children of the grave

...children of the world,

Listen to what I say
If you want a better place to live in
Spread the words today
Show the world that love is still alive
You must be brave
Or you children of today are
Children of the grave

-Ozzy Osbourne / Black Sabbath

style

How come dudes that wear black jeans always wear them really tight and have high-water cuffs, with black satin jackets and big plain white old-school reeboks?

more like my dad everyday

We all know that we will turn into our parents, but nevertheless each step along the way scares us. When we were growing up my dad always had mouthwash - in the bathroom, in his dopp kit, in his office at work, in the car, wherever and everywhere. I don't have mouthwash anywere but the bathroom, but I deffnitely hit that shit everytime I leave the house. I ran out last week, and while I didn't need it bad enough to shell out big bucks at the Teeter, I did hit Target yesterday and am glad to have a fresh supply.

FYI - here is an explanation of the term "Dopp Kit" from Word Detective:

"[T]hanks to a discussion of the term "Dopp Kit" on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org) a couple of years ago, I can assure you that "Dop" or "Dopp" isn't an acronym or abbreviation for anything. According to newspaper accounts unearthed by Merriam-Webster's Jim Rader, the Dopp Kit was first produced by Charles Doppelt, a leather goods designer who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the early 1900s. Although it may have been Doppelt's nephew and employee, Jerome Harris, who actually invented the snazzy leather toiletries case, Doppelt was the boss and so the finished product bore a cropped form of his name, giving us the "Dopp Kit." Dopp Kits were manufactured by the Charles Doppelt Company until the firm was purchased by Samsonite in the 1970s, and Dopp Kits today are made by Buxton. The popularity of Dopp Kits was evidently boosted considerably by World War II, in the course of which the U.S. Army issued them to recruits by the millions.

Incidentally, the "kit" part of Dopp Kit is not quite the same "kit" we use to mean "a collection of parts used to assemble a whole," as in "model airplane kit." A soldier's "kit" consists of the standard equipment and personal articles issued to and carried by a soldier on a regular basis.

available at http://www.word-detective.com/103001.html

exams

For the next 3 weeks I will be in exams. That means that the days of the week have even less meaning than they do when you are a normal student, and the hours of the day become totally irrelevant.

Tat also means that my posting here will likely become (more?) sporadic. I could go 10 days with no post, then just break down into delirium and post once an hour for 3 days straight - we'll see how it goes.

Unamailer

This is me - I usually hate trying to have significant communication via e-mail, although I really hate I.M. That is not to say that I won't break off a longer heart felt e-mail now and then, and I see the virtue of properly used I.M., but I hate getting caught in an escalating e-mail exchange where my every reply/response engenders a longer e-mail with more gartuitious detail and more questions to which I am supposed to respond.

From Lisa Belkin in today's NYT:

"Johnny Wong, a public relations consultant from San Bruno, Calif., suggests "Unamailer" to describe "someone who replies to e-mail with one-word responses. Right. Good. Thanks." Ray Symmes, a business consultant in Portsmouth, Va., suggests a similar term. "BlackBerried," he writes, is "a short and possibly patronizing response to a thoughtful e-mail, suggesting it was received on a mobile device: 'good anal. of world hunger. thks.' "

full article available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/jobs/23wcol.html?th&emc=th

on the iPod:
Neil Young, On the Beach

WARNING:

If you are lucky enough to speak with me or hang out with me on a regular basis, you might discover that I do not embargo my blog topics. That is, in addition to posting them on my blog, I may also talk about the wonderful ideas and observations I have about the world. And, on really good days, I might take something you brought up and post it as if it is my own idea.

time capsules

Remember when time capsules were all the rage? It seemed like there was a ten year period when you were forbidden from building a mall without burrying a collection of notes from 1983 krimpped hair and break dancing 6th graders to futuristic 6th graders who would ride hover boards and wear metalic clothes, living on a diet of re-hydrated pizza like Back to the Future 2.

on the iPod:
Black Sabbath, We Sold Our Soul for Rock & Roll

quote of the day

"I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. " - Dubya

One day, maybe I can be a decider, too.

Texas is Awesome, pt 1

I have a few recurring topics, including "Albums", "Tips for D.C. Tourists," "Cheezy Music," and "The Little Things" series. Today I'm starting a "Texas is Awesome" series. We all know how awesome Texas is, mostly because people from Texas always tell us, but this is just icing on the cake...

Swinging for the Suburban Fences, but Not Too Hard

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

BELLAIRE, Tex. — It's not just one, two, three strikes you're out at the old softball game in Feld Park.

Belting one over the fence will do it, too.

Home runs are outs in this otherwise all-American Houston suburb about nine miles west of downtown, where encroaching development has upended one of the sport's most hallowed rules, even, for a time, getting home run hitters ejected from the batter's box.

(Inside-the-park home runs — what the Amateur Softball Association soothingly calls "four-base awards" — are still O.K.)

It is not as if this city of 17,000 — named perhaps for the gulf breezes and swallowed by the Houston metroplex nearly 60 years ago — has anything against the American pastime. The bulbous white water tower that looms over town like a giant onion still celebrates Bellaire's two baseball legends, the 1999 high school national champions and the Bellaire Little League All-Stars that took the American pennant in 2000, making it to the World Series in Williamsport, Pa., only to lose a heartbreaker to Maracaibo, Venezuela, 3-2.

But when the love of green space and recreation ran headlong into property rights amid a homebuilding boom, something had to give.

"I don't want to be in the backyard to be clunked on the head with a softball," said Lee Decker, a builder whose new and yet-unsold $721,000 two-story house overlooking left-center field lost two windows late last year to homegrown sultans of swat in the park's Optimist Club league. Mr. Decker has since been mollified by the long-ball sanctions and a 50-foot-high fence-and-net barrier that has proved impervious to all but one improbable blast of 300 feet or more several weeks ago that broke another window.

If I was a kid down there, all of that dude's windows would be busted out.

On the iPod:
Tom Petty, She's the One

full article available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/us/16bellaire.html?th&emc=th

It was rainy and 41 degrees when I woke up

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion - I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all a little rain must fall.