Entries Tagged 'Family' ↓

One morning this past weekend I'm down one end of the hall making a bed. I hear my wife, at the other end of the hall in our bedroom yell, "Are you out there?"

"Yes," I replied, heading back her way.

"He's coming to get you," she said, referring to my son who I notice is crawling down the hallway in my direction.

So I immediately did what any geek dad would do, I dropped down onto the floor so my face was even with his and said in my best Sylvester Stallone growl, "Murdock….I'm coming to get you!"

Pause.

Silence.

"Aw come on! Rambo II? Anybody?" I then went about explaining to Kerry the whole scene in Rambo II where he's been sent over to the enemy and he's there in the radio room, surrounded by bad guys, talking to the "good" guy who sent him over there in the first place. "Just tell us where you are," says Murdock [the supposed good guy], "And we'll come get you."

"Murdock," Rambo says, tightening his grip on the microphone that's about to become a weapon, "…I'm coming to get you!" And then in true Rambo style he kills all the bad guys, and then of course goes back home to give Murdock what's coming to him. Classic.

Kerry waits for me to finish and says, "You like that kind of movie?" and goes downstairs with the kids.

Well….no, I don't *like* that kind of movie. I actually find that kind of movie relatively stupid. But it is a very *quotable* movie, and that's not the same thing at all. I mean, dear god, Predator is not a good movie, but it might be the greatest, most quotable guy movie ever made. Right up there with Die Hard. Why did I have to have daughters first? How many years before I can watch movies like that with my son?

I've been seeing the commercials for "National Bingo Night" for awhile. This is the one with the Indian man in the referee's outfit yelling "No bingo!" The latest crop of game shows (1 vs 100, Identity, etc…) have failed to really catch fire, so I've been hoping for one that would be fun to actually get behind and enjoy. The question, of course, was going to be "How do you play competitive Bingo? Isn't it just random numbers?"

Well, here's how you play it. You get a contestant (more on that in a minute) and have him play a random number game. One of the games was "Guess red or black", one was "Try to get numbers with 5's in them", and one was "Try to eliminate the digits 1-9". In each case all the contestant does is press the button to serve up a bingo ball.

The catch is that the audience is, in fact, the ones playing Bingo. So the idea is that the contestant has to win their game before anybody gets bingo. Interesting, actually. The longer the game goes on, the better the chance of someone getting bingo. As people get "one away" from Bingo, they stand up, so the contestant feels that much more pressure.

What's fun is that you can play at home, and not online like a bunch of other lame games. Here you actually print out bingo cards, each of which has its own unique identifier. So if you win you can punch the number back in and claim a prize. Sure the prizes are lame (like movie tickets or a $5 KMart coupon), but hey, it's a reason to get into it. You can print a bunch of cards and everybody can play.

Now, back to the contestants. Like all television game shows, the contestants are just crazy annoying. Where do they get these people that have no problem making complete fools of themselves, jumping up and down and screaming crazy things? It's the most annoying part of the show. Basically I tivo'd the whole thing and fast forwarded through the contestant parts to get to the actual number drawing.

I didn't win anything. Oh well, there's always next week.

Update: Hooray, I'm famous – BoingBoing.net used my link :). Well, acknowledged that I pointed out the video link. Close enough :).

When I first heard about this in passing I didn't think much of it. I didn't realize that there is video. This is the incident you may have heard of where a small boy climbed under the ropes in a Kansas train station and danced all over a Buddhist sand mandala that they had been working on for days. The video shows the entire event, and I have to admit that I did look at the progress bar to see when it would mercifully be over.

Perhaps the most annoying part is not the child – I mean, come on, he's maybe 2 years old? — it's the mother. Not only does she leave the child completely out of her site for close to 2 minutes (in a train station?!), but when she finally comes to collect him, she never even stops to look at the damage he's caused, and makes no effort to make amends or even to acknowledge fault. She just walks away. Not sure whether to call her a bad mother or just a bad person in general.

Wherever you are, lady, I hope you get reincarnated as a centipede. And I stole that joke from NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me.

The best part of the story, of course, is the quote from the monks who simply said, "No problem" and started over.

Last night there was an "ice cream social" event for preschool. I took the kids, Kerry stayed home.

At one point when they were getting a little too wound up, this came out of my mouth:

"Listen, I didn't take you out here just to have you scream. I took you here, well, to have ice cream."

Get it? you scream? ice cream? Ah, ferget it.

I'm sure I'll never get to meet the Dalai Lama, but I continue to be fascinated by stories of people who have. Rick Ray made a movie about the experience ("10 Questions With The Dalai Lama") which looks like it could be neat. Through a bizarre set of serendipitous occurrences he was granted an audience with His Holiness. He was given 90 days and told to prepare 10 questions, and that he would have at most 1 hour with him. The Dalai Lama, apparently, has a habit of cutting interviews short if he feels that the questions are "insincere." (Comments like that bother me, because they make him sound like he's not a nice guy.) Luckily for Rick the interview goes quite well, over an hour as a matter of fact. His description of how the room changes with the Dalai Lama enters it is quite enjoyable. You can see, from his explanation, that someone would indeed have to be pretty insincere to deserve a snubbing from the man.

Ray's movie is a tiny little independent thing so I don't expect it to come from the local cinema anytime soon. I'll have to keep an eye out for it on DVD.

Update: Thanks very much the anonymous commenter who provided the URL of the movie, which contains a trailer. Looks interesting, although I fear that the questions are the same questions that are always asked ("Does tolerance work? Will there be peace in the Middle East?") As I read more news stories coming out of Australia that are pro-China, I am wondering about some of the historical comments. Was there really torture and slavery used in Tibet until China showed up? Does the Dalai Lama get a paycheck from our CIA to fund attacks on China? On the one hand I would like to laugh those things off, but it would be nice to get answers to the questions from both sides.

"Daddy, who do we pray to?"

"We pray to God, sweetie."

"Oh. How does he wear his hair?"

That's what I get for singing her to sleep with the lyrics to HAIR:

My hair like Jesus wore it, hallelujah I adore it!

Just something for 7am on a Monday morning:

"I love you, Mommy."

    "I love you too, sweetheart."

"I can't dance."

She's not quite 3 yet. How old are they before they learn what "non sequitur" means?

Elizabeth gets up with the sunrise. Katherine needs a small explosive set off in her room. We try to let her wake up on her own, but on a school day there comes a point of no return where I have to go wake her up if she's going to make it out the door. So this morning I come in to her room, turn the lights on, open the shades and say, "Wake up, sweetie. School today."

Zombie-like, she sits up and begins rubbing her eyes. "Daddy?" she says in a very quiet, sleepy voice. "Do you think maybe when you come in to wake me up you could just turn on the light a little bit, at first?"

That's one of those moments where you future flashes before your eyes, and I can picture her at about 13 pulling the pillow over her head and mumbling "5 more minutes!!"

Nope, not something I wrote, something I'm linking to. Perhaps even more interesting than the article itself is the political correctness battle being waged in the comments. How DARE he say that dad should help out mom, what's he from the 1950's? Doesn't he know that all households require that both parents share all housework equally at all times? And god help him for saying that when Dad has the kids it's "babysitting". Duck, man, duck!

The list, though, is a good one and worth reading. People say "obvious", but as a general rule, people *always* say that whenever somebody makes a list.

If I had to add one it would be, "If you want a job for your children done right, do it yourself." I painted both my daughters' bedrooms, as well as the footstools they use to climb into bed (my dad made the stools themselves). I could have bought something, or hired someone. I didn't. Not because I'm cheap, and certainly not because I like to paint. And by "right" I don't mean that the quality of my paint job was better than a professional. I mean that these were things for my children, and I did them myself rather than throwing some money at the problem and having a stranger do it. Maybe it's a silly little thing, but it's important to me because I think it's important to them.

This weekend we got the kids to a carnival that included a magic show. During the show the magician pulled up a little boy on stage who clearly didn't want to be there, and then proceeded to put a pigeon on his head. Pigeon proceeds to go to the bathroom on the boy's head. Later they bring out a giant bunny rabbit, and before the boy can reach out to pet him, the rabbit pees all over the boy. Kid's having a tough day.

Later in car ride home:

"Daddy, wasn't it funny when the bunny peed on the boy?"

"It was funny. And when he got pooped on, too."

[pause] "I think it was pee, Daddy."

"Right, but remember the pigeon? The pigeon pooped on him."

[much longer pause, so much so that I think we're on to a new topic] "Daddy?"

"Yes sweetie?"

"I know that sometimes my brain forgets things, but I'm pretty sure it was a bunny."