This past week was all about the cost of things. The cost of health. The cost of luxury. The cost of living. Fortunately, for all its annoyances, it wasn’t such a big deal. When counting what you’ve paid, it’s always good to be mindful of what you’ve received in return.

A 4-minute time-lapse video of the drive from L.A. to New York City.

Pointed out to me by Steve 'I'm so buff from working out my last name should be Maniel' Laniel.

Whoever thought that COBRA was a good name for health insurance was probably the same person who thought up the phrase Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act in order to make it work.

Also, clearly not a child in the 80s.

Don’t get me started on those things.

(This post is a bit of an homage to Jessica Hagy's Indexed. If I’ve inadvertently duplicated an idea she’s already done, then it is only because she’s, like, way smarter than I am. You should visit her site. Start at the first post and work your way forward to get the full effect of this brilliant site.)

I forgot my camera this morning, so in lieu of the cool shots of the passing scenery from the train that I had planned on taking, I give you me at 8:12 AM (conveniently noted in the corner), as taken by my laptop camera. I’d love to say that my concerned look is a sign of my disappointment with myself, but I apparently have a permanently furrowed brow. I guess I furrow a lot. You can’t un-furrow, so I think I need to start planning my life as either one of those concerned citizens you keep hearing about, or a curmudgeon.

In spite of Current Config going blank, I am still here. Expect some holiday bloggery when I have a bit more free time.

In the meantime, go visit Indexed, a great little web... comic... blog... infographic.... just go look, it is fantastic and Jessica Hagy deserves our attention and support.

I’m a big fan of Halloween, and now that we own a house in a neighborhood full of kids, I can fully indulge in my love of the holiday. This year, our treats on offer were: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (full size), Snickers, Milky Ways, Nerds, Laffy Taffy, Bottle Caps, Runts, gummy body parts, and skull and spider rings. I like to think we make a good showing, particularly by allowing two selections. No need to be stingy.

My sister-in-law, who helped us hand out candy to all of the trick-or-treaters this year, made an interesting observation at the end of the night. Whenever someone sees Nerds, they will, seemingly without fail and not even necessarily with any overt emotion, say “Nerds.”

I stood at the coffee pot this morning, noticing our coffee grounds canister was low, so I reached up in to the cabinet to dump out more from the bags. As I brought them down, I realized suddenly why I’ve been so groggy after my morning coffee and why my weekend pre-coffee headache hadn’t subsided as it normally does.

Somehow, I neglected to buy any caffeinated coffee and have been blending two types of decaf beans into a distinct brew of...decaffeinated coffee.

Where’s my Nobel Prize? Where is it? I am leading the human race forward here, people.

Yesterday during an IM conversation about United Airlines shutdown with my friend Steve, I wondered aloud if the reason why legacy carriers are so terrible at managing the actual experience of commercial flight is because all of their tasks break down into two categories:

1) Things that can kill hundreds of people.

2) Things that won’t.

I could see a lot of office conversations at UAL going something like this:

Sir, people don’t like the food or the leg room on our planes. They also don’t like losing their luggage 25% of the time.

I’M KEEPING PEOPLE FROM TURNING INTO PULLED PORK IN AN INFERNO OF JET FUEL AND TOILET SANITIZING AGENT RIGHT NOW. I’LL GET TO THE TRUFFLES AND BELLHOPS LATER, JOHNSON."

I’m guessing when you have two daily to-do lists on your desk, the one that does not involve preventing catastrophic tragedy tends to get balled up and used for waste basketball more often than the other.

A brilliant idea, put forth by my man Jon:

They should rig things such that posting a comment on YouTube takes a month off your life. If you think about it, it’s win-win all around.

Someone should get to work on this immediately. Google, I know you’re watching this.

I understand that it may both be rapid and a test, but I’m going to have to still vote No on the name.

In marketing, it often helps to ask a few people about your idea before sending it out into the world.

