Whoever invented button-fly jeans should be shot!

Um ... not sure what else to say, since the title sort of covers it.

Last Summer I ordered a pair of these from Amazon.com.  I unfortunately can't blame Amazon since I neglected to bother with their fine print, and I had just plain forgotten that 501s have a button-fly.  So I got them, wore them, and immediately regretted buying them.  But didn't feel like returning them.  I do think they show off my butt real good though.

Problem is ... normally taking a pee, as a guy, is simple.  Walk up, unzip, do my business, and rezip.  However having a button-fly brings that effort to an entirely new level.  No longer can I simply just unzip when I wear these things.  I have to wrangle and wriggle around so they I can unbutton 5---yes 5--- buttons on my crotch.  And if I really have to pee, well, it's just that much worse.  Then, and only then, will my god-foresaken pants allow me to relieve myself.  And then afterward I have to reverse that, buttoning all 5 back up.

Oh what a pain it can be to be a guy!

Is Christmas green?

It sure as hell is red and green, but it sure as hell isn't green.  But let me begin with an "I don't do Xmas" disclaimer.  But oughtn't that be obvious? (and is that the correct usage of the word oughtn't?) (and isn't oughtn't a wordicle?)  Yeah, we're Jewish and we don't even do that.  So we sure as hell don't do Xmas.  And this time of year (say ... mid-October through the New Year) is irritating as hell, because everyone continuously tries to cram the red and green crap down my throat, over and over again, 24 hours a day, in pretty much the same way that we just cannot escape the ridiculous political garbage come every election season (on TV, on the radio, on sight-nauseating billboards along every road ... vote for this person ... no, vote for that person ...).  But anyway ...

So for whatever reason this morning, as I was sitting down doing my daily "business", the thought of whether or not Xmas is green popped into my head.  And I immediately said to myself, "No."

Why?  Isn't it immediately apparent?  Think of what people do during the holiday season every year:

Finally someone else gets it ...

Well, almost.  Let me explain:

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal a guy named Matt Ridley wrote an article titled "Who to Blame for Natural Disasters".  Ultimately he basically says that if prosperity, the big key word in his article, were to spread throughout the entire world, as it has not yet done, most people who currently die from natural disasters would instead end up alive.  Says he:

In short, prosperity buys survival. (The shocking thing about Hurricane Katrina was not that it killed so many people but that it did so in such a prosperous country.) ...

... Suppose world per-capita income were to octuple in the next 90 years, as it did, roughly, in the last 90. So long as countries like Haiti get their share of this prosperity, we can expect most of the world to become as nearly disaster-proof as the rich West is today: through building standards, warning systems, health and emergency services, and technology.

This, he says, is borne out by the actual statistics of wealth and technology over the last almost-century.  But this is not what I am interested in ... that in which I am interested??  Whatever ...

I am interested much more in his opening paragraph:

Disney vs. Holiday Inn

A few weeks ago we went to Disney World.  It wasn't our first time.  And our room (suite) was huge, as it always is, this time with 2 bedrooms and 3 full bathrooms.

A couple of weeks ago we went to Hersheypark.  Fun time.  As Hersheypark is a couple-hour drive from home, we decided to spend the night at a local hotel.  I booked us a nice room at a local Holiday Inn.  They gave us a non-smoking room with a king bed.  We had brought the kid's sleeping bags so they would sleep on the floor.

I got the key from the front desk and we all grabbed our luggage and went to the room.  I opened the door and we walked in.  Li'l D, my son of 6 years, walked in, took a quick look around, and said

"One room?"

I chuckled, realizing that my kids need to get out more ...

Disney World vs. Hersheypark

Living on the east coast, we have access to both the largest of the Disney properties, a place known as Disney World, and Hersheypark.  For those not in the know, Hersheypark is a relatively huge amusement park located in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that is owned by the Hershey company, the one that makes all of the chocolate.  We went to Hersheypark a couple of weekends ago for the day.  Unfortunately for us, it was a bit more anticlimactic than it might otherwise have been, as we had just a week before spent the week at Disney World.  Bottom line is that it just don't get better than Disney World.  Everything from the customer experience to the atmosphere to the ambiance (note to self: look up that word ...) to the customer service (remember my recent post).

My daughter's second theme song

The other day Li'l A, 4 years old, was playing around in our family room when my wife and I suddenly heard

Mamma Mia
Here I go again ...

I asked "Where did you hear that song?"  Li'l A responded "My friend at school!" (she has a lot of friends at school).  I ran out of the room and came back a minute later.  My wife, smirking, said "You have that song on CD, don't you?"  "Of course I do" said I.  It is the last song on CD #3 of my ABBA's Greatest Hits collection, purchased somewhere in downtown London in the very early 1990s.  And, yes, I admit that.

