The Inner Punk and President.

Many of you know about my life long fascination with all things Punk.  As you can see from my blog banner, I have a fondness for the skull and crossbones, not because of some ethereal netherworld connection, but because of the continued personal battle between conservative normality and my high-school counter culture nostalgia.

 

As a skater, the "threat of pain" and "actual pain" has always been a present force weighing on me.  Punk is the genre that explained that pain. 

The years spent sitting on concrete steps watching friends smith-grind handrails and crash with force on the asphalt below were set to the musical angst of a generation of punks.  The Misfits, Fugazi, The Ramones, and The Dead Milkmen, all contributing to a movement that many of us still embrace in our hearts, while condemning it with our present reconciliation with society outside of the shadows and parking lots.

We wear ties to the mall, but we always walk into the shops with with the Minor Threat and Ministry T-shirts and wonder what would happen if we just for once, indulged ourselves and bought one to replace the one we lost in college.

My favorite thing about punks, however, is not their music, it is their hair.  It is just that simple.  Punks spend more time on their hair than the most wealthy Wall Street banker, and use more product than Miss America.

I can't remember how long I have have a fascination with Mohawks, I know that nearly every caricature I have drew from the age of 8 to 35 had a mohawk, and if it was in color, it was a green mohawk.  In the vain of going punk, my personal relationship with the mohawk is as close as my ability to play the guitar, which is to say, virtually non-existent.  I can't play, but I would love to, I "can't" have a mohawk, I merely admire them from a distance.

So when I pulled out the axe this week for a little jam session, I started thinking to reminisce.  Little guy loves to play my guitar, and he also loves skulls, that was probably learned.  I got him his first skull and crossbones belt buckle at about 6 months, and he has a vast assortment of Jolly Roger style t-shirts. 

Last night, at Nordstrom's, he found an awesome skull/bones shirt and brought it to me with a beaming smile and asked if he could have it, and it broke my heart to have to put it back because the last thing we need in our house are more T-shirts.

So I started thinking the other night about whether I should encourage this watered-down punk culture or not.  And it really is a tough call, because for 20 years now, I have been waiting and plotting the perfect time to pull out the clippers and give myself a mohawk and now I am plotting to give us both mohawks.  Not sissy fauxhawks, I mean clean shaven on the sides, and sick tall and narrow hawks, just like the photos above.

But what if he decides he likes the look?  What if he decides that the corporate rat race is for the birds and the suckers and wants to spend his life wearing a wallet chain and a nose ring and working at Zumiez at the mall because he isn't really presentable for any other line of work.

I mean when was the last time you saw a punk with enough initiative to do landscaping, let alone run a landscaping company.  Punks don't perform manual labor unless it's welding, and then they just go on to build gnarly raked-out motorcycles

Most of them have logistical problems with hairnets and most of them never make a court appearance wherein they are the person doing the representing, rather than being represented.

So what is a punk to do?  Some burn-out, and most of the rest of us just admire from the sidelines and repress our inner punk but I think a few of them become President of the United States.


Now we all think that President Bush was giving a shout out to the Longhorns, but I am pretty sure that he was signaling to all of the punks out there, that you can be lazy, barely graduate from high school, still get into Yale where you can do nothing but get high, get inducted to Skull & Bones (which is where punk goes yuppie), go to Harvard MBA school, run a few companies into the ground while getting high on coke, watch a few Larry the Cable Guy videos to learn how to fake a southern accent, get elected Governor of Texas and then beat a "faux-caring" hippie in a close race to the White House where you can just appoint the Devil incarnate (according to some commentators and pundits) to be your VP and bomb a bunch of countries back to the stone-age they were already living in anyway.

So rock-on Little Guy, rock-on.

PETA Friendly Vampires and Lame Movie.

So this weekend after watching a Twilight Spoof on Saturday Night Live, I agreed to watch the actual movie.  Aside from being told by a good friend on Facebook that not only did I lose 2 hours of my life that I will never get back, I lost 2 hours of my MANHOOD.  Ouch, but quite possibly true.

I'm not sure that I followed the whole plot, but let me see what I can tell you.

A not-super pretty girl moves to Washington/Oregon somewhere because her mom is hooking up a minor-league baseball player that can't hold a job.  She somehow makes a ton of friends on her first day at school, even though she is not-super-pretty.

