If you've been wondering what the writers strike is about in Hollywood and why you can't watch Letterman, or gag, Leno....this should provide some clarity....rally on 'riters!

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Dear Friend,

Once again the long suffering child bride has dispatched me to pen the annual Christmas missive. Readers of last year’s missive know this a task I approach with trepidation. Not that I don’t enjoy penning missives, rather I fear boring you with the ins and outs of our lives for the past 345 days or so. However, I am under orders and no longer enjoy sleeping on the couch as much as I used to. So buckle up dear reader and let’s get this show on the road….by the way, if you don’t like curmudgeonly Christmas letters just burn this now.

This year Loinfruit is a junior in high school, a feat that delights him and has mom and dad shaking their heads as they wonder where the time went and search for suitable colleges.  (Dad would like to rent his room out when he is away, preferably to a Swedish exchange student named Helga, but that idea is being met with resistance, one might say fierce resistance, from the aforementioned child bride.) Last season he was a starting pitcher for his varsity baseball team as a sophomore where he went 4 and 1. He continued to improve in the off season; pitching in the Junior Olympics tournament in this summer and attending various college baseball camps. 

The child bride left Clear Channel Radio this year (thank heavens) and is working part time for a small, private firm that conducts portfolio management and bookkeeping services. She keeps fit playing tennis, working out and providing fierce resistance to my mainly misguided ideas.

Ace the Wonder Dog continues to lead the team in tennis ball management and awaking the house with his new found nocturnal barking. Apparently dogs dream….or at least ones who are getting older do. We’re not sure what he dreams about, but it sure sounds like fun. Old dogs party in their sleep.

When not dreaming up revenue generating ideas for soon-to-be empty rooms Austin spent the past year renovating two bathrooms, had a new roof put on the house, rewrote a screenplay and worked full time as a marketing/communications consultant for clients in the high technology sector….a sector that is enjoying a strong regeneration here in the Silicon Valley…and watched 853 baseball games in various parts of the country.

And with the passing of another year he also devoted time to compiling a list of tips for global self improvement. Please note that none require dieting or exercise so most should be achievable. Herewith then are some of the more carefully crafted concepts designed to improve our lives, Lord knows we need it…

• One day a year everyone has to dress as a pirate and say “Yar”

• The end of those annoying little labels on fruit, enough already

• The advent of Frisbee religion: when you die your soul goes on the roof and you can’t get it down.

• The self-slimming ass; just push a button and that baby goes down five pounds, every time.

• Pharmaceutical companies will stop marketing social anxiety drugs that offer side effects like diarrhea… nothing like a swift bout of diarrhea to quell the social anxiety, eh?

• Once a week everyone in the world has to stop and simultaneously whistle the theme song from “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”

• While you wear self-cleaning underwear

• Food packaging proffering peal and reseal opportunities will actually peal and reseal

• The end of bar peanuts

• Once a year children replace Congress for a day and we’ll see if anyone can tell the difference

• The return of Latin as a foreign language requirement in schools

• Hunter S. Thompson returns from the dead and brings Warren Zevon with him

• No more “make-over” television shows, unless they involve monkeys

• The end of airline instructions informing one that their seat is a floatation device in case of a non-traditional water landing; water landings are non-traditional and do you really think a piece of foam full of farts is going to be of much help?

• The return of brevity

• Folks who dress up and attend Renaissance festivals replace our elected officials for one month a year

• More time is spent learning foreign cultures with care and the understanding that we do not live on this planet alone, nor are we in charge of it

• Less time is spent thinking about ‘rims’

It’s been a year of fortune and peril, love and risk, reward and rolling away the dew…hope your holidays are full of light and the new year full of, well…

new.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

The first light of an false dawn was breaking through the gloom as I walked Ace the Wonder Dog through the neighborhood. As he sniffed and peed on every other thing I wondered if the day was to bring the usual miasma of stress, deadlines, soul dead engineers, traffic and such when the smell of lumber shook me to my core.

In the gathering light I spied a pile of fresh-cut lumber in front of a home soon to receive a remodel of some sort.  As Ace peed on it I began to think of the lumber used to build the walls and windows in my life. As a child I grew up in a lumber town comprised of chainsaws, pick-up trucks and diners. A place where a family's entire life was captured in the felling, hewing, sawing and selling of trees. A place where the slip of a saw could spell eternal doom and sadness, where trucks laden with fresh-cut trees clogged the main street, their mighty engines spewing fumes as they hauled a community's sustenance to the mill where it was refined and sent to places far way. Places we only learned of from flickering black and white televisions and truck drivers who told stories as they ate pie in diners.

And I realized, as Ace tugged on his leash to move on, how far I had come from those trees and if the lumber that had taken my full measure in the early morning light was from the mountains in western PA so far away.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend