Emily: Hey Daddy! What do you do when your nose goes on strike?
Sean: I don’t know, Emily. What do you do when your nose goes on strike?
Emily: You picket!

I’ve been meaning to rent Fierce Creatures for quite a while, and finally got a chance to see it this weekend. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and many of the Monty Python Alumni, it centers around an American business magnate’s purchase of an English zoo. As one might expect from this group, the film is quite funny and enjoyable, smacking a bit of Neil Simon’s situation comedies, but with a fair bit of Python-esque humor slipped in as well. Definitely good for a laugh or a dozen and easily worth the $.99 at Hastings for the John Cleese Freudian Slip scene alone.

This past Saturday was my 31st birthday, which I celebrated by dragging my family down to the Tower of the Americas in downtown San Antonio where we met up with Dad McMains, Lana, and Meara. We all enjoyed a meal at the top of the tower, where the rest of my crew had never visited before, watching the miles-long view wheel along below us as we ate. It’s amazing just how far you can see from up there.

We then proceeded to the San Antonio Zoo, a fantastic place that was build largely by the WPA, and which has grown and gotten even nicer ever since. The kids had a great time running around and seeing the various critters. The adults were a bit hard-pressed to keep up, but enjoyed the time quite a bit as well. I had hoped to drop by the Japanese Sunken Gardens after the zoo, but everyone was tired and work was paging me incessantly, so we headed home.

Sunday saw a visit from Mom McMains, who generously offered to come up to San Marcos since we were still road-weary from the day before. We all enjoyed some dinner and visiting time, rounding off a very enjoyable birthday weekend. Thanks for making it a great one, everybody!

Any of you folks know more about decent brands of PC computers than I do? I haven’t done much shopping for the other side of the fence, so any input you PC-wise folks can provide would be welcome. Here’s what Dad had to ask:

Speeking of computers, I will be looking for a PC to
complement the Mac. Much of Meara’s work in webmaster
class and other classes are on a PC platform. Any
suggestions that combine the best in quality, features
and affordability?

Popcorn is the best snack in the world, and here are several axiomatic truths to help you enjoy it more:

1. Popcorn is intended to be popped in oil. Air popped and microwave popcorns are but a pale imitation of the true glory of oil-popped corn. If you’re into redundancy, corn oil works well, but I prefer olive oil. You know why movie theater popcorn tastes so good? It’s because they pop it in coconut oil, the most saturated, least healthy oil you can get that doesn’t come from a dead animal. (Exception to this rule: microwave caramel corn, which can be glorious, but is also pretty tough to find. Additionally, it’s not really wonderful because of the corn, but because of this gooey caramel stuff and the convolutions you have to go through to get it distributed across the popcorn evenly, building oddly shaped apparatus out of tinfoil that burn your fingers before dumping the piping-hot caramel-popcorn mixture all over your new carpet. But I digress.)
2. Popcorn is versatile. Though butter & salt, the old standby, works pretty well, one must experiment to make the most of this snack of all trades. Some of my favorite flavorings include Lowry’s brand seasoned salt (accept no substitutes!), Tony Chachere’s cajun seasoning, parmesan cheese, and chili powder & salt. There are also various powdered cheeses available at finer popcorn stores everywhere that are good if you like that sort of thing.. (Heaven knows I do.) And now that I think about it, experimenting with curry is probably worthwhile too. I’ll let you know.
3. Finally, the very best part about popcorn is after you eat most of the fully popped kernels and get down to the unpopped ones at the bottom, and find the rare barely-popped kernels that have just a bit of white peeking out of the husk. They only comprise about 2% of any batch, but they’re the best part of the whole experience, something akin to eating fish eyes for an eskimo, I suspect. Why doesn’t Frito-Lay make a barely-popped-corn snack? Would having them removed from the rest of the batch of popcorn somehow cheapen their specialness? A question for the ages, I guess, since nobody seems inclined to pick those kernels out for me. We can put a man on the moon, blah blah blah…

To summarize: popcorn. It’s yummy. Eat it.

I’ve got a few more eBay auctions going now, so go buy my stuff and help put my kids through elementary school. Items on the block are an Airport Base Station and a big chunk of my game library, which I’m a bit sad to see go. Sniff.

Warning: Incomprehensible Geekiness Ahead

I picked up a LinkSys Etherfast broadband router today so that I could have multiple computers share a DSL connection. (Necessary, since my ISP uses a loathesome PPPoE system.) I just got it installed, and am hugely impressed with it. Not only does it allow sharing of the connection as advertised, but its built-in PPPoE client software is evidently much better than the skanky Enternet client that my ISP provided, as my transfer speeds are markedly faster. (Up from about 75Kbs to 115Kbs!) Definitely a worthwhile addition to the studio.

EA.com, the guys who sign my paychecks, just announced that they’ve acquired pogo.com, which has a strong lineup of online games and a very active user base. Seems like a good fit with the directions the ea.com site is headed. Now if they’d just provide better support for the Macintosh, I’d be clam-happy. Oh, yeah, and release Majestic.

Yesterday’s good news: we secured refinancing on our house at 1.5% lower interest rate than we had been paying, which will save us a significent amount monthly on our house payments. Hooray for liquidity!

Yesterday’s bad news: it will take several months’ worth of savings on the house to replace my guitar, which suffered a fatal accident last night after church. Alas, poor Yamaha. I knew him, Horatio…

Continuing with today’s Egyptian theme, here’s an interesting excerpt of an email my good friend Jason Myre sent to me today after spending his Christmas holiday in Cairo:

I guess I’ll briefly share with you the
three cool things I learned about the ancient Egyptians. The first was
the fact that the hieroglyphics were painted in color. There’s quite a
few examples of paintings that are still intact.

The second, related
to the first, is that the paint they used was made with fruits,
veggies,
herbs, etc. To keep insects from eating the paint, they added toxins.
After thousands of years of being sealed in an air-tight vault, the
tombs were full of dust from the poisonous paint. So… The first few
people to enter the tomb die of poisoning. The mummy’s curse revealed.

Third thing, little thing, is that they commonly wore mustaches. (That
may not be news to some, but it was to me.) You can visibly see them
on
the better preserved statues and paintings.