Rather than hooking up with the normal kids or even the Indian kid who goes to school on "The Res", she hooks up with some kid that bedazzles his face, but that only shows up when he is in the sunlight, because apparently the inventors of the bedazzler are vampires, or at least vampires are their core demographic market.

Vampire boy lives with a bunch of other vampires, but not this kind of vampire (left) they are more like this kind of vampire (left-below).  Basically not your garden variety vampire (that was supposed to be funny).

So then garden variety vampire smells her as the PETA friendly vampires are playing baseball, then a nationwide chase begins as bad vampire wants to eat not-hot-chick.

To sum up, good vampires save human girl from bad vampires even though none of the vampires have fangs.

1.  This is too much crappy drama without any of the classic vampire suspense.
2.  What the crap is a vegetarian vampire, and why would I want to watch a movie about them?
3.  I could have made this movie on my iPhone, apparently no editing was required.
4.  Most of the music was terrible and did not flow with the film.

If you watched this move more than 5 times voluntarily, please leave me some comments about why.  I don't get it.

Definitive NCAA Div 1 Football Poll... Now Discuss Amongst Yourselves.

I have decided to grace each of you with the definitive college football rankings based on my 4 tier strength of schedule, non-biased proprietary ranking algorithm.  When you look at the games actually played on the field this year you will find that this ranking system is nearly flawless.

Other ranking systems add in significant biases depending on conference, margin of victory and other meaningless statistics needed to ensure that USC and Oklahoma can play each other every year in perpetuity in the Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game.  They consider hypothetical match-ups and make inferences based on games not yet played but assume the results in their polling.

As we saw last year, ranking were arbitrarily based on who was going to play who the next week, and ranking those 2 teams in the top 5 made a significant difference in the viewership of that game, not a data point that should be used in determining champions in a system lacking a play-off.

So here it is, please discuss in the comments section about why you think this system should not be used to determine the Bowl Games this year, I expect some comments from the "Men of the Scarlet and Gray" on this one..  Enjoy!

I’ll take a Capitalistic Economic System, Hold the Capital.

What happens when you want to support the free flow of capital, and yet you have no capital to flow?  Some of us have to find this out the hard way.

Every day in America we face economic choices.  Where do I put my money?  Should I save it, should I spend it, or should I invest it in someone that I believe can invest it in people and equipment and ideas that will turn my capital into multiples of my original investment?

Do I finance medical school/law school/rodeo clown school hoping that I will be able to realize a return on that investment of many times its cost?

Most of us just spend our capital, hoping that the joy we receive from consuming the output of the Chinese manufacturing sector will exceed the cost of whatever cheap plastic do-dad we have just purchased.  In fact until this year, we routinely spent more than we made generating a negative savings rate as a country, which is why we constantly have to guilt the Chinese into financing our Chinese import purchases.  In essence we are paying interest to the same people we are buying from, even if we pay cash.

Little Guy learned this lesson the hard way a few weeks ago.  We were shopping for something we probably didn’t need, and Little Guy found a 5 pack of Hummers.  There was the classic H2, and H3, and a couple of Hummers that just looked made up, it was a 5 pack, it needed 5 cars, what was the manufacturer to do, just put 2 cars in it?  Ridiculous, that is what American public schools would have you believe, you can just hope for 5 cars, and maybe it will happen with the help of candle-light vigils and unicorns.

So, he asked me if he could have it.  Seeing that the morons couldn’t even put in the Original HUMVEE, or H1 as it is commonly known, I said “no”.  Now don’t get all Debbie-downer on me, he got a new Ford GT a couple days before, so he was pretty set for the week.

Not one to take “no” for an answer, he promptly told me, “Fine, I am going to buy it myself!”  No joke, those were his exact words.  So I said, “Fine, good luck with that.”  I merely expected some whining and running to Wife to ask her to buy it after telling her that I said it was ok, but he marched his bad little self up to the check-out line and waited for his turn at the register.

I must have looked really creepy as I hid behind a rack of clothes and just watched him to see what he would do.  He stood there defiantly, and even got mad as some lady cut in line in front of him, probably thinking that he belonged to the lady paying in front of him, otherwise he didn’t flinch.

I had no idea what he thought he was going to do when he got to the front of the line.  I didn’t get to find out either as Wife came around the corner and caught his attention and asked what he was doing.  I think he might have actually put the cars up on the counter and tried to pay with smiles.

