Oh yeah? My kid can bench-press Teddy Ruxpin!

From Yahoo/AP comes this wonderful story about combatting childhood obesity-

Weighted toys may help burn calories
Researchers at Indiana State University in Terre Haute tried a small experiment to test the effects of having kids play with heavier toys. They found that 10 children ages 6 to 8 burned more calories and had higher heart and breathing rates when they moved 3-pound toy blocks instead of unweighted blocks.

I fear for a future where kids are throwing out their backs trying to bring their stuffed animals with them to bedtime. Or Monday mornings at school where kids are missing and presumed dead after the tragic collapse of a tower of Legos.

I don't think heavier toys will lead to skinnier kids. I think it'll just lead to more savage beatings at the hands of yoked muscle-laden bullies who can curl a Winnie the Pooh...

Tears of the Kings Fans

L.A. King Pavol Demitra got traded over the weekend.

So for those keeping track at home, this is the second year in a row that my favorite L.A. Kings player has been shown the door. Apparently my admiration and fandom is some sort of kiss of death. I can't wait to see Sportscenter some day and hear, "Everything was great, then I became Eugene's favorite player. My career died that day."

Sigh. It's not a bad trade for the Kings. It's just depressing.



Go Kings.

No Updates Til Next Week

Up against a script deadline. See ya next week!

Thoughts on the NHL Finals

There is no better television than Game 7 in the Stanley Cup Finals. Yes, even better than those episodes of the Maury Povich show where they do the "You... are NOT the father" episodes.

The terrible tradition of playoff beards MUST END. By Game 7 of the finals, the players on both teams look disgusting. Especially in High Definition. For the love of improving the game, if I was commissioner, players would be forced to shave. Heck, if you want, televise it like the weigh-in before boxing matches. Put Pierre Maguire alongside to interview the players after they get shaved.

After the game was over, you know the Edmonton Oilers wanted to shake the winning team's hands, then get out of there and escape "We are the Champions" to deal with their heartbreak in private. Unfortunately, because the NHL took forever to set up, the poor losing players had to sit around and wait forever before they were allowed to leave. Nothing like a little salt in the wound.

I love Commissioner Gary Bettman trying to give a big long speech about how great this NHL season has been, how he's a genius for helping put hockey in Carolina, and about how all his detractors can kiss his... when Rod Brind'amour comes to try and take the Cup away. Thank you, Rod. Your leadership in ending Bettman's rambling is why you wear the "C" as Captain.

Congratulations to Ray Whitney, who joins the rare club of Stanley Cup winning players who are so happy that they scream a curse word on national television. On behalf of club president Ray Bourque, welcome to the BLEEP-ing club.

Anyone else notice this fun trend in hockey? Three straight years, the finals have been one good regular season team vs one Cinderella team. Cinderella takes the good team to Game 7 - but then the good team kicks Cinderella in the stomach and the series ends. New Jersey over Anaheim, Tampa Bay over Calgary, and now Carolina over Edmonton. Next year, I'm going to predict... I dunno, Buffalo over Columbus? Ottawa over Minnesota? Detroit over Atlanta?

I'd like to take this time to remind everyone that despite everything, I still love the L.A. Kings. If you only knew him, momma, you'd see that he's a nice man. This shiner is only because the Kings love me so much. And I don't care if the Anaheim team is much nicer to me and treats me right. The Kings are the only one for me. You can't just give up just because the guy breaks your heart continually since the 1960s. If you only gave them a chance. Go Kings.

I'm going to miss hockey. See you this Fall, hockey.

June 2006 Music Diary

For those of you who don't know, every month I blog what music I'm listening to at the moment.

A while back, I read about Cameron Crowe and his mix tapes that he makes every month - he can go back and listen to previous tapes and remember what he was doing that month. Never above stealing from my heroes, I give you the music that iTunes says I've been listening to most this month-

One - Mary J. Blige & U2
Take It Back - Pink Floyd
How to Save a Life - The Fray
What You Know - T.I.
Life is a Highway - Tom Cochrane
No More I Love Yous - Annie Lennox
We Never Change - Coldplay
World In My Eyes - Depeche Mode

I've avoided the new cover of One. I'd read some pretty unflattering things about it, but I finally broke down and plunked down my 99 cents for it... and I love it. Mary J. Blige gives the song less of a "son vs father" feel to it and more of a "woman vs man" - and nobody sings about an angry woman in love like Mary.

