

I love that Eli already loves books!

Countdown to LCROSS

This morning NASA will be shooting a probe into the moon at 6000 mph. The probe will shoot a huge plume of debris which will be analyzed to see if the moon has water. This is important as NASA moves towards building a permanent lunar base. For any who are interested, you can watch the impact live via the probes onboard camera here. You have to really want to see it live, because the impact is scheduled for 4:31 PDT.

Nuts!

I am confused about something and I want to see if anyone in cyberspace agrees with me because so far everyone that I've talked to in real life about this looks at me like I'm crazy.

I understand that a shelled nut means the shell has been removed, but it sounds so counter-intuitive to me. If you took the shell off wouldn't it be un-shelled or de-shelled??? A shelled nut sounds like a nut with a shell. If I say I "covered" Eli, that doesn't mean that I took a blanket off of him. That means that I put a blanket on him. I think that the description "shelled nut" needs to be changed because I cannot be the only one confused by this. I am going to start a petition to send to the nut industry. Who's with me?!?!

It was hot today!

Am I in Arizona? Someone needs to remind the weather that summer is over now.

Cooking

I very recently (in the past month or so) have been really interested in cooking. In the 3 years that Michelle and I have been married, I can count the number of times that I cooked dinner on 1 hand. And each time I cooked, dinner consisted of overdone scrambled eggs and underdone toast. I hated to cook. Cooking was the most stressful thing to me. Everything happened so quickly and I was never prepared. But I recently tried to make a couple things and it turned out ok which gave me a lot of cooking confidence. I made a decent batch of divinity and a decent batch of peanut butter fudge. Then Michelle and I saw Julie and Julia and I started making dinners. So far I've only got me feet wet with casseroles, but they have all turned out pretty well. Cooking is no longer stressful and I really enjoy it now. I'm going to crack open The Joy Of Cooking and try my hand at some of the fancier kinds of cooking. Occasionally I'll share some recipes that worked. Today, I'll share the easiest peanut butter fudge recipe in the world (from Alton Brown):

1 cup peanut butter (I recommend chunky to add texture)
1 cup butter
1 lb powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Microwave peanut butter and butter on high for 2 mins. Stir and microwave for another 2 mins on high and stir again. Add vanilla extract and (sifted) powdered sugar and mix into peanut butter/butter mixture. Pour mixture into lightly greased 8 X 8 inch pan and cover with wax paper and refrigerate until chilled. Slice into pieces and store in air tight container for up to 1 week.
***Warning: this recipe creates an insanely sweet fudge. I used about 3/4 lb of powdered sugar and it was still so sweet that you bypass the sugar high and go straight to sugar coma.

Easy peasy. I added melted chocolate to the top for a Reese's effect and it was pretty good.

Religulous

Bill Maher has made a less than flattering documentary about religion which he has cleverly titled Religulous. Maher admits in his documentary that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. His family chose his father’s religion and he was raised Catholic, but he was only really Catholic when he wanted something from God. He asked his mother why they went to church while he was growing up and his mother responded with “that’s just what you did back then.” So according to his own confession, Maher is not religious. However, he understands the basic doctrines of Christianity and often quotes the Bible in his documentary, but he is to be taken less seriously than one who has truly investigated the claims of Christianity and chosen not to believe (like Bart Ehrman). While he harpoons all three monotheisms, he focuses most of his documentary on Christianity.
Maher believes that all religion is bad and needs to be eliminated before mankind can progress to our next intellectual stage. He gives some thought provoking reasons for this belief: religious fundamentalism results in war, religion leads to racism and a new type of class warfare in which classes are divided by belief instead of wealth, and religious creeds are crazy. He asks how anyone can believe that a second millennium b.c. religious mystic talked to God through a burning bush that wasn’t really burning, or that God impregnated a first century AD virgin teenager to give birth to His son who is also God, or that the Trinity is monotheistic. Maher, like most other modern critics of Christianity, falls victim to the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum in which he reduces the doctrines of Christianity to their simplest form and criticizes them as absurd. The same method can be used to make evolutionists look crazy. “Do you actually believe that the tree in your backyard, or your dog, or your body and your mind all came out of a bunch of rocks?” Of course evolutionary theory is more complex than that! An evolutionist has a right to get offended if I say that they are naïve, crazy, or just plain stupid to believe in something so preposterous. Christianity is the same way. If you reduce Christianity’s beliefs into their simplest form and then criticize Christians as stupid for believing them, then you commit the same offense as I just mentioned. And this is what Bill Maher does in Religulous. Most of Maher’s claims about Christianity can be refuted with a little common sense and independent thought.
Bill Maher is no better than Michael Moore. Both make pseudo-documentaries that support a conclusion which they’ve determined before they started. Both edit their documentaries to portray people on the fringe who make themselves and their organizations (in the case of Religulous, Christianity) look crazy and make the narrator/interviewer look intelligent. Both use hot-button issues in a spectacle of disingenuousness that becomes mere entertainment with no intellectual value. But don’t get me wrong; it is entertaining. Its entertaining like Favre’s retirement announcements and Kanye’s apologies: they’re fun to watch, but you just don’t take them very seriously. I enjoyed Religulous not as a documentarian look at religion, but as a representation of how some non-Christians view Christianity.

