Month: February 2007

With my new cell phone, we captured a really cute video of Kelly singing “Jingle Bells.” As doting parents in the internet age, of course our first thought was “we must put this up on the web!” And we thought it would be really cute if Kelly had her own MySpace page. It turned out…

It was refreshing to see the old movie, since I saw the 2005 remake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when it was in the theatres. The story is the same in both, and I like them both, though they’re likeable in different ways. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is darker, and Neil finds the paddleboat’s tunnel too frightening. It also manages to get in a few more digs of social commentary. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has far better child actors and they play a bigger role than the parents, who had almost all the lines in the original. The new movie is also far more fantastical and Willy Wonka’s factory really looks like a magic world of its own. I only realized later that the geese who laid the giant golden chocolate eggs were replaced by squirrels and chocolate nuts in the remake, but it didn’t make any difference in the story.

I hate to think how many hours I’ve spent hunting for lost stuff. So when, in one of his many gadget magazines, Peter heard about a product, called Loc8tor, that’ll help you find missing objects, I was more than a little interested. It works like this: you buy several tags, which you attach to the…

I was surprised to find out how saddened I was to find out this morning that Anna Nicole Smith had died. The authors of her various obituaries seemed to be ashamed they even knew who she was and struggled to describe her career with various synonyms for “celebutard.” Which left me to wonder if I’m…

The first comic books I ever read were Harvey Comics my father got for me at the Heidelberg US Army PX. I loved Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good Little Witch. I didn’t like Richie Rich too much: he was a perpetually grinning dork, but he did have a cool robot maid, and…

It is an understatement to say that Kelly loves books. “Book” and her own declensions of the word book: abook, bookoo, were her first words, and until we trained her not to do so, Kelly used to wake me and Peter up by pounding one of us with a book and insisting we read it…

I keep my weight under control for a variety of reasons, not least of which is I don’t want to buy “fat clothes.” I’m not obsessive about it. I have an ideal weight, at which I think I fit most of my clothes well, but I allow myself to fluctuate from it by about 5…

In the New York Times. You knew it was gonna happen someday. And I don’t think he’ll have to go to jail, since he’s already been found innocent. Via Mental Floss.

In the past few years, Comic-Con has become too much for me to deal with. Each year, it’s gotten bigger and flashier, and since San Diego built a sports stadium downtown, almost impossibly crowded. I’m nostalgic now for the days when a few weeks before the Comic-Con, I could book at the Clarion, a modest…

As they’ll tell you themselves, Europeans are better at foreign policy, cuisine, and fashion than troglodytic Americans. In order to help you, my readers, towards the path of becoming as suave and sophisticated as our betters on The Continent, I present to you a selection of European music videos to further your understanding of their…