You know, the same way we are going to pay for Universal Healthcare.

FREAKING CUTE LITTLE KID.

G.I. Joe Total Flop…Was Childhood Really This Lame?

What a total disappointment.  G.I. Joe was one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time, and that includes “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” and “You, Me and Dupree.”  I totally missed out seeing GI JOE in the theatre, even when it was at the Dollar Theatre last week near our house.  Now I am not sure that was such a big deal.

When I was a kid, G.I. Joe was all the rage.  Blue lasers for the good guys, the guys defending America and the world, and red lasers for the bad guys, the commie loving Cobra and his army of cyborgesque fighters intent on destroying the world for no other reason than “what else are they going to do, be gardeners?”

So I thought that this movie would be at least OK.  The beginning was really cool.  I love back-stories.  My marriage has strained several times under the weight of my need to watch movies with the Directors Commentary playing because I have an insatiable need to know what the director was thinking when he hired his dad to write the score for the movie, when his dad was a nobody, and then somehow scored and Oscar for best original score.

I want to know how you became evil, because you were born like every other little kid, you ate Cheerios at church so your parents could keep you from screaming, pooped your diapers and even played dress-up in your mom’s high heels, hardly what you would believe could spawn a life of global domination and universal mayhem.

Maybe in their youth, all of the great conquerors wring their hands together while flashing mischievous grins and making growling noises.

Twin #1:  "What are we going to do today Twin # Mischevious?"

Twin # Mischevious:  "The same thing we do every day, try to take over the world!"

But despite the 30 seconds of really cool back-story of a double dealing arms salesman set in Pre-Industrial France, the movie was so devoid of substance that I dozed off at least 5 times.  The actions sequences alone could not get me to care about your Sean Connery “The Rock” rip-off green plasma rocket looking thing that will end humanity as we know it.

And sorry ladies, even though we like watching chicks in thigh-high leather boots shooting guns, you are not supposed to be the main characters in a film meant to pique the nostalgia of 30-45 year-old men, and subconsciously convince them to go out and buy 2 of every G.I. Joe action figure and machine, 1 to give to their sons, and the other to keep for ourselves as a memory of simpler times where nuance was not as important and when we didn’t have to pretend that communism isn’t really communism it is just making things fairer for the little guy using “totally capitalistic” income re-distribution where the state makes it easier on everybody by just owning everything in the first place.

I wanted this movie to be good, a classic battle of Good over Evil where evil is not just a little girlfriend/boyfriend spat.  After I found out that it was a set up for multiple sequels, it was even worse.  The tough guys flashed cheesy little smiles when they should have been showing grit.  Dennis Quaid, Seriously?  He showed the same demeanor and seriousness in G.I. Joe as he did in “The Parent Trap.”

And Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, that should have made only 4 second appearances 2 or 3 times in the movie, were paraded around as if bringing them out of the shadows would add to their mystique.

We loved them, but we know their role, they are the guys behind the guys, and the fact that they are quasi-brothers, that is classic sequel ending stuff.  Seriously, did you not see the Star Wars Trilogy?

I'll Take 3 Big Macs, the NJ Governorship and a Fire Drill Please. PSA

I would normally just post a snarky commentary on todays elections in New Jersey and Virginia, but even I would be bored by that, and I have nothing useful to say after Chris Christie called out NJ Governor John Corzine last week and said "Governor Corzine just needs to 'Man up and just call me fat!"  Below you can see NJ hopeful Christie explaining to congress that he only ordered 3 Big Macs for lunch, not the 7 as mentioned by Gov. Corzine.

That is classy.  It caught my attention because the words "man up" are a staple in my house.  Our 3 boys hear it a lot after falling down, stubbing toes and even last week when I stubbed my toe, Little Guy even said, "Dad just man up a little, you will be fine, look, its not even bleeding!"

However, I thought as a special treat for my readers I would throw something out there that we almost never think of, and that is Fire Safety. 

Somehow last night during family night we got on the subject of the house burning down, so we decided to have a fire drill.  I'm not exactly sure how we got on the subject, but it seemed like a good impromptu activity for the night.  Certainly not as useful as hide and seek or swallow the blanket, but good enough.

So we freaked out the kid by setting off the alarm, but had a couple fo good run throughs. 