Americans and American History

It seems like every year a study comes out showing how abysmal Americans' knowledge of American history is. Jay Leno frequently show us how little we know in a humurous way with Jay Walking. We even make light of it with shows like Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader. Surveys of college students have been conducted that show how most college graduates know very little of our country's history. (Click here for an example) Here are some results from this study:
"Approximately 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 schools nationwide were given a 60-question, multiple-choice exam on basic knowledge of America’s heritage. Both years, the students failed. The average freshman scored 51.7% the first year and 51.4% the next. The average senior scored 53.2%, then 54.2%."

In response to this survey, I would like to take my own survey. Please indulge me and take my short 15 question quiz on American history and politics.


U.S. History Quiz
1.) Which came first, the Revolutionary War or the Civil War?
2.) What decade did the Civil War take place in?
3.) How many presidents have there been?
4.) Name the original thirteen colonies.
5.) Which came first, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? (extra credit for naming the years that either were drafted)
6.) Name the branches of government.
7.) What was the Monroe Doctrine?
8.) How many amendments are there to the Constitution? (extra credit if you can describe them all)
9.) How many presidents have been shot? Assassinated?
10.) How long can a president serve? What are the prerequisites to become president?
11.) Who said “Give me liberty or give me death?”
12.) Who/what is America named after?
13.) On what ship did the Pilgrims sail to America?
14.) What significance is there to the date June 6, 1944?
15.) Who is the current commander-in-chief of the armed forces?

Music vs. Lyrics

Do you listen to the lyrics of a song, or do you listen to the beat/instruments/other aspects? Do you have a song that you love, but the lyrics are bad? One of my favorite songs of all time is Say Goodbye by Dave Matthews Band, but it is about how this guy is cheating with another guy's girlfriend. Its all about making love to a girl for one night and then she has to go back to her man the next day and they have to be just friends. The live versions are even better than the studio, but the lyrics are even worse. But I still love the song and it remains on my top 5 greatest songs of all time.
Can you disassociate the lyrics from a really good song? What songs do you love that have bad lyrics?

Meca-leca-hi-meca-hiney-ho.

Good news for all you Pee-Wee Herman fans
Here and here.

Happy Anniversary, Honey!!!

Today is Michelle's and my three year anniversary. Three years ago today we were standing in the gazebo at the Huntington Beach Hilton proclaiming our love for each other through marriage. A lot has happened in the last three years, the best thing is this little guy.




Michelle, if its possible I love you now more than I did then. I look forward to every day with you. I thank God every day for blessing me with you. I love you!

Eli Update

Eli just had his 9-month well baby check-up. I cannot believe he is 9 months old already! He is 31.5 inches: the doctor said that he is above the 99.9 percentile which I'm pretty sure means that he is the tallest boy in the world. He is 22 lbs, 4 oz which is in the 67% so we have a little string bean. The doc said he's doing really well, which for some reason means a lot more when it comes from a doctor than when you think it for yourself.

Yesterday he climbed the stairs by himself!!! He climbed all the way up! I was behind him to make sure that he didn't fall back (obviously!) but he climbed them by himself, I did not help him at all! He can climb the stairs on his hands and knees better than I can! I could not believe it. And he knew that he shouldn't be doing what he was doing because when I brought him back downstairs he looked at Michelle like "Ha Ha, look what I just got away with!" We're going to have to be careful with him. I have a feeling he's going to get into a lot of trouble.

Things Eli will never know/understand

From Wired magazine. I added a few of my own, too. Sad to think he will never know about a lot of these things. I can already feel myself turning into an old man who always talks about how it was "back in my day."

1. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
2. Han shoots first.
3. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
4. Looking out the window during a long drive.
5. Having to manually unlock a car door.
6. Writing a check.
7. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
8. Remembering someone’s phone number.
9. Sending film away to be processed.
10. Answering machines.
11. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
12. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
13. The scream of a modem connecting.
14. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
15. Phone Booths.
16. “Rolling” down the car window.
17. Broken record.

Letters of Abgar and Jesus

In my off-season reading, I came across a pair of letters that were allegedly written to and from Jesus c. 25 AD. I thought they were pretty interesting and I did a little research and here is what I found:

Abgar V of Edessa was a Syrian ruler of the Kingdom of Osroene (also known as the Kingdom of Edessa) between the years AD 13-50. Abgar was suffering from an incurable disease. Word of the deeds of Jesus had reached Abgar and legend states that he was converted to Christianity by Addai (also known as Thaddeus) who was one of the 70 disciples mentioned in Luke 10:1-24. Abgar believed that Jesus was the only one who could heal him and he wrote to Jesus asking for a healing. He offered Jesus asylum in Edessa offering protection from the malice of the Jews of whom he believed hated Jesus. Jesus responded with a letter stating that he could not come to heal Abgar because He needed to complete His mission, but once He had completed His mission (i.e. after His ascension) He would send someone else to heal Abgar. Jesus’ letter was very popular in the region because it promised divine protection of the city of Edessa from its enemies. The letter lost popularity, however, when the city of Edessa was conquered.

There are several surviving manuscripts of the letters: a Syriac text, an Armenian translation, two independent Greek translations, and several inscriptions on stone. Eusebius records the letters in his Ecclesiastical History (written in the early fourth century) and he was convinced that the original letters still existed in his day in the archives of Edessa, although he never saw them himself.

The letters are likely not authentic, however. The correspondence allegedly written by Jesus mirrors passages from later versions of the gospels. For example, the passage in the letter in which Jesus says that He cannot visit Edessa and heal Abgar because He has to finish his mission but promises to send someone after His ascension mirrors John 16 in which Jesus says that He must fulfill His mission, but will send someone later and predicts His own death and resurrection. This passage was not taken from the original gospels, however. It more closely resembles the equivalent passage from the Diatessaron (the Diatessaron was a ‘gospel harmony’ in which all 4 gospels were combined into one uber-gospel.) The Diatessaron was written sometime between AD 150-160 which would place the letters sometime after that.


Here are versions of both letters:

A copy of a letter written by Abgarus the toparch to Jesus, and sent to him by means of Ananias the runner, to Jerusalem.

Abgarus Uchama the toparch to Jesus the good Saviour that hath appeared in the parts (place) of Jerusalem, greeting. I have heard concerning thee and thy cures, that they are done of thee without drugs or herbs: for, as the report goes, thou makest blind men to see again, lame to walk, and cleansest lepers, and castest out unclean spirits and devils, and those that are afflicted with long sickness thou healest, and raisest the dead. And having heard all this of thee, I had determined one of two things, either that thou art God come down from heaven, and so doest these things or art a Son of God that doest these things. Therefore now have I written and entreated thee to trouble thyself to come to me and heal the affliction which I have. or indeed I have heard that the Jews even murmur against thee and wish to do thee hurt. And I have a very little city but (and) comely (reverend), which is sufficient for us both.

The answer, written by Jesus, sent by Ananias the runner to Abgarus the toparch.

Blessed art thou that hast believed in me, not having seen me. For it is written concerning me that they that have seen me shall not believe in me, and that they that have not seen me shall believe and live. But concerning that which thou hast written to me, to come unto thee; it must needs be that I fulfil all things for the which I was sent here, and after fulfilling them should then be taken up unto him that sent me. And when I am taken up, I will send thee one of my disciples, to heal thine affliction and give life to thee and them that are with thee.
*Later texts add a promise that where this letter is, no enemy shall prevail: and so we find the letter copied and used as an amulet. It was regarded naturally as the palladium of Edessa, but was also thought to act as a protection to individuals.

Presidential Speeches

Politician's speeches are notoriously long-winded without saying anything of substance. President Obama, while more articulate than President Bush, is no exception. The president who was most notorious for long-winded speeches, however, was President Warren G. Harding. William McAdoo called Harding's speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." H.L. Mencken said about president Warren G. Harding's 1921 inaugural address:

"I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

This can also be said of other writing. So the next time you hear politicians' speeches and realize that after an hour of speaking, you cant remember a single thing that they said, remember that they are just fulfilling a centuries old American tradition.

