You know, I love my family, especially the small subset of my family that acts as if my brothers and I are members of it. Some of my family actually treat my brothers and I like we're members of the family, and it's really nice.
Now, no-one's family is perfect, so there are always family things that you do regardless of their vapidity or the general bored disinterest of all participants. It's part of the grease that lets families exist. For the past calendar year we've already performed the normal holiday "since we're co-located at the moment, let's play nice & pretend we care" rituals like:
Aunt: So... when is the wedding?
Madeline: We were married in April.
Aunt: Oh, well I guess we'll have to get that present right in the mail!
or
Aunt: So how come you never let us know when you're visiting?
Me: I called you the last three times I was in town.
Aunt: Oh.
So, when I checked my email this morning, the last thing I expected was this:
Hi Jim
Hope you and Addy are doing fine!
I want to get you both a gift certificate for your wedding gift. Sorry............. this gift is quite tardy, but I am trying to catch up. Where would be a good place for you all to have a gift certificate?
If you are ever in Dallas, give us a buzz. We would love to see you.
Let me know what you think about the gift certificate.
Love, ******
If it's true that it's the thought that counts & not the gift... do they really sell gift certificates that small?
Available at BigCSLewisFan. This made the rounds thanks to reddit, and since I hadn't seen it before, I wanted to put it up. You can see the parallels to events in Surprised By Joy. Its funny how much "Middle-Aged Moralists" can teach you -- things you already sorta knew, but never fully got your finger on top of.
In the spirit of all the fun that gets poked around vis-a-vis male/female relations, I thought I'd cite Myths and Truths, which's a little on the jaded side, but very entertaining in that "been there, done that" kinda way. Even with the broad generalizations (pun intended), my dating life would have been so much happier if I'd have seen this when I was young....
UPDATE: Two women have told me they read this and thought "Yeah, women are just like that! Hey, I'm not like that....!" I'm not saying his statement applies to all women any more than all men like football. But I did marry one of his stereotypes my 1st time around....
If you've had a hard time dismissing the "tin foil hattery" that's been going on about with theories that postulate the Pentagon brass sending a missle onto themselves instead of Flight 77 crashing into it due to the sheer lack of facts to analyze, here's a handy analysis. I know that it's tempting to want to dismiss a conspiracty-theory out of hand (like any significantly-sized group of soldiers would whack their own buds), but even stopped clocks are right sometimes, so I think it's important to address theories directly. Anyway, here's the link.
From my brother, Boxing Alcibiades:Juan's going to the Sandbox, and when he gets back, for Physician's Assistant training. Not bad for a kid who used to be a migrant worker -- when he's done being "exploited by the Pentagon" (for those of us not steeped in '68er cant, that translates as "expensively and exhaustively trained") he's going to easily double my slightly-above-average middle-class salary).
My buddy, The Lizard Queen, has a doctorate now, and is, in theory, an official member of the intellectual elite. Her Mom grew up in a bamboo hut.
And people wonder why I have no patience for cringing, whinging, suck-ass leftist whiners who bitterly harp about how there's no social mobility left in this country.
By "Cinnamon Stillwell" (I can't imagine that's her real name), a freelancer from San Francisco. Could it be that at least someone in my town has a freakin' clue?
Judge for yourself at The 'Day Without Immigrants' Backfires.
My rapidly becoming favorite bloggerette in the universe over at Headrush has posted an entry on the so-called "Shangri-La" diet, which I've been investigating for some time. It seems the anecdotal evidence is starting to pile up in favor of it, so I'm going to go ahead and give it the plunge. Yet another triumph for Dennett and the school of "mind is what brains do"?
After a brief hiatus to decide if it's really worth it or not, the Mimsi project is back on. There are so many fun projects to code, like Jonathon's political analyzer, etc, that I just had to stop & ponder if maybe it was worth it to settle for Ruby after all (I code Java at work and won't do it at home -- it isn't fun enough). Well, Ruby is beautiful and elegant, but as an "I like seatbelts" static-typing all the way-type coder who doesn't want to have to test invariants he could just tell the compiler about, it doesn't work for me. Plus, Ruby doesn't give you free multi-tasking. So if I "owe" you a computer program or three, don't worry, I haven't forgotten; it'll just be written in a language no-one's every heard of. :0)