I Showed him how if he smells smoke when he is sleeping, to first look out the window to see if maybe he and his brothers driven their mom to chain smoking and drinking like a sailor on shore leave in Okinawa to deaden the pain of constantly being a yelling board slash jungle gym.

If that coast is clear, he should start screaming and crawling on the floor. 

Then I sprang into action doing my best Parkour imitation up the stairs into the twins room, throwing one under each arm and back-flip to double somersault back down the stairs to the front door, where for drill only purposes we left the dogs inside to meet their doom.

All in all it was a pretty good lesson and one that everybody should do with their families.

Halloween Fun... And Other Family Fluff

I am not sure that I have ever had this much fun on Halloween before.  LEGO CHEST-BUMP, need I say more?  The candy was as plentiful as the family, and the football was as just as sweet.

BUCKEYES WIN!

USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   
USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!   USC LOST!!!!

As you may be able to tell, I have a completely IRRATIONAL hatred for all things USC, All Florida Schools, and U. Oklahoma. These football teams it appears can do no wrong.  They can lose to 3 crappy teams, and then blow out a team with a barely winning record and all of a sudden they are back in the top 10.

Now don't get me wrong, I could care less about the "lesser" conferences, but if we are going to use the crazy logic that OU beating Texas Tech means that OU is better than UT becuase Tech beat UT despite losing to UT on the field of play, then Boise State is better than USC. 

Interesting the conversations we have to listen to to determine that regardless of the win/loss record of any team, USC, OU and Florida should just be granted the first ever 3 team Championship game, each team just subbing out each quarter for like 12 quarters of play.  Actually I think I am going to propose that, that sounds like a fun game.

However, as much as you come here to hear me rant about college football, you probably want to see pictures of my cute kids and their cousins and hear about the 1st Annual Brig Bash [Halloween Edition]. What an awesome party.  You can probably see more great pics of the weekend over at www.witnesstoinsanity.blogspot.com

We hosted at our place and all of the Grandparents showed up, as well as a whole slew of Aunts, Uncles and cousins. There was award winning chili, Jack-O-Lantern themed pizzas and a big pan of Johnny-Cake.

Our weekend even featured a sleepover and some spirited conversation about the actual process and societal effect of buying, selling and the tax consequences of mutual funds/ hedge funds and other fun financial products.  It also featured a rousing game of pin the face on the pumpkin, giant balloons, and little parachute guys that we threw off of the balconies from the game room down into the living room.  Uncle Z even hooked up a fog machine, flashing spotlights and laser show in the garage set to spooky music and was a HUGE hit from the neighborhood kids, who left their own party up the street to hang out in our garage checking out how he did it.
 

The only thing that needed adjustment this weekend was my candy strategy.  I expected a lot of kids, but I had no idea how much of a meiser I was until some little girl (who was our 1st trick-or-treater) came back to our house a mere 10 minutes after we saw her first only for me to discover that her bag was full.  She could not have hit more than 10-12 houses. 

So I had to move to the 3-4 pieces per kid in order not to be blacklisted by all the kids next year, much like we did with the "smarties house" or the "3 pennies wrapped in plastic wrap lady."  nobody wants that.

Thanks to all of you who came, and for any of you that want an invite next year, good luck, probably not going to happen.  I hear it is VIP only and crazy exclusive.  Rumors are that Oprah, Tom Cruise and the Gray's Anatomy guy  McCreepy will be there.  See you next year!

NYT Advocates Slavery... Brig Duped Out of Chance to Cash In!

In a radical twist of fate, I have decided [not really] to put in an application to work for one of the governments newly acquired companies.  I would generally not be interested in working for the government, but just this week, the government has made it possible for me to actually make a ton of money.  I might even join a union!

Many of you likely have followed the governments new Pay Czar, and many of you probably think curbing $20M paydays for bankers is a good idea.  I used to think cutting their pay was a really bad thing, however now that all of those people that were in line for a $19,500,000 pay cut have left AIG, Citi, etc.  There are a lot of good jobs opening up.

And why not me, I could use $500k/yr, and I have actually heard of all of the words that the "Political Class," "The Press," and the "Celebrities" have been fumbling over for the last year.  In fact, according to Hal Heaton, the Denny Brown Professor of Business Management Finance at the Marriott School of Management, I was numbered among the top 60% of students who managed to not drop his class in utter frustration after spending 3 straight days trying to bootstrap a yield curve.

