80's Buddy Pictures

We here at thunderstrokes are big believers in the four R's: recycling, reducing, reusing, and repurposing.

As proof, today we are offering a collection of repurposed pictures featuring recycled celebrities, reusing a traditional comedic device known as inappropriate photo captioning, the results of which have been reduced in scale from monumentally hilarious to merely silly.

The following gallery of celebrity buddy photos all hail from the era of Reagan, Frogger, and Gilbert Gottfried, and were borrowed without permission from The Huffington Post, which really wasn't doing anything with them anyway.

So, here you go, a little feature we're calling...Celebr80's

#1:  Betty White and Charlie Sheen

Charlie (to himself):  Betty has no idea what she's in for tonight...
Betty (to herself):  The hell I don't.                                                    

Twerking Hitler

You may have seen the secret photo session pictures released this week of Hitler shortly after his release from prison (Mein Kampf, anyone?) in 1925, according to this story in The Huffington Post.

After seeing the photos, I'm kind of relieved that he was using that time to perfect his Angry Aryan impersonation. I was really worried they'd turn out to be boudoir shots. 

At any rate, as I was scanning through the photos, I couldn't help thinking about how silly he looked in them, practicing these exaggerated, almost vaudevillian poses.  I blame Mel Brooks for my failure to be properly impressed; he pretty much single-handedly destroyed any chance for me of taking Adolf seriously.  Don't get me wrong; I completely understand what a dangerous, hate-mongering fascist he was, and how much power and appeal his ideas continue to have amongst the feeble-minded and helplessly fear-mad in our world.  It's just that after you've seen The Producers and laughed uncontrollably throughout "Springtime for Hitler," and watched Dick Shawn's character, LSD (Lorenzo St. DuBois, if you must), brilliantly deflate Der Fuhrer without even realizing it, there's only so much respect you can hope to muster for a man who insisted on wearing a toothbrush moustache.   

As I scrolled through the pictures, one after another I had these completely ridiculous and equally incongruous captions pop into my head, imagining the things Hitler might be saying or thinking.   

Critics may accuse me of beating a dead horse, but I know better.  This horse isn't dead, really; it's more like undead, and as the current popularity of zombies extensively illustrates, there are no limitations on the type or frequency of beatings that can be visited upon the undead...

In that spirit, then, I humbly offer the following:

"This twerking thing is harder than it looks..."

Just having a little Fun.

Congratulations to Fun., who won two Grammys Sunday night.  They won for Best New Artist, and for Best Song of the Year for “We Are Young.”

Just how young are they?  Rumor has it that after winning their awards, they bumped into veteran rocker – and inveterate practical joker – Neil Young backstage.  Seeing their Grammys, Neil casually mentioned how the phonograph-shaped statuettes were actual size, and that if they wanted to, they could chip off the golden coating, and play records on them.  

The trio was later seen at the Warner’s after party, scraping the awards with swag bottle openers, and accosting music industry insiders and celebrities alike to find out if they “had any vinyl in their pockets.”

 

Seriously, congrats to the band, and especially Nate Ruess, who grew up in Glendale and went to Deer Valley High School.  There is a rumor floating around the internet that Nate and I attended Brophy Prep together; but both the New Times and The Republic confirm that he attended Deer Valley, while I attended Brophy.  In completely unrelated decades.

However, it’s possible I delivered the mail once or twice to his house back when he was still practicing in his garage, and I was delivering the mail to the box at the end of the driveway.  Not that I’m claiming all the credit for your success, Nate.  Maybe three percent, no more.  Alright, make it two.  What’s that?  Oh, so that’s how it is?  Fine, be that way.  I always liked Neon Trees better anyway.

Destructapalooza! '13

Here at the thunderstrokes home base, we held our 2^nd Annual Destructapalooza! celebration just prior to the Super Bowl last Sunday. 

