Yahoo! News - 'Lap Pillow' Offers Solace to Lonely Men

Yahoo! News - 'Lap Pillow' Offers Solace to Lonely Men

Just when you thought the Japanese had cornered the market in weird behavior, they come out with us. Weird and offensive. A double whammy! Bravo to the Japanses company that invented this particular masterpiece.

And just in time for Christmas.

A Bad Dream

I was just reading my friend Dave's most recent post about the best Christian music this year. It got me thinking about some of the high-points we've heard from Christian artists, and some of the low points also (the award for most disapointing album of the year goes to Third Day for the sub-par "Wire")

So, while contemplating all that is good about Christian music, I heard the most bizarre Christmas song EVER recorded in the history of the world yesterday. Well OK that may be a small exaggeration. Go ahead and look this one up online somewhere. It is HORRIBLE. Nice idea, but horrible. Like a mixed drink gone bad. Or something.

So, basically, Burlap to Cashmere decided to do a version of "Holy Night". Sounds good, right? Well, yeah, except they decided to layer that on top of Jaci Velasquez singing "For God So Loved The World". Again, nice idea, but the end result is terrible.

It's wonderfully produced and mixed etc. It's not out of tune singing or anything. But it just doesn't work musically. It doesn't ever come together as one complete song. Instead of sounding like a single cohesive unit, it sounded more like the radio was mistakenly somehow playing two songs at once, fading one song in, then the other, back and forth. Like a bad joke by the DJ.

It was like mixing orange juice and chocolate milk - the end result left me feeling queasy.

Please, please don't try this at home.

When your neighbor dies

My neighbor died. It's surreal. It was just the other day that he was showing me his new RV, and getting excited about taking his family on road trips and camping trips. Now he is dead. The funeral is over. And his body has been cremated. Meanwhile his wife is left wondering what on earth just happened. He was a young guy, only 42. And his wife had just given birth to a beautiful baby boy. One night he went to bed with a fever. The next day he was dead.

Every day I see his car sitting in the driveway - untouched, unmoved. No-one wants to go near it. It's creepy. It's sad. It's confusing. I can't quite wrap my head around the finality of it.

The Home Front

I was looking for coupons in the junk mail this morning when I spotted an ad for a sporting good store. I took a look to see if they had any special deals for paintball guns (which they didn't). However, what I did see really surprised me. There was an ad for a special price on a new knife. It's all black, including the blade, and it's called the "Homeland Security Knife" I almost fell out of my chair. This has to be the most ridiculous item I've seen in a while. Talk about profiting from people's fears. This is truly unbelievable.

So, who exactly are you planning to secure with your Rambo-style military knife? Have we gone back to the Cold War days when people were worried about Communists parachuting into the heartland and attacking our quiet suburbs? I feel like I've gone back in time 20 years to 1984 when Patrick Swayze and his merry band of gun-toting teenagers saved America from the Russians in "Red Dawn". I suppose this knife would have appealed to them. But honestly, are people really thinking that anyone is going to invade America today?

Yes, we have been attacked by terrorists several times now, and probably will be again in the future. But in not one of those cases could any civilian have done anything to prevent the tragedies from ocurring. And certainly a Homeland Security Knife is not going to do anything to make anyone or anything more secure.

But what do I know. I don't own any knives.

Almost into the iPod world

Santa Claus has promised to deliver early this year - we're getting a 60GB iPod Photo this week. Pretty exciting, except for the fact that our main desktop computer at home is so old that the iPod may not work with it. Our desktop PC is a Pentium II, 400MHz, built in 1999, which is pre-USB 2.0. So, even though I can theoretically just buy a new PCI card to upgrade the computer, the PCI ports on my motherboard are so old that I don't think the newer PCI cards will work with them. It's pretty annoying. And buying a new computer doesn't solve all our problems because we have a ton of files on the current machine that need to be copied off...how on earth are we going to do that with USB 1.0?

First post

This is a test of the new blogger setup. The type-face is kind of big but I guess that's OK. I am typing this while holding our 4 week-old baby on my lap. She starting to wake up. Gotta finish this quickly.