I was taking the 1 train back to the office from a press check today and next to me stood a trio of 15-ish year-old girls, dressed in a punk-esque manner that simultaneously communicates an unsettling worldliness and a certain degree of naïveté, chatting about something or other. They had the appearance of the kind of subway chatterers I try to tune out. But as I queued up closer to the door for my upcoming stop, their conversation came into focus. They seemed to be discussing graduation requirements of some sort, as well as graduation ceremonies generally.

The first comment I distinctly caught was, “They said that we’re the future,” to which one of the others responded, “I hate it when they say that.” She laughed and they all agreed, continuing, “I just want to say: what does that make you?”

Indeed.

I have a handful of delicious posts planned for you to mentally munch on, most of which were meant to be up by now. But we all know how that goes. In the meantime, feast your eyes on Hevlticake.

I have about 11 hours of train ride ahead of me over the next two days, so I expect to get a lot of blogestry done. And you, the consumer, will be the winner! If you ask nicely, I will say hello to Boston for you.

Update: To further my understanding of hubris, the powers that be have decided that our laptop hard drive should fail, taking with it about 2 weeks of data. So, please forgive me for not delivering on my promises. It has been an un-fun week. God must be cracking the hell up at this point.

You know what I love? When news programs interview stranded travellers in airports during snowstorms, fog, etc. Their viewpoints are so refreshing and unexpected. They usually run something like this:

Reporter: We know that there have been 4,000 delays and cancelled flights this holiday weekend, stranding people like yourself here in Industrial Parkway International Terminal of Gray Dispair. How long have you been here?

Traveller: I’ve been here for 3 days. Last night, I slept inside of my garment bag, on Section A, level 3, area K48 of the parking garage. My mouth tastes like Orange Julius all the time now.

Reporter: Do you feel that aiport officials are looking out for you, the traveller?

Traveller: Well, I don’t think the people in the airport can be held accountable for the weather, but the administrators are clearly a bunch of idiots. I mean, it snows, like, every year, right? So why do we have such problems? If I was a boss of an airport, I would just send my flights to another airport or call everyone up and tell them that they didn't have a flight anymore as soon as the weather got bad. I don't know what’s so hard about that. It seems like such an obvious solution.

Reporter: Well, there you have it. Shit be mad nuts and managing airports is totally easy.

Seriously, I DON’T CARE. John Q. Public has no idea what it takes to run an international or national air travel hub (and neither do I). Airports are badly managed, but it’s not because they just aren’t trying. Also, I’ve been in an aiport before, so I know that simply stepping through the doors on a sunny day still makes your life notably worse. Just...just stop. Please.

Just a reminder, Eggnog Season started a week or two ago. Be sure to start drinking up* now, because after the new year starts, you’re out of luck. It’s a small blessing that the Christmas MindAssault doesn’t start until after Eggnog Season begins. Build up your good will now. It’ll keep you bright and cheery in the face of all that Bright Cheeriness looming over the horizon.

*Non-alcoholic eggnog. Rum is for pirates.

1) I went to WaWa this evening to get a sandwich and I remembered that they’re offering milkshakes now, so I ambled over to their shake-making device and decided to put the...the...I can’t believe they call it this...the “F’Real Shake”...to the test.

Now, I’m a fan of a good strawberry shake made with real ingredients and well-blended (no unpleasant strawberry gibs in my nicely-textured shake, thanks). So much so, that I even used to drink shakes at Burger King and McDonald’s (not anymore). My stand-by is the chocolate shake, but a good strawberry shake can really hit the spot. So I am always on the hunt for a good shake hit where I can get one. In spite of my doubts about WaWa, I had to know for sure.

