Kids say the darndest things!

"You know what I hate about rain? When it gets into your sandals. Then it looks, feels and sounds disgusting."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm not weird, I'm just a person who likes tasting weird things."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Dad, 'en Francais' means French in French."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Come on, evolve yourself! ! !"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

Mommy to Daddy in the middle of a conversation: "You're just dangling a carrot out in front of me."

C: "I know what you're talking about and that's NOT a carrot!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I have everything I need! I have a disposable lunch, my toothbrush, my toothpaste, a change of clothes and my pajamas in my backback. I also have a "thank you" and a "your welcome" in my heart just in case."

- C (age seven) describing how ready she is for her sleepover with her friend tonight

Mom's say the darndest things!

"This is why bands shouldn't do covers. Because if you suck you can tell!"

-M (age 34) listening to a bad rock band playing for Race For The Cure right outside our condo complex.

Kids say the darndest things!

The Magnolia

The magnolia is a tree
That has beautiful flowers
On it and the flower smells
So sweet that I just want
To pick it.
But wait, if I pick this flower,
Then it would die
And I would not want that
To happen.

(C - age seven - to Mom for Mother's Day)

Kids say the darndest things!

"That's not a roar, that's a violent squeal!"

(C - age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm imagining what God's house looks like. I think it's red with a little green and some yellow and orange too. It has lots of rooms in it and there are no slaves."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, I think the force is just engineering. If you want something to move by itself you just engineer a remote control and push the buttons when nobody's looking."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Trust the Chloe..."

- C (age seven), right index finger held aloft with eyes at a sage-like half mast

And the master said...

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It's like a storm in the atmosphere."

- Thomas Jefferson (to Abigail Adams)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Whoa...I'm being hijacked by weird things!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"If your nose was numb, it wouldn't feel like your nose was numb."

- C (age seven)

And the master said...

"...but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in."

- Ishmael, Moby Dick, Herman Melville

And the master said...

These words were part of Thomas Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. Meant to be part of a scathing inditement of King George III, these words were removed during the two days of debate over the document by a group of representatives from southern states who used slaves, and northern ones who delivered them:

"[The King of England] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distiguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

- Thomas Jefferson (accepted with minor clarifying edits by Benjamin Franklin), July 2, 1776

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm always interrupting myself."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm smart enough not to do anything."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Whoa! Bad cheese things!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"There is such thing as Columbia!"

- C (age seven)

They're willing to raise your taxes, but not pay theirs.

How could someone so smart be so stupid? The answer is out there...

"Daschle's stunning statement came less than three hours after another Obama nominee also withdrew from consideration, and also over tax problems. Nancy Killefer, nominated by Obama to be the government's first chief performance officer, said she didn't want her bungling of payroll taxes on her household help to be a distraction.

Daschle was the third high-profile Obama nominee to bow out. Obama initially had tapped Bill Richardson to be Commerce secretary, but the New Mexico governor withdrew amid a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors.

Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Daschle's former Democratic colleagues had rallied to his defense in the wake of questions about his failure to fully pay his taxes from 2005 through 2007. Last month, Daschle paid $128,203 in back taxes and $11,964 in interest."

Drudge wins again!

One day after Drudge reported that Citigroup was purchasing a $50M jet, the Obama administration puts a stop to it with a phone call.

Drudge wins again!

One day after Drudge reported that Citigroup was purchasing a $50M jet, the Obama administration puts a stop to it with a phone call.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Politics/story?id=6740011&page=1

Kids say the darndest things!

"Wait! My toes aren't ready!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"There is no such thing as a person that is not a creature. So be nice to everyone."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"It's time to open presents! ! ! Everyone goes first! ! !"

C - age seven

Kids say the darndest things...

"Daddy, if you want to get married but don't want to have a baby, how do you do that?"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Excuse me. My hands are sweaty and the gun just fell on my toe."

- C (age seven) during a hot nurf gun firefight

Kids say the darndest things!

Daddy: "That mom sure is pretty smart isn't she?"

C: "Yes, she's a LOT smarter than I used to be."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I know how to work at a job, Daddy. You just type stuff into a computer and then you get money."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things...

Daddy to Mommy: "Well, I think our best hope for the possibility that our child has no vices is that you secretly had her fathered by another man."

Mommy: Hmmm.

