Life on Mars?

Nick just revealed that one of our favorite albums from our teenage years got 75% of its appeal from emotional retardation, not the quality of the music.

And he’s right!

Late Night Computer Setup

Step One:

When doing something you really should not have agreed to do in the first place, the first step is to find music you can work with.

My choice for this is NiN’s ‘Pretty Hate Machine’.

It’s suitable. It work.

In brief:

Year Zero is our generation’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It successfully does what American Idiot cries itself to sleep at night, wishing it could do.

One of the signs that I was starting to listen to good music was when I was finally able to list a lot of music that was not about love.

And once again, after tragedy strikes the nation our wanna-be puppet masters rush in to try and grab a few more of our strings. Whether it’s Dr. Phil or Thompson blaming the event on video games before we even knew who the culprit was, or the gun control nuts wanting to blame the whole affair on a piece of metal instead of the person pulling the trigger.

It’s sick.

I have two alarm clocks.

My actual clock wakes me up.

Hearing the coffee grinder gets me out of bed.

My manager is going to start chemotherapy for his cancer next week. He really is the last person in the world who should have cancer so young (28). He’s healthy, does sports, he eats right… But it shows that this kind of thing could happen to anymore.

But still, God is good. I’m praying for him, and I’d like you to too, please. Eric and I are going to have extra work on our plates to help him out, so please pray for us to be up to the task too. ; )

Holidays are always best when there are babies and other small children around. It just seems so much more magical when you add in their wonder about what’s going on.

My resolution for being a more responsible person this year…

#1 - I will only eat out for lunch if there’s a special occaison (Like someone else volunteering to pay. ; ) )

This will save tons of money and calories.

The best thing I’ve come across in trying to learn Japanese is something Alex showed me, a game called Slime Forest. Essentially it plays like an old-school SNES RPG. The difference is that when you try to attack something, a katakana symbol will appear over the enemy’s head, and in order to successfully attack you must type out the sound that that symbol makes.

Deceptively simple, but pretty effective.