Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, can people do what the sunshine does?"

- C (age six)

SOS

Just a castaway
An island lost at sea
Another lonely day
With no one here but me
More loneliness
Than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

A year has passed since I wrote my note
But I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life
But love can break your heart

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

Walked out this morning
Don't believe what I saw
A hundred billion bottles
Washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
A hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home

I'll send an SOS to the world
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

Sending out an SOS

- Message in the Bottle, The Police

Kids say the darndest things!

C: "Daddy, where is heaven?"

Daddy: "Heaven is everywhere."

C: "Really? Is heaven in a movie?"

Daddy: "Good question."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Hurting parents is what kids do best!"

- C (age six)

Number One

Go Bucks!

Kids say the darndest things!

"Darth Vader is a bad guy, except he's cool."

- C (age 6)

Free your mind...

...from the matrix.

The coming dawn...

As the dew turns into frost
There is something that I hope will not be lost
The leaves will change, they'll start to fall
I still wonder if it mattered much at all
When my world starts to fade
I can only hope that every choice I made
Will endure, and carry on ... into the
Coming dawn

The breezes blow, soft clouds drift by
Like some artists' canvas captured in my eye
I am sure, I'm holding fast
I am dying for a lifetime that will last
But when my world starts to fade
I'm still hoping this foundation that I laid
Will endure, and carry on ... into the
Coming dawn

We're so close, yet never touch
Can there be a love that changes me this much
I can't see, eyes open wide
Yet I'll never doubt you're standing by my side
When my world, starts to fade
I can only hope that every choice I made
Will endure, and carry on ... into the
Coming dawn

- Kerry Livgren
Kansas - Somewhere To Elsewhere

Historic

"We reviewed and we can't find a team in the history of the AP Poll that has ever lost to a lower division team..."

- Sports Center



"Uh...uh.....i think it's a combination...i think...uh.... inexperience.....uh....uh......ya hafta play to get it and...uh.....uh....Appalachian State had tremendous speed at the....uh....skilled positions....and......uh....uh .....you know.....uh ......they did a good job.

- "Coach" Lloyd Carr

Pain is a necessary part of beauty...

Artists suck unless they really, fundamentally hurt. And so they seek pain, and in so doing hurt those around them.

Those who believe themselves to be artists are similarly possessed of this tendency. And thus, despite their lack of ability to heal, they hurt - fundamentally.

Damn.

Quotable quotes...

"Nothing says revenge like mother nature."

- Chris Harmon, artist, father, excellent host!

Kids say the darndest things!

"The only thing I want to be is a astronaut, a ballerina, a famous singer, a teacher, a chef, a window sill cleaner, a gardener, a sewing lady, a builder and some kind of fixer."

- C, final days of age five

And the moral of the story is...

So I just watched "The Devil wears Prada". Ok...I'm soooo gay. Whatever. Anyway, it was probably the best acting I've seen in a long time. Which is to say that I'm beginning to wonder how Star Wars suckered in Sir Alec Guinness.

Great story. While the theatrical tension was entirely predictable and the end game preordained by all that is Hollywood, it really came off well for a low-budget, bollywood, cult, conspiracy theory film... That's what it was, right?

Whatever, haters. It made her both horny and self-assured.

Xan Shui
Philosophic Philanthropist, Honest Man

There you have it...

Don't worry, Al...you've got Al!

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070730/D8QN2CGO0.html

Wisdom

The last surviving veteran of WWI battle revisits the battlefield.

"Harry Patch, of Somerset, made the trip to Flanders in Belgium to recall his part in the battle which claimed 250,000 British casualties.

...

Mr van Emden showed him the five miles they advanced over 99 days which claimed 3,000 British casualties every day.

He was also shown a recently discovered panoramic photograph of the fields taken in 1917.

"Too many died," said Mr Patch. "War isn't worth one life."

- from the article

Kids say the darndest things!

"Change can be good...did you know that? See? That fart was me!"