The WaWa shake, unlike other frozen beverages, is stored in a separate freezer, to be blended in front of you in the body of the F’Real Shake machine. F’real. The beverage comes in a foil-topped plastic cup (also F’Real) which you open and fit into what I will now refer to as the F’Real Shake Seat of Ascendancy. Upon seating your cup in its steel chariot, you select your thickness as prompted by the little LCD display. Not wanting to tempt fate, I chose the regular thickness, fearing a syrupy goo or an unyielding mass of solid ice cream. The F’Real Frozen Shake Media in its F’Real Shake Cup is then carried aloft by the F’Real Shake Seat of Ascendancy into the Chamber of Shake Makin’ F’Real. The machine bumps and jostles a bit as it clearly uses some sort of terrible burr grinder to convert the F’Real Frozen Shake Media into a F’Real Shake full of urban cachet and dairy. The sound is uncannily like a dentist working in your mouth with powered dental instruments. The newly F’Real’ed F’Real Shake descends from the mouth of the machine, oddly only about 3/4 full, complete and remarkably smooth. In fact, I think I did remark to no one in particular that it was remarkably smooth, proving that to be true.

The shake was actually not that bad. It lacked the overpowering strawberry flavor of some shakes and didn't have the disturbing texture that other fast food shakes have. It was, as I said, remarkably smooth. This, combined with the thickness, allowed one to drink the bottom of the shake out from under the top, which was a tad aggravating. But overall, a bearable shake. Though I don’t know that it’ll be a regular or even a repeat purchase, as the process still weirds me out F’Real. Plus, that’s the stupidest fucking name for anything, ever, anywhere (they don’t even use the name in the ads).

2) Last night, when I was in dire need of some sleep, around 10:00 PM, the power in our neighborhood went out. The whole area was dark, but that wasn’t really an issue for us, as we were a bit more focused on the lack of air conditioning. Philly was doing its best impression of an armpit and our bedroom was designed extremely well to restrict airflow as much as possible, particularly when one window is plugged with a large metal box that says “Cool” and “Fan” on the front. As I lay on the bed with successively fewer layers and progressively more water molecules gathering about me, I pondered the possible causes of the blackout and also the fact that I no longer had internet access. I concluded that we probably suffered a crippling initial strike by a functioning North Korean Nodong and was struck with fear that nobody would be able to post a warning blog entry about it, becuase the internet is meant to function during times of war, but only if your computer and router run on rubble and crying, rather than electricity. This progressed into making a laundry list of things that run on electricity and how screwed we’d all be if we all didn’t have any for a week. Then, around 2:00 AM, the power came back on and I was lulled to sleep by my conveniences.

3) Ze Frank’s the show is the funniest thing I've seen in ages and he does it every weekday. I’d like to thank my friend Adam for linking to this episode, as it set me on the path of Sports Racerhood. I’ve worked my way through the roughly 4 months of them he’s done so far. His delivery style is frenetic, with lots of fast cuts and quick, quirky humor. It’s sort of a DIY Daily Show with more in-jokes. Very, very worth it. I also recommend this one.

4) There’s a new Rocky movie coming out. Here are my thoughts on that:

I’ve been too busy recently to regularly post to Current Config, and I’ve got a post on Half-Life 2: Episode 1 that's still cooking, but in the meantime here are three random thoughts I had recently:

Thought 1
In a conversation yesterday with my man Steve, he told me a story about a friend of his who ordered a grape Icee, and was then informed that the flavor was, in fact, not ‘grape’, but simply ‘purple’. We talked about how great that is and how beautifully self-contained the concept is, etc. Then it occurred to me that we, as a society, have constructed a set of fruit archetypes, or maximally-charactered fruit-flavor types, that have informed our concept of what various fruits should taste like, in parallel to their actual flavor characteristics.

