happy holidays – see you after the first of the year…

christmas and the holiday season aren’t that big a deal to me. but i recognize they are for most other people. which is why i’m always astonished how many people can’t hold off being dickish until the new year.

happy holidays to you too.

along with death and taxes, you can add eclipse becoming useless after upgrading online to the list of things that are unavoidable.

prostitution is illegal, pornography is not.

both industries have problems with coercion but otherwise involve consenting adults getting naked, making some whoopee and then trading a bit of money.

with prostitution, you slink off quietly and only you and your mate are the wiser. unless of course you were unfortunate enough to have the paparazzi or police following you, but thats a different story…

with pornography you capture the whole affair on film and anyone with $19.95 (or $14.95 if they subscribe for three months or more) gets to enjoy you and your mate getting it on, for all of time. just ask anyone who got famous after a dubious start in adult magazine or film.

so the societal take away here from pornography being legal and prostitution not is this. you can trade money for getting your nasty on with someone else, but only if your willing to share the footage with all the rest of us.

ethan watched and laughed as his sister played without jumping in once to change the game to suit his taste. he sat through dinner at the table talking to us with no shouting. he even walked from place to place where typically he would bound and scream when moving about.

i’d say our boy is growing up but the one hundred and two degree fever is a more likely cause.

and while our poor son suffers we revel at the peek we get in to the life of having a more placid son.

its nice having the windows open in december. it seems so wrong since everything i know about seasons say its winter in december especially since i’ve mostly lived in the northern half of the united states.

its even nicer that the windows are open without screens and there has been no bug problems. everything i know about living on earth contradicts that possibility…

i think t.i. and o.j. and michael vick taught me one thing. people with shit to lose can not hang out with mother fuckers who don’t got shit to lose. because people who don’t got shit to lose will lose your shit for you.

- d.l. hughley, comedy central last laugh 2007

i haven’t spent a day at either, but both preschools ethan has attended were highly regarded.

the preschool in the united states he was mixed on, the preschool here he loves.

there are a number of theories on why this may be, but my favorite is that we separated him from any playmates his own age for two and a half months. the first time he had more than one other kid around his own age was when he started preschool here.

deprivation always has a way of increasing appreciation.

you can tell we didn’t bring many clothes to new zealand as you flip through the family galleries because everyone is always in one of three outfits…

my wife doesn’t read this site very often. she complains that she doesn’t know what i’m talking about.

it makes we wonder if the person i’m living with has no idea what i’m talking about if anyone else bothering to stop by does…

if you do, hook me up and send my wife an email with an explanation.

when espn posted this, the fourth quarter of the dallas v. detroit game had just started. the point spread was less than a touchdown and the patriot v. steeler’s game was more than an hour away. what trend are we talking about here?

i see an annoying trend. in place of investigative and fact based reporting the u.s. news media has become a collection of empty headed fashion models spewing conjecture and attempting to create drama where none exists. granted an argument could be made that espn is as much about entertainment as sport news but this headline seemed somehow so typical of the garbage that has taken the place of valuable, objective news coverage (especially since anyone who knows anything about sports at the time this was printed would have still been betting on dallas and the patriots to win).

i used to wonder how half the american voting public could hand the most prosperous country in the world to an incompetent, egomaniacal, man child who didn’t even bother to thank them for their assistance in completing his silver spoon collection. now i think they’re simply a bunch of apathetic, ill-informed sheep who can’t take their eyes off the shiny sixty-inch flat screen long enough to see there is a much better show right outside their windows. the end of the u.s. empire.

and what a pompous lead in – “while the world awaits”. are you kidding me. the entire north american continent doesn’t even make up 5% of the worlds population and i’m pretty certain there were exponentially more people awaiting a good meal than the outcome of this eventual dud of a contest.

don’t mistake this as a criticism of espn. i’m much more worried why no one cares that the cia destroyed detainee interrogation tapes (against congressional and legal council) and the congress approves tax cuts by adjusting the alternative minimum tax without increasing revenues elsewhere or cutting programs all the while burning $177 million a day on the lie in iraq. and these were just two of the atrocities visited upon us this week by our elected “representatives”.

but its hard to blame the fox for raiding the hen house and my real dismay is with the soft and over entertained masses who don’t seem to realize all thats being taken away.

the gentle slide in to old age and my resemblance to melvin udall from as good as it gets is turning in to a free fall and i expect its possible i’ll stop leaving the house by next christmas.

its even odds on ‘next christmas’ being christmas 2007 or 2008…