Dialog with a 4-year-old about Iraq

Scene: Me and the 4-year-old daughter B. in the car returning from Dairy Queen where we have picked up a "Welcome Home" ice cream cake for the homecoming party for Uncle Nick, who is home on leave from Iraq.

B.: Daddy, does Uncle Nick have a big job?

Me: Yes, he has a very big job.

B.: In... Iraq?

Me: Yes. He has a big, important job in Iraq.

B.: Oh.

B.: Is Uncle Nick a soldier?

Me: Yes. He's a soldier in Iraq.

B.: Oh. ... Does he have to fight?

Me: Sometimes. But only when someone wants to fight him.

B.: Who wants to fight him?

Me: The bad guys.

B.: Are there lots of bad guys in Iraq?

Me: There are some bad guys. But most of the people are good guys.

B.: What do they do with the bad guys? Do they kill the bad guys?

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: They just try to catch the bad guys. They try to make them into good guys.

B.: Oh. So the bad guys won't be bad anymore.

Me: Right.

B.: Is Uncle Nick the only soldier?

Me: No. There are lots and lots of soldiers in Iraq.

B.: Like hundreds?

Me: More like thousands.

B.: Thousands? What's a thousands?

Me: That's a lot of hundreds altogether.

B.: What are their names?

Me: I don't know all of the soldiers' names. There are so many that it would be hard to know every name.

Me: My friend Bill from high school is a soldier. But there are lots more whose names I don't know.

B.: Oh.

B.: When are we going to eat the ice cream?

And... scene.

tagged: Iraq, soldier, war, family, parenting

YouTube Tuesday: Robot Chicken skewers George Lucas

Remember the hilarity that was the Robot Chicken sketch when Evil Emperor Palpatine learns that the Death Star had been blown up? ("What the hell in an Aluminum Falcon?!?").

Well, Seth Green and Co. are planning a larger feature based on that concept, and at 3 o'clock in the Morning, we have the non-exclusive preview. The show airs June 17 on the Cartoon Network.

"Your tongues can't repel flavor of that magnitude!"


tagged: movies, YouTube, video, Star Wars, Palpatine, Robot Chicken, humor

At the very least you need a beer*

We had a lot to celebrate on Saturday. It was Cinco de Mayo, a day very important to my family's cultural heritage, and my brother-in-law Nick, recently arrived for R&R from his deployment in Iraq, was visiting.

So what better way to commemorate both occasions than to enjoy an activity so close to the Mexican culture: a tour of a local artisan brewery.

We arrived at Boulevard Brewing Co. on (fittingly) Southwest Boulevard a couple minutes early for our 10 a.m. tour. According to our schedule, we would take the tour then be finished just in time to slosh down enough free beer samples to get us through lunch.

The tour started in the Boulevard tasting room with a brief introduction by our host, Jason, about the history of beer in the U.S. According to Jason, the pilgrims stopped at Plymouth Rock not because they had arrived at their destination, but because they had run out of beer and needed to find provisions to brew more. (Presumably, after brewing more beer, they were too "chemically inconvenienced" to go any further).

Anyway, fast forward a couple hundred years during which beer became so popular that pretty much every town in the Union had a brewery or three, to prohibition in the 1920s which effectively shut down all but the biggest breweries, to 1989 when I graduated from high school and John McDonald founded Boulevard Brewing Co. (I may have left out a few details, but you can fill in the gaps for yourself when you take the tour).

We then were guided through the brewery proper. Jason showed us the original brew house that was bought from a small town in Germany. We were walked through the brewing process, from the milling of barley, making the mash, introduction of hops, fermentation, filtering and bottling.

Jason showed us the new expanded brew house that will allow Boulevard to ramp up production to meet a growing demand for their beers.

Employees at Boulevard get some great perks, including a basketball court inside the bottling plant, a workout facility and an employees-only bar where you can drink (of course) free Boulevard beer.

