Comments, as I have noted before, are the best thing about blogging. Comments make it more like making love and less like intellectual masturbation.

I hit a milestone, yesterday, when Tuning Spork left me my 3000th comment since coming to MuNu. Wow. 3000 comments. I am really very grateful and a little bit overwhelmed by the number.

Rob said it the best on his blog, in referring to the people who comment on my blog:

You have, without a doubt- The best collection of "commenters" I have seen, bar none.

Rob is right. Y'all are the best! Thanks so much for making this worthwhile for me.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:34 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Oh, no. Please, thank you!

Posted by: Wicked H at August 09, 2005 01:33 PM (iqFar)

2 Congrats, RP! Someday when I grow up, I too shall have a nifty batch of commenters. Even if I have to enlist all my personalities. *sigh* Now I have "commenter" envy. Great.

Posted by: Rob at August 09, 2005 01:48 PM (Gkhif)

3 You deserve the visits & comments, You deserve the high praise. The quality of your writing and your wit is what compels us to return.

Posted by: michele at August 09, 2005 07:39 PM (ZUSFz)

4 I think why RP gets such great comments is there's a lot of respect there. You will almost never see someone calling you names, or talking crap, because you don't put up with it and we/they know it. Plus your stories are great! Sometimes it's hard NOT to leave a comment.

Posted by: Oorgo at August 10, 2005 04:16 PM (lM0qs)

5 You have that knack for inviting conversation. I'm jealous.

Posted by: Ted at August 10, 2005 04:41 PM (+OVgL)

6 Um, Thanks, Rob??

Posted by: Mark at August 11, 2005 12:32 AM (Qy2ks)

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Been awhile since I've done one of these but there were lots of interesting things to note, so:

Births, today, in

*1593 Izaak Walton, a name known to anyone who ever picked up a fly fishing rod. He wrote the Compleat Angler in 1653 or thereabouts.

*1930 Betty Boop born in in Max Fleischer's animated cartoon Dizzy Dishes.

*1938 Rocket Rod Laver, one of the greatest Australian tennis players, winning the Grand Slam in 1962 and 1969. He also never lost at Davis Cup play.

Events, today, in

*BC 480 Persian forces of hundreds of thousands defeat Greek forces of 7000 led by Spartan king Leonidas and 300 other Spartans at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae. The Spartans were wiped out to a man but caused huge casualties among the Persians. The epitaph remains:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

*378 Battle of Adrianople (with nice diagrams), the surprise arrival of the Visigoth heavy calvary defeats Roman Army, setting the stage for the end of the Roman Empire.

*1638 Jonas Bronck (link is to cool page on history of the Bronx) becomes the first European settler in what later becomes known as "da Bronx". Always, "the", by the way, the only borough in New York City to be named that way.

*1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes his essay, "Walden", on his time spent on Walden Pond in his cabin:

*1902 Edward VII crowned King of England after death of his mother, Queen Victoria. The Victorian age ended.

*1936 Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, making Hitler crazy. See article at ESPN on Owens. Owens died from lung cancer after smoking a pack a day for much of his life. I note that Owens, America's greatest track star, never denied taking steroids (whether he was asked is, of course, besides the point).

*1945 US drops the second atomic bomb ("Fat Man") on Japan and destroys part of Nagasaki.

*1965 Singapore gains independence from Malaysia. Celebrates National Day. See message from Prime Minister here.

*1974 Richard Nixon (bio from Nixon Foundation website), our only Quaker president, resigns presidency in wake of Watergate. Gerald Ford takes over "under extraordinary circumstances". I've been to Ford's museum in Grand Rapids. Not too bad, but I really hate Grand Rapids.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:28 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Christina, at Feisty Repartee, is hanging up her spurs. I will miss her sure handed and spare writing (never a wasted word), her clever insights, her penetrating observations, her sometimes heartrending stories and the terrific anecdotes of her way too smart children. Today, we lose one of the really great ones!

Thanks for the excellent writing and wonderful memories, Christina!

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1 Bless you for the very kind words, my friend; however, I shall be haunting you here. ; )

Posted by: Christina at August 08, 2005 05:55 PM (zJsUT)

2 NO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O!!!! I didn't visit often enough, but I also loved it when I did. This is a sad day in Munuvia.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at August 08, 2005 09:18 PM (ZgQJ1)

3 I've left my incredulity over there but I'll just add an "awshit" over here. *sniffle*

Posted by: Margi at August 09, 2005 02:39 AM (nwEQH)

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I'm not saying I'm going to hell for this, but I am certainly not scoring any points with the Big Guy. The problem? I had a major Jimmy Buffet craving this weekend. I gorged on a couple of cd's and what, you may ask, what song did the Girl Child, supported by her brother, want to hear over and over again until she could sing along?

