My So Called Life

Oh, sweet internet

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Our DSL modem inexplicably quit working Sunday night, so we have been incommunicado for a few days.  After dealing with AT&T’s phone system and tech support for a frustrating but acceptable amount of time we got a replacement modem and everything seems to work okay now.   Unfortunately, since I had Internet at work and Sara has been cooped up with no contact with the outside world, I think the Internet is still inaccessible to me at home. 🙂

So last weekend we went to WI because my uncle was visiting from CO and my grandma had a get together.  So Evie got to meet her great grandmas as well as many great aunts and uncles.  More importantly she finally got to meet her uncle Nathan!  I want to put this down here so that it is forever recorded in history; despite being like 2 1/2 hours away, uncle Nathan didn’t meet her until she was about 2 months old.  I guess that’s why he’s the bad uncle (he is, ask him).  Although, to be fair, he doesn’t have a car. 

Speaking of my brother, I don’t devote enough time to him here.  Certainly there are more good stories to tell about him than anything that happens in my life!   Maybe I will write some of the classics in here sometime if I haven’t already.

 So my brother went out to the bars with some of my uncles when they were visiting.  When it was time to go home he walked out to the bus stop and my uncles all left.  After waiting for awhile, he realized that the buses stopped running at midnight and he didn’t have a ride home.  So he called a cab and he told the guy, “Look.  This is all the money I have.  Can you just start driving in the direction of my house and stop when my money runs out?  This is all I have, so don’t forget to tip yourself.”  So the guy started driving and when they were about 4 blocks from my brother’s apartment he stopped and said, “This is as far as you get.”  So my brother at some point realized he had in his pocket a snickers bar and he says to the guy, “If I give you this snickers bar, will that get me 4 more blocks to my apartment?”  The guy thought about it for a while and then he took the snickers bar and dropped my brother off at home.  That’s good bartering!

Okay I found this a very interesting theory.  It is from Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a weekly article that is about football and a lot of other things.  It is a very long winded column, so you might just want to read the excerpt:

“The apparent absence of artificial radio transmission in the galaxy suggests that intelligent life, at least in its technological stage, might be rare. Regardless whether we owe our existence to divine offices or natural forces, if there are millions of Earth-like worlds, you’d think either God or evolution would have put thinking beings in many places. Have other intelligent beings come into existence, only to wipe themselves out with war or evolve beyond the physical? Perhaps intelligent life takes a very long time to arise, then rapidly either destroys itself or ascends to a higher plane. After all, it was 3 million years from Lucy in the Olduvai Gorge to controlled agriculture, then 7,000 years from controlled agriculture until Guglielmo Marconi sent the first high-powered, long-distance radio signal, then a mere 60 years ’til the United States and former Soviet Union possessed doomsday arsenals sufficient to end human life. Perhaps across the vastness of time there are only brief intervals in which civilizations exist in the technological phase — transmitting radio and television signals, launching spacecraft, and searching for others who are doing the same. Right now, we’re transmitting like crazy and firing rockets as fast as they can be built. Maybe a thousand centuries ago another civilization on a nearby world was doing as we do now, then either destroyed itself or evolved beyond such concerns. Maybe a thousand centuries hence, a civilization will arise in the Gliese 581 star system but find no evidence of us because by then humanity will either be extinct or have chosen to leave corporeal limits behind.”

It is interesting to think about, I don’t know why I’ve never seen that mentioned as a possibility before.

Anyway, I will leave you with a Leno-esque slide show of reasons not to hyphenate your last name, courtesy my first name is not Dabu.

Leonard Koeppel

/ Shane / 2 Comments

In my mom’s family, if you are dishing up food and you take a little extra from an adjoining piece, you will quickly be labeled a “Leonard Koeppel”. For example, if you are grabbing a slice of pizza and you accidentally get a little cheese and/or toppings from a connected piece, you would be considered a Leonard Koeppel. As far as I know, nobody in the family knows who Leonard Koeppel is or was; he is lost to history.

Think about that for a second! Oh, the notoriety! Here is a guy who lived and died and did who knows what in his life and his only legacy on this earth is stealing corners from other people’s food! How often would you have to do that in order for your name to become synonymous with the act? I don’t know who invented toilet paper, but I sure can tell you that that S.O.B. Leonard Koeppel would just as soon steal the corner of your pie as look at you!

How would something like that spread? Did he really steal corners so much that he was renowned through out the family or some geographic region for doing it? I’d like to think that he stole a corner from the wrong hombre who decided to begin a campaign of defamement and name bismirchment against ole Leonard.

So here’s to Leonard Koeppel, whoever he is, that any of us could have only half the fame and legacy that he has achieved.

Strike Over

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Quick, just like expected! I’m glad everything got resolved.

Stiiiiiiiiiiiiirike

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So the UAW walked off the line at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning.  It sounds like it will be a relatively short strike.  My dad doesn’t have picket duty until 12 – 4 a.m. on Saturday, so he’s got some free time on his hands!  He doesn’t seem to be too worried about things, but I am a little worried for him (and Michigan’s economy!).  GM isn’t doing all that well and my dad isn’t really willing to give up anything, especially wages.  That’s the sort of thing that leads to a stalemate.  I don’t know how to feel about the whole thing…on one hand the company is struggling with competition from foreign automakers on top of struggling with how to pay for pensions for all the retiring baby boomers, so it seems like something’s got to give there.  On the other hand, corporate CEOs (everywhere, not just at GM) are making so much silly money that it is kind of hard to feel bad for them.  Either way, we hope for a swift end to the strike so the 72,000+ workers can get back to being paid!

Not much going on here, we bought a new dining room table that is enormous.  That is all.

“It’s not often that someone else poops on your underwear!” – Sara

Our Big Day

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We had a big day today!  We went shopping at several places and out to lunch.  We had our first public diaper changing (in the backseat of the car no less) and our first public feeding.  Sara bought like 8 shirts, we got about 4 new outfits for Evie and we got like one metric ton of new books for her.  We were gone for about 5 hours and she did great until right at the end.  It was definitely the longest foray with the baby and I think we get a little more confident every time we go out.  Plus I think Sara likes to get out of the house.

Not much else planned for the weekend, other than watching the Packer’s home opener tomorrow.

In completely unrelated news, that Fillipino prison full of dancing prisoners is definitely not a hoax.  I wasn’t sure if they were really prisoners or not, but it turns out they are.  And they are forced to dance!  But they like it.