Fun With Kids Toys!

Presidential Family Portraits

Presidential family portraits have been an on-going tradition. Its interesting to see the change in styles. You can kind of tell when presidents started paying more attention to their image due to the advent of t.v. and multimedia. While not all presidents took family portraits, and some of the pictures below are more candid than a posed family portrait, I still think its interesting to see what family members the presidents brought with them to the White House. Here are the presidential family portraits since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Happy Memorial Day!!!

We had a really easy and restful day today. Eli gave us a Memorial Day gift which was sleeping until 8:00. Thanks Eli! We took Eli to the park. Here are some pics. He's getting really big and he's starting to do the pre-crawl hands-and-knees-rock thing.

Sarah Barnard

Sarah Barnard, and her company Sarah Barnard Designs, is not very nice. My cousin, who will remain anonymous but whose initials are M-O-L-L-Y, is going to CSUN and is studying interior design. One of her classes involved a final project in which the students were split into groups and had to visit a hotel and create a hotel interior design plan based on ideas that they got from their hotel visit. Sarah Barnard was a guest auditor of the students' presentations. It was the final for the semester for this class, and Sarah Barnard helped the professor judge the students' projects. Although Sarah Barnard did not issue the grade, she did offer critiques as an "expert" from the field of interior design. Before my cousin and her group could finish their conclusion to their project, Sarah Barnard cut them off and said, "I have to interrupt you, because your presentation is making me sick." Sarah Barnard then went on a tirade completely demeaning these four students and their project. Sarah Barnard told them that their project was a mockery and was a fraud and complete plagiarism of the hotel that they visited. The teacher actually had to speak up and defend the students because my cousin and her group did exactly what the teacher requested. But Sarah Barnard did not care and she ripped into the students. I want to use my blog as a platform to publicly inform all four of my readers about Sarah Barnard and her treatment of these students. Even if you do not like a student's presentation, you do not rip on them and tear them down as if they are not worthy of any kind of respect. Sarah Barnard's actions are a tragedy and need to be told. This is not the proper actions of a professional interior designer, or the actions of any rational human being. Rational human beings do not attack each other like this. Sarah Barnard's actions are the actions of someone who is threatened by students' ideas and who is so insecure with herself that she has to demean others to make herself fell better. This is all I have to say about this.

How My Work Is Like The Office, Part 1

Party Planning Committee -
There is a party planning committee at my work that plans all parties including birthdays, monthly gatherings, and holidays such as Cinco de Mayo. They meet in secret, closed session and then reveal the details of the party after this small group has made the decision for the rest of us. There is a president of the party planning that bears an uncanny resmblance to Angela. This person likes to plan parties and becomes visibly upset if someone else tries to plan a party. The parties are equally as cheesy and everyone stands around in the conference room with the same low level of excitement as the characters in the show. Today was one of those types of parties that you don't really look forward to but it makes the day go by faster, so you tolerate it.

Michelle and I have been keeping a secret from everyone...

Eli is actually a twin!!!

Why I love being a dad!

This is pretty old......

But its still really cool!

A Beautiful Piece of Americana

In case you have not had the chance yet of experiencing the awesomeness of the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, please enjoy this video. I hope your life is more complete for having seen this video.

Junk E-mail

Does anyone else think its silly that if you unsubscribe from junk email, they will send you an email to confirm that you don't want anymore emails?

Theological Question

To all you M.Div's and Th.M's, I have a question. For some reason, I can't stop thinking about this for about a month now, and what better time to talk about this than this time of year? I know this question doesn't have much life application, but it is stuck in my head nonetheless. Is Jesus' human nature eternal, or did He acquire His human nature at Bethlehem? If it is eternal, and Jesus' human nature was tempted in Matthew 4, was He ever tempted to sin in the past, maybe even before creation? If it is eternal, was Jesus' human nature what humanity was created in the likeness of?