Tbf’s of the blog probably remember last year’s event.  Resulting as it did from a moment of sheer inspiration, we never gave it an official name; instead, it was typically referred to as “that thing where we smash the gingerbread houses with the bowling ball.”  If you want, you can read about that first one, and watch some video of it, here. 

This year, we gave it a much shorter, ultra-retro-cool moniker, because once you’ve done it two years running, it’s pretty much on its way to becoming an annual tradition, and as such deserves to be officially recognized with its own registered and trademarked name. 

Encouraged by the phenomenal response of the ten family members and friends who took part in the festivities last Sunday, we have decided the time has come to turn Destructapalooza! into a mainstream cultural event.   We have a national expansion plan ready to roll out, and have retained a high-profile marketing company to help increase our brand awareness.  If all goes well, by the year 2023 Destructapalooza! will have passed Festivus as America’s 47^th favorite annual celebration. 

We envision Destructapalooza! as becoming the crowning glory of a new holiday which puts a bold exclamation point at the end of the winter holiday season.  As it stands now, the holidays are just allowed to trail off indeterminately, like an old cat looking for a place where it can quietly die alone.  Everybody is forced to decide on their own when they consider the holidays to be over.  Sure, most people are ready to put the season behind them right around New Year’s Day, but you also have those who wake up on December 26^th and strip their homes of all Christmas ornamentation faster than the Grinch stripped Whoville.   And what about those people who refuse to acknowledge any end to the holiday season, and keep their trees up in their living rooms year-round, and turn on their outdoor light displays when they think nobody else is watching?

Hard Freeze in Phoenix

We recently endured a stretch of freezing nighttime temperatures.  This usually means two things:  Hell's weather hotline is being swamped with calls, and it must be time for another Eagles reunion.   

In our desert climate, freeze warnings are a cause for great alarm.  We don’t often have to deal with water in its frozen state.  Come to think of it, we don’t often have to deal with water in its liquid state either.  Ditto for water vapor.  Consequently, we run our water pipes willy-nilly all over the place because we don’t have to think about protecting them from the cold.  We leave our animals outdoors year-round, because there's not much chance of them turning into petsicles overnight.  And we buy our plants based on their pretty shapes and colors, not on whether they can tolerate a freezing night or two.    

Nothing seems to mobilize the valley quite like the threat of cold weather.  In their finest moments, the Suns used to be able to muster up a similar sense of civic industriousness, but those days are long gone.  But anytime the forecast calls for 32 degrees or less, people you normally never see are outside with their ladders and their bed sheets, frantically working to cover up their citrus trees and bundle up their bougainvilleas.  

Anyway, this being one of the more dramatic examples of cold we’ve endured in the last thirty years, I thought it would be a good time for a visual survey of how different people approach the problem of protecting their plants.  I took the following pictures almost entirely from one small neighborhood in the area where my oldest daughter goes to school.  

As you will see, there is a wide range of techniques, philosophies, and strategies evidenced in the following photos.  Covering up, with plants as with fashion, seems to mean different things to different people.  

This is a reasonably average Arizona response to a freeze warning.  You pull out the pool towels (which you're not using at the moment anyway), maybe grab a few blankets, and head out front.  If it's a plant you really don't want to lose, you drape a towel over it and hope for the best.  It's not foolproof, but it does strike a balance between having to re-landscape your yard in the spring, and sitting out all night with the blow dryer.

A brief history of lemons and lemonade

If the internet is to be trusted, it was Dale Carnegie (famous lecturer and author of How to Win Friends and Influence People) who first coined the phrase, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

Today, Mr. Carnegie would be called a motivational expert or a self-improvement guru, but he was born ahead of his time, and so is simply referred to as a writer and lecturer.  Mr. Carnegie was one of the first people to realize that the essentially American combination of constitutionally protected freedom plus disposable income equaled one hell of an opportunity to profit from our long-standing obsession with self-improvement.  His book How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold 15 million copies since it was first published in 1936.  Lord only knows how many more copies have been pilfered from public libraries over the years.  He was a pioneer of sorts, paving the way for the modern self-improvement industry, which took in 11 billion dollars in 2008, according to Forbes.  Compared to the home-improvement industry, which had revenues estimated at 250 billion during the same year, this may not seem like much; but remember, people are generally much smaller than houses, and need to be reroofed far less frequently. 

