Author: matthew

Yet another Shockwave media file which defies explanation: The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. Since I know at least one other person here is a comic book and movie buff (*cough*), thought you might get a kick out of it.

NOTE: Contains some mild language and is rather bloody in a cartoonish way. Those of exceedingly delicate constitutions should skip this. But, dude? Indiana Jones, Chuck Norris, Optimus Prime, and the Care Bears vs. Godzilla? Rockage!

Second Note: OK, yeah, the music sucks, but I wish I were that clever…

Third Note: Mr. Rogers 4 teh win!

OK, so how many obscure movie/games/book references can you find there? I see Back to the Future (you gotta watch close, Santa gets hit by a Delorean which then has tires that burst into flames), Super Mario fighting with Sonic the Hedgehog, R2D2 and C3PO being beaten to a pulp by a Jawa… wow, lots!

He got an article published in the Deseret News! Go Jay! http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635175840,00.html

(OK, OK, he was already famous. But still!)

Any description I’d give would not do this justice… so I present: Tripod performs at Comedy Festival.

This just in: The Big Guy is a little upset at recent statements by Pat Robertson blaming Him for Disrael Sharon’s stroke, among other things.

I ran across an interesting video of Bill Reilly on the Dave Letterman show at OneGoodMove.org.

I’m not much of a Letterman fan, but the thing I came away impressed with the fact that Bill Reilly came away looking like a pundit with an agenda to push, and Letterman came across looking like a regular guy who was distressed by the pundit’s assertions.

Over the holidays, I got into a small almost-argument regarding the whole “Happy Holidays” vs. “Merry Christmas” thing with my Mom. I could tell who the person was that listened to a lot of right-wing radio 🙂

Favorite quote by Letterman:

I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling that about 60% of what you say is crap. But I don’t know that for a fact.

So last night, as we were sitting at the dinner table playing Sequence, my middle son, Elijah, plopped himself down on the bench next to my oldest, Zack. After a few minutes of messing with the tiles (to the chorusses of “No, Elijah!” from the players), he began humming.

I recognized the tune after a few bars. The allegro from Mozart’s Sonata in G, better known as “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, or “A Little Night Music”. I thought it was pretty cool that he was humming a classical tune. Pretty soon, he saw me grinning, and cranked the humming up to full volume.

I got a musical kid. You know, my kids can do and be whatever they want, but it’s nice to hear a kid have such an ear. He was even in the correct key! (Yes, I have semi-perfect pitch: if I think about it, I can name the note. It takes me a few moments to figure out, though, based on reference points in my brain.)

He then seamlessly transitioned to “Do Re Mi”, from The Sound of Music.

This may not seem really funny, until you consider the meter of the first few bars: dotted quarter, eighth, dotted quarter, eighth. Identical first bar meter, but with different notes. He seamlessly transitioned from one to the other, and I began singing along to the medley. Terribly entertaining. The reason this is funny is because my kids hear me do this all the time with other songs that sound similar. Like “If You Chance to meet a frown” and the chorus from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:

If you chance to meet a frown, Do not let it stay, Turn that frown right upside down And smile that frown away.

Noone likes a frowny face, Change it to a smile! Make the world a better place by smiling all the while!

(Chorus) He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!

Oh, If you chance to meet a frown, Do not let it stay, Turn that frown right upside down (then a bit of a mixture) ’cause Santa Clause is coming to town.

My other kids are starting to do this, too. Taking a song and making up lyrics on-the-spot to try to be funny. They will learn later in life that, unfortunately, as funny as we think this is at home, this will brand them as an insufferable dork in high school, with redemption coming in the form of other musically-inclined kids in college.

Alas. Four or five years of suffering.

Anyway, you can have fun with all kinds of songs. I love song humor! One of the things that’s been fun is putting odd words at the end of hymns in the church hymnal, or pious popular songs. Like, “In the Bathtub”, or “In Bed”. Totally changes the meaning of the tune. “Amazing Grace in Bed”. “Praise to the Man In the Bathtub”. “Onward, Christian Soldiers In Bed”.

Sure, it’s not highbrow. But it’s fun.

I found myself remeniscing about New Years present and past as I sat at home while my wife and kids went to church today. I wrote this to a mailing list, but figured it would be worth it to post to my blog for, erm, posterity. Or whatever.

On Youth Stake Dances as a young Mormon kid

I was in the Washington, D.C. stake (later, the D.C. North Stake), and dances were really big events growing up. There was one thrown for New Years Eve where several stakes would get together and rent out an entire mall (it was Tyson’s Corner for several years, but then Tyson’s changed management and nixed it) to throw a huge gala. Those were great! I snuck into the first one at 13, with my older brother and my foster sister taking me. I was tall for my age, so I passed for 16 or so.