Pink Floyd is one of those bands that everyone told me how great they are. Yes, I've seen the Wall and yes they're talented. But I still didn't "get" Pink Floyd. Thanks to the good people at Pandora, they found a Pink Floyd track that crawled into my head and stuck there.

You know the sure way to sell a bunch of records? Write a catchy song, call it "How to Save a Life", and then watch as your tune gets used as catchy background music on both Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs.

Living in San Diego for a few years ruined my appreciation of good rap and hip-hop, because San Diego has a horrendously bad rap and hip-hop scene. If your choice is bad rap or no rap? No rap wins by a LANDSLIDE. As a result of being out of touch, the whole ATL/Ludacris/krunk style has never hooked me, which must because it's either not that good or because I'm now old and unable to appreciate it. Then I heard this track by T.I. on the radio and now I'm discovering this great stuff. "What You Know" reminds me of summer nights in high school, with bass speakers booming in the trunk, rolling down Brookhurst Ave towards Huntington Beach - cruising below the speed limit so everybody would notice. Man, were we uncool...

"Life is a Highway" is back in the regular rotation thanks to the Rascal Flatts cover on the Cars soundtrack. For whatever reason, I remember exactly when I first heard this song. I was a kid and my alarm clock went off in the morning and this song was on it. Took me a decade or so to get this catchy tune out of my head, and now years later thanks to Cars, it's back.

While I've been singing the praises of Pandora, Pandora also played an awful track for me - some cover of "No More I Love Yous" that made me want to stab out my ear drums with a PDA stylus. I cleansed my palate by listening to the original.

The Coldplay and Depeche Mode tracks are just random selections that have gotten played a few times this month, when iTunes was set to randomize music. No significance to them, except I wrote to them this month.

A Couple Spiteful Reviews

Allow me to vent for a sec. Unfortunately, I met a couple writers online. These guys like to slag on other people's projects, because it makes them feel better about their tiny modicum of creativity to use said modicum to come up with insults.

It's one thing for the audience to react negatively to your work. But it's another thing entirely when you fancy yourself a professional writer, but you're so spiteful and bitter that you become the equivalent of a mall pet store parrot who's learned to squawk "It stinks! It stinks!" over and over again. It's called professional courtesy - try looking into it, you no-talent no-success armchair hacks.

And on that happy note, some quick reviews-

Cars
Many reviewers have said that this film is not Pixar's best. I must convey to you in the most erudite way that those dumb@#$ reviewers are full of @*#$.

Too erudite? Okay, let me tone it down. Cars is amazing. The story, jokes, and characterization are top notch. Amazing art direction, especially the old 50s neon deco and the gorgeous desert landscapes. Paul Newman's gravelly voice carries so much weight and power, while I nearly fell out of the theater chair when I realized who Jeremy Piven was voicing.

Still waiting for Pixar to make something bad. A-

X-Men: The Last Stand
While I'm a longtime X-Men fanboy who loved the first two films, I hated all the trailers for this one. I wasn't looking forward to seeing it. First ten minutes of the film with the first action sequence, it was so obvious that they'd shot it a certain way to save money on special effects, I was ready to throw something.

But imagine my surprise - the film turned out to be pretty good. Third act was a bit long, but when you've got that much action going on, I'm willing to cut them some slack. One minor nitpick in the third act, where something was done differently than the comics. I don't want to get into it at risk of spoiling the film, but it was a disappointing change.

Might as well take this time to praise Chris Claremont, the X-Men writer for 20 years who practically raised me with his superhero stories. So if you hate my stories, blame him.

X-Men. Good time at the movies. B

The IT Crowd
British sitcom about two guys who work in an IT department and the woman who works as their manager. Great great GREAT comedy. I'd love it even if I hadn't worked in computer software for all those many years. I don't think it's available in the U.S. yet, but when it does finally air, catch it. A

Here's a clip from YouTube with a couple of scenes from the third episode (warning: some strong language).

I Love Modern Art

From Reuters comes this article - Art gallery loses its head, displays plinth-

One of Britain's most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth -- a slab on which a pedestal is placed -- and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The sculpture itself -- of a human head -- was nowhere to be seen.

Okay. So that's - by any objective viewpoint - HYSTERICAL. But how exactly did this error happen?

The academy explained the error by saying the plinth and the head were sent to the exhibitors separately.

"Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently," it said in a statement. "The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted.