So now that all of the competent guys are gone, I am entitled to my shot at greatness.  However if the good folks over at the New York Times get their way, I will be forced to continue eking out a meager existence on the pittance I call a salary.

If I fail to start rollin' phat on Wall Street, it is only because the NYT has convinced the government to stop bankers from leaving their current jobs to go work for companies that will pay them their filthy $20mm lucre.  This according to the Times, is unconscionable.  The people who made the mess should be forced to stay and clean it up, and that only 3 paragraphs after they got done railing these people as incompetent.

What?  Force them to stay?  Nice.  Slavery.  I would be more than happy to be a $500k slave.

I will get a nice shack in Connecticut, prolly roll a benz, and my kid will get to do Mike D/ Randy Walker impressions like this all day cause I can now afford to have him look stupid AND afford to buy lots of these lame flat brimmed hats.

Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to clean up the mess, and either is anybody else that would be EXCITED about taking the $500k to do that job.  Because if you are smart enough to clean this up, you are too smart to work for $500k.  I'm sorry, but if you can walk away from your $20M job, and just go get another $20M job across the street, you are probably worth somewhere around $20M to someone.

The only losers here are the taxpayers that will never see a dime from our $795B investment in AIG and the rest of the banks.

Brig's Blog Giveaway...Winner Announced!

It has been a busy week, which is my excuse for not posting to the blog for the last week.  In reality, I just had nothing to say [not true] but that may be a better excuse than pretending to be too busy.  I actually have a lot to say, but sometimes most of it is best left unsaid, in which case I make a concerted effort to say it even louder.  So lets just say I was lazy last week and leave it at the truth.

However, I am excited to post the winner of my giveaway last week!  And just to keep it honest, I used the totally unbiased Microsoft Excel Rand() function to choose for me. 

I was not shocked by the winner as she had her sister sign up so she actually had 4 chances to win (under contest rule 3 section 4 paragraph 3.2.4.1).  So JENN, please send me an email at brighamcochran@gmail.com and I will arrange delivery.

In typical rollover nice guy (read: total sucker) fashion, since I happen to know most of you who posted comments personally, if you would like a diaper/wipes case, please send me a note and I will probably just suck-it-up and make a few more this weekend (though I could bounce that back to next week as we have a huge Halloween Bash at our house on Saturday, I think at last count we were going to have about 250 people stop by that evening, so there is lots of prep work to do, find big bowl, open candy bags, make sure that supplemental candy bag is available just in case I happen to eat most of the first one runs out mysteriously).  In fact, I will go ahead and make one for each of the next 3 people that sign up as followers to the blog, so if you have friends that would like one, just tell them what to do.

Apparently, on Etsy, you can get one of these for around $16.  I was online with my sister the other night checking out several of them, and was appalled by the lack of attention to detail you get for your hard earned cash. 

So I am going to note that the actual retail value of one of mine is somewhere around $320 (premium pricing, think of me as Baby Prada, although after hanging out in Chinatown last year in NYC, I may just go ahead and order tags that say Baby Brada and attach them to the case [not really]) 

Now all I need is that guy from the Sham-WOW commercials to pitch these for me. 

"I could give you not 1, not 2 but 3 diaper/wipes cases for the low low cost of 199.99.  But we're not done!  Order now and you can get not 1, not 2, yes 3, I said it 3 diapers with each case!  Our loss is your gain!"

Any Takers?

Brig Caught in Sewing Sting... Will Donate "Super Cute" Diaper/Wipes Case to Reader!

After my previous arrest yesterday and short incarceration, I thought I was in the clear.  However, earlier today I was caught by the paparazzi doing something especially heinous, I was targeted by the government in a sewing and arts & crafts sting operation.

There I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden this guy breaks into my "studio" and busts me red handed making a baby diaper/wipes case.

I don't know if the government objected to the fact that I used the pattern fabric on the inside and the solid color on the outside, but the government cannot make policy based solely on what Coach is doing this season.  And anyway, I'm not even all that happy with Coach for the last few years because of their schizophrenic styling.  You may need to cater to people with ADHD, I get that, but for the rest of us, we just want simple classy styling 'everywhere' bags [for our significant others].  Sorry wife, Year 3 of no new Coach handbag.  Maybe next year, don't hate the "Playa," hate the Game.