Cause and Effect

It's so interesting to watch Eli learn. It started when we put him in his bouncy saucer seat and he started playing with all the little toys around him. Then we put a stretchy toy on the arm of his car seat and he started pulling that down. Yesterday, Michelle was playing with him and he had a toy that made music every time he pushed a button. So, he pushed the button and Michelle screamed "Yay Eli!!!!!!" He did that a couple more times, and when Michelle stopped saying "Yay, Eli" he looked at her like "You need to say 'Yay Eli' because I just pressed the button that makes music." I think he's really learning about cause and effect, so today I think I am going to talk to him about a slippery slope and how an assumption that one event inevitably leads to specific results when the causal chain is unclear is a logical fallacy. He's 5 months old now, I'm pretty sure he's ready for this talk by now.

Happy April Fools Day!

In the spirit of April Fools Day, I give you the top five April Fools Day pranks care of this website where you can read the rest of the top 100 best pranks.

#1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest
1957: The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

#2: Sidd Finch
1985: Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa." Mets fans celebrated their teams' amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.

#3: Instant Color TV
1962: In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular color broadcasts only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.

#4: The Taco Liberty Bell
1996: The Taco Bell Corporation announced it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed, a few hours later, that it was all a practical joke. The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

#5: San Serriffe
1977: The British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.

Two Things

First, recently I am finding myself, as a new dad, speaking baby-speak to Eli a lot. I often find myself in the middle of a "hooshie-booshie-hooshie-boo" and think to myself "What on Earth am I doing??? This doesn't make any sense to either of us!" Also, I call him "buddy" all the time. Also, I make this weird throat noise that seems to make him laugh. Its not so bad when its just me and Eli, but recently I have caught myself doing the same things in public. I have made the same weird throat noise when someone says something that I think is funny. And I have been calling everyone "buddy" more often than should be allowed. So, if I come up and "hooshie-booshie" you or call you buddy, I apologize. Blame Eli.

Second, I have to confess something. It has been burdening me for a long time now, and if I do not confess this then I will never be able to move on. I am a blog-stalker. I read people's blogs who I don't know. I read people's blogs who I only know second or third hand. I read people's blogs without them knowing. I like to read people's blogs. Please don't judge me. Whew! I feel better! Now that I have admitted that I have a blog-stalking problem I can now move to the next step which is seeking help. Maybe I can find a good therapist's blog.

Life Updates and Random Thoughts

- I just finished forty hours of classroom observation. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about how the classroom and how a school works, but I feel like I have a lot better grasp on how to run a classroom when it comes time for me to teach (hopefully next year). Also, I have discovered that high schoolers now dress a lot differently than they did even when I was in high school. Especially the girls! Some of them look like they are going on a job interview with Heff.
- Speaking of high school, my 10 year high school reunion is this year. I cant believe its been 10 years! So far, there is no plan coming from the alumni association. I really hope they so something. It would be fun to see where people are ten years after high school.
- I love being a dad! I get about 2.5 hours alone with Eli after work and they are the best hours! I love hanging out as a family, but there is nothing like hanging out, just the two of us. I feel like I've bonded with Eli a lot more since Michelle has gone back to work. Suddenly he realizes that he has 2 parents instead of a mom and some guy who shows up for half the day.
- I love living in OC and am not likely to move, but I still have such strong ties to Simi. It took me a while to feel like OC was home, just because I live in Simi for so long. What has made it feel like home is connecting with the place that I live. Sometimes it has just been finding a store, like a palce to buy guitar strings or a trustworthy mechanic. But within the last couple months, I have been connecting with the city of Tustin and it really feels like my permantent home now. This observation class that I am taking has required me to get really involved in the city schools, and therefore involved in the city. I have visited the local schools, attended school board meetings, and have connected with local politics. I definitely want to get more involved with local stuff, and this class has made me really feel like Tustin is my home.
- I am starting to send out my resume for a teaching position next school year. I did it last year and didnt find a job, but this year I have a lot more experience and I am a lot more employable than I was last year, but there is still the whole issue with the state's economy. I hope I can find something because I really want to get out of the mortgage sector.
- How amazing is Lost this season??? That's all I have to say about that.
- I was looking through some old pictures of Eli last night and it makes me kind of sad about how fast he is growing. He was so tiny and he is so big now. I know time is going to fly, but I was hoping it would go a little slower than this.
- I am writing a paper this semester that is going to be a chapter of my thesis. I am writing about medieval travel narratives. Its really interesing so far. I am writing about the how some were reliable and others were not and why they weren't and why the unreliable ones were the most popular.

The Madoff Scandal

In case you were a little confused about Bernie Madoff and the scandal surrounding him, I found this helpful video that explains it all in simple terms. I hope this helps anyone who is still confused about the scandal.