- C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I wanna be funky like Mom."

- C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

C: "Daddy, there is such things as ghosts. Did you know that?"

Daddy: "Really? Why do you say that?"

C: "Because I saw a white thing in the bathroom once and it wasn't me."

- C (age 5)

Kids say the darndest things!

"People can't really fly like Superman you know. Only sparrows and ducks and geese and some bugs and fairies can really fly." - C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

Mommy: "Are you intense?"

C: "No, I'm in threes."

- C, age five

Kids say the darndest things!

"If I were a girl with a beard that would be just nasty."

- C (age five)

Buddhist thought of the day...

Buddhism teaches that the human mind is adroit enough to conclude that there is no person or thing in this universe that can really change anything meaningful. When your actions are in accord with the inevitable they are irrelevant, and when they are not they are like the fluttering of a bird's wings against the bars of its cage. Once you see this, then you can have peace.

- Paraphrasing 'All Else is Bondage; Non-Volitional Living' - Wei Wu Wei

Suffer the little children?

I use Google's portal as, among other things, a news bank. It allows me to quickly check what's going on in several areas of interest. One being general headlines and, those often being driven by sensationalism, I very often see stories of young children missing and only slightly less often read of the terrible fates they endured when their little abused bodies are found abandoned, and analyzed.

Every time I read of the missing I say a prayer for the safety of that child, and every time I read of the grieving family I say a prayer of condolence for the family. The few times I hear of a safe recovery I whisper a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

For the vast majority of us, our brains can do nothing but see the pure beauty in a child. In all their innocence and energy, they represent nothing but the future. Our brains evolved to protect them from harm, especially when our genes are part of their makeup.

But for a few who have seemingly fallen into an abyss of sexual selfishness that could only be described as monsterous, children represent an opportunity for gratification that they cannot pass up at nearly any cost. Why can we not see that this is an illness whether or not it is also a crime? Why do we let people go free who possess so dangerous a tendency? Would we allow a person who is incapable of restraining his or her anger to buy a gun? <--oops, I guess we do in Virginia.

Human sexuality is a wonderful thing, but in the possession of a chronic, irrepressible, apparently unrestrainable desire, it is also a weapon. And since we criminalize sexual violence, it is a weapon that is used in crime, which means a society has at least some obligation to control it. More, in the case of child molestation, it's a weapon that only attacks two classes of individual - one that is entirely incapable of protecting itself and the other that is apparently incapable (the child and the pedophile). And in this case, without the weapon (the chemicals that allow body to fulfill the desire of the mind), the criminal is as helpless to commit the crime as he or she (let's face it - its most always a he) is uninterested in committing it.

It is legal for me to possess a gun because I can be trusted to use it. But a gun isn't part of my anatomy and so we cross a threshhold of property freedom that is indeed sacrosanct when we suggest that society should be able to take away that weapon. But we castrate hopeless sexual criminals today, so it's not a boundary we haven't already crossed.

In Sin City, when the hero removes the child molester's weapons ("both of them"), the audience cheers. Twice. And they don't cheer for the raw violence, they cheer because of their innate sense of justice that has just been satisfied before them. I suggest its time to consider lowering the criteria with which we medically remove the sexual ability of people who demonstrate even one time the willingness to victimize a child for their sexual pleasure.

If we don't act ourselves then all we have is my prayers. And so far, frankly, their track record is just awful.

Xan Shui,
Philosophic Philanthropist, Honest Man

I have a question...

Who invented the word "hos" anyway?

Xan Shui
Philosophic Philanthropist, Honest Man

Kids say the darndest things!

C: "I'm gonna be a mountain climber."

Daddy: "Oh, really? That's cool! What do you have to do to be a mountain climber?"

C: "You just have to do what you don't know you can do."

- C, age five.

Kids say the darndest things!

Daddy: "What's that you drew on the dinosaur's tail - a firecracker?"