My head hurts, my feet stink, and I don't love Jesus

Hearing her sing along to this, if I don't die by Thursday I'll be roaring Friday night!, made me realize I would have some small explaining to do to our religious Mormon nanny. All she said, when I explained, was: "oh, my."

I'm not helping myself at all here, am I?

Oh, and do you know the song 1985? The Girl Child knows all the words to this one, as well. And she sings it with the 2.5 year old Boy Child. I could hear them one night when we were staying at my parents' house. It went something like this:

GC: She was gonna be an actress, she was gonna be a

BC: STAR!

GC: She was gonna shake her ass, on the hood of White Snake's

BC: CAR!

My wife and I just about fell over when we heard this little duet. Putting to one side the fact that we were not particularly pleased that the last nanny played this song enough for the Girl Child to learn, by the way. Not pleased in the slightest. Still, pretty darn funny.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 12:23 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 Oh man, that's a good one. At least your kids don't say stuff like the little one on "The Fockers"... asss hoooole I still laugh. Whenever we hear our little guy swear (which isn't often, thank goodness) we pretend we don't understand what he's saying, i.e. "Sit? Did you say sit?" .. it doesn't work very well though, especially when he even says it in the right context.

Posted by: Oorgo at August 08, 2005 01:24 PM (lM0qs)

2 You should teach them to do the Run/DMC Aerosmith version of Walk This Way. That would cool.

Posted by: Howard at August 08, 2005 02:31 PM (u2JaN)

3 Did you clear the Mormon Nanny through Howard????

Posted by: Wicked H at August 08, 2005 02:34 PM (iqFar)

4 ***snort*** I agree about "Walk This Way," but really any Beastie Boys song will do -- that's exactly what I pictured when I read the duet! Glad you've gotten settled in -- somewhat, anyway. Good luck in corrupting the mormon na...um...I mean...meeting the nanny's approval...uh, yeah.

Posted by: Allison at August 08, 2005 03:55 PM (ddjrP)

5 Heh. My friends have learned to carefully ignore any swear words their 4 year old says. Any sort of attention to them make them much more likely to appear again.

Posted by: owlish at August 08, 2005 03:59 PM (kVnh2)

6 Once I made a mix. It had a Jimmy Buffett song on it. And lots of other songs. I was getting ready for a party and I grabbed some mixes. Later, while we flipped burgers and kids whacked a badminton birdie around, Jimmy sang out loud and clear, "Wha' don't we get drunk and skroooo?..."

Posted by: Amy at August 08, 2005 06:09 PM (nUCsP)

7 Yes, Wicked, the Nanny has been cleared by me. I gave her my official Seal of Approval..."Dude, she's hot!".

Posted by: Howard at August 09, 2005 02:15 PM (u2JaN)

8 Oh my word! I laughed so hard. There is a country song out now called "Hillbillies" and the chorus is "like it in the hay" and my 2.5 year old son sings along. The funniest is when he says "you know how we get when we get it on" and it comes out just "get it on!" Priceless, too bad you didn't get it on tape.

Posted by: Oddybobo at August 09, 2005 03:08 PM (6Gm0j)

9 OMFG - I read this yesterday, and again today and I am still laughing my ass off!!! I want my Hello Kitty pencils!

Posted by: Mark at August 10, 2005 09:55 PM (Qy2ks)

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It has been a long time since I did a Behind the Curtain post, but that's just because nothing or no one caught my particular fancy for awhile now. I don't go out looking for these people, they sort of have to find me. Today, I was found by Mr. Soulé. A colleague of mine asked me if I had ever heard of him. He told me that Soulé served as President Pierce's ambassador to Spain in the 1850's and, while there, managed to grievously wound the French ambassador in a duel and give the Spanish government a 48 hour ultimatum over something (which they ignored) and, finally, consorted with ant-royalist activists and intriguers. Curiosity officially piqued.

All in all, seems like a perfect candidate for a Behind the Curtain portrait.

As always, the rest is in Extended Entry! more...