Many people don’t really understand the important role lemons have played throughout human history.  Sure, most of us probably recall learning in elementary school about how lemons were used by sailors to prevent scurvy.  Interestingly, they never said how they used them.  Maybe they kept the lemons in their pockets, or rubbed them on their bodies, or hung them around their necks, like garlic was used to ward off vampires.  Personally, I have a hard time believing that they or anybody else would just eat raw lemons.  Scurvy can’t really be that bad, can it?  Still, it’s fun to imagine a bunch of pirates as they come swinging over the side of a captured frigate with their eye patches and their bandannas and their parrots, raising their swords aloft and then suddenly exposing bright yellow lemon smiles, the way kids like to do with orange wedges.  After all, if there was anything pirates were known for more than their lack of vitamin C deficiencies, it was a finely-tuned sense of the absurd. 

Haboobed!

Every summer residents of the Valley experience a signature feature of life in the desert in the form of massive dust storms.  For those who don’t live here, you might have seen video of them on the national news.  Those giant brown clouds you’ve seen consuming an entire metropolitan area of four million people?  That’s us.  For some reason, we’ve had a few doozies in the last year or so that have even made the old-old-timers sit up and say, “Now that one there reminds me of Oklahoma.  1932, I think it was, or was it ’33?  Either way, it was that one where we lost half our roof, Davy Crockett our Basset hound, and our front yard.” 

So where do these enormous rolling walls of dirt and sand come from?  Well, I’m no scientist, but being a child of the 70’s, I like to use the analogy of thermonuclear war whenever I can.   You know how, when an atomic bomb goes off, it makes a mushroom cloud in the sky?  Well, imagine a reverse atomic bomb, one that starts in the sky and goes down.  A dust storm is basically a mushroom cloud created by a 10 megaton thunderstorm after it collapses out in the desert.  The nice part is, instead of radiation poisoning, we just get Valley Fever. 

Until recently, these living signs of the biblical apocalypse never really had a name of their own. We just called them dust storms; and frankly, that term just doesn’t capture the peculiar grandeur and immensity of a good, 500-foot high, solid wall of blowing dirt and sand.   Other flexings of nature’s prodigious muscles, such as hurricanes and tornados, have been assigned names that seem to epitomize their strength and terrible power.   A dust storm just kind of sounds like something that happens when your grandmother cleans.  It makes it kind of hard to be taken seriously by someone from Kansas, let’s say, when you attempt to communicate the ferocity of a dust storm. 

Arizonan:  Man, you should have seen the dust storm I got caught in on my way home the other day!  It was unbelievable.  It was like driving into a wall.  Couldn’t see a thing…     

Kansan:  Sounds scary.  Did this ‘dust storm’ pick your car up in the air, twirl it around like a hyperactive schoolgirl’s baton, and then drop you upside-down in an oak tree three miles away?

Arizonan:  Well, no.  But I had to pull over and wait for it to stop.

Kansan:  And you lived to tell about it?  Amazing.

Fear the R.O.U.S!

For those of you who continue to refuse to believe in the existence of ROUS’s, I would like to draw your attention to a little article that appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago.  For your benefit, it has been reprinted here in its entirety.  If you don’t take the threat of ROUS’s seriously now, you will by the time you finish reading this post.