They had three live bands. On either end of the mall were the rock bands, one more electronic and one more traditional. In the very center was where the “old fart” music was playing, mostly jazz stuff.

And even the stake dances were over-attended. Entire gymnasiums filled with sweaty girls. It was heaven for a kid like me. I’d see a lot of the same friends every dance (never the ones in my own ward; I was too much of a dork for them to be friends with me), and we’d dance our butts off for hours on end, making a huge circle and changing partners constantly. The DJ would play “Rock Lobster”, and on the part where he would sing “Down, Down, Down!” the entire hall full of kids would fall to the floor on their backs and bang their feet as hard as they could on the floor, then jump up when the music started again and scream our heads off.

Good times. Apparently a parent got concerned about the laying down and the shouting, and we had a dance where “Rock Lobster” was banned. About forty of us kids showed up at the Stake President’s door, insisted it was all good fun and that it be reinstated. He backed down, having never observed it, and said they’d play it next dance.

And they did. And every dance afterwards.

On December 9,1991, I attended a tri-stake dance with a date. It wasn’t my home stake, but it was a dance, and really, that was all I cared about. I loved dances. The date stopped hanging out with me partway through the night, so I danced with a few other friends.

Midway through the night, a girl named Christy introduced herself to me, saying that she liked the way I danced and would like to reserve the next slow dance with me. I’d rarely been asked to dance, so I excitedly said yes and gave her a kiss on the cheek, promising to dance the next slow tune. It was a wonderful evening. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses, knowing that this was a huge dance and that we lived some 80 miles apart. We wrote a few times over the ensuing months, and in the spring when I returned from attending college, she dumped her prom date asked me to be her date to the prom on the night I returned.

Christy is now my wife of 11 years. We have four children together, and although we have our differences regarding many things, we’ve never been happier.

From http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm110 :

1. Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down. Corporate profits are a 35%, versus 2001’s 22%, while median household income is down 4% from the same time.
2. More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt. Average indebtedness has gone up 35% in the past four years.
3. Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4. Poverty is on the rise.
5. Rising health care costs are eroding families’ already declining income. Employee-paid health care costs are 45% higher than they were in 2001.

Is this a systemic problem? Is it a wave of new corporate profit-taking affecting average workers? Is it a failure on the part of average Americans? Or something else?

I can personally attest to the issues of rising health care costs and indebtedness. I blame hospital bills for the debt, though…

EDIT: Fixed link.

So here I sit, in Idaho, blogging about a nifty keen device. I my VoIP phone.

We’re with Vonage. We’ve talked about switching to Comcast’s VoIP service a few times, but it hasn’t been something really compelling (saving maybe $10 a month), and we’re a little concerned about portability. Anyway, there are a couple of neat features that I really like: 1. Plug into any IP network, and you have your regular phone line going 2. If for any reason our VoIP adapter is down, phone calls get forwarded to my wife’s cell phone.

We hauled our phone-adapter up with us in order to be able to include my sister-in-law on the Christmas celebrations over the phone. That way, we could just call her and keep her on speakerphone as long as the batteries last so that she’s a part of the family for the gift-opening and stuff.

Christy’s family is contentious, but close. Kinda’ weird, but I suspect most families are kinda’ weird under the hood.

So on the way up to Idaho today, Christy gets a call. I hear her explain to the person that we’re on our way to Idaho. Obviously, the other person is confused, and apparently said that she thought she called on our home line, not our mobile phone. Christy explains, “Oh, well, yeah, we unplugged our phone. When our phone is unplugged, calls to our home line go to my cell phone. When we get to Idaho, we’re going to plug in our regular phone and get phone calls on our home line up there.”

I could almost hear the silence on the other end of the line as the person digested this statement. I mean, think about it in terms of a regular phone line! If someone told me that, I’d be tempted to say, “Uhm, dude, it really doesn’t work that way.”

But with a VoIP phone, it does. As long as that person has an Internet connection, just plug your phone-adapter in, and you’re off and running. The newer adapters (ours isn’t, unfortunately) don’t even require any special configuration to work through a network-address-translating firewall. As long as the port’s open, they work for two-way communications.

Pretty dang nifty. I’m stoked.

So if any of you call us this weekend to ask to borrow a cup of sugar, be prepared to be put off because, even though we’re answering our home line, we’re not actually home.

I love the twenty-first century. Gimme more!

So it looks like Firefly is officially dead, as far as TV and movies go. I’m betting it will have a long, active life in fan-fiction, though.