Tomorrow (Thursday) morning, Ethan is having cardiac surgery. If you’ve got any spare bandwidth in terms of thoughts or prayers, everybody involved would appreciate it.

Update: The surgery went well. From my mom:

Just wanted you to know that Ethan’s surgery this morning went very well. The doctors were able to close the hole in his heart, and everything seems to be A-OK. Thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. Mom and Dad seem to be holding up, although there were tears of joy and relief after they got the report from the doctors. Thanks again.

When you fire up Google Earth, it presents you with a “default” view that you can zoom in on. As it happens, this default point is two blocks from my parents’ home in Lawrence, KS. I’m told that the corner of Crestline Drive and Compton Square (Compton is the name of the owner of the apartment complex located at that intersection) became the center of the default view because the engineer who entered the defaults once lived in these apartments.

Tuesday – yes, it was Tuesday when I saw my congressman coming out of the titty bar. He didn’t look like my congressman, but that’s okay. Nobody really looks like themselves anymore. I think its got something to do with that crap they’ve been pouring into the water.

I decided it might be wise to follow the congressman, just to see what he was up to. After all, my tax dollars do pay his salary. The congressman got into a taxi, so I hailed a taxi despite the obvious dangers involved, and the colored voices in my head began to sing: “All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall and I can hear it all, yes I can hear it all. All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall, and I can even hear the little insects crawl”

The congressman was in taxi number 23, and I was in cab 17, but numbers are meaningless in this kind of cat and squid game. My driver was an Aries, and he laughed when I said “Follow that cab!” And he kept laughing until he saw the cold blue steel of Little Elvis.

“Keep your god-damn hands off that radio!” I warned him “I work for the government!” This is actually a half truth. I’m really a bike courier, but I make a lot of deliveries to government offices. That’s where I heard about the cheese.

And the colored voices in my head kept singing: “All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall, and I can hear it all, yes I can hear it all. All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall, and I can even hear the little insects crawl”

There’s this super secret government program called “Operation: The Cheese Stands Alone.” It’s the congressmen’s pet project. They claim that they’re giving surplus cheese to the needy. I, of course, have my suspicions. After 15 very quiet minutes, the congressman’s cab pulled up outside a warehouse. I had the Aries circle around the building and drop me off. He seemed to be grasping the importance of my mission. Since he said I didn’t have to pay him. As long as I promised to stay very far away from him and his taxi. I swear, some people just don’t want to get involved.

So I walked into that cold dark place, Little Elvis drawn and ready for action. I too was ready – ready for the moment when I would be a real American.

— The Dead Milkmen, Peter Bazooka

Carter, The Kid and I went to the “Taste of Lexus” event today (photo set). Held out at Dodger Stadium, it’s a chance for people to come out and drive Lexus’ cars around like idiots.

The event itself was pretty swank. There were some cool freebies, great free food, and the facilities were quite cool. Lines for the cars were relatively short, and they didn’t hassle you for pushing the cars. Good times. Here’s a quick run down of what we drove.

IS 350

The first car we drove, it was easily the most exciting as well. It’s small, light, powerful, and handles wonderfully. If you’re all about spending a lot of money on a car that has much more performance capability than you’ll ever be able to legally use, this is your car. I’m not by any stretch a car guy, but I was genuinely impressed by this one. It was as fun to drive as the Corvette that I drove at a GM event a few months back.

(Note to Carter: I will agree before I am even told that if I were to spend more than 30 seconds driving a Corvette then I would know now and forever that it is the greatest car ever made.)

GS 450

This is Lexus’ luxury/performance line. It had lots of low-end power, but its handling was crap. I felt like I was at sea because of the body roll. Carter, who is a somewhat more aggressive driver than I am (note: he’s actually a much more aggressive driver than I am), pretty well got it to go sideways around a couple of turns. Not a good sign at all.

BMW 530i

This didn’t have the speed off the line that the GS 450 did, but it handled almost as well as the IS. I felt much better pushing this in to turns than I did the previous car. On the down side, there were way too many wheels and knobs and lights on the inside. What’s that all about?

SC 430

Lexus’ little convertible was fun to drive. The handling wasn’t great and the power was sub-par, but the stereo sounded wonderful and the top was down while I spun its tires around the slalom course they had set up. I wouldn’t buy one of these, either, but it was definitely fun to drive.

