Ever since I was a kid I’ve always enjoyed dropping money into the Salvation Army’s red kettles at Christmas time. Once I vowed that anytime I saw a kettle I would empty my pockets of whatever spare change I had.
Here’s the problem with that policy in the 21st century—I very rarely have spare change in my pocket, or cash in my wallet for that matter. More and more I pay for things with a credit card or some other form of electronic payment.
Last night was a case in point. I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work to pick up some milk and juice. I was planning to use my credit card. But there was the lonely bell ringer standing outside the store—and Scrooge McRooney had nothing to give him.
One year I actually volunteered to ring the bell a couple times. I enjoyed it a lot. I found it to be very fulfilling and I’ve wanted to do it again ever since, but I never seem to find the time. Does that make me a bad person?
Anyway, I’m trying to make up for all of this by hosting an online kettle. You can click on the link on this blog to make a donation.
Merry Christmas. God bless us, everyone.
There are a few simple, constant rules of television: Rachel Ray is always on (she is usually cooking, somewhere, on some channel) and so is the guy who sells "OxyClean" and those new wall hooks that can be used to mount a frozen turkey in your den. A few more rules of television: Dane Cook is on HBO most hours of the day... and when you come across "Pulp Fiction" while channel surfing, it's usually at the point in the film just before the twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim's.
We toured the museum and then listened to the story of the Berlin “Candy Bomber.” It’s the tale of a U.S. pilot who dropped candy tied to parachutes made of handkerchiefs to children below during the Berlin airlift in 1948.
I'm pretty psyched about Andy Pettitte coming back to the Yankees. They never should have let him go in the first place.
If you're a small child, can you imagine anything more frightening, more terrifying than...SATNA CLAUS?!?
I found this photo of reports from various Washington commissions on The Daily Nightly.
Scientists have theorized that there may have been water on Mars millions of years ago--maybe billions of years ago.As a Black man I’m all in favor of people of all colors using the n word all they want, but I’m also in favor of people beating the piss out of non-blacks who use the word poorly, as in the case of Kramer.
To me the n word is like lsd, semi-automatic weapons, and unprotected sex. In the wrong hands and in the wrong situations it could be a bad trip. But when used properly it can be a positive, life changing tool.
We took the kids to see the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Holiday Train when it rolled into Saratoga Springs today.
Santa Claus was also on hand. The kids got to have their picture taken with him and told him what they want for Christmas, and he gave each of them a nifty train whistle.
If you have a kid under the age of 6 in your house, then you’re all-too-familiar with the Wiggles.
"Dave saw the movie and he cried -- not because he was bitter," family friend Clifford Meth said. "He cried because his characters were on screen and they were living."There is a nice tribute to Cockrum on the Marvel Comics site.
Here are some thoughts on last night's episode of "Heroes"..."As God as my witness, I thought turkey's could fly."
Yesterday was the “First Grade Feast” at Nolan's school. All of the first graders dressed as pilgrims and Indians and sat down in the hallway to have lunch together.
This little NBC promotional item was passed on to me today. It’s my very own set of official “Save the Cheerleader…Save the World” pom-poms.
After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.
No services are planned.
The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.
VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.
Major League Baseball owners approved television contracts today. The bad news is, the World Series will remain exclusively on Fox through 2013.
The good news is Fox will no longer have exclusive rights to the ALCS and NLCS. They’ll start sharing those series with TBS under the same system they used to have with NBC. Fox will have the ALCS next year, TBS gets the NLCS. Then the following year they’ll switch.
I don’t know if TBS will be any good or not, but at least it will be nice to have an alternative to Fox.
The ESPN article doesn’t make any mention of the Divisional Series. Right now ESPN gets some of those. I believe that’s part of a separate deal that’s still continuing.
If you watch “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” you might be surprised to learn that the dusty little town of Pahrump, Nevada—where Nate Cordry’s character got arrested and hauled before a gruff judge played by John Goodman—is actually a real place. It’s a town of about 40,000 residents west of Las Vegas.
I’m pretty excited to find out one of my favorite books is being made into a movie. The lengthy title of the book is “Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II.” I suspect they’ll shrink that title down for the movie.
Well, Sony seems to have successfully exorcised that unfinished "Spider-Man 3" trailer from the Web. I can't find it anywhere.
This was a very big day for Nolan—one we’ve all been anticipating for quite some time: he lost his first tooth!
The geek-ization of the boys continues…
Is “Heroes” helping or hurting the comic book biz? That’s the question Entertainment Weekly poses in an excellent article that looks at the relationship between Hollywood and the comic book industry.
I got this toy for Christmas in 1978! He had a "web" you could pull out of his hand and hook onto a clamp that you'd attach to a table or bookshelf or whatever. Then watch him climb!"Tomorrow, you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax and spend Democrats take all your hard earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!" -- Stephen Colbert, a national treasure, on last night's Colbert Report.
