In six and a half years and three kids, we've never really had anyone get into something unsupervised and make a mess...until today.

Landon has developed the fun little habit of pulling the placemats off the kitchen table in order to get at whatever is sitting on the placemat. Today, he managed to acquire some Cheetos while no one was in the room to hear the bag fall to the floor. The spring loaded clip was no barrier to the cheesy, salty, crunchy, goodness inside.

Someone's got guilt smeared all over his little chin.

Our family dentist (who is awesome by the way) really emphasizes the importance of brushing and flossing to our children. Will has been flossing for a number of months now and, well, you just have to see it for yourself...

At dinner Will was being a typical 2 year-old, not eating, playing and not listening. After repeated insistence by Mary and me to get him to eat and stop playing around, I asked jokingly:

Daddy: "Do you want a whoopin'?"

Understand, Will has never heard this term before. We've not yet had to strike our kids and, if all goes well, we will never have to...although, I hold the option in reserve. Since Will is generally only offered good things, it's entirely logical, even if comically wrong, to state affirmatively that he wants something even if he doesn't know what it is. So, Will responded to the question, "Do you want a whoopin'?" with:

Will: "Yes. Go get it."

I couldn't stop laughing.

The Scene: After a delicious meal at the Cheesecake Factory the day before, Daddy has some left over ribs for dinner. At meals, we often discuss the foods, where they come from and how they get to our table. Drew understands that milk comes from cows and can name just about every major food that is made from milk. He also knows that chicken comes from chickens, beef or just "meat" comes from cows and pork comes from pa-pa-pa-pigs (his mnemonic for remembering the source of pork).

There was only one slight flaw in Drew's wealth of knowledge, he only understood "comes from" being in the sense of milk comes from a cow, as in the cow gives us some milk or some hamburger and then goes about the rest of its day happily eating grass in the fields...until tonight:

Drew: What's that?
Daddy: It's a rib.
Drew: What's a rib? [Although he knows what a ribs is away from the dinner table.]
Daddy: It's the rib of a cow, like you have ribs. [Poking Drew in the ribs.]
Drew: How do they get it?
Daddy: They cut the cow up.
Drew: Oh...[pause]...but they're cute.
Daddy: And, tasty!
Drew: Oh. [Contemplating becoming a vegetarian without even knowing what a vegetarian is.]
Daddy: Eat your meat.
Drew: It's not meat, it's pork.
Daddy: [Realizing today's food lesson has gone far enough.] Eat your pork.

Drew doing his best Calvin faces from Calvin and Hobbes. I tried to get Drew to make faces for this six months to a year ago, but he was too shy. Even today, he was still a little subdued. I'm not sure we pulled it off as well as we could have. Maybe we'll do it again sometime with spiky hair and a red shirt.

For the record, this is a shameless ripoff of David Kim and a young Nathan.

An attorney I work with, Ed, celebrated his 20th year with the firm this week. In his honor, the firm held a dinner tonight at the Cedar Ridge Country Club where the LPGA just played. Ed is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met and definitely the most intelligent attorney I've ever known. He's also a liberal...a far left, radical, liberal. But, unlike most liberals who annoy me, Ed is awesome in that he can intelligently and rationally argue his points without resort to emotional feel-goodism that so permeates most of liberal arguments. I could debate him for hours, unfortunately, the demands of our jobs prevents all but the most occasional dip into unbillable intellectual repartee.

Because of my well known political enthusiasm, I was asked to write a tongue-in-cheek speech poking fun at Ed's liberalism. I chose the format of a fictional letter from President Bush recounting their long history together. For Ed's benefit, I also took a few jabs at President Bush. I found the picture on the internet a few years ago and held on to it for an appropriate moment. It is not Ed, but bares a certain comical resemblance. We had it blown up to poster-board size and revealed at the appropriate moment during my speech. After the jump is the text of the speech I delivered which went over quite well...much to my relief.