As a society, we’ve kind of encapsulated this concept in our candies, sodas, and artificial fruit beverages. For example, if someone tells us that we can choose between cherry, grape, and orange popsicles, we pretty much know what to expect. We’ve actually created a widely-accepted alternate concept of how cherry ‘should’ taste. But the odd part is that we also know how cherries actually taste. This is the key distinction: we ask for cherry soda that tastes like cherry or we ask for a pie with actual fruit in it that tastes like cherries. You never get ‘cherries’ Skittles or ‘strawberries’ Starburst*. You get ‘cherry’ or ‘strawberry’. Therein lies the distinction. ‘Cherry’ is the Group-Think Over-Flavor and ‘cherries’ is the flavor of, well, actual cherries.

I imagine a group of future cultural anthropologists or culinary historians gathering at the Smithsonian in 3006 to discuss the possible reasons why strawberries no longer have the vibrant, sweet flavors remembered in the original recipe for Skittles. Possible explanations given would be pollution, ozone depletion, exposure to dirt and insects, cultural decay. Theories would abound to explain and memorialize the lost ‘true’ flavors of fruits, now only captured in the astounding gastronomic wizardry of Hi-C and Fruit by the Foot (notice we still haven’t adopted the metric system).

Thought 2
Rye Bread is a bad loaf. Rye bread is the sucker punch of breads. Now, I’m no bread pansy. I eat an organic wheat loaf with seeds in it. This is the kind of bread made from smaller loaves that fell to it in battle. My wheat bread makes off-road sandwiches. None of that velvety-soft pillow-bread from Wonder Bread for us. But man, I’m tellin’ you, rye bread is some bad loaf. I just don’t get it.

Thought 3
‘Evenflow’ is a great name for a medication to relieve monthly bloating and cramps associated with menstruation. I even totally know what song to use in the ads.

*By the way, Mac OS X knows how to spell Skittles but not Starburst. Does this seem wrong to you, too?

I have a very hard time finding clothing. I’m a short and slight adult male, a market segment most clothing stores accord about as much attention as unicorns. Finding a suit is nearly impossible and generally finding clothing that doesn’t require tailoring takes a special kind of patience and a tolerance for indirect putdowns. In clothing terms, I’m not so much a man or a young man, as much as a child. In order to avoid shopping next to 10-year olds, I’ve been forced to put together a mental list of places with a decent percentage of appropriately cut adult-ish clothing (usually 1–10% of what’s on the racks): H&M, DKNY, Express, The Gap, Old Navy. There are others, but H&M is one of the most consistent for finding decent clothing that I can wear off the rack. The downside is that H&M’s aren’t that common and often they’re women’s-only. Fortunately, I live near the King of Prussia Mall, the largest “naturally grown” mall in the U.S.* So when I need to search for an item of uncertain properties (in this case, some kind of button-down shirt I could wear to a casual wedding in a hot climate) I go to the KoP Mall. I was forced to visit most of the stores on my list. And once I used up all of my usual choices, I was forced to go second-tier. In other words: stores I normally ignore or don’t consider: Aeropostale, Vans, American Eagle, etc. This is how I ended up in the hyper-branded, youth-optimized, teen hipness den Hollister.

*I believe it was our friend Julie who coined that phrase. KoP, unlike the Mall of America, was not built huge. It grew through a series of expansions. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but there you go.

Thank you for losing my luggage tonight. Having an arrival time after 10 PM makes luggage loss so much easier, so your timing was great. I guess by checking in early I gave you lots of time to screw up, which worked out well for you. You’ve now misplaced both my luggage and my wife’s in a three week span, in two totally different instances with completely different destinations. This has also strengthened my belief that the Philadelphia International Airport’s slogan should be: “If It Was Legal to Urinate On You, We Probably Would”.

Idiots.

Sincerely,
Chris Rugen

The annual springtime daylight savings time (DST) adjustment kills me. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t make such a big difference in my day, as it’s merely one hour, but that’s the thing. It’s juuuust enough to screw with my head and put me off at senstive intervals and the effect compounds itself (particularly since I have to get up around 5 AM more than once a week).