C (age seven): "Daddy, I don't really think that's a very good sentence....because I don't understand a word you just said."

Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, did you know that ten 10's is equal to 100 and one hundred 10's is equal to 1000? I just figured that second part out using my fingers."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

At a Halloween party:

C (age seven): "Daddy, look! An angel and a devil!"

Daddy: "Cool! Which one do you like better?"

C: "I like the devil best."

Kids say the darndest things!

"Father, a proper lady has a sword."

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, I'm offending myself!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Oh I get it, insurance is another word for money!"

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I don't play music, I sing!"

- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Is ice cream polite? Because ice cream you have to lick like a dog!"
- C (age seven)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm as hungry as a mountain eats clouds."

- C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

"I'm so tired of hearing ha ah wa wa ee ee ah ah leh ah ah me ne!"

- C (age five) listening to a Hawaiian radio station

Kids say the darndest things!

We took my youngest daughter C to Hawaii last year. She saw a beautiful bird sitting in a tree on one of our hikes and spoke to it:

"Excuse me, do you have a cousin named Pablo?"

- C (age five)

Kids say the darndest things!

C and I were walking back from Starbucks this morning after getting our morning coffee and breakfast. One of the slabs of cement that make up the sidewalk between Starbucks and home has been washed out and now moves when you step on it with an audible "clunk". So when I stepped on it today I looked down at her and said, "Weird".

Her reply: "That's not weird, dad, that's mysterious."

- C (age 6)

Kids say the darndest things!

"The rule of the beach is, never touch anything that is wiggling."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

Daddy (on observing C hard at work making something): "Wow. What are you making?"

C: "Whatever it turns out to be."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

My Mommy
- By C (age six, for mother's day)

I loved my mommy when she was young.
I love her so, she's lots of fun.
Even if she's very sad.
I still love her so she loves my daddy.
Even when I'm bad.
Just like my daddy.

Kids say the darndest things!

"Everybody has to love someone."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

C: "What is the video game doing?"

Daddy: "It's updating."

C: "What does that mean?"

Daddy: "Sometimes the system needs new software and this is how it gets it. Don't worry about it - it's just how the system does it."

C: "Oh. Well, my way of updating is very much looking forward to dating someone someday."

Daddy: "Huh?"

C: "Don't worry about it. That's just how I do it."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

"You're so goofy you could explode the earth. Pshfewwww! See, that was you...you exploded the earth!"

- C (age six)

Clinton / Sagan?

Come to think of it, I never did see Hillary Rodham Clinton and Carl Sagan in the same room...

Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, what if I was a chocolate covered grasshopper? I mean, hopping, hopping, baking, hot, hot, swimming in chocolate, eaten, hurts!! "

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

Daddy: "My brain doesn't work very good sometimes."

C: "Go see the doctor and she'll tell you what's wrong with you."

C: "And, by the way, patients rhymes with patience!"

- C (age six)

And the master said...

"If ever there was a city designed to distract us from our troubles, it would be Paris."

- Thomas Jefferson

Kids say the darndest things!

"Wow! It's so warm out here that all I need to go outside is nothing!"

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Daddy, did you know that there's very little gravity on the moon and that means that when you jump you go up much higher and stay up longer. So, that means you can jump up and do poses before you come back down just like Pocahontas does."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

C, holding up a small sundial-shaped device she has made from construction paper:

"Daddy, this is the new game I made. This is the spinner and whoever is up gets to spin it. And if this big giant pointy part points to someone, then they get to sprinkle the magic dust and then we all have a party. Then you clean up the party, clean up the magic dust, put it back into the thing and then we do it all again...

It's a very big game."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

C, holding up a five foot long paper snake that she had made:

"Daddy, this is my new pet. It's an anaconda that can turn into a king cobra when it wants to strike. And she's very nervous..."

- C (age six)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Oh. That's kind of like 'cheating magic'."

- C, (age 6) upon daddy showing her a magic trick purchased from a magic show.

Kids say the darndest things!

"'Syllables' has three syllables."

- C (age 6)

Kids say the darndest things!

"Wow! Clouds are made by trains! Look!"

- C, age six

Kids say the darndest things!

Watching the desert town battle scene in the movie Transformers:

"Wow! All the people in the whole beach are here to fight the dragon Transformer!"

- C, age six

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