everything's better with dad in charge...

DAY 1: Dinner at Pizza Hut. ALL YOU CAN EAT! Hey kids... have a SPRITE!
DAY 2: A trip to Target, then... out for ICE CREAM!
DAY 3: I know... let's go rent a MOVIE!!

Who knows what tomorrow has in store? I'm running out of tricks.  (posted by Dave at 3:01 PM || )

  most pointless souvenier... ever!

One of the places we went on our road trip was the Abraham Lincoln Presidential LIbrary and Museum in Springfield, IL. It was a pretty nicely done museum... the multimedia shows were cool. I'm not much into the history stuff, but I had a good time.

Anyway, whenever we are on vacation my wife insists on picking up these souveniers... I think it's a leftover thing from childhood or something. It's this machine that you put 2 quarters and a penny in, and you turn this big wheel and it squishes the penny flat and imprints it with a picture of Niagra Falls or Royal Gorge or the Louvre or wherever you happen to be. We get one of these everywhere we go, then my wife puts it in her purse and it gets lost before we even get back home. Whatever...

But the point of this story is... what can you get for 51 cents from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential LIbrary and Museum in Springfield, IL?

An ABRAHAM LINCOLN SOUVENIER PENNY!!

Hell, skip the machine... I'll sell you five for a quarter.  (posted by Dave at 8:08 AM || )

  take that, marketing bozos...

The highlight for the 6 y.o. for this trip was a promised trip to American Girl Place in Chicago. I have mixed feelings about the status-symbolness of these little historical dolls, but the wife thinks they are borderline educational, so we let our daughter Katie save up her money for one.

It's very clear that the historical dolls were created so there would be one redhead, one blonde... one girl with glasses... one black girl... a latina... even a native american doll. That way every girl would find a doll who looked enough like her that she could "identify" with it. And so what doll did our pale, blonde, freckled Irish-Welsh & German little moppet choose...?

Josefina!

Priceless.  (posted by Dave at 10:20 PM || )

  from the back seat... how to end any argument...

6yo: ... because all of the planets are the same age.
2yo: Pluto is not da same age.
6yo: Yes, all of the planets are the same age.
2yo: Not Pluto.
6yo: Yes. Pluto was the last planet to be SEEN, but it was made at the same time.
2yo: Pluto was not made at da same time.
6yo: Daddy, weren't all the planets made at the same time?
Dad: Yes, all the planets are about 5 billion years old.
6yo: See? Pluto WAS made at the same time.
2yo: (pause...) I have a giant FOOOOT!!



  (posted by Dave at 9:12 PM || )

  smells like global ecological irresponsibility...

I was looking through the paper the other day... Father's Day is coming up you know... so the department store ads all have ties and cheap cologne on sale. There are all sorts of weird "sponsored" colognes out there nowadays... named after car models and such. One of the brands on sale was "Hummer" cologne.

Hummer...

I'm sure it smells great... really manly and all... problem is, you have to use a whole gallon of it every day to get it to work.


  (posted by Dave at 1:27 PM || )

  the rumors were true..

(Most of you can safely ignore this post) I was skeptical, but it turns out all of the leaks for the past few weeks were right. Apple Computers are dumping IBM and making the transition to Intel/Pentium chips over the next two years.

How will they do it? Well, it turns out there have been guys in a bunker in Cupertino compiling the MacOS to run on the Intel architecture FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS!! In fact, Steve Jobs stopped in the middle of the Keynote address to mention that - oh, by the way... this presentation I'm been giving has been running the MacOS on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 all morning. IT'S ALREADY DONE!! Then they brought over a guy from Wolfram to announce that it took them 5 days to port Mathematica to the new architecture. FIVE DAYS.

Steve Jobs, you are a fucking genius.

I don't know HOW he's going to brush aside all the negative "RISC is better than CISC" propaganda of the last 10 years, (**) but... if anyone can do it, it's The Steve.

Fuck, this doesn't mean I have to have one of those ugly "Intel Inside" stickers on my next Mac, does it?? Maybe he'll loan them some designers to come up with a spiffier logo.

A good report of the keynote can be found at engadget.

Dr. Dave

(**) Actually, I do know how. LIke the article above says - they'll simply keep repeating "Pentium runs cooler than PPC" and even though hertz-for-hertz, PowerPC still beats Pentium (as in a 2 Ghz PPC actually runs more instructions per second than a 3 or 4 GHz Pentium) IBM hasn't been able to deliver a G5 that will run in a notebook without causing it to burst into flames. Steve will simply stress that portables are an important part of Apple's business, and that if they don't make the change NOW, they are in danger of falling behind Windows in the portable market. And we'll all smile and nod, becuase He's Steve and we're not.  (posted by Dave at 2:58 PM || )

  i'd rather pay off my CAR, thanks...

We got a catalog in the mail from this pen place yesterday. I assume it's because we're on the Levenger mailing list, but this place makes Levenger look like Office Fucking Depot. I'm sorry... I'm as much a materialist as the next guy, but... anybody who spends more than $5000 on a fucking PEN deserves to be STABBED TO DEATH WITH IT!  (posted by Dave at 2:08 PM || )

  the good, the bad, and the puffy...

I TiVo'd that show "Hit Me Baby One More Time" last night. At least I think that's what it was called. The premise was that they resurrect some has-been artists to perform their big hit song, and then have them cover a current pop song and then... well, I don't know... maybe they pick a winner or something... I never made it past the first segment because it was so HORRIFYINGLY BAD. It was like karaoke, only worse... because you expect the person who actually wrote and performed the song to NOT suck as bad as a karaoke performer. But you'd be wrong. After watching the puffy lead singers from Loverboy and Flock of Seagulls grunt thier way through "Workin' for the Weekend" and "I Ran" respectively... I couldn't bear another minute of it.

Then later I was flipping channels and I came across the Eagles "Farewell Tour #1" on Bravo. I was pleasantly surprised and a little befuddled. It sounded far better than it had any right to. Apparently, musicians with TALENT can manage to NOT SUCK when they get old.

I especially enjoyed the guitar solo to Hotel California... not a single note out of place, man... cuz you know... any improvising on THAT number and people would be demanding their $300 back!  (posted by Dave at 1:45 PM || )

  navigating the fantasy/reality line with toddlers...

Ian wakes up from his nap yesterday...

IAN: "Me. Haff. Bad. Dream."
ME: Aww.. you had a bad dream?
IAN: "Ya."
ME: What was your dream about?
IAN: (pause...) "Tigers!" (makes clawing hand motions)
ME: Oh, no... tigers? Were they SCARY tigers?
IAN: "Ya."
ME: Oh no. Were they chasing you?
IAN: (pause...) "No, Daddy... It was a DREAM."

Right. Of course. How silly of me.  (posted by Dave at 9:28 AM || )

  i suppose we should be proud of him for trying, at least...

From the President's press conference on TUESDAY... in response to a question about the Amnesty International "gulag" allegations...

In terms of, you know, the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees.

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic], that means not tell the truth.

Actually, George... "disassemble" means "to take apart"... "DISSEMBLE" means to not tell the truth. You know how I know?

Dictionary.com's word of the day for MONDAY? Yup... dissemble!

Coincidence? Right.

Now I ask you... how cute is it that the President subscribes to the Word of the Day email to try to improve his vo-cab-u-la-mary, and then tries to use the new words in a sentence the very next day? Even if he does bungle it up. Isn't he a lovable little chucklehead?  (posted by Dave at 11:58 AM || )