For me, DST is worse than travelling to another country with a dramatically different time zone. The travel difference is usually great enough that I can make a dramatic change to my rhythm by staying up and just re-orienting. Plus, for me it’s often associated with vacation, rather than day-to-day, so there’s some wiggle room in my schedule. DST, on the other hand, is like waking up one morning to find that all of your furniture’s been moved over one foot. Instead of thinking “OK, it’s all different now, I need to reorient completely,” your mind is lulled by the lack of contrast from the expected and you end up banging your shins and stubbing your toes until you can’t walk. Your point of reference is just different enough at those corners and table legs that the repeated subtle jarring of your cycle adds up and you end up hobbling. For me, those corners and table legs are meals, bedtime, and waking up.

Damn you, Benjamin Franklin!

It’s been a very autumn winter thus far. Now things outside our window feel like they should.

A few days ago, after noticing that Gmail displays links to Spam-based recipes in the sponsored links bar when you’re in the ‘Spam’ folder, I began to wonder: how does Hormel, the maker of Spam, feel about its food being associated with the insidious crud of the web and online communication? I also wondered whether Hormel employees are internally forbidden from referring to it as ‘spam’. Well, apparently Hormel doesn’t object, for the most part though they stipulate that their product should be denoted as ‘SPAM’ and the junk email as ‘spam’.

Here’s to a good one.

To manage the first transit strike in 25 years, they opened up a special line in New York City today, reserved for extraordinary situations like this:

I think the craziest part of the strike was not the extra 70 blocks I had to walk, but the complete lack of cars on Madison Ave. today. It was the most concrete evidence I’ve seen that the noise in NYC is largely attributable to cars and trucks. It was eerily but pleasantly quiet as I walked up Madison and watched rollerbladers and bicyclists ride down the center of Madison.

I recently ordered a copy of DJ Shadow’s latest mix album, Funky Skunk. Because it’s part of some thing he’s doing with Shepard Fairey and his OBEY project, I also got a tshirt as part of the package (I didn’t go for the big super-expensive package with seven tshirts and tons of stuff). I didn’t expect to get anything else. But when I opened the oddly-shaped packing box, I got the coolest piece of vinyl I’ve seen:

Last night at around ten ’til four in the a.m., I stumbled out of bed to assuage my body, which was resentful that I hadn't pulled a blanket over myself and sent a ‘constrict like crazy’ message to my bladder. I didn’t turn on any lights to avoid blinding myself and aggravating Alisa, who will threaten to kill you if you trifle too long in the wee hours. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone outside of the warm shelter of my bed.

Saw my first Santa Claus ad of the season earlier this evening on TV. And so it begins.

Has anybody else noticed what a weird first name ‘Sherlock’ is? I mean, what the hell? I can’t imagine what his parents’ names were.

From the Beyond was delivered unto them a recepticle for the collection and dissemination of the holy nectar, the fruit of the holy Brewing. Long had they gone without the means to fill themselves with the holy Energies, the warmth of the spirit of the highest of concoctions.

Unto them was given a Carafe. And it was good. And from it flowed Life.

Et a mihi bibo affero.

...when you’ve got friends like these?

Thank you, Jon Sung, for being straight-up awesome at just the right time. This man right here hooked us up with Season 1, out of the goodness of his heart. How great is that?

OK, that’s all for now. Must get to watching DVDs.

According to CNN:

Earlier, police officers told CNN that some of their fellow officers had simply stopped showing up for duty, cutting manpower by 20 percent or more in some precincts. Before Thursday night fell, police were stopping anyone they saw on the street and warning them that they were not safe from armed bands of young men who were attacking people and attempting to rape women.

This comes along with the reports of shots fired at National Guardsmen and widespread looting. Not looting for food, mind you, but looting for electronics, alcohol, and guns. I am hesitant to call out any specific examples, but I find the behavior of the people who use this tragedy as an excuse to become violent disgusting. I am also at a loss as to why the response is to get violent, rather than trying to pitch in and help. This is, if anything, a lesson about how fragile civilization is and how hard we must all work to maintain it. In contrast to the base and selfish behavior, I’ve heard accounts of gunmen being told to leave the convention center by citizens who banded together and told them to leave.