GX 470

The Kid’s favorite car, this was a pretty typical SUV. It handled for crap and was under-powered for its size, but it sure was big and noisy. Why do people buy these stupid things?

RX 330h

The hybrid SUV (based on the Camry frame) was there as well. We drove it. It was nothing special. If you want to make people think you’re cool because you drive a hybrid but you still want to piss people off by driving an SUV, this is your car.

All in all, this was a fun event. You can’t beat the price (free), either. If you get a chance to go to one of these things, I would recommend doing so. They really are a lot of fun.

Today was my last day in Pasadena (photo set). It would have been sad, but it’s Chippy Friday and I ordered a pitcher all for myself, so it wasn’t.

On Monday I start in Burbank. I hope all you crazy kids who are staying behind have a good time. I’ll try to make Chippy Friday every now and again so I can still see you all.

See also: Tearing Down the YRL/Pasadena Server (photo set)

The Kid and I went trick-or-treating tonight (photo set). As we have for the last few years, we went up to the Halloween block party in Sierra Madre. It’s a super-impressive deal; a bunch of houses put what has to be weeks of effort in to decorating. There are hundreds of jack-o-lanterns, flying ghosts, graveyards and all manner of spooky and cool. If you’re looking for something to do next Halloween, I can’t recommend this enough.

I would like to state, for the record, that I am offended by the Halloween patrons of Boardner’s (photo set). Yes, there were slutty devils and slutty schoolgirls and the three amigos and cops and state pen inmates, which, sure, is fine. But dammit, when I play Janis’ Bobby McGee, you don’t all need to go out for a smoke. It’s a good song. It’s an important song. Show a little respect.

Despite a complete lack of Foreigner on Boardner’s jukebox — I could have killed for some Double Vision or the Dirty White Boy — I think we did a pretty good job of rocking things out properly tonight. Justin Kick Started Our Hearts (and even played some Sinatra just for me), Joe told us a little story about Mr. Brownstone, and Darin let fly with the Subterranean Homesick Blues. Good stuff. I queued up Patsy Cline’s Crazy for a parting shot, only to be completely outdone by Justin’s subsequent playing of Willy Nelson’s cover of the same song. Truly it was an outstanding feeding of the monkey.

Epilogue: I got voicemail from Justin while he was driving from my place to the hotel. They were playing Hot Blooded on the radio. Rock out.

Tip: if you’re in Manhattan beach, don’t *dare* cross the street when the “don’t walk” light is flashing. If you do, you will get a jaywalking ticket with a quickness.

Some friends are in town this weekend for a football game. I took a few pictures of the friday night leading up to the game (photo set). Enjoy.

Lindsey, Alex, The Kid and I went apple picking (photo set) with some friends this last Sunday. It was a nice, sunny day, and a good time was had by all.

Lindsey, The Kid and I carved jack-o-lanterns (photo set) yesterday. It was great fun, and we got two rad jack-o-lanterns and a big bowl full of roasted pumpkin seeds out of the deal. Yay!

In high-school I went camping in New Mexico with my Boy Scout troop. We would hike anywhere from five to fifteen miles every day over some really beautiful mountains. It was a lot of fun.

About an hour after we went to sleep one night, I heard some noises outside of the tent. My tent-mate, Stephen, looked over at me, as he clearly heard the noises as well. Panicked hand gestures started flying in the tent. Somehow, we managed to communicate without sound that we both agreed that there was a bear just outside the tent — clearly not a good situation.

The first thing you have to understand about North American Black Bears is that they’re possibly the most lazy creatures on the planet. If they have to lift a finger to do something, odds are that they won’t do it. That considered, the most common prescription for dealing with aforementioned creatures is to make as much noise as humanly possible, letting them know that whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, you’re trouble and that maybe they should go on to deal with something easier.

We screamed. At the top of our lungs, we yelled and hollered and whooped and carried on. We stopped and listened, and it was still right there, outside of our tent. Again, clearly not a good situation.

We took a second go at screaming. Equally loud, but with a fire that we simply didn’t have the first time around. That’s what we needed — fire — to make the bear go away. Otherwise it would rip open our tent and eat us.