I put the CD in the player in our kitchen and told Li'l A to stop and listen.  When the chorus came around, she had a huge smile on her face. And we've been singing that song ever since.

Another plus: I have a second theme song for my daughter.  Here is my blog for the first.

For those who are pop culture-inept, here's the video:

Disney comes through again!

We are Disney freaks.  We'd had a few very successful and enjoyable trips to Disney World, both with and without kids.  We had bought some Disney stock (DIS).  I had bought some Marvel Entertainment (MVL) stock a long time ago and last year Disney decided to buy the whole company, giving me a nice ten-fold increase on my original investment.  We now own a bigger buttload (relative term ...) of Disney stock.  We have some friends who are even more avid Disney freaks than we are, and at their urging/hounding/incessant suggestions, we joined the Disney Vacation Club, just like them.  It ain't cheap, but we get top notch somewhat pre-paid vacations in incredible lodgings and second-to-none customer service for the next 50 years.

We just went to WDW last week for our second annual family trip.  We stayed at Kidani Village at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge.  Our two bedroom suite had three full bathrooms.  When we opened the curtains and went out on our deck we saw (mostly) a very nice replica of African wilderness.  Between our room view and those of the surrounding hallways and such, we saw zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, warthogs, okapi (looks like a Dr. Seuss rendition of a combination of a donkey, horse and zebra), nyala (look sort of like striped deer), storks, cranes, vultures, and numerous other birds.  It was wonderful.

Why don't we care about our pants?

It's raining today.  Raining hard.  We're s'posed to get ... I don't know ... several feet of rain in just a few hours.  OK, a few inches anyway.  So I came to work this morning and had grabbed only my keys, wallet, phone, and umbrella.  Parked the car.  Made sure to stow away my keys and wallet in my pockets, leaving both hands free (unusual, since I usually carry lunch, a book or two, and who-knows-what-else), grabbed my umbrella, got out of the car and locked it.  Began walking toward my building, rain coming down fast and from everywhere (mostly above).  And then a thought came to me that I have thunk (a wordicle!) quite a bit about:

I'm doing my damndest to cover my topside--head, shirt, arms--but evidently, aside from doing my best to dodge puddles, I don't care how wet my pants get from the rain.

Why is that?

"I don't get what you're saying"

OK, so it's been a while.  But my son, Li'l D, said something to me the other day that was just so mature, it stopped me in my tracks.

Li'l D is six.  OK ... six and a half.  He and I were playing with his marble game, one of those (very high quality and therefore pretty expensive) marble run sets where you set up lots of tall sculptures with tracks and holes and whirligigs and such, and then drop lots of marbles down the chute and watch them go.  It was fun.  He had built a large one on his own in the basement, and then I came over and for an hour he and I made bunches of improvements, many of which necessitated some very intricate and precise movements as we shifted pieces around, carefully working together so as to not wreck the entire thing by making it plummet to earth.  After we were done with the bulk of the rebuild, and after 5-10 minutes of him dumping hundreds upon hundreds of marbles down the chute (which is pretty loud---try dropping hundreds of glass marbles onto a piece of 3/4" thick plywood and see how long you last ...), I was studying the few pieces we had left and realized that we could indeed use them all with two more minor mods.  So I stopped the cacophony of marbles and said to him, "If we move this one over here and then shift these pieces to there and then place those on top of this and then ..."  It was then that he said, very plainly and simply:

"Daddy, I don't get what you are saying."

Very subtle, but for a six year old, I think this is absolutely amazing.  He literally stopped me in my tracks.  I sat there for a few seconds collecting myself.  I then told him that that was an incredibly grown-up thing he did.  Rather than just sit there and hear what I was saying and pretend to understand, he really wanted to fully follow what I was saying, know the details of the plan and be part of it.  He had to admit to himself (though this wasn't a conscious decision) that he didn't understand what I was saying and that he'd have to tell me so.  I was incredibly proud of him.  And I told him so several times afterward.  I also continued explaining my plan, but in a much slower and simpler manner.

Books: "The Sydeian Coalition"

Steampunk book number two complete.  The first one I read, The Difference Engine, is considered to be a steampunk classic and I could really see why.

This one?  Not so much ...

The Sydeian Coalition is ... fun.  It did hold my interest.  But most of the time I got the feeling that I was reading a novel that was due as a term paper by some eleventh grader.  No ... an eighth grader.  Grammar, punctuation, spelling, proper word usage, etc., etc., all were pretty much thrown out the window in this one.  However, there may be one small saving grace here in that maybe, just maybe, that was all done intentionally.  Y'see, this book was written in the form of diary or journal extracts by the two fictional (I assume ...) main characters.