Awesome. I see this as a testament to the inherent humor in life - and the awe-inspiring power of the small bone-shaped wooden stick in reflecting the human condition.

But if you want to see this as a sign of a wee-bit of pretentiousness in modern art, that works too.

My New Diet

I've read that a blog is a good way to keep up a diet, so here's my update on my new diet. I'm on Day Two of the "Get the stomach flu and be unable to eat anything without horrible stomach cramping and fear of impending DEATH" diet.

So far, so good.

I've lost 2 pounds - thanks to not being able to eat much the past two days. Today I got down a bowl of chicken broth and a couple glasses of apple juice. I'm feeling a little better now, which is why I've managed to blog this, after googling every page I could find about "avian flu". With my luck, I'll be the first person in America to start the bird flu plague. I'll be like the host monkey in Outbreak.

As for the diet, I know I know. Most diets are doomed to fail. But at this rate, if I can stick with the "Get the stomach flu and be unable to eat anything without horrible stomach cramping and fear of impending DEATH" diet, I'll be at my ideal weight in 6-8 weeks.

Size 3, here I come!

My Powerbook 1400 Photo Frame

Inspired by various online articles - and other geeks who couldn't just leave something well enough alone - I finally got around to transforming my old Powerbook 1400 into a digital photo frame.

First, I updated the Powerbook to Mac OS 8.6, added a Orinoco WaveLan Silver wireless network card, and connected it to my wireless network. After copying over my favorite digital pictures, I installed Jpegview to handle the slideshows and VNC Server so I could control it remotely. It took me a while to remember how to navigate my way around Mac OS 8, but I got the two apps to autostart and run the slideshow.

Once I was sure it was working, it was time to take it apart. Using the Powerbook 1400 technical guide that I found here, I took the laptop apart and discarded all the case pieces.

Next came the frame. Most people suggest buying a Shadow Box Frame - but I couldn't find a 9"x12" Shadow Box frame anywhere locally. Online, they were going for $50 - so forget that. I bought a 9"x12" frame, and then some balsa wood from Michael's to build a 1.5" deep shadow box.

I had a picture mat cut, glued it to the LCD screen, put it in the 9"x12" frame, and glued the motherboard to the back of the LCD screen. There weren't exactly a lot of contact points to glue a motherboard down, so I ended up using a ton of duct tape to supplement the structure. Then I cut a few holes in the frame - one for the power cord, one for the wireless card, and a couple at the top for cooling.



It doesn't look pretty inside. Fortunately, it looks good on the outside.



The 11.3" active matrix screen looks terrific - even though it only supports 65,000 colors, so there's a little bit of dithering in the photos that's barely noticeable. It took a while to find the old OS 8.6 drivers to get it on the wireless network, but the work was worth it - now copying over new pictures to it is a snap. And the environmentalist tree-hugging hippie in me likes that I've rescued an old laptop and given it a nice new life hanging on my wall above the piano.

I'm geeked about how it turned out. If you have an old laptop sitting around, I totally recommend you try it. It was super easy and the results look great. This page helped me out a lot - Laptop to Digital Picture Frame : Homemade Hack Resources

My next project? To complete that nuclear doomsday toaster that I've... oops, I said too much.

"Why would I put on a hat when my best friend just got blown up?"

I got nothing at the moment. Writing some stuff on spec, having lunch with friends, doing some home improvement projects, and trying to find the inertia to leave the house and go watch X-Men 3.

Oh, and waiting for life to come crashing down on me and crush my hopes and dreams. You know. The usual.

In the meantime, enjoy this American Express commercial directed by Wes Anderson. This is the two minute long version - quite clever.

My My My My MySpace

So a few nights ago, I was joking around with a friend - and we were making fun of another friend's MySpace page (NOTE: If you're reading this and you have a MySpace page.... no, it's not you. It's someone else we were making fun of.) Anyways, we're making fun of the page - and then I click on one of the "Friends Of" links.

The "friend of" turned out to have graduated from the same college as I did. Not in the same year, but clicking on the link brought me the option of searching for every MySpace user who'd graduated from my college in the same year. Curiosity got the better of me - so I started looking for old classmates who graduated with me or the year after me. A few clicks in and wouldn't you know it-

I'm staring at an ex-girlfriend I haven't seen in years. Cue the dramatic "As Time Goes By" music from Casablanca.

From her MySpace page, she's doing good. She's married now, she hopes to someday have children, she loves her mom and dad, she works as a software engineer, and she watches all three C.S.I. shows. She hasn't put on 200lbs of weight around the neck like I have. Like I said, she's doing good.

