This was the coolest movie ever! Go see Treasure Planet right away. Take your kids, they’ll probably like it too. Great movie.

Eat less fat and more vegetables. (Potatoes don’t count. Even mashed.)

Today we sold my broken down Contour for $1500.

The problem with cars is that it costs so much for a diagnostic. My car was doing some weird stuff before it broke down, and I probably would have had it checked out if it didn’t cost (at least) $80. Our current car is making weird knocking noises when it’s cold, and some weird noise like a window is open a little. Is there anything wrong with it? I don’t know, and we can’t afford to spend $80 to find out. If there is something wrong, I want to get it taken care of, but if there isn’t I don’t want to waste the money.

I need auto repair insurance. I have a Ford though, so my premiums would be insane.

recently posted this link to a site about a talking budgie. I thought the site was a hoax (the details are in this post).

My mom does large bird rescue (parrots), so I asked her about it. This was her response:

Budgies are the best talkers in the bird world. Parrots have the intelligence of a 4-5 year old child and many will converse intelligently. Fred [friend who does bird rescue] has several birds who do that, and when I am alone with Merlin [Amazon Parrot], she will converse with me.

So it looks like I was wrong, and it’s very possible that the site is not a hoax. I’m sorry.

(Although, I can’t understand a word her birds say. My wife and I think that it’s the same thing as a parent interpreting every gurgle a baby makes as their first words. But who knows.)

I read a comment about a Berkeley student leaving a suicide note on her journal before jumping off one of the buildings there. Like any rubberneck driving by an accident, I went to look. To my surprise, there was some good stuff there. Namely this analysis of the value of higher education.

And on a more morbid note, I’ve always thought about how fragile some people are. Sometimes just a little comment could push someone over the edge. Like this. I wonder if that guy feels guilty. I understand where he’s coming from though. I’ve known people that were always depressed, and just didn’t want to feel better. They just wanted everyone around them to feel as bad as they did. I don’t know if you can help people like that, or if you just have to save yourself.

A lot of people say really stupid things in the form of “We need to do whatever it takes to do X.” As in “I don’t care what it takes, we need to get drugs off the streets!” Or “We need to do anything we have to do to end crime.”

These statements are made without thought, because there is always an easy solution for a problem if peripheral consequences don’t matter.

Want to end crime? Instate martial law, live in a dictatorship. A society with heavily armed men on every corner authorized to execute on site is a polite society.

End childhood disease. Practice eugenics. (that’s got bumper sticker written all over it)

End gun violence. Ban bullets and destroy all gunpowder plants.

End corporate fraud. Disband all corporations.

End illegal immigration. Conquer and annex all sovereign nations. (Bush has already thought of this one, apparently)

End this post. Comment profusely.

This was a story that might have been good as a short in a literary magazine, maybe even a novella, but not a feature length film. It was basically a mix of Dead Poet’s Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus, but without the touching, poignant characters. It might have had touching characters, but we never get to find out, because they were kept at arms length through the whole movie. There isn’t really any characterization at all. We see little snippets of many different relationships, but they are never solidly woven together. We never see how these relationships affect the characters, or how anything affects the characters. As far as I could tell, not one event that occured in the movie affected any of the characters’ lives at all. I think that was the premise, that people don’t change, but it was poorly executed and made for a dull film.

A penguin was driving around one day when his car broke down. With the help of a friendly emu, he pushed it to a gas station. While the mechanic looked at the car, he went inside and bought a candy bar. Being a pengiun and having nothing resembling fingers, he made a mess of it and smeared the chocolate all over his face. When he went back into the garage, the mechanic looked up from under the hood and said, “It looks like you blew your oil pump,” to which the penguin replied, “No, it’s just chocolate.”

What did the Zen master say to the hot dog vendor?

Make me one with everything.

What do you call a computer graphics researcher at Brigham Young University?

A Utah Polygonist.