Finally, we ended the tour back in the tasting room where the five Boulevard brands were ours for the tasting.

I had previously tried the Unfiltered Wheat (my favorite) the Pale Ale, the Dry Stout (very smooth, not at all bitter, my second favorite) and the Bully Porter, so my first sample was of the Lunar Ale. I gotta say, it didn't speak to me. It's a wheat based beer, but it had a taste on the back of my tongue that I can only describe as "green."

So I switched to the sixth beer on tap, labeled only as "Test." Boulevard often has a test beer on tap in its tasting room and today it happened to be an India Pale Ale.

It was a great surprise for me. I'm typically not a fan of the bitterness of IPAs, but it didn't bother me in this test brew. It was so well balanced and the finish so crisp that this ended up being one of my favorites.

Boulevard would do well to add it to their brand lineup.

*10 points to the first person to name the author of this quote.

tagged: Kansas City, Boulevard Brewing Co, beer, India pale ale, stout, porter, Cinco de Mayo

Wha happa???

The astute observer will notice that there have been a few changes around here lately.

The old original Blogger template seemed to be growing a little clunky. It seemed there was a lot of neato stuff that could be done with the shiny new Blogger.

So, for the last couple of weeks I had been experimenting with a new template on a supersecret test blog. Then yesterday, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge, pull the trigger and flip the switch.

At least one astute observer (perhaps the astutest) John B. of Blog Meridian noticed immediately. He left a comment on the post previous to this one:

I like the new layout; in a couple of places I've seen hacks for the 3-column layout, and I've wondered, given all my blog's links and geegaws, if the 3-column might be helpful.
Have you lived with it long enough to know whether you like it?

Well John B., the short answer is... No, I haven't had it up long enough to know whether I like it. It seems like it might be a little too busy, that it offends my minimalist taste. Maybe I need to get rid of some of the chicklets in the side columns or something.

Actually, it occurs to me that maybe widening the gutters between the columns would help. If there are any CSS Code Ninjas out there who can help, I would be very grateful.

But I'll probably stick with this layout, out of inertia and laziness if for no other reason.

I am interested to read what everyone thinks, so please post positive reaffirming messages in the comments section.

PS -- I wanted to say a special thanks to Stavanger at Blogcrowd who put up with a lot of my dumb questions through this process. For anyone thinking of updating their template, this is a great resource.

tagged: blog, blogger, template, Minima Black, css

Gunbusters?

I'm seeing these signs at various places around the city lately.

Are they new? Are they just now popping up because of recent events?

Or have they always been there and I'm just now noticing them (because of recent events).

tagged: gun, signs, shooting, Kansas City

Friday Blogthing: My cell phone etiquette

Believe me, my cell phone manners are much better than my table manners.

Your Cell Phone Etiquette is 51% Bad, 49% Good

Your cell phone manners are simply okay. Sometimes you can be very considerate. But when you are in the middle of an important conversation, all rules go out the window!

How's Your Cell Phone Etiquette?

tagged: cell phone, mobile, etiquette, quiz, manners

Buddy can you spare $50 million?

With apologies to J.D., I can't help but be excited about the prospect of owning my very own Mark Rothko original.

The prize item in Sotheby's New York sale of contemporary art on May 15th is by Mark Rothko, a Latvian-born, American abstract expressionist. David Rockefeller picked up the painting, titled White Centre, for around $10,000 in 1960, and it hung in his outer office when he was chairman of the Chase Manhattan bank. The painting is described by Oliver Barker of Sotheby’s, with barely a trace of exaggeration, as "a masterpiece".

The top price fetched by a Rothko to date is about $22 million. But experts of the hoity and/or toity expect White Centre to go for upwards of $45 million. In fact, rumor has it that Sotheby's has guaranteed Rockefeller a cool $40 million at a minimum.

So basically, all I have to do is come up with about $50 million to get my grubby little hands on this modern masterpiece (I figure I'll need a few extra million for bribes and other incidentals).