C: "No. It's a drink with an umbrella in it."

- C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I have TONS of patience. I can wait for ONE WHOLE MINUTE!"

- C (age five)

Lies in the sand...

Lies in the Sand

There's a man, who says there is a light in the sky.
All my friends say he's telling a lie.
But he speaks with such passion that I have to think about.
And his hands ... well they tremble as he points it out.
But I can't see what it's all about
And the voices of many are singing along it seems.

Is it all something new? And will I see it too?
Or is this just continuing man?
Throughout all history claiming they all can see
but the evidence falters just short of my hand.
And there are lies in the sand.

There's a man who says he was a Satanic Beast.
And the many were there at his feet.
And he scared all the people, cause he just what we want.

Is it all something new? And will I see it too?
Or is this just continuing man?
Making more history claiming they all can see
but the evidence falters just short of my hand.
And there are lies in the sand.

There are things that will surely seem as they are not.
And I might not know all that I've got.
But the bluffing is easy, and I haven't seen your hand.

- King's X

An interesting point of view.

"Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming.

Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect.

Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the 20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human activities.

Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.

Dr. Shariv, a prolific researcher who has made a name for himself assessing the movements of two-billion-year-old meteorites, no longer accepts this logic, or subscribes to these views.

Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant climate driver over geological time scales. The study also found that an upper limit can be placed on the relative role of CO2 as a climate driver, meaning that a large fraction of the global warming witnessed over the past century could not be due to CO2 -- instead it is attributable to the increased solar activity."

- from the article.

Kids say the darndest things!

"I really do wish I was a jaguar so that I couldn't have hands but have claws instead because that would teach me to swim deep underwater without holding my nose because if I held my nose I might scratch my face with my claws."

- C (age five)

.

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm really strong and I can figure a lotta stuff out."

- C (age five)

.

On Your Side

Kevin apologizes, before the Superbowl, for a commercial that will air for the first time on it.

Dude! Who's side are you on?

Kitty Washing Machine

Life it feels better down where it's wetter take it from me!

(Ignore the error message, just click on the video again to go to youtube and view it.)

Kids say the darndest things!

"There's no such thing as a 'master'."

- C (age five)

.

Kids say the darndest things!

C: "Daddy, when I grow up I want to be a jaguar."

Daddy: "Well, then you'd have to eat animals raw."

C: "What does that mean - raw?"

Daddy: "Well, it means you have to catch an animal, then kill it with your teeth, then tear it open and eat it without cooking it."

C: "Oh....COOL!"

- C (age five)

The world catches up...

They finally realized...

And a more direct reference to the impact's impact on orbital debris from ABC news from February 2.

D'oh!

A couple of wiseguys stole a cache of what they thought were mobile phones. Turns out they were GPS devices which led police right to their home!

Wise indeed.

Do as I say not as I do...

Looks like the Chinese have decided to show us just how vulnerable our testicles are. When there's nothing but loose bolts and smithereens floating above us in 16,000 mph freefall and we realize that we've just imprisoned ourselves on this planet for the next hundred thousand years or so because there is no longer a safe path into space, I wonder if anyone will write about how incredibly brilliant human beings are.

Chinese destroy satellite

Why can't they just leave us alone?

Why do they have to count things? Takes all the fun out of it. All we want is to sit back on our recliner, drink beer and feel superior to women...is that so wrong?

Article: Women are better drivers than men

Kids say the darndest things!

"You can only try to think of an idea for so long before you must say there is a lack of one."

- S, age 14

Let there be bass

In the beginning there was a bass. It was a Fender, probably a Precision, but it could have been a Jazz - nobody knows. Anyway, it was very old ... definitely pre-C.B.S.

And God looked down upon it and saw that it was good. He saw that it was very good in fact, and couldn't be improved on at all (though men would later try.) And so He let it be and He created a man to play the bass.