(I left out Ed's last name as well as my firm's name. They are both easily Google-able and I have nothing to hide, I just didn't think my little blog should turn up on a search for either.)

Jim, Mike and Roger really wanted to make Ed's twentieth anniversary with the firm special and so, for the past year, they have been going through all the official channels and using all their high-powered connections...they invited President George Bush to be here with us this evening.

Unfortunately, the President was unable to attend. Although we understand he was going to be here but, at the last minute, he went looking for weapons of mass destruction in the corner of the oval office and hasn't been heard from since.

The President was, however, kind enough to send a personal message to Ed...and now I'd like to read that:

From the office of the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush.

Dear Ed,

Congratulations on your 20 years with [Firm Name]. It must seem like a long time, I know my 8 years as President have seemed like an eternity...and I'll bet you agree.

I had my lovely wife, Laura, do some research and she tells me when you started with your firm in 1988:

• a first class stamp cost 22¢
• The average price for good old leaded gasoline was 98¢
• The Last Emperor won 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture beating out Broadcast News, Fatal Attraction, Hope & Glory and Moonstruck
• The Summer Olympics were in Seoul, South Korea
• The Winter Olympics, still held the same year as the summer games, were in Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• Notre Dame won the college football championship with a 12-0 record
• Kansas beat Oklahoma for the college basketball championship
• The Chicago Cubs played their first ever night game at home in Wrigley Field
• United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is appointed (big mistake)
• Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was indicted on charges relating to the Iran-Contra Affair
• Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs, California
• After 8 years of fighting the Soviet Union Red Army began withdrawing from Afghanistan [hand written note: that don't make no sense]
• The U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shot down civilian Iran Air Flight 655, over the Persian Gulf, killing 290
• Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up by Libyan terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people
• Of course, I'll always remember it as the year my daddy George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle beat Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen in the presidential election

So much has happened in the last 20 years, but it seems just like yesterday that we were both working on Richard Nixon's 1960 campaign together...I remember snack time the most and that you always made the best brownies. I think that if you had come up with Nixon's 1968 slogan "Nixon's the One," a few years earlier, we might not have had to suffered through those horrible Kennedy years.

I asked Senator Hillary Clinton to go through some of the FBI files she keeps laying around and, as luck would have it, she found a picture of you at a recent John McCain rally. [reveal picture]

You and Hillary Clinton sure have one thing in common...you never quit.

I want to especially thank you for your tireless work over the years on behalf of the multi-billion dollar international insurance conglomerates. Thanks to you, their profits are as high as you and I back in our National Guard days. Speaking of which, I never understood why you felt it necessary to always report to duty when ordered, I thought all that was optional once you signed up.

You have single-handedly done more for the insurance industry than Dick Chaney and I have done for the oil industry. I'll bet you've saved insurance companies even more than I've spent in Iraq. Ed, you are truly a man after my own heart: I veto appropriations to keep money from being spent on injured veterans and you keep money away from injured plaintiffs. We're kindred spirits, you and me.

I know we've lost touch these last few years, I don't think we've seen each other since the Strom Thurmond fundraiser.

Laura sometimes reads briefs you have written to me, especially when I have trouble sleeping. And, although I don't always understand all the big words you use, your brilliance and passion always comes through. Clearly, you haven't wasted a terrible mind, or however that saying goes.

As you know Karl Rove is the brains behind the White House and I know you will take this as the highest compliment, you, are the Karl Rove of [Firm Name].

In closing, I just want to say, that if your desire upon entering law school as a wide-eyed, hopeful, idealist, was to promote capitalism and keep money out of the hands of widows and orphans then Ed...MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Very truly yours,

George Bush

Is there no end to the amount of peanut butter jelly sandwiches a child can eat? When its Daddy's turn to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I play the "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" song. It's a tightened up clip from the Family Guy of the Buckwheat Boyz song I got off the podcast of Chicago radio host Steve Dahl.



