Strange phrases often pop into my head, so I write them down because they’re weird and, obviously, I’m weird and I like keeping track of my weirdness. Any one of these could be proof I’m a dork, or maybe all of them are. But at least I’m creative.

Here’s a list of strange phrases that I wrote down a while back that I just found:

Burned man parade
Starving man parade (obviously inspired by the above, but when I was hungry)
Gracefully sleeping forward
Subtle man of demands
Spicer Kirk
The small and Cindy
Desoto liver moon
Fascist typist
I am upset with you, devil
Buildings begin to sweat
Beeswax landing candles
Cats in cloth turbines
Wake up bright sleepers
Too soon after Buddha
Gravy master
Random gladiator

Evil food Somewhere along the line last week, I innocently picked up and ate something that contained some form of vile evilness that stored itself away inside me and then attacked, pretty much eliminating in a very short time any form of nourishment I attempted to take in. In other words, folks, I got food poisoning. I don’t know where, I don’t know how, but I got it, and it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t as bad as the stomach flu over Christmas, but it’s just another event in my life I’d rather not repeat. Two bagels, several cups of rice, and a stack of saltines were my good friends for the past couple of days.

Evil bug While I had that going on, at pretty much exactly the same time Amanda managed to pick up a cold somewhere, too. Children with colds are always so much fun. At least we got her to stop wiping at her nose with her arm immediately after sneezing so we could use a wipe on her and get the mess cleaned up. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: kids have so much snot in them.

Control Alissa did not get sick and so unwittingly performed the roll of “control” in our experiment over the past few days.

/Geek week+ It came to an end Friday with Atlantis successfully touching down at Edwards Air Force base in California, a few days later than planned due to ISS’ situation with the computer malfunctions, the torn insulation blanket, and a bad weather wave-off for a Kennedy Space Center landing. But have no fear, Geek Week will return NET (that’s NASA-speak for “no early than” - you pick up acronyms quickly when you hang out on spaceflight forums) August 7 when Endeavour returns to ISS for more construction.

And why am I a space geek? Looking at pictures like this . . .

. . . has me more than awed in amazement - I have to find out why it looks like that. And I’ll explain: In short, because I won’t bore you with the really technical, aerodynamic-related stuff I don’t really understand, it’s an event that happens just before a vehicle breaks Mach 2. A high pressure wave builds up around certain parts of the vehicle, and areas of low pressure (behind the crew-cabin, the tail, and booster nose cones) cause condensation to build up behind them, resulting in this mist effect. The rainbow-ring is also due to this, or could be the shock-wave itself passing over the vehicle. If you want to be really creeped out, this is also the point at which Challenger disintegrated. This is “max q,” if you remember that term being tossed about, the point at which maximum dynamic pressure is being applied to the vehicle. The shuttles engines are throttled down to something like 65% a little before this to alleviate some of the stresses on the vehicle, then as it passes through max q, the call is made: (and everyone who witnessed the event in some way will remember this) “(Orbiter name), go at throttle up,” and it’s corresponding call back from the shuttle, “Roger, go at throttle up” - the last words heard from Challenger. I still feel nervous hearing those words with every launch today because I know that this is most likely when something could go wrong.

You’ve learned something today, haven’t you. Maybe you’re a little disturbed, but you’ll probably remember this, won’t you?

Remember I mentioned The Secret a short while back, about what a joke the whole thing was? Of course I’m not alone but it seems opposition is quickly building to try and stub out the ridiculous blooming sales of this, frankly, bullshit. Like they say in the article, the book/DVD claims people are responsible for the situations in their lives - so the Jews in concentration camps actually were responsible for that happening in Nazi Germany, not Hitler and his henchmen, and people with terrible, incurable diseases are responsible for those because they just didn’t think positively enough. It just disgusts me that people like this get so much attention and make sales for their stupid products - and very few of the people who buy them think deeply enough to contemplate anything further than “what can I get for myself.” If the power of the this Secret is true, then I’m going to concentrate all my positive thoughts on ridding the world of horrible people like this - in the worst, most gruesome ways possible. Let’s see how it works out.

