So there is this website, www.lifehacker.com, that is all about organizing your life and taking advantage of tips, tools, and tricks to get things done more efficiently.
The editors over there recently put together a list of their ‘essential free software’ that I really can’t disagree with. It is a very reasonable list that might just find its way onto a CD at some point for some outrageously cheap presents.
Here’s the link:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/feature/geek-to-live-lifehacker-pack-149665.php
So presuming you can read this, my kid is smarter than you. Here’s my theory…
Babies know everything.
Here’s why- If you think about how the brain works, connections are reinforced and new connections made as new information is integrated into the system. That’s the information theory perspective anyway. So why is my kid smarter than you?
Well, her brain is born maximally connected. She starts with just about every possible neuron connection there is. So why can you read and she can’t? Well, suppose she can? Maybe she just can’t tell you, or make sense of the information she has. Which leads me to part two of my old theory on babies:
Babies are drunk.
Face it, they have no balance, no coordination, inability to speak, lots of drooling, urinating/pooping on themselves, and they’re always puking. Clearly, they’re drunk.
So to summarize- 1. Babies know everything, but 2. Babies are drunk
So Wednesday was the Beauty and the Geek II casting call episode and let me tell you, my appetite was sufficiently wet. Thankfully, the WB followed up with the first episode on Thursday, and after making K watch the casting call, we watched the first episode on our replay TV.
I have to say, with a good deal of shame, we’re hooked. Tearful bimbos with IQs ranging from ‘C’ to ‘3000′ talking about how they never expected to like the geeks, Geek solving Rubics cubes behind their backs and nearly vomiting at the sight of some pretty women; these disparate groups, joining forces to improve each other and in the process trying to win a quarter of million dollars by being the last geek and bimbo standing… Now that’s just good television!
As if I needed confirmation, I took a quiz on the ‘Beauty and the Geek 2′ website to see ‘How Geeky Are You’. My result: ‘Very Geeky’. I’m satisfied with that score, but honestly, don’t more people know that the Inert Gasses are also called ‘Noble’ and that James T. Kirk’s middle name is Tiberius? Isn’t this common knowledge people?
So I’m heading back from Walgreens this afternoon where I purchased some butt rash creme (for M, not for me) & photos (of M, not of me), and I heard this commercial on the radio. The ad started: ‘From the mind of Ashton Kutcher’, and for some reason, I didn’t completely tune it out at that point. Apparently our trucker-hat wearing friend produced a ’smash hit’ last summer called ‘Beauty and the Geek’ which aired, not surprisingly on ‘the WB’. Now as a certified geek (I’m wearing a hat that reference unix scripts, and I own several geeky shirts, even one that just read’s ‘Geek’), I thought I would find the rest of the ad ridiculous. Instead, I found it totally ridiculous, and therefore possibly funny. The line that got me: ‘I think some of the girls are afraid to touch their geek’. That line pretty much sums up most of my high school and college womanizing careers!
So now I’m left with the dilemma of adding another ‘guilty pleasure’ to my Tivo, or not adding it. I’ve already got my geeky cooking show, Alton Brown, my 3 hours of low quality Destinos (a spanish soap opera made to help gringos learn spanish), and my 3 episodes of standard quality Stargate (from the one and only SciFi channel). So when Beauty and the Geek airs (next week I think, I was too caught up laughing at the ‘touch their geek’ line to hear clearly) should give it some space on the Tivo, or should I reserve all additional space for the 25th season of Survivor? What’s a geek to do…
Maybe I should build a home-brew PVR out of my old PC, constuct some RG6 to splice into my cable amplifier and hook them all into my flux capacitor**. Then my video recording space would only be limited by the capacity of my HDD and my hunger for bad television.
*We don’t have Tivo, we have ReplayTV. It is basically the same thing, but people know Tivo better, so I used it here.
** I don’t have a flux capacitor, it is the thing that Doc brown came up with when he slipped off his toliet while setting a clock. It’s essential for time travel. DUH.
Ok, another note about the movie ‘A Christmas Story’. There is a scene near the end where Ralphie has opened his Aunt Clara’s gift to him. When his mother asks him to show everyone what she got him, he tries to refuse. Turns out it is a large pink one-piece pajama outfit with bunny ears on the hood and bunny faces on the feet.
So why is this noteworthy? It isn’t really, except that M has a sleeper with bunny faces on the feet and it always reminds me of Aunt Clara’s gift to Ralphie. Man I love this movie…
So the ’sunroom’ has now been officially converted to a baby room for M and her new friend A. A’s mom will be joining Aunt L as one of M’s nannies during the week. In order to accomodate another infant safely, we put down a rug with some padding, some multi-colored linking foam tiles for extra padding, and I even mopped the floor.
Also added are about 33% of M’s toys and a some outlet covers. So now the recently repainted sunroom is actually a livable space that easily converts into a baby-safe room. Of course we still have a space heater, an ungated stairway with nice pointy corners, and plants in heavy pots on the table, but you have to have some hazards, otherwise these kids will never learn to be careful!
So I’m working in my basement today and about noon I decide that I need a little background noise. I rummage through the christmas debris and manage to find my DVD case (1 of only 2) in which I found ‘A Christmas Story’, almost certainly my favorite Christmas movie of all time. Here’s the problem…
I didn”t watch it this year! Even with at least one station playing the movie for days non-stop, I still didn’t manage to watch it this past holiday season. I threw it in, and as I came back down after lunch, Ralphie and Randy were in line to see Santa at Higbee’s (actually in Cleveland according to the director’s commentary). Then was spoken one of my favorite lines… ‘I Like the Wizard of Oz…’ as uttered by the flight-goggle and bomber cap wearing kid in front of Ralphie in the line.
Why do I enjoy this line so much? Well, my college roommate Matt once said it to me as I climbed down from my Jeep Wrangler wearing some driving goggles I picked up at a Harley dealer in Urbana, IL. Cracked me up to no end. I still own the goggles and I still laugh when I think about Matt imitating the kid with a nasal snear. Friends who not only remember obscure lines from modern day classic films like ‘A Christmas Story’, but call you on it when you look like one of the minor extras, are a rare and wonderful thing.
So I hereby dedicate this post to Matt C., Gene Shephard, and Red Ryder.
Since there are some of you out there who are directly responsible for this, I thought I’d let you know that I now know G, C, Am, Em, and D chords on my guitar. Up until now, I’ve shied away from the chords for the simple reason that I couldn’t play them. That all changed at my Wednesday guitar lesson when my teacher pulled out a metronome and gave me the task of switching between two chords within 4 beats. As I got better, he’d speed up the metronome. I actually enjoyed it so much that i used another gift certificate to get an upgraded tuner that included a metronome.
Mind you, I have no idea why I find this fun, but it is working. I’ve actually started practicing my chords, and accordingly my strumming.
Just a quick note, the tuner in question is the MetroTune MT9000 from Sabine. Again, because I know y’all were going to lose sleep over it.
You know you wanted to hear about it, admit it.
So K came home from work yesterday and I hear M’s aunt L telling K that M has been pushing herself up on her hands an knees. Good thing someone told me!
It was true though, I saw it with my own eyes. M can get up on all fours now and sits there looking chock-full of potential energy. She has yet to convert it into any sort of forward or backward movement, but progress is progress!