New Orleans resident Alan Gould described the situation as “modern day genocide”. I’m not sure what to do with this statement. Watching a video of the convention center, I saw groups of people chanting and yelling into the camera. It’s hard to comprehend being corralled into an area then essentially left to sit and wait. I’m not surprised that anger flares up. How couldn’t it? But I honestly don’t know what claims of genocide and demonstrations are going to do for the situation, other than enrage people further. Do they truly believe no one is working to help the situation? People are demanding to know why they aren’t taking them out of that situation right now, but where would they go? Shuttling people around without a plan will be worse than doing things right.

+ If you can, donate to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief. Or go to FEMA’s site to see how you can volunteer or make a donation. If we pitch in, I sincerely hope that we can celebrate Mardi Gras in 2006 with a revived and rebuilt Gulf coast, but that just may not be possible. +

Last week, my wife and I drove to the not-so-nearby VW dealership for scheduled turn’n’cough car service. I was leading in my car and she was following me in hers. As I turned left onto the road, about 30 feet from the entrance to the dealership lot, I caught a view of something large and shiny disappearing under the front of my car. ::KRUNCH, scraaaaaaaaape::

Crap.

I pulled into the tiny parking dot (it’s a parking lot in a conceptual, rather than literal, sense) and promptly hopped out of my car, convinced I had slashed my tire(s) horribly and was driving on one or more of my rims. Nope. Whatever I hit chewed up a plastic covering on the underside of my engine, which was then dragging on the ground. It seemed largely cosmetic, so I took a deep breath and cursed a few times on my way into the dealership. Arguably, I did screw up my car at the most convenient moment possible.

Alisa, being the enterprising and wonderful woman that she is, ran out onto the street as I waited at the counter in the service office, and came running up to the lobby holding this:

Is it odd that I feel cheated somehow, even though the fortune was free and it came true?

While in New York this weekend (more on that soon), I noticed that about every third New Yorker had the distinctive little white ear buds and white cords of the iPod earphones trailing from their ears. In fact, it was so prevalent that I saw a couple actually walking and talking together while listening to their iPods.

I mentioned to Alisa that I was pretty sure iPods were now required by the state of New York, then she pointed out that all I could see most of the time were the ear buds, not the iPod. She also claimed that the earphones are available separately (they are, but only with a remote, so I’m skeptical). So, in light of this new information, I submit that in order to live in New York for more than a year, you are now required to own iPod earphones.

iPod optional.

Today, while waiting for my chicken tenders and strawberry shake (more on that in a moment) at a food court Burger King, I noticed a sign that reads: “14 and 15 year olds can only bag fries”.

I immediately imagined the following scenario:

The scene: a Burger King kitchen. A manager is speaking to a new employee, who is 14 years old.

Manager: So, we've got some rules here at Burger King...

New Employee: [nods]

M: The first, and I can't emphasize this enough, and most important— [pauses and peers at NE]—rule is right here. [points to sign] See that?

NE: [eyes widen, nods]

M: It says, “14 and 15 year olds can only bag fries”. Do you know why that is?

NE: Um, no...

M: See that man back there? [points to a man handling a mop with one arm, his dirty jumpsuit's left sleeve is pinned to the shoulder] He started here back in '62. Before the Law. The Fry Law.

NE: The fry—

M: He decided he was old enough to bag a cheeseburger. Wasn't 16. Couldn't hold it together. Had to give up the arm.

NE: [eyes widen]

M: So! Now we measure you for your uniform!