Eli also wants to wish everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day!

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, Eli would like to show you his dance moves. His favorite dance is the sprinkler.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

Here are some fun facts care of London's Telegraph

1. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, although he was born in Britain, around 385AD. His parents Calpurnius and Conchessa were Roman citizens living in either Scotland or Wales, according to different versions of his story.

2. As a boy of 14 he was captured and taken to Ireland where he spent six years in slavery herding sheep. He returned to Ireland in his 30s as a missionary among the Celtic pagans.

3. Legend has it that he used the native shamrock as a symbol of the holy trinity when preaching and brought the Latin alphabet to Ireland.

4. Miracles attributed to him include the driving of serpents out of Ireland. However, evidence suggests post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes in the first place.

5. Wearing green, eating green food and even drinking green beer, is said to commemorate St Patrick's use of the shamrock - although blue was the original colour of his vestments.

6. St Patrick was said to have proclaimed that everyone should have a drop of the "hard stuff" on his feast day after chastising an innkeeper who served a short measure of whiskey. In the custom known as "drowning the shamrock", the shamrock that has been worn on a lapel or hat is put in the last drink of the evening.

7. Popular Irish toasts on St Patrick's Day, include: may the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends beneath it never fall out.

8. St. Patrick's Day was first celebrated in America in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1737. Around 34 million modern Americans claim Irish ancestry.

9. It is believed that St Patrick died on March 17 in 461AD. It is a national holiday in Ireland, and on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, which was founded by Irish refugees. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and a provincial holiday in the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

10. Dublin has a parade that attracts hundreds of thousands of people, while in Chicago the river is dyed green for a few hours. The biggest parade is normally held in New York, while the largest celebration in the southern hemisphere is in Sydney, Australia.

Are you racist?

I had to take this test for a class that I am taking on methods for teaching diverse students in secondary schools. It was created by psychologists at Harvard and is supposed to measure implicit attitudes towards other races. It only takes about 5-10 minutes and you should take the test. Click here to go to the test. Then click on 'Demonstration' then 'Go to the Demonstration Tests' then 'I wish to proceed'. I think that its pretty accurate and revealing about subconscious racial biases.

Happy Pi Day Everyone!

Please enjoy the following video in celebration of Pi day.

Ashley Madison

I was listening to the radio this morning, and I heard a commercial for Ashley Madison. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, so I had to look it up. Have you ever heard of this? This is the worst thing that I have heard in a long time. It is a dating service for married people. It caters to people who are married and want to have an affair but don't want to leave their spouse. Their motto is "Life is short. Have an affair." They're big enough to get ad space on KLOS, and according to this article they have some tv commercials. Here is part of the LA Times article:

"One television spot shows a glamorous couple in the throes of passion. A title card reads, "This couple is married ... but not to each other." In another ad, a man retreats to the sofa to escape his obese, snoring wife while a voice-over declares, "Most of us can recover from a one-night stand with the wrong woman, but not when it's every night for the rest of our lives.""

A quick Google search provides headlines like these:
- Ashley Madison provides that romantic rendezvous for attached adults who don't want to leave their spouses, they just want a little sex on the side.
- Bored with life? Have an Affair.
- Married Dating, Affairs, Married Women, Extramarital Affair. Ashley Madison is the online personals & dating destination for casual encounters.

In an interview you can read here, the CEO of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, was asked if he would be ok if his wife used the service. He said, "No. If my wife were using my service, or any dating service, or if I even found her on Facebook chatting with former boyfriends and not telling me about it, I would be emotionally hurt beyond belief, and would feel that our relationship had severe problems."

I try not to soapbox on this blog, but I'm outraged by this. I can't believe the creator's casualness about how he is facilitating marital infidelity and his hypocritical reaction to how he would feel if his wife used his service. If you search just a little bit online, you can find tragic stories about people who just discovered that their spouse signed up for this service and they don't know what to do now. This is tragic! What makes this even more tragic is its popularity. The service claims it has 3.2 million members, and LA is its biggest market. Unbelievable!

Manliest Cities in America

How did San Francisco beat us?????

Congratulations Michelle!

Michelle wins the Best Mom of the year prize for taking a mouth full of spit-up. Warm, yummy, thick, curdled spit-up....right in the mouth. We were getting ready to run an errand last night and Michelle was playing with Eli and getting him ready to go and she picked him up over her head and he turned his head and (with seemingly intentional aim) spit up right into Michelle's mouth. She has definitely won one of these. So, congratualations babe! Thanks for taking one for the team.