(Steve Google Alerts himself so...hey, Steve, love the show, thanks for making the podcast available, been listening since the early eighties, you help keep me connected to Chicago from down here in Tulsa.)

I don't usually take time here to point things out that I find around the internet, but this is an exception.

A while ago I happened across xkcd which the creator describes as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Basically, its an insightful comic about life for geeks. If you didn't take some college math and science courses and don't spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, you probably won't fully appreciate too many of the cartoons. However, if you are a geek or just one at heart, you'll find some insight here that you won't get anywhere else. (Be sure to hover your mouse pointer over each comic on the site for additional commentary by the author.)

xkcd led me to another fun discovery, Indexed. It's a collection of insightful diagrams drawn on index cards with a heavy emphasis on Venn diagrams. Call me a geek, but I LOVE Venn diagrams! And, I was dumbfounded when I found a site devoted to Venn diagram and graphing based humor. The internet truly has everything.

Seriously, the set of things dead and the set of things rolling around, in the intersection of which there exists rotisserie chicken and the founding fathers. That's gold, Jerry! Gold!

[Update: FWIW, I just noticed that this is my 500th blog post!]

Setting: (Saturday morning...early Saturday morning...very early Saturday morning)

Drew: (Standing bedside) Why is the sky orange?

Momma: Because you got out of bed before the sun came up.

Drew loves to roughhouse with dad on mom and dad's bed which is where the game of "Heal Me" somehow evolved. Drew is just a month shy of turning two in the video. Aunt Catherine was the videographer and supplied the laugh track.

[Update: Tuesday, August 15, 2006, for those of you who saw an empty white space here today:

YouTube.com, which serves up more than 100 million videos online a day, suffered a six-hour breakdown on Tuesday -- its first-ever unplanned outage, a company spokeswoman confirmed.

Access to the YouTube site was cut off around 7:30 a.m. PDT (1430 GMT) and was only restored around 1:30 p.m. PDT (2030 GMT), or six hours later, according the spokeswoman.

I knew Drew's video would be popular...but I didn't expect it to cause YouTube to crash!]

I'm sure the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics medal recipients will be so overjoyed with winning an Olympic medal that they won't mind the fact that the medals are simply a couple of AOL discs glued together and spray painted. Kudos to the Italians for coming up with a good use for what would otherwise be another toxic landfill contributor. Anything for the environment.







Put together two AOL discs, some red ribbon and a little glue...and you get a silver medalist!


Judging from his beret, it looks like he's a returning champion.

The redesigned Freedom Tower was announced today. It reminds me of something...I just can't think of what. But, I have this subliminal feeling that somehow it's appropriate for New York.

In all seriousness, this design is far better than the previous piece-of-crap topped by a bird cage/skeleton. I'd still be happy with rebuilding the old towers, bigger, better, stronger...Steve Austin style. But, I'll happily leave the final choice to New Yorkers. I just hope they (the people) have a voice, rather than the decision being made by out of touch politicians and second-rate architects aspiring to mediocrity.

[This post was generated using the AutoBlogger software system. You have a life. AutoBlogger helps you live it.™]

Drew is doing very well. He continues to surprise us each day with the things he can do and the concepts that he understands.

Republicans, at least the conservative ones, are good. Democrats are still evil...as is the liberal media.

Summer is coming and Oklahoma is getting hot. Our garden is looking as good as ever. All our hard work is paying off.

[Update: I guess the internet is not the place for subtle humor.]

Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song will never be the same for me. I have to admit that I didn't know all the words until now...except now the song is about Viking kittens, which I'm not sure is what Zoso had in mind. (click the pic)

From one of the greatest comic strips ever, Calvin and Hobbes, I fear Drew will pose this question some day:

If I ever have a daughter, these are the swimsuits she will wear:

Obviously, I'm just kidding...like I'd ever let my daughter go swimming!

For the record, these are real swimsuits that are available for purchase.