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I spent the morning at summer camp. It was the last day of the Girl Child's summer camp and they were putting on a little skit they had been working on in drama class. She was very excited and, despite the fact that it seems as if I have been out of the office more than I have been in the office, I decided to take the morning off and attend. After all, ten years from now I will not remember what I did in the office this Friday but I will remember attending her little skit in ten years.

It was charming. They were "going on a bear hunt" and acted out the whole little story. They put the Girl Child smack in the middle of the line of kids, I think because she's so tall, and she did just fine. Then they gave out t-shirts to the kids. The counselors all made t-shirts for each child and presented them with a few remarks about why each child received that particular shirt. The Girl Child was given the most creative camper award t-shirt, for all of her creative work in art class and because she loved doing the art projects so much. The expression on her face was priceless. She was so self-consciously pleased with her t-shirt.

And then we left them to their devices for the remainder of the camp day. But her counselors had nice things to say about her to me ("she's sooooo smart"; "she made so many friends"; "she was up for anything we did") and her drama teacher said that the Girl Child was fearless and enthusiastic and a big risk taker. All of this, of course, was music to my ears. Nice music, not industrial grunge, just to be clear.

Otherwise, we didn't even mind being outside for this as the temperature was already 87 degrees by 10:00 a.m.

It was a very sweet morning.

*Any takers for telling me what the title of this post is a reference to? Without using a search engine, of course. I bet a number of you erudite readers know what this is.

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My desk is a lovely shade of reddish/brownish wood. I had forgotten it was so lovely. It only took just under five hours today to clean it up enough for me to see it again. Also, while on the subject of good news, I do not appear to to have buried anything of a time critical nature such that I have defaulted on something, let a statute of limitations run, missed an important deadline, or otherwise committed malpractice per se. That's always the really big risk with having a messy, messy desk.

Yup, looking mighty shiny and clean in here today. I can practically see my reflection in the surface of the desk.

What the hell. Beats working!

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In what other city could you possibly buy from a Japanese language bookstore, for $1, a copy of Bill Cosby's book, Fatherhood, translated into Norwegian (title: Kunsten Å Være Far), ?

Of course, I bought it. I mean, how could I not?

I love this city.

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Thanks to some guy in Missouri, vicarious liability is dead in NY. Vicarious liability ("VL") is a really interesting concept. It has to do with ownership of a conveyance -- a motor vehicle now but a carriage before. VL means that liability for the damage caused by the motor vehicle is imputed to the owner of the vehicle and not merely the operator. This meant that car companies were on the hook if a leased car got into an accident. NY was one of the only states with this law.

VL dated back quite some time and came into being when horse and carriage travel was popular. It made a lot of sense. Horses and carriages were very expensive things but they were generally driven not by the owners but by a poor and poorly compensated carriage driver. If the driver hurt someone, there was no recourse. So the NY State Legislature provided recourse to the owner of the horse and carriage, generally a person of substance.

The concept was simply carried forward to motor vehicles later.

At the time, it seems to me that VL was not particularly revolutionary. I recall from my days studying Roman Law (literally, the laws and legal system of Rome and the Roman Empire) that it provided for VL. If you threw something out of a rented apartment and hurt someone, the injured person had recourse against the owner of the apartment building, whether or not the owner had anything to do with throwing the object out the window. VL, no?

However, VL in NY has made leasing cars very, very expensive and caused all sorts of havoc in terms of insurance and in terms of indemnification of the car companies by the lessee. I know because I got involved in one of the cases once. Went all the way to the Appellate Division where we lost.

Representative Sam Graves, put an unexpected end to the issue.

The provision is in the federal transportation bill under "Title X: Miscellaneous Provisions." It states that people who rent or lease motor vehicles to others "shall not be held liable under the law of any state" for any harm their vehicles cause, as long as they are not guilty of "negligence or criminal wrongdoing."

Representative Graves's amendment passed the House in March by a vote of 218 to 201, mostly along party lines, and it stayed in the bill through the conference committee process. When the full bill went to a vote, it passed overwhelmingly, because it included billions of dollars of spending on transportation projects that lawmakers in both parties wanted for their districts.

If the president signs the bill, officials said, the federal law will take precedence, and New York's vicarious liability law will no longer apply.