Click and vote for the obvious best rock trio - Rush. It is a freakin’ embarassing shame that the friggin’ Bee Gees are way out in front at this point. This is ridiculous. (I do feel a bit sorry for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and ZZ Top, who deserve a LOT better than the 1%, 1%, and 0% they are respectively getting right now. Destiny’s Child and TLC do not even belong on this poll - we’re talking about rock and we’re talking about bands. When they pick up some instruments, let me know and I’ll reconsider.)

Update: That’s more like it. Rush is now at 46%, Bee Gees at 29%. I still feel sorry for Hendrix, Cream, ZZ Top, and The Police, however. They all deserve better than that.

(Somehow this got marked as “private” in the Wordpress Dashboard and so, I think, only I got to see it on my site until today when I noticed the problem. It was meant to be a Father’s Day post but now is three days too late. Annoying. This isn’t the first time Wordpress has done this on its own to me, either. Anyway, I’ve edited the time-stamp to make it the newest post, but realize it was written June 16, intended for June 17, Father’s Day.)

Mothers are given a gift to have an instant chemical bond with their children. From the moment they’re born, the love is there and it’s unquestioned. For fathers, it’s a bit different. Maybe some men feel it instantly, but we don’t have that shared chemical bond possessed by someone who was able to grow and carry a tiny person inside of them. Maybe some men look at their offspring and instantly feel love gush up from somewhere inside, but for others it’s just not that way - it’s learned, or grown, maybe cultivated, between child and father. Whatever it is, it was never obvious. Not to me, at least.

I don’t have a doubt that motherhood is the far more difficult task, but for the life of me, I can’t think of anything that’s been more difficult in my life than being a father has for the past 21 months. That’s not to say I’d change a thing, however. It’s a strange thing that happens when you become a parent: you instantly become aware of just how difficult it is, and yet it’s the greatest thing you will ever know.

For me, the worst part has simply been The Fear. I’m a worrier by nature. I get it from my dad who frets over everything that can be fretted over. I can always tell something is getting to him because the muscles in his upper jaw start to flex back and forth as he mulls over the details of what could possibly go wrong. I don’t know if that happens to me. I don’t know what I do. I just know that I’ve always thought deeply about, and probably over-thought, pretty much everything in my life.

I’m not a “planner,” per se, but I almost always do my research before diving headlong into things. I will sit and stare at something new to me for what seems like ages until I’ve thoroughly absorbed everything I can about it, mentally charting out potential disasters, and, in this day of the internet, I research, research, research. But what I can’t research, or plan, is just the everyday random events that wreak far more havoc, and it’s those that, as a parent, I fear more than anything else. And that’s why I probably stay awake at night thinking up worse-case scenarios.

I have this strange belief that if I can somehow imagine it, it probably won’t happen, because, as we all know, whatever you’ve planned for is exactly what won’t happen. So I often lie awake at night and feel The Fear gripping me as another ridiculous scenario enters my brain. My sweet, amazing little Amanda has somehow gotten into the backyard while I’m mowing the lawn and before I know it, she’s reached under the lawnmower and mangled her cute little hand. Probable? No, of course not. My sweet, amazing little Amanda has somehow gotten through all of our security gates and the front door and lock to chase a ball out into the street just as the garbage truck rolls by our house. Again, sure, it could happen, but the likelihood is extremely low (and yet it happens everyday, somewhere - but maybe those kids’ parents didn’t think of the worst-case scenarios . . . )

I think it would be easy to suggest that I don’t trust my daughter, but it’s the opposite. My little girl is brilliant and amazing. I have no doubt of her abilities and her bright future. It’s the rest of the world that I don’t trust. I don’t trust that the garbage truck is going to stop for her, that the driver is going to be paying enough attention to see my beautiful baby girl running out there, unaware of the danger. In reality, I know that as soon as Amanda saw the truck, she’d stop well away from it and stare in awe, pointing and chanting, “Oooh! Truck!” like she always does now when she sees a truck.

But still I fear. I fear everything. In some ways, that’s how I know I’m a father, because I have never feared like I fear now. Danger is everywhere and I want to protect her from every little threat out there. I try and imagine every danger that I can, but I only have so much time and sanity. I have finally realized, of course, that The Fear is just the result of wrapping so much of my life up in one little person that means so much to me that I can’t bear the thought of letting something happen to her that might take her away from me. That fear, of course, is love.

