I Like This Guy!

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/macomber200509200820.asp

Ahoy, Mateys!

It turns out that today is National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Shiver me timbers if I'll miss it! So, avast, ye landlubbers, and get busy saying "Arrrrrrrrr," or it's the plank for ye!

Baseball Weekend

It's official. This weekend at the Red Sox-Orioles game to be played at Camden Yards, we (Tom, Cassie, Caleb and Luke? Aurora? Caleb's friend Ann? a fourth person not yet known?) will be sitting FIVE ROWS behind home plate, a little to the first base side. Watch for us on TV.

Wanna take a trip?

Now is your chance to bid on EBay for "the ultimate hippie vacation," an adventure trip to who-knows-where in the bus shown above. (If you go to the link, scroll up the page -- for some reason, the link makes it open to the bottom.) Of course, there are a couple of minor drawbacks: you will be expected to sell tie-dyed t-shirts for food and gas money, and the brother-in-law shown in the picture comes with the vacation package as driver. From the information on the auction site, he seems to be, perhaps, a mite unpredictable. But that's what adventures are for!

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to align the pictures and write things next to them. But you guys all know what these are. Wakefield and Mirabelli coming to the bullpen. (Amid huge excitement from the fan. That was the first sign that the game was going to go on. ) Then the blurry one is Wakefield jogging. Kendra and I soaked but really happy. I have some other pictures of people up at bat, but they are very small. We had a really good time. The game was delayed for an hour, so we had to leave before the end of the game. (The garage we parked in closed the doors at midnight.) I think we were in the rowdy section. There was a huge fight and these two guys were taken away bleeding in handcuffs. I saw one of their girlfriends punch a cop. It was crazy. Someone else was taken away in the 8th inning for um...dropping his pants. Luckly, I missed that. We had really nice seats with a perfect view of the field. We were really close to Johnny Damon and Kevin Millar. A really great experience. We got home at 6 am and crawled into bed. The drive home wasn't as bad as we thought. We all got our own nap time of 2 hours and split up the driving. Once Chris puts his pictures on the internet, I'll steal them. He took much better pictures than I did. It was fabuuuulous.

Chris fell asleep. I put my bear on him. hehe.

I'm not sure what the point of the sign is. It was the only thing I could take pictures of when we went under during the delay.

The Sierra Club wants YOU

to conserve. Not them. It is, after all, a personal choice.

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003562.htm

Whatta buncha wankers.

Panda goes canoeing

Today was a beautiful day for a paddle up the Chenango from the bridge at the Rogers Center until we reached shallow water, and then back downriver again. All was peaceful on the river.

Wait. Is that an alligator, over by the riverbank?

No, it's Panda! He was up to his old tricks of standing in the canoe panting and whimpering to be allowed to jump into the water, and then, once in the water, paddling determinedly into the deepest water and then panting and whimpering because it scares him to be so far from land. But he does look happy here:

The mighty canine swimmer shows the canoeists the proper path:

We saw kingfishers, herons, and another fishing bird we couldn't identify, but we confess that we were somewhat mystified by the example below of river-zone wildlife. Found on a rocky island in mid-stream, this critter does not show up in any of our natural history guidebooks. Although we observed its behavior for some time in hopes of finding some clues to its identification, it did not seem to be very active. Fortunately, it had no apparent fear of humans, nor of dogs, so I was able to sneak up close enough to take a picture without spooking it back into the wild. Any ideas on identification from knowledgeable natural historians out there would be welcome.

The song that Flight of the Conchords used to stop racism in New Zealand ( it was really bad before they started singing this song)

In the marmalade forest,
between the make-believe trees,
in a cottage-cheese cottage,
lives Albie, the racist dragon.

Part 6

And so, all the villagers chased Albie the racist dragon
into a very cold, very scary cave.
And it was so cold and scary in the cave that Albie began to cry dragon tears
which, as everyone knows, turn into jelly beans.

Anyway, at that moment, he felt a tiny little hand rest upon his tail.
He turned around and who did that hand belong to but
the badly burned Albanian boy, from the day before.
"What are you doing here?
I thought I killed you yesterday."
Albie grumbled quite racistly.

"No Albie, you didn't kill me with your dragon flames.
I crawled to safety.
But you left me very badly disfigured."
Laughed the boy.

"Why are you crying so?"
"I'm crying because those horrible villagers chased me into this cave.
I think it's because I'm so racist.
Get your hand off my tail.
You'll make it dirty.'

"No Albie, it's not because of your racism that they chased you here.
They chased me here, too, when I became all disfigured like this.
They just don't like you and I,
because, well, because we're different to them."

And that made Albie cry a single tear
which turned into all the colors of the rainbow.
And, suddenly, he wasn't racist anymore.

So they sat in the cave
and ate bubblegum pie (Yum!)
Albie, the racist, well, not anymore, dragon.



Copyrighted by Flight of the Conchords, I'm sure.

How much oil?

One of Luke's teachers, who proclaims himself a socialist, sez the pessimists think the oil will run out in 10 years and the optimists think it will be twenty. He must talk to different optimists and pessimists than I talk to. The pessimists actually think the oil will run out in the 1980s. The optimists think it will never run out. Maybe I can get him to bet with me.