Anyway, I again would like to apologize to anyone that is offended by the fact that I do indeed delve into the sewing trade now and again.  It is a medical condition for which I will soon be seeking treatment in some lavish rehab center that looks suspiciously like a country club, as one of my other medical conditions is a really high handicap.  I would also like to apologize to my family for the embarrassment that I have caused them.  That said, I am going to donate the case I was caught making to one of my followers that leaves a comment on this post.

If you are a casual reader and want a shot at this, maybe you have a new baby [...ahem... Jenn, tell Erin] [Randi, did Turbo show up today yet?]or maybe you have a baby shower coming up and you don't want to take a crappy package of pacifiers and generic hair ribbons, but would rather take something original and "super cute" but don't want to try to figure out how to make one of these yourself [it is really hard], just click the "follow" button here to the RIGHT and then come back to this post and leave me a comment and one of you will win this case. 

Comment as many times as you want to increase your chances to win, however only substantial comments will qualify!  Go look at other blogs like Dooce and SeriouslySoBlessed for examples.  Basically clicking follow just makes this show up in your Google reader.

If this goes really well and I get more than a total of 30 comments from a minimum of 10 followers, I will make a few more and do this again.  So tell your friends, if they become "followers" and note that you referred them, you get an extra 3 chances to win!

Good luck!

Brig Offers Public Apology... Context Debated.

"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm proud of my son."  No, this is not a quote from First Lady Michelle Obama, she is finally proud of America and she doesn't even have a son, these words are my words.  Now, this is not supposed to mean that I have never been proud of my son, even though that is exactly what I said, you must have taken that out of context.

For any of you that took offense at my words, my agent told me that I  have to apologize to those of you that are so emotionally sensitive that you took offense in the first place. 

I love public apologies, they are always so liberating, and useful, very very useful.  I was finally relieved to get apologies from that governor guy that took a weekend soul mate getaway to Argentina, I was pretty shaken by that incident but was comforted by his kind words toward his mistress despite the public humiliation of his wife and children. 

Oh, and when Mike Tyson apologized to me for his behavior after biting off Holyfield's ear, I hadn't been able to sleep in days until his calming words assured me that I took that out of context.  Please leave me a comment if you have any particularly memorable public apologies.

However this weekend was a good weekend for me.  Let me explain.  Little Guy and I decided to get all religious on Sunday and go to church, well at least after I lost the "Who gets to stay home from church with the snotty nosed little twins" game.  I thought I had it in the bag, but lost at the last second, I had the sun in my eyes and my shoelaces had come loose, it wasn't my fault.  I even requested best of 3, but the ref denied my request and my fate was sealed.

So Little Guy and I got loaded up in the car and head of to church.  The route to the chapel winds around the greenbelt, and it would be a lot of fun to take some of the corners at high speed if it wasn't for the perpetual presence of cops in the neighborhood.  Total buzz kill.

Anyway, we came around one corner and all I hear from the back of the car is "Dad, Dad did you see that?  That was awesome!"  "What" I asked, thinking the kid some some crazy Area 51 style UFO alien kind of thing.  He answered, "Did you see that '68 Camaro?"  "Where?" I asked.  "Right back there" he said.

I had missed it, but in total disbelief that he could recite year and model of a car on the street, I stopped the car, backed up and no joke.  There was a white with black stripes 1968 Chevy Camaro sitting in a driveway.

Now this might not seem like a big deal to a lot of you.  But I love American muscle cars, now I say that and I still can't tell you what MOPAR stands for, I just know that lots of guys that know how to use a wrench get really excited when they get near one.  I met a lot of these guys at a place I used to go to in high school called Carneys, a drive in diner that hosted an impromptu car show on Friday and Saturday nights in a town about 50 miles south of Cleveland.  I have even been known to stop by Hot August Nights in Reno every once in a while for an evening of watching the parade of cars.

Most of all I love cars that don't have computers under the hood, just engines, motors and transmissions (I'm pretty sure all 3 of those are different things).  I love to admire their beauty, simplicity and raw power.  Don't get me wrong, if you put a Bugatti in my garage, I am not going to light it on fire, but I love the lines of a nice muscle car.