So, once I got my strawberry shake, the first Burger King shake I've had in quite some time, and started to drink it, I noticed something odd about it. It tasted good, and it seemed OK, but there was something not quite right about it. It was as though the texture was shake-like, and the flavor was strawberry-like (and good), and the thickness was decent, but the parts didn't fit together. The sensation of drinking the Burger King shake was something akin to getting all of the sensations of a shake, but having them held together by their coincidence in time, rather than their coming from something that had all of those properties inherently; as though the taste, texture, thickness, and other attributes were applied. That doesn't mean I didn't drink the shake, or like it, but it was an odd sensation, let me tell you.

Thus, I dub it 'the Burger King Simulation of Shake-Like Sensations, featuring Strawberry Stimuli'. The tenders were pretty good.

I'm sitting in a community coffee shop with my book, my laptop, Alisa, and lots of other people's children. Watching the people around me, I've determined that cocktail parties, and really any adult social gathering, would be infinitely cooler and more fun if they ran the way small children interact when meeting each other for the first time.

Imagine, instead of sitting at the intersection of two couches in someone's living room, trying to balance your crappy box wine in one hand and 85 cheese cubes on a dish the size of a silver dollar in the other, you were piled onto an arm chair with 3 other people. Two of you are upside down, dress/bulky sweater over your faces, another one is wandering away clutching a cup the size of their torso (possibly singing), and the last one is kind of bopping to an internal rhythm, bumping into the person next to them, who is totally cool with it.

To celebrate a few random things, including some minor site maintenance, I'm going to bring some web-based light and goodness into your life.

It's been a while, but I just recently rediscovered Airbag, a great blog by Greg Storey, who is funny, intelligent (or he reads that way, at least) and designs a damn nice blog.

Do yourself a favor and browse his site.

And thus it begins on this October 16th: the Christmas shopping season's slow creep into every fold of my precious brainmeats. Today, I walked past an Express in the King of Prussia Mall (the largest naturally-grown mall in the U.S.) and I saw a Christmas display.

Screw all of them. Give me Halloween and Thanksgiving, you scum!

Alisa and I recently saw an ad on TV wherein a child gets $1 for their tooth from the Tooth Fairy, and then the punchline comes when the kid points out to the parents that their sibling (I assume) got $2.

I don't know about you, but I got 50 cents from the tooth fairy. I did not go through childhood believing that I had a mouthful of cash, and it really wasn't a big deal. I know some kids who got five bucks. Five bucks!? When we have kids, the Tooth Fairy's middle name is going to be 'Cold Dose of Reality':

Future Child: "Daddy, daddy! The Tooth Fairy came and left me a note!"

Me: "What does it say?"

FC: "It says: 'Dear Child, congrats on the tooth. I give you permission to grow another one to replace it, so you can chew your food... for which you should be very thankful. Love, Tooth Fairy'. I thought the Tooth Fairy gave money, Daddy."

Me: "See how wrong you were? Eat your breakfast... if you still can."

I see this working out well for us. Don't you?

In Dante's Inferno there is a special place reserved for the gluttons. It is the 3rd Circle, where they lay in mud, besieged by snow, hail and filthy water, guarded by Cerebus*. I do not doubt that their moans of misery and cries of greed fill the dark skies of this region of Hell, just inside the Gates.

While I'm sure the interiors are much brighter, the inside of Toys 'R' Us sounds about the same.

I haven't been inside of one of these temples of child-targeted marketing and consumerism in a few years, at least. Perhaps it's because I buy my gaming software at EBX, perhaps it's because I'm an adult, or perhaps it's because I don't collect 'figurines' of my favorite movie and comic characters. Regardless, I've had little occasion to enter Geoffrey's domain. Until now.

Have you seen as many DHL trucks as I have recently? I think it's related to their new ad campaign. Alisa and I saw it a few weeks ago and the day after I started seeing their trucks all over the place.

Now that's a well-coordinated campaign. But it's not just the coordination that's making it so effective. It's also the new identity.

This man right here rocks. Many thanks to voodoochild for helping me get this thing on its first steps forward.