ShamWow Song

Happy Square Root Day

What are you doing to celebrate square root day? I haven't decided what Michelle and I are going to do yet. We're probably just going to keep it low-key this year.

Funniest headline of the day

Click here

Lost "316" = Best Episode so far

(Warning: this is a rambling-stream-of-consciousness post, little cohesion will be found here)

- Here is my grand theory about what Lost will look like once we have the last episode. A lot of this theory is based off of last night's episode so stop reading this until you have watched episode '316'. I think that the original Oceanic flight 815 centered around Christian Shephard. I think that he needed to get back to the island, just like John did. And just like John was a proxy for Christian, Christian was a proxy for someone else (Jacob?). Most people on the plane had a connection to Christian, the rest were collateral damage. Obviously there were his kids, Jack and Claire, and there was Ana-Lucia, Sawyer and Kate, but then there were the others who, just like the Oceanic 6, had to get back to the island. These were the people who were taken by the others in season 1 like the stewerdess and the children. They were on Jacob's list and Jacob was replaced by Christian, who will be replaced by John.
- The time-traveling Losties (Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Daniel, Jin) were caught in the 1970s Dharma heyday when John fixed the donkey wheel and had 3 years (the time from when John fixed the wheel to when Jack and others made it back to the island) to incoporate themselves into the Dharma Initiative. (sidenote: I bet Jin will speak fluent English now)
- John fixing the donkey wheel made them stop jumping through time and now they will continue growing old and passing through time normally until 2004 when Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. I bet the show is going to end when the plane crashes and they see themselves after the plane-crash and it will end with the same scene that started the series and last night's episode, i.e. Jack's dilating pupil in the forest.
- I think Daniel built the island-finding Lamppost station.
- I think that the errand/favor for a friend that Ben had to run before joining the O6 on the plane was to go kill Penny. The look on his face when he saw Desmond showed that he realized Penny was not far, and the fact that the next scene shows him all bloodied and on a payphone that happened to be on a dock makes me think that he tried to keep his promise to Widmore to kill his daughter. However, the fact that he came on the Ajira Airlines plane in an arm-sling makes me think the blood all over him was his and that Desmond saved Penny and kicked Ben's butt.
- best line of the whole season so far was Lapidus "We're not going to Guam, are we?"
- The O6 made the plane as similar to Oceanic 815 as the could: dead John took the place of dead Christian, Jack was Jack, Hurley had a comic book like Walt and a guitar like Charlie, Sayid was in the custody of (presumably) a US Marshall like Kate, Ben showed up late and made a bustle just like Hurley, Frank took the place of the-pilot-whose-name-escapes-me, and (I think) that gestating Aaron was replaced by a knocked-up Kate who waylayed (pun not intended) Jack the night before. If we are to take this correlation to further, then is the marshall going to die a horribly painful and long death? If Kate is pregnant, then will she give birth on the island? Will John wake up and haunt the island like Christian did? Will poor Frank suffer death-by-smoke-monster like the other pilot?
- I think that Sawyer's outrigger crew from a couple episodes ago were being shot at by the two people who we saw with the O6 on the Ajira flight.
- new questions sparked by last night's episode:
Who are the two mysterious people in business class with the O6?
How many other off-island Dharma stations/pockets of energy are there? Is there one in Australia by Isaac of Uluru? Wherever Penny's Portuguese friends were? In Tanzania where Ben and the polar bear (and maybe Locke) ended up after turning the donkey wheel?
Did Penny's Portuguese-speaking compatriots have the same island-finding technology as the lamppost station?
Who are the true powers that are using all of our lostie friends as the pawns that Desmond described? Ben and Widmore? Mrs. Hawking and Isaac of Uluru? Jacob and Widmore?
Who convinced Hurley to get on the flight? Maybe Libby?
What did Sayid do to get captured by the Marshall?
Why is Ben on the flight? I thought he told John that whoever turned the donkey wheel was not allowed back on the island?

Lastly, I am so stoked about next week's episode entitled "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham." The writers have said that this week's and next week's can be are 2 parts of one episode and can be viewed in either order. But, if you saw the preview last night, John goes and talks to Widmore and Ben is there when John hands himself (maybe convinced him to hang himself?)

What did you think about last '316'?

Mmmmmm.....sleep!