And lo the man looked upon the bass, which was a beautiful 'sunburst', and he loved it. He played upon the open E string and the note rang through the earth and reverberated throughout the firmaments (thus reverb came to be.) And it was good. And God heard that it was good and He smiled at his handiwork.

Then in the course of time, the man came to slap upon the bass. And lo it was funky.

And God heard this funkiness and He said, "Go man, go." And it was good.

And more time passed, and, having little else to do, the man came to practice upon the bass. And lo, the man came to have upon him a great set of chops. And he did play faster and faster until the notes rippled like a breeze through the heavens.

And God heard this sound which sounded something like the wind, which He had created earlier. It also sounded something like the movement of furniture, which He hadn't even created yet, and He was not so pleased. And He spoke to the man, saying "Don't do that!"

Now the man heard the voice of God, but he was so excited about his new ability that he slapped upon the bass a blizzard of funky notes. And the heavens shook with the sound, and the Angels ran about in confusion. (Some of the Angels started to dance, but that's another story.)

And God heard this - how could He miss it - and lo He became Bugged. And He spoke to the man, and He said, "Listen man, if I wanted Jimi Hendrix I would have created the guitar. Stick to the bass parts."

And the man heard the voice of God, and he knew not to mess with it. But now he had upon him a passion for playing fast and high. The man took the frets off of the bass which God had created. And the man did slide his fingers upon the fretless fingerboard and play melodies high upon the neck. And, in his excitement, the man did forget the commandment of the Lord, and he played a frenzy of high melodies and blindingly fast licks. And the heavens rocked with the assault and the earth shook, rattled and rolled.

Now God's wrath was great. And His voice was thunder as He spoke to the man.

And He said, "O.K. for you, pal. You have not heeded My word. Lo, I shall create a soprano saxophone and it shall play higher than you can even think of."

"And from out of the chaos I shall bring forth the drums. And they shall play so many notes thine head shall ache, and I shall make you to always stand next to the drummer."

"You think you're loud? I shall create a stack of Marshall guitar amps to make thine ears bleed. And I shall send down upon the earth other instruments, and lo, they shall all be able to play higher and faster than the bass."

"And for all the days of man, your curse shall be this; that all the other musicians shall look to you, the bass player, for the low notes. And if you play too high or fast all the other musicians shall say "Wow" but really they shall hate it. And they shall tell you you're ready for your solo career, and find other bass players for their bands. And for all your days if you want to play your fancy licks you shall have to sneak them in like a thief in the night."

"And if you finally do get to play a solo, everyone shall leave the bandstand and go to the bar for a drink."

And it was so.

- Unknown

.

O-H!

I-Ow!!!


CHOMP!

Kids say the darndest things!

Daddy: What would you do if you had a pet elephant?

C: Leave it outside.

- C, age five

.

Sister Moon...

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
My hunger for her explains everything I've done.
To howl at the moon the whole night through...
and they really don't care if I do.
I'd go out of my mind but for you."

- from Sister Moon, Sting

Rainmaker

Have you ever seen a miracle - you couldn't doubt or imitate?
What's it really worth to you to shake the holy hand of fate?
Well I did what I could to make ends meet
Been a gunrunner and a medicine man.
In a Kansas town I was a rainmaker - there the hand of fate got out of hand.

Rainmaker Rainmaker save this one horse town
Rainmaker pray to heaven!

From the Flint Hills the land was cracked and dried
Thirsty streets in misery
I took the sign down that said medicine man
Put one up that said rainmaker - that was me.
So the townspeople gave me money up front
To light a fire - pray, and dance around.
Tell them it'd rain so they'd all go to bed
And I'd make my break clean out of town.
But I started this dance and a storm kicked up
The sky went black from coast to coast.
It was too late to stop - it was to late to pray
I had summoned down the Holy Ghost.
Oh the searing wind and the clouds of dust
And hell came raining down!
What came out of me and the powers that be
Was the last of that one horse town!

- Kansas, In the Spirit of Things