I was so proud, I called my dad immediately and told him about it.  I forgot that he was in church at the time, but this was a pretty big moment.  My dad talked my ear off at length about hot rods when I was a kid.  I know that he had a '55 Chevy, and that his best friend drove a '69 Chevelle.  Those are sweet cars.

Little guy can correctly identify just about all of his Matchbox cars, but this was the first time he correctly identified anything other than a Porsche Carrera on the street.  Proud indeed. 

Good Work Little Guy Man, Good Work.

Kid Lacks Brain Bucket... Brig Gets WSJ Front Page Perp Walk!

Well, it looks like I am going to be doing some hard prison time here pretty soon.  I just wanted to let you all know that I appreciate all of the support that you all provide to me and will thank you all in advance for the love and support and home made shivs that I look forward to from each of you over the next 10 years. 

I expect that the Feds are going to show up at my door sometime this week so that I can get my Wall Street Journal front page PERP WALK (Dramatic Pre-Creation pictured to the left, also note how freaky it is that Jeff Skilling of Enron and I have interchangeable bodies) and then charge me with Conspiracy, a felony; contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a felony; attempting to influence a public servant, a felony; and false reporting to authorities, a midemeanor.

Let me explain.  I didn't think it was a big deal at first, I just wanted to tape a quick video to send to all of my friends and family, even post to my blog and maybe get a few "extra" hits from people that will actually click on the ads on my blog so that I can make like 4 cents this month from Google Ads.  I knew it would probably be wrong, but not this big a deal.  I think I really screwed up by involving Wife, (hence the conspiracy charge) she had some reservations, but thought that it might be funny and in the end harmless.

Long and short of this, I let the twins ride a bike without helmets on.  The police got word of it, and now I and possibly Wife are going to be charged, with Felony Conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and since I told Oprah (in an email I sent her last night) trying to influence her to not bash me too hard on her show on Monday, they added this sweet little gem; a felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant.  What the heck?  Public Servant just because she gave a free FloBee to each member of the audience when she did her Rod Blagoiavich show?

Just kidding...  Hopefully you already knew that.  But Do you think this could happen in real life?

Let me first state that I could care less whether this crazy weather balloon family in Colorado goes to prison for life or not.  I'm not going to get all Nancy Grace on you, you know add a bunch of outrageous hyperbole to make a point.  Wait, now I'm being charged with making untrue statements on my blog?  Whatever, with that out of the way I would like to address the government in this case because you need to understand that you could go to prison for just about anything.

The government has had probably 30 lawyers working for 5 straight days and nights trying to come up with something to charge these people with.  Apparently they tried to get some publicity for a possible reality show by pretending their kid accidentally whisked away in a homemade weather balloon. The sheriff even said that he was working with the district attorney to try to find something with which to charge them.

Now don't get me wrong I think jaywalkers should rot in prison, but if it takes the entire legal prowess of Colorado and the US government a week of research to find an crime who's technical definition may include some obscure act wherein it could be construed that you may have run afoul, In my mind this should be a huge red flag that what happened was probably more entertainment than it is crime.

So my understanding is that the district attorney is going to charge this family with Felony Conspiracy to committ a crime, which was filling a false police report.  Wait, back up.  They are charging Felony Conspiracy to committ a Misdemeanor?

AWESOME.

Also apparently they are going to charge them with attempting to influence a public servant, so Larry King is now a 'public servant'?  More awesome.  Oh, and there goes everyone who has every made a campaign contribution, Felons, all of them.

Sorry Oprah, you are a criminal, and we all knew it.  Yeah, you Oprah, don't think we don't know how you tried to influence Barack Obama to join your book club, or that little stunt when you influenced the Obama's into going to Europe to shill for the Olympics so that she could get lots of doped up athletes to come on her show for a few weeks giving a huge boon to her ratings and netting her another cool billion duckets.

Contributing to the delinquency of a minor? I would pretty much think that until The US Attorneys have finished arresting everyone that has ever sent in a video to Bab Saget on America's Funniest Home Videos, they shouldn't spend extra cash on working harder to discover crimes.

So next time you tell your kid to climb half way up the White House fence for a picture, just know that you are 1 step away from needing a copy of Prison for Dummies so that you can learn how to fashion a shiv out of a bar of soap to protect yourself from some psycho serial killer that made a "special request" to have you as a bunk-mate in the joint.