That first night in the hospital with Amanda, I tried to sleep but mostly laid awake listening to her breathe as Alissa slept deeply and soundly after her hard day of work bringing her into the world. With every hitch, hiccup, and squeak from Amanda’s tiny little mouth, I jumped up to her bassinet to make sure she was okay. She always was. I didn’t know it then, but that was my first night facing The Fear.

It’s pretty rare that I find anything actually personally useful in a news article, but today Yahoo delivered with BlogBackupOnline in this piece. The name implies its purpose: it backs up your blog, online. If you’re like me, and you worry about losing all of your writing and yet do absolutely nothing to protect it by backing up your site like you should, this is just what you need. You sign up, log in, put in the address of your site, and it finds what it needs to back up your writing. Then it does so everyday so that if your web host somehow manages to delete everything you at least have the content of your site, if not the visual element (and BBO will back up images on request, too.) the only catch is that you just need to be using one of the more popular blog engines: Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress (I haven’t even heard of most of these). Pretty cool and handy if you ever want to move your site. I feel safer already.

Miss school - miss out You’d think with this much time between, um, “issues,” I guess I’ll call ‘em, that I’d have a ton to offer, but it’s just the opposite. Just like missing school, you don’t post, you miss out.

Geek week It’s that time again - Atlantis is in orbit and that means NASA TV is an oft-visited channel at our house. Alissa’s baseball (White Sox and Diamondbacks) compete for airtime with space-related issues, but as there’s something like 6 billion baseball games in the season and only ten days or so of space stuff, I tend to get to see the space stuff. Which has an effect on . . .

My little geekette I have already begun my conquest of turning Amanda into a dork. She knows the shuttle, and, when asked where it is, will go running from her room to the TV, yelling, “Shuddl! Shuddl!” where she taps at the screen because she knows it’s in there, somewhere. It hasn’t topped her fascination with trains and tractors, but I’m working on it. If only the Wiggles did some space-related stuff, I’d have her hooked. Damn that “Fruit Salad.”

I know an old lady who swallowed a fly It’s one of Amanda’s favorite books right now, but you might not realize it’s sort of a true story. It happened to me. So I’m not an old lady, but I did swallow a fly. Drinking a glass of milk, a fly somehow landed right in it just as I took a gulp, and down it went before I could react. This, I should tell you, happened when I was like 8 years old. Lucky for me, as a growing boy I did need the protein.

You may remember the political “intrigue” last fall as two smoking bans butted heads on Arizona’s ballot. The good one won, of course, and went into effect about a month ago, effectively banning all smoking from pretty much any indoor areas - bars included. What’s been fun is watching none of the doom and gloom predicted by the proposition’s opponents. For months beforehand, opponents poured unbelievable amounts of attention on how badly a smoking ban would destroy the bar scene, because, of course, the only people who go to bars are smokers. As we’ve seen in the past month, people who don’t purposely breathe pollution regularly actually do go out and do things, and they’ve been turning up at previously smoke-filled bars. “‘We’re drawing in people who would not come before because they didn’t like the smoke,’” says one bar owner. No kidding? Who would have thought. Oh, that’s right, everyone but the non-smoking ban opponents.

Tonight we dined from the George Foreman grill, not having pulled out “the George” for a long time to make burgers because, having a house with a porch and things like that means we can have a real grill. You know, a grill that belches fire and poses more than a scalding hazard. Until recently, we had one of those. But now we don’t.

You see, the old gas grill has given up the ghost, kicked the bucket, is pushing up daisies, or so it seems. I tried to revive it - I got the parts I thought would fix it but it turns out that the only parts the stores carry are for grills I don’t own. It’s salvageable, and that’s the most frustrating part. I know that if I wait long enough, go to enough stores, contact enough places, I’ll find those parts. But I want to eat the way primal man ate. And “the George” is just too polite to provide any charring.

But tonight I slapped on a few patties of the first ground beef “the George” has seen in about 7 years - since we moved into our house, when my parents gave us that fine gas grill that finally went to the great barbecue in the sky. And, yeah, I made sure it was clean first. The results were . . . edible. But not grilled. And I know grilling aficionados abhor gas grills, but even they have to admit it’s a step up from the glorified hot plate that is “the George”. But he served us well - when we lived in the apartment, that was our grill, and we loved it. But once you’ve cooked with fire, it’s pretty hard to step back down to hot metal plates.