I'm coming up a little short so far. I've got about 12 bucks. So anyone want to loan me $49,999,988?

tagged: Mark Rothko, art, White Centre, Rockefeller, Sotheby's, auction, culture

Nelson update: New Yorker review

The New Yorker has posted a review of the controversial Bloch Building, the new addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, designed by Stephen Holl.

Despite local criticism of the project, the reviewer gives the work high praise indeed:

As it turns out, the building, which will open in June, is not just Holl’s finest by far but also one of the best museums of the last generation. Its boldness is no surprise, but, in addition, it is laudably functional, with a clear layout, handsome and logically designed galleries, and a suffusion of natural light. Furthermore, Holl’s five glass structures, punctuating the hill, don’t mock the old building as you might expect; they dance before it and engage it.

The addition is set to open in about a month, and I for one am pretty excited. I had an opportunity to tour the addition as it was being constructed.

The New Yorker review has a pretty good slide show of the structure. You can also view lots of pictures of the project that I previously posted here.

Hat tip to Dan at Gone Mild for finding the article.

tagged: Steven Holl, Nelson Atkins, art, architecture, Kansas City, museum

YouTube Tuesday: Next month on ABC

The TV networks have a knack of cancelling the shows I like and making more of the crap I can't stand.

For example, new shows like the excellent The Black Donnellys, Six Degrees and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip have been canned while I'll be forced to avoid more of the simple-minded Deal or No Deal clones, so-called reality programs or lame stand-up comic based family sitcoms.

It's like the networks want me to use the DVR and Bittorrent to get decent programing.

Anyway, the one bright spot is this pilot episode for an upcoming ABC sitcom: Haunted Lesbian Sorority.



tagged: TV, Haunted Lesbian Sorority, The Black Donnellys, Six Degrees, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, television, pop culture, humor

Right on target

The hot topic of conversation in the KC blogiverse today is yesterday's 3-death massacre at Ward Parkway Mall.

My good friend Xavier Onassis is taking a particularly rough comments beating for his point of view:

I think we should limit gun ownership to one narrowly defined hunting rifle per adult and round up and confiscate everything else.

He's suffering the usual slings and arrows of the slack-jawed knuckle-draggers who think the constitutionally guaranteed right to own firearms guarantees them the right to own firearms.

Well I'd just like to come to XO's defense on this one.

He's right. Just because the constitution says we should have something, doesn't mean that we really should. After all, what do we know. We elect people to congress and White Houses to tell us what we need so that we don't have to think about it.

XO make a valid point that, since we've given up so many of our other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, we should give up this one as well. Who needs rights anyway? Isn't our society advancing to a point where we can rely on the Morlocks to provide for us at the relatively low expense of sending them one or two of our Eloi now and then?

No, I'm with Xavier on this one. In fact, I think his ideas don't go far enough.

Sure, restricting the types of guns people can own is good. Absolutely we need to have government troops round up and confiscate all non-approved firearms. But that's only the beginning.

As a next step, we need to create a government registry of all people who want to own a firearm, or have views sympathetic to firearm owners. As XO points out, these kinds of people are obviously mentally defective. So they do need to be tracked and controlled.

We should probably designate certain areas within each city for these people to live and, for the safety of the public at large, restrict their movements from these areas.

To be doubly safe, we should make sure all of us right-thinking, non-insane non-gun-owners know when we're dealing with a "gun nut" by requiring them to wear some kind of insignia that identifies them as the sub-humans they really are. I'm thinking a red and white target, or perhaps a six-pointed star or something.

Anyway, I'm sure there a more ideas out there to help us come to a final solution on the gun owners problem. Maybe since gun owners like to hunt in the woods, we can send them all camping. Of course we would have to fence in the camps to make sure innocent people don't stray into these concentrations of gun owners. But it could work.

It's clear that after the last few weeks, we have to do something.

tagged: Kansas City, shooting, Ward Parkway Mall, gun control, eloi, morlock, constitution, rights