No matter what you think of VL, it was the law of NY and has been hotly debated, again and again in the Legislature. For some schmuck from Missouri to come in and change NY law is, to me, an abuse of the federal system. I may not have liked the law, but I resent like hell this hick coming in and usurping the powers granted to the dysfunctional NY State Legislature by the equally dysfunctional citizens of the State of NY.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:30 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. The kids actually were napping, the wife was working out, the nanny was off at church, the air conditioning was humming away, we were as unpacked as we need to be at this stage of the weekend, and, for the first time in four days, I sat down for more than a moment.

But, I am a man and in some ways a typical man so I could not sit down in my new den without holding the remote. The adult male pacifier. And I could not hold it without using it, of course. But I did strike gold. Conan the Barbarian was only moments away from starting. I settled in to the couch to enjoy, as if for the first time again, the theatrical stylings of the Governator.

This brings me almost to the point of this post. Bet you thought I'd never get there, did you?

While watching this subtle play on the nature of good and evil, on choice and destiny, on nature v. nurture, I kept seeing breasts. There were a bunch of woman naked from the waist up in this cinematic tour de force. Normally, I suppose, I appreciate the naked female form as much as the next red blooded heterosexual male. But something about these breasts struck me as odd. And then it hit me. These breasts were real! That's why they looked so unusual and even, frankly, so nice.

And now we do get to the point. The point is this: real, not surgically enhanced breasts are seldom seen in movies today. They have vanished, much like cigarette adds from television. So much so, that I am wondering whether the natural breast should be added to the California endangered species list, Hollywood Chapter. They should not be allowed to vanish altogether. We should take a stand and demand their return to the big screen.

Seriously, how messed up is it that real breasts stand out on the screen? How many women have undergone cosmetic surgery to "improve" their looks for movies?

I'm reminded of a scene from a movie I can't recall the name of. Steve Martin and Sarah Jessica Parker are fooling around, in LA, and he says that her breasts feel weird and she says that's because they're real.

Could we start a grass roots movement here? Small breasts for the big screen! A rallying cry!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 09:53 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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The movers came, the movers schlepped, the movers worked hard, they nicked walls, they damaged only one piece of furniture, and they left us with our boxes of possessions all over the house, mostly in the correct rooms.

We unpacked, to a minimum level of acceptability, our bedroom. We worked until late and then went out for -- margaritas. Well deserved re-hydration.

The next morning came with no hot water in the house. Someone had turned the furnace off, kindly meant, to not burn oil without the need. I turned the furnace back on and promptly it filled the furnace room with smoke and fumes. Service call one. The oil company. Hot water was restored, bodies were washed. Happiness returned. Ten hours of unpacking later, the kitchen was done. Kitchens take a lot of time to unpack. No question about it. In the meantime, deliveries came and went and our house became fuller still.

Friday, my father came to help. He made us a little bit crazy but he was a huge help. The kids' bedrooms were done and the den and living room were unpacked, the book shelves were adjusted, and the books were put away. Cable was hooked up so we had television again.

Saturday dawned with a trip to Stew Leonard's for pick up 1.5 lbs of jalapeno poppers. That's all we ended up eating for the whole day, as it turned out. The playroom was unpacked. The gym equipment was delivered and assembled by experts. We worked until the wee hours getting everything as finished as we could.

You should see the garage. In fact, I will take some pictures so you can see how we turned a spacious two car garage into a place where boxes were sent to die. My garage is the elephant graveyard of moving materials.

Sunday, the children came to their new home. I was promptly informed, and then regularly reminded by the Girl Child, that if it "was too hard" for her at the new house, her grandparents said she could move back with them.

Yesterday, first day back at the office and lots of catching up to do.

Today, too gruesome for words at work. Oh, and my wife has left us. You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille! Jetted off to Cinncinnati. Business, she claims. But we all know what a garden of temptation Cinncinnati is. Who knows what she's doing there.

I told the Girl Child last week that when her mother went away, we could stay up late and do something fun, just the two of us. Last night, after I said good night and turned off her light, she said, "Pappa, I am sooo excited about tomorrow night!" Yay for me! I'm going to hold on to these moments as long as I can!

Another thing I'd like to hold on to? When I tell the Boy Child that I love him, in Norwegian, "Glad i deg!", his response back, "Goal die!" is too precious for me not to savor.

Finally, the kids are excited by the deer. They have seen the deer and like them. Me? I have seen the deer and concluded that, much as pigeons in the City are rats with wings, deer are rats with antlers and big ears.

More to come later.

Thanks for all the good wishes on the prior post! You all are the best!

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