Baby Stuff

Being a new parent, I am often finding new products marketed to new parents. Sometimes there are very practical things that you wouldnt normally think that you would need. For example, Michelle and I bought a pee guard device that is basically a mini sports cup made out of a sponge that you put over your baby boy's genitalia while you are changing him so you arent marked with a pee stream, which, by the way, I recently discovered can sometimes go as far as 7-8 feet. Some products, however, are not as useful as they are described. Never in a million years can I see myself purchasing this product.

I dont even know what to say about this...

Economic Stimulus Package

From fedfilter.com



Sometime this year, taxpayers will receive an Economic Stimulus Payment. This is a very exciting new program that I will explain using the Q and A format:

Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers..

Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.

Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. No, they are borrowing it from China. Your children are expected to repay the Chinese.

Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q. But isn’t that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up.”

My Thoughts on Last Night's Episode of Lost:

Again, for all the TIVO-ers, watch the episode before you read this:

Widmore -
Widmore blew my mind last night. He's an other?!?!?!? How long has he been on the island? Was he born there, or did he arive recently? He implied that nobody knew the island better than him, so he must have been there for a while. Since he funded the Dharma research, that means that Dharma wasn't a foreign entity that found the mysterious island - they were purposely sent there by someone who knew the secrets of the island and was an (ex?)-other.

Charlotte -
I think that Charlotte was born on the island. This explains her reaction when she first parachuted onto the island and Miles' comment to her about being 'back' on the island. I also think that her mother is the woman with the rifle who took her group hostage. I think that her mother is going to die as a result of Faraday's actions which is going to erase Charlotte. I've stopped reading spoilers, so I don't know if this is going to happen, its just what I think.

Locke -
We get some closure to the story arc where Alpert visits John as a newborn and as a child. He visits John as a newborn, becasue John told him to. And the reason Alpert stormed off after he showed John all those things to choose from when he was a kid was because he chose the knife instead of the compass, which future John had given to present Alpert several years in the past.

Jughead -
The episode name is Jughead, another name for an H-bomb. I think that the others, taking Faraday's advice about burying the bomb, buried it under the swan hatch. The people in the swan hatch had to discharge the electromagnetic energy from the radioactive H-bomb every 108 minutes by pressing the button. I dont know if there is any science behind this, but it makes for good t.v.

Alpert -
Alpert told Faraday that there was a chain of command and that he was reporting to someone. I don't think he meant Jacob, because first he reported to Ben, then he reported to Locke. I wonder who he's reporting to in 1954. Also, Juliet said that Alpert has always been on the island. I wonder how old he really is. Faraday said that they could jump back 5000 years. That goes with my theory that Sawyer loses a toe due to him stepping on that stick last episode and the castaways go back thousands of years and an ancient civilization living on the island build a giant statue to worship him.

Epic Couch Buying Extravaganza!

Michelle and I have been in the market for a new couch for our place. The one that we have is kind of small. We bought it when we first got married and it was great in our little 1-bedroom that we started in, but now that we're in a slightly bigger place, we find that when we have people over there is never enough seating. So we were looking for a sectional. Because our place isn't very big, we needed very specific things for it to work. Every couch that we had looked at was facing the wrong way. The long side was where we needed the short side to be. But then we found it. The most perfect couch for us. It's the perfect side. If it was 1 inch longer it would not have fit. We found it on craigs list from a lady who bought it at Macys. Click here to check it out. Notice the $5500+ price tag. We got that couch, with the ottoman, for $450. It is the most amazing deal that I have ever been a part of and I needed to share it with the world. Thank you for listening.

This Semester

I am going to try to post more. My blog-father hasn't been posting much recently which takes the wind out of my sails, but I'm going to post even if he doesn't.

This semester I am taking 3 credential pre-req classes and 1 graduate class. It is going to be a lot different than last semester. I love the graduate class already, even though we have only had one meeting so far, because it is adults who want to learn the subject matter, not people who are just trying to get a degree, and so it changes the dynamic of the way the subject is taught. Plus, it is the time period that I am specializing in: Early modern (1350-1500). The entire grade of the class is based on a 30-page paper which can be used as one of the chapters of my thesis paper.
The credentialing classes involve observation and teaching philosiphies, so I am pretty excited for that to start. I am applying for my C-19 credential in the fall, so hopefully (if there are any teaching jobs left) I can start teaching next school year.

Lastly, here are some cute pics of Eli