The rest of our camp took issue with our screaming in the middle of the night. They all had to wake up and hike ten miles with sixty pounds on their backs the next day and would like their rest, thank you very much. What on earth were we screaming for, any way?

“There’s a bear right outside our tent!” This seemed perfectly reasonable to us. Why not yell and hoot and holler in this situation? It was the correct thing to do.

We heard a tent unzip, presumably to get a look at the bear that was about to eat us alive. “Yeah, you sure do have a bear there. It must be six, eight point.” There was much laughing at us after that, but we went to sleep anyway, secure in the knowledge that the deer probably wouldn’t eat us.

When I was a kid I use to go to Loose park in the winter with my mother and my sister to go ice skating on the frozen pond. It didn’t freeze over every year, and sometimes when it did the ice wasn’t solid enough to skate on. Those years when everything worked out perfectly were pretty cool, though.

One thing you could expect when the pond at Loose park did freeze over properly is a camera crew from the local TV news showing up to do a story. (This is what passes for *news* in Kansas City.) They would always want to interview the one kid who actually knew how to ice skate (there was always one) and the two kids pretending to play hockey. They mostly left the families alone, though.

I decided one year that I was going to be on the TV news from Loose park. I didn’t have it in me to learn how to properly ice skate — that’d be a whole lot of effort. I didn’t know anybody with hockey sticks, so that wasn’t much of an option either. The plan that I settled on was wandering back and forth on foot in the background of every shot they took, hoping that I’d make it in to something that they would show on the air.

At the end of the day, my strategy worked. I was on the far left side of the frame for a fraction of a second at the very end of the segment. The news coverage of yours truly was a bit underwhelming, I’ll admit, but it was nice to have set a goal and accomplished it.

It’s a little-known fact that the Space Needle is the hub of all communications for the World Supergovernment-Alien Alliance. It’s true. I learned this when I was in Seattle for a conference a couple of years ago.

I don’t know if this is the best place to talk to the aliens. There are a lot of nerds in Seattle. Microsoft is up there. I think Google has a facility there as well. You’d think that with that many geeks around, somebody would have stumbled upon the such a vital link in the doomsday pact between man and alien. I guess not, though, because it hasn’t been on the news.

If it were up to me, I’d center all communications in one of three places: Madison, WI, Lawrence, KS, or Berkeley, CA. What do they have in common? Well, they’re all college towns, they’re all peopled largely by strangeo’s, and they all excel at manufacturing controversy. I don’t think anybody would notice a bunch of black helicopters arriving at a facility to transmit ultra-low frequency messages in to space. It would fit right in.

I use to know a guy who had a truck like this. It didn’t run very well. Whenever it would rain he would have to sacrifice livestock to make it start. This was inconvenient because we lived in a city and livestock was hard to come by.

It’s handy that the truck was, well, a truck, because schleping out to the sticks to find livestock would be a bitch in a Civic. You couldn’t even fit a goat in one of those things without it tearing up the interior. I bet some people would try to put chickens in the back of a Civic — especially if it was a hatchback. That would be a mistake. They won’t stay there. What were they thinking, putting chickens in the back of a Civic?

We were never shot at while hunting for sacrifice-ready livestock in the busted up pickup. You’d think that being out in Erie and Newton and Hayseville with city slicker tags and city slicker clothes and city slicker attitudes in a busted up truck trying to coax a llama or an ostrich out of its yard would draw more attention and perhaps ire. It did not. Country folk just don’t care about morons in a broken down truck. They’re wise that way. The country folk, that is.

Most of the time we didn’t bring back any livestock. We’d drive around rural Kansas, not stealing things, maybe stop by the Quick Trip for a cool, refreshing Squantrum of soda (or pop: Kansas does not have a cola-nomenclature preference the way Chicago or Los Angeles does). When it would rain we’d have to take my car, which was much less exciting on account of it would always start, even in the rain.

One day, after a particularly good thunderstorm, the truck refused to start. My friend wasn’t in the mood for killing animals so he got a loan at the credit union and bought a used Grand Am. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as the truck, but it had a better stereo (with a tape deck).