For now, the hull of our former grill sits on the patio, forlorn. I feel bad, like it’s waiting for me to come out and pay attention to it. But we all know that’s not going to happen. It’ll sit there until a new one comes along sometime soon, and then it’ll be wheeled to the side of the house where it will sit, forgotten, for some unknown amount of time. And then one day, the grill will be wheeled to the curb, probably excited because it thinks it’s going somewhere fun because it’s finally getting some attention again, like all grills would think in its position, until the big truck comes and the little tractor grabs it with with its nashing claw-arms, tossing it thoughtlessly into the truck’s giant bin. We’ll know the truth, but we’ll tell everyone else that we took it out to a nice farm where it could be repaired and grill up freshly butchered and ground meat - the true dream of all grills - and, hey, did you see our new grill? It burns 48,000 BTUs . . .

A key moment for me in Knocked Up came when family-man Pete (Paul Rudd) and expectant father Ben (Seth Rogen) watch kids playing at the park and discuss the trials and tribulations of parenthood. Ben expresses amazement when the kids all freak out over bubbles and Paul, with a tinge of sadness, states, “I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.” Ain’t that the truth?

What is it with “growing up”? Why do we stop loving things like that, like kids love something as simple as bubbles? Bubbles give way to computers and cell phones and cars and homes, but none of it is really any fun, is it? I know when I buy something for my computer, it’s just a part. A tool. Not a toy, nothing to have fun with. Even if it aids me in getting things done, it’s still a boring thing. Why do we abandon our “bubbles” - whatever it is that makes us truly happy - as we get older?

I’ve tried not to - I’ve tried to stay stupidly childish and in that respect, I still get stupidly excited about music. Maybe it makes me seem ridiculous, but it’s one little thing that I can look forward to that isn’t attached to any big agenda in the world, isn’t something to get me ahead in life, and doesn’t do anything in any tangible sense of the word. No, it’s not the same as when I was 16 years old, anxiously awaiting the release of some new album. I hate to say it, but as open-minded as I try to be, I’m jaded simply by exposure to thousands and thousands of albums in the past 20 years. But I’m a lot more open-minded than most people are.

What confuses and concerns me as I get older is watching people give up things they love, like music, books, and movies, and instead focus on things they think will get them ahead or better them somehow. This, in many people’s eyes, is “growing up,” becoming an adult. And with it comes some strange need to follow bizarre philosophies churned out by people who never needed the help in the first place. There’s The Secret - I’m not even going to bother linking to it because I think it’s pretty gross that someone can actually make money off of something as simple as “think positive and good things will happen to you,” the “good things” in this case for most of the people interested being dollar signs. And there’s all those Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus type things that try to help you solve problems in your relationship by reasserting archaic cliches about men and women that we’d just about broken down. You know, there’s no better way to solve an argument than to suggest the opposite sex’s brain just doesn’t grasp things the way you do. Somehow, this guy has sold millions of books simply by suggesting that we understand the other sex’s mental shortcomings. There was a time that was called “sexism,” but now it’s called “understanding.”

I have a suggestion for the two groups of people buying these two tomes (and I suspect there is a big overlap of the two): the path to financial enrichment is littered with the mines like these books. This is a test. You will find yourself richer in all aspects on the other side if you simply ignore the books and follow two (or maybe three, depending on how you look at it) pieces of advice: “be good and happy” and “listen to each other.”

And along with that, I think everyone should have their own “bubbles.” Funny enough, it’s a notion first suggested in another Judd Apatow (Knocked Up director) vehicle, the wonderful but short-lived NBC series, Freaks And Geeks. In the first episode, drummer Nick excitedly shows his soon-to-be love interest, Lindsay, his huge drumset. When she expresses dismay at it, he enthusiastically explains that everyone needs their giant drumset, or whatever - just something they can be excited about, even if they’re not great at it. It’s just something to distract from the tedium of daily life, but really becomes a reason for living, even if it’s something simple. Adults so quickly slip into the doldrums of work schedules and all of our stupid gadgets that keep us tied down to things that really mean little in the long run. So don’t be so adult. Don’t give up on bubbles or your giant drumset, whatever they may be. Maybe it won’t get you rich, quick, but you will be richer.