Hey, "Heroes" fans...I spotted this T-shirt for sale on Television Without Pity.
The people's sentiment is crystal-clear on the war. They simply want out of the conflict - if there is a way to get out. But there isn't...
...But the bring-the-troops-home-now bunch has largely been marginalized; reasonable souls understand full well that this war, however disagreeable it is - and it sure is - cannot just be walked away from. For now, the anti-war fervor of this newly reconstituted Congress runs smack into the ugly reality that giving up the fight in Iraq will leave behind only catastrophe.
Which means soldiering on with a President, now decidedly lacking in political capital, while hoping for the best.
We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the day news of the Iran-Contra scandal broke--Nov. 4, 1986.The scandal also resonates now in ways that couldn’t be imagined back then. Today, the Lebanese magazine that broke the story would be online. Experts and journalists with responsibility for the region —- not to mention bloggers -- would have found it almost immediately and pushed it out a lot quicker. And what few recall is that the scandal unfolded in large measure because of the White House’s nascent e-mail system, a prototype electronic mail system from IBM called the Professional Office System (PROFs). As North and countless others have learned since, e-mail leaves a long digital tail that lives on even after being deleted.
I meant to blog about this yesterday, but alas, I got too busy.“[The] first gunner lighted the fuse … fearsome enough to be heard by the next, unseen, gunner down the line because it seemed as if the echoing boom from the northeast came so quickly as to step on the lingering reverberations of the first roar … it rolled through the country of the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Oneidas, and the Tuscaroras … moved east, through the Niagara Country, the Genesee Country, the Montezuma swampland, through the Mohawk Valley, past the Catskills, and down the Hudson… It took the cannon telegraph relay only one hour and twenty minutes to reach the island of Manhattan and deposit its historic word before turning about for the return relay to Buffalo.”Telecommunications sure have come a long way.
That M&M's game I blogged about before has a timer built into it, so you can tell how much time you've cumulatively wasted between saves. At the 1 hour mark, I've figured out 45 of the 50 movies."Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps... I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite, like I kind of like to look at the ranch... reminds me of where I want to be sometimes."
NBC's “Heroes” is easily my favorite show on TV right now. I so look forward to sitting down in front of the TV every Monday night and satisfying my inner comic book geek.
You've got to check out the cool "Treehouse of Horror XVII" promotion over at thesimpsons.com.
We had a fantastic time at the Tiger Cub Fun Day yesterday at Camp Boyhaven. There were all sorts of great activities for the boys to take part in.
[House Speaker Dennis] Hastert and [House Majority Leader John] Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount.
Tomorrow Kris and I will celebrate 11 years of wedded bliss. We’re marking the occasion one day early tonight by taking in the Blue Man Group’s “How to be a Megastar 2.0 Tour.”FoxNews is 10 years old this week. This year, Al Jazeera turns 10. So did The Daily Show. All that the three have in common, besides birthdays, is that they brought new voices to TV news: no longer the allegedly objective, cold, institutional tone that journalism took on when it became a monopoly, one-size-fits-all business in this country, thanks to the impact of broadcast on the media marketplace. These fraternal triplets each brought perspective to news, a distinct and clearly apparent worldview, and a passion about serving a public that each believed was underserved.
In a recent interview George Lucas said "Indiana Jones 4" is still in development, but not exactly on the horizon. He says he and Steven Spielberg are still trying to come up with something everyone in involved can agree on.
I only shot stills this time. I'll try to grab some video at a future game. If you want video, you'll have to go back to the clip from last year with the crazy father completely overreacting to his son's goal.
Google is slowly taking over my life. As you can see, I use Blogger (a Google product) to run this site. I use Gmail for my primary, non-work e-mail. I keep track of my schedule on Google Calendar. I have a Google personalized homepage. And I'm completely addicted to keeping track of all of my feeds on Google Reader.
Am I the only geek that finds it ironic that there is a news piece about Japanese scientists creating a "power suit" that augments someone's strength on the same day the news breaks that Robert Downey Jr. will star in the new "Iron Man" movie?
“I am just upset that I just feel they take advantage of Terrell,” she said. “Had this been someone else, this may not have happened.”
“The officers reacted because they were called to this location to do this job. Now they're being put under a microscope by some fancy little football person,” Senior Cpl. Glenn White said. “Give me a break. Those officers are 10 times better than this man. ... We police officers don't go out to these calls and make stuff up.”
Japanese golfer has rough time, shoots 19 on par-3 hole
"Superstitious or not, Japanese golfer Mitsuhiro Tateyama is likely to shudder whenever he comes across the number 19 in future after an horrific round Thursday at the Acom International."
I cannot believe it's been 10 years since "Tickle Me Elmo" first hit the shelves.
Posts
All Comments