A while back, I mentioned that Harvey Danger was giving away mp3′s of their new CD to try to drum up business. I downloaded them and listened to them. It’s not the greatest album ever recorded, but it’s pretty good, and I was so pleased that I was allowed to listen to it before making the irrevocable purchase decision that I ordered a copy from Amazon.

So here’s the message, record labels: if you want me to with any regularity buy CD’s produced within the last thirty years, let me listen to them first. It costs you nothing, and at the end of the day your customers are more satisfied with their purchases. You can’t lose.

I played chess with The Kid the other night (photo set). It was pretty fun.

Apparently he’s been playing at school and doing pretty well. Some of the other kids go to an after school program called “Chess Masters” where they are taught how to play a simplified variant of chess. The Kid’s dad, however, is a jerk and doesn’t believe that learning a simplified variant of the game is a good thing, so he doesn’t go.

I won when we played, and he was rather put out. How uncool is it to lose to your dad? It took me explaining and actually producing evidence that I did in fact use to play a lot of chess for him to not feel bad about the loss. Not that he’s competitive or anything.

A brief parenting tip: it may not be the brightest idea to give your growing son a taste for sushi. Worse yet is teaching him about “chef’s special.” It turns out that kids can say “what’s good today?” and snork down whatever the chef hands them all night long.

The Bramlets, The Kid and I went to the LA County Fair (photoset) this past weekend. It’s truly wonder of nature, the fair, and easily the best excuse to stuff corn dogs in to your face, drink watery American beers and spend some quality time with livestock. Plus: mullets! Mullets galore! You’ve never seen so many! Hoo boy.

The Kid geeks out over the animals and the old-timey/blacksmithy stuff. I get in to the photo contest and some of the artsy-craftsy things (plus: corn dogs). It was the Bramlets’ first time, so they were taking everything in. Good times. Good times indeed.

One of the oddest things about this trip is that we went on the day when ZZ Top was to play. Now, we don’t get a lot of the ZZ Top here in LA County. That’s really more of a San Berdoo thing. The crowd was impressive. I saw one obese 60-something woman in a mechanized wheelchair with a ZZ Top t-shirt on. I don’t think that could be topped.

One thing I can recommend to anybody thinking about going to the fair: show up early. We got there around 10:30, and it didn’t really start to get crowded until after 2:00 (at which point it really started to get crowded). Also, if you show up in the AM, the “standard” parking only differs from “VIP” by fifteen feet or so.

I put a LA County Fair photoset on Flickr. I hope you enjoy it.

The Kid and I went to the Pasadena Farmers’ Market this morning to buy some berries. We’re both big fans of blueberries and strawberries, so they go very quickly every time we have them in the house. The Farmers’ Market is a really good chance to stock up for the next few days at a somewhat cut rate.

Because I’m a giant dork, I took the camera out with me and took a few pictures (photoset linked to above). The Kid watched over my shoulder while I was entering titles and captions for a few of them, and when I keyed the title for this one in, he absolutely terrified me. “There’s only one man who would dare give me the raspberry!” He said. We finished the though in unison: “Lone Starr!”

I swear that I am not trying to teach him to do this. Honest. You believe me, don’t you? Please?

A momentous day in Pasadena history, today the Home Brewery of Mediocre Magnitude sold its first bottles of beer. As luck would have it, I was able to be customer number one, purchasing a sixer of Brother Seamus, their Abbey Dubbel style ale.

I had this particular beer for the first time at Connie-Lynne’s party when Clancey brought over all of the HBMM’s current offerings. Now, all of his beers are good, but this one is well beyond good, closer in fact to “damn” or “holy crap.” It’s the first surprisingly impressive beer I’ve had in a good long time (since NB’s La Folie), and I’m imminently pleased to own some of it now.

As per the label, Brother Seamus is an Abbey-style ale (Chimay is a good example of this style). It’s brewed whole-grain with cinnamon and ginger added in, and the combination really works. What’s even more impressive is that it was HBMM’s first whole-grain brew.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Clancey did a bang up job on the labels as well. At the tasting the labels were black and white and told us little more than the name of the beer. The current generation is big, colorful, well-designed and informative. You can see all of them on HBMM’s beers page.

For your viewing pleasure, I’ve put up a photo set of my Brother Seamus purchase. Do enjoy them.