A few days ago I spotted this humorous video by comedienne Chelsea Handler about being childless. It's done as a satire of public service announcements (PSAs) about avoiding drugs. Go ahead and watch this video if you're interested in cultural acceptance of childless adults, or if you just want to watch Chelsea Handler parade around in her ( Read more... )

Our drive out to Oakdale on Friday night (see previous blog) did exactly what we planned for it to do: give us the luxury of time on Saturday morning. Instead of getting up at the crack of dawn, rushing to get out of the house, and driving hard for 5 hours we slept in. We slept in 'til almost 9 and then still took our sweet time getting out. Better ( Read more... )

This weekend I went to the movie theater and saw... seats!

No, not "Seats" the movie. There is no such film AFAICT. Though if there were I'd expect it to be a parody of "Cars" where the overstuffed but slightly dilapidated armchair is voiced by John Ratzenberger[1].

The movie I saw this weekend was "Avengers: Age of Ultron". But that wasn't what ( Read more... )

Day One of our trip to New Mexico has gone fairly well ( Read more... )

...Continued from previous journalHeading east from Gilroy, Route 152 threads through the southern end of the Diablo Mountain range. It's a sparsely populated section of California between US-101 and I-5 that feels surprisingly remote given that it's not terribly far from the Bay Area and its millions of inhabitants. In the middle of this nowhere ( Read more... )

Last Sunday University of Missouri college football player and likely NFL draft pick Michael Sam announced publicly that he is gay. This has lit up discussions on radio, TV, and the internet as the chattering classes ask and attempt to answer the question, Is the NFL ready for an openly gay football player? That could also be phrased as, Are ( Read more... )

I surfed across a hilarious 30-second commercial jabbing at Russia's publicized intolerance of LGBT people and poking a little fun at the Olympic games themselves, particularly the sport of luge:

Click to view

[YouTube link in case the embedded video is not showing up.]

After enjoying a good laugh watching the video the first thing I wondered was, "Is the ( Read more... )

That's right. Thankgivukkah. Tomorrow is the rare convergence of the public US holiday Thanksgiving with the start of the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah. How rare? Well, due to the way Hanukkah follows a luni-solar calendar and Thanksgiving follows a guber-solar calendar, astrophysicists (goober-solar scientists?) estimate it won't happen again for ( Read more... )

Portland's always an interesting town. It's kind of a tale of two cities. Two virtual cities. One Portland is mild and straight laced. It is the middle-of-the-road Midwestern culture that settlers brought with them in their Conestoga wagons hundreds of years ago. I know people in/from Portland, and some of them are among the most boring people I ( Read more... )

Two days ago I wrote that the moral argument for attacking Syria isn't as moral as it seems at first blush. The problem is that the situation in Syria is a mess. It's a civil war. We know Assad is a bad guy but it's not clear the other side would govern better. It's not even clear they could govern. It's not even clear who they are. By the morality ( Read more... )