I hope she's doing good. I mean, I wasn't exactly the best boyfriend in the world to her. In hindsight, back in college, I was pretty immature, selfish, clueless... well, okay, one could make the argument that ALL guys are immature, etc. One could also make the argument that the previous sentence would be more accurate with the words "back in college" stricken from the record.

But in all seriousness, in my situation, I genuinely do feel bad for being such a crappy boyfriend. And I hadn't really thought all that much about it until I saw her MySpace page.

Which brings me to the first observation out of this strange experience.

THE WAY WE WERE

Remember back before the Internet? In movies and tv shows, it'd happen something like this-

INT. SOME PLACE - NOT IMPORTANT

Guy hangs out with his friend(s).  Friend waits for a lull in
the conversation, so he can clear his throat and deliver some
key information.

                    FRIEND
          Oh, don't know if you're
          interested, but I saw your ex
          girlfriend the other day at the LP
          Record Store yesterday.
          
                    GUY
          Really?  My ex?

                    FRIEND
              (acting as if it's no big
               deal)
          Yeah.  She was, you know, looking
          at buying a Bay City Rollers 8
          track or something.          

                    GUY
          Oh wow.  I haven't seen her in
          almost ten years.
              (pause)
          So how'd she-?

                    FRIEND
              (interrupting)
          She looked good.

                    GUY
          Yeah?

                    FRIEND
          Yeah.  She's, you know, older now. 
          But she still looks like herself.

                    GUY
          Did you talk to her?

                    FRIEND
          No.  But she looked like she was
          doing good.

                    GUY
          That's good.  I'm glad she's doing
          good.  She's a good person, you
          know?

                    FRIEND
          Yeah.

                    GUY
          I'm glad she's good.

                    FRIEND
          Yeah.  Good is good.

                    GUY
          Yeah.  Good.  Good.  Good that
          she's good.    
    
Pause.  Friend exhales, then goes back to whatever it was he 
was doing.  Guy pretends he's okay and pretends that this is 
all no big deal - then looks away, tormented. 

See, this is the way it USED to be. But thanks to the Internet - and specifically, MySpace - things are a little different. Instead of hearing someone tell me that they saw my ex? Now I can see EXACTLY how well my ex is doing. And from her page, she's doing good. Which is good.

The thought of emailing her crossed my mind, but it'd probably be a bad idea. Especially since I'm married. Especially since she's married. Also especially because she might still be mad at me for breaking up with her and could break me in half given the chance.

Which brings me to the second part of this whole experience.


HOW TO LIE TO YOUR WIFE ABOUT FINDING YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND'S MYSPACE PAGE

Just kidding.

After I found the MySpace page, I told my wife about it. A friend of mine was shocked that I'd done such a thing. I felt like I had nothing to hide. It wasn't like I was actively seeking out my ex-girlfriend. Anyways, my wife didn't seem to mind. But if I end up dead tomorrow, go ahead and assume this was the motive.

Interestingly enough, my wife had read an article that most men and women have used google to look up old ex-boyfriends and girlfriends and see what they're up to. Wasn't something that had crossed my mind, but sounded like fun, so I did it.

My ex has 554 pages with Google hits - not including her MySpace page. Mostly people with the same name as her - unless she's somehow gone back to high school to play soccer in Wisconsin or is involved in some medical experiments in England.

The first girl I ever kissed? 1,140,000 Google hits. She had a REALLY common name, I guess. One ex-girlfriend of mine brings up 5 Google hits. I still keep in touch with this ex, so I guess I'll have make fun of her lack of Googleness next time I chat with her.

Which brings me to the last part of this whole experience.


YOU NEVER KNOW

When I started this blog, I never expected that so many friends from high school - and even elementary school - would find me and get back in touch with me. It's mind-boggling how the Internet has made things so easy for people to search and connect with each other.

That being said, I can't help but wonder if everyone I've ever wronged, everyone I've ever bugged, everyone who hates my guts is reading this blog right now. Maybe throwing stuff at the computer monitor? Maybe adding my email address to every spam list they can find?

Or worse - maybe they're making fun of me and my page. The way I was making fun of my friend's page last night when this whole thing started.

By the way, if you're reading this and wondering if you should email me just to say hi, please do. I'd love to hear from you. Cause I'm doing good.

And I hope you're doing good, too.