New York Times

May 6, 2012

Betty Conklin – staff reporter                       

Public safety officials have issued a preliminary report stating that the death of a Waldorf Astoria hotel bellhop was ‘most likely’ the result of an ROUS (Rodent Of Unusual Size) attack.  Stephen ‘Kip’ Stevens, a bellhop for the venerable Manhattan landmark, was on duty when he disappeared around 1:32 a.m on April 20^th.  He had last been seen unloading the luggage of a Mr. Atagatawa, a visiting pharmaceutical representative from Bellevue, Washington, from a Super Shuttle van next to the hotel’s Lexington Ave entrance.  Neither he nor Mr. Atagatawa’s bags ever made it to his room.   According to John Riordan, chief of hotel security, Mr. Stevens, a Waldorf employee of eleven years, was first suspected of absconding with Mr. Atagatawa’s luggage and was reported to the police Friday evening after an exhaustive search of the hotel premises.  Six days later, however, Mr. Stevens’ remains were located behind an isolated outcropping in Central Park, along with the luggage and abandoned luggage cart.  Mr. Stevens’ body showed ‘significant evidence of being gnawed to death,’ according to Sergeant O’Hurlahy, the lead investigator from the city’s elite Bizarre and Occasionally Silly Crimes unit.  According to Sgt. O’Hurlahy, “At this time, we believe the attacker was most likely an ROUS.  We are currently working with the Museum of Natural History, which, fortunately, has one of the few ROUS skeletons in existence, for confirmation based on the size and severity of the many incisor marks present on the victim’s person.”  Mr. Carvato, director of the rodent department at the Museum of Natural History, confirmed that the museum is working on a “gruesome, but fascinating” investigation, but would offer no further details.  When asked to explain the presence of the luggage and luggage cart more than a mile from the hotel, Sgt. O’Hurlahy responded that “one of the bags had been ripped open.  In our interview with Mr. Atagatawa, he described having placed two large summer sausages in the bag in question, which were gone when the bags were located.  We can only surmise that the perpetrator of this crime, whoever or whatever it was, somehow detected the sausages and removed them.”  Nothing else was reported missing from the victim’s luggage, which included “some gold jewelry and a dozen iPad knockoffs.”  Neither police nor Mr. Atagatawa would comment further on the sausages, except to say “they came from a specialty cheese and sausage shop in Nasonville, Wisconsin, and [Mr. Atagatawa] was extremely distraught by their loss.”  If authenticated, Mr. Stevens’ death would be the seventh this year to be attributed to an ROUS, placing it 48^th in causes of death in the city, just behind non-vehicular jogging fatalities, and just ahead of mattress suffocation.

'The Avengers' Dialogues

Saw the big blockbuster movie last week.  Those of you who read Avengers Assemble!  know the anxious excitement with which I was anticipating this film (by the way, for those of you playing along at home, it took 8 days to get to the theater, which, in parent time, is the equivalent of a single person missing the midnight premiere but making it to the 10 a.m. show the next morning).  You may be wondering if and how much I liked the movie.  However, those of you who are tbf’s of the blog know that I have little interest in writing straight-on movie reviews.   

The laws of physics and bloggers alike tell us that when two immovable objects meet, something’s gotta give.

I wanted to capture my thoughts and observations about the film while they’re still fresh; you know, give a first blush reaction while I’m still blushing, as it were.  It also has to do with the fact that I have a notoriously defective memory, plagued as it is by a constant crawl of oblique thoughts and completely unpredictable flights of fancy.  But how to do it, that is the question…

Hmmm, here’s an idea.  Let’s treat this as though you and I just went to the movie together (Harkins Theatres, of course), and now we’ve arrived at Culver’s for a double-cheese ButterBurger and a concrete mixer, ensuring us plenty of time to hash out our reactions as well as draw curious looks from the restaurant’s patrons who can’t help but notice the two crazies in the booth who are way too excited about something.  For those of you out there unfamiliar with Harkins and/or Culver’s, feel free to substitute your own favorite movie theater and burger/shake joint, although, in all honesty, it’s just not going to be the same. 

The Avengers Dialogues

SPOILER ALERT:  THIS IS A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE MOVIE.  IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET, AND WISH TO RETAIN YOUR AVENGERS VIRGINITY, STOP READING NOW.

The Ballad of Boba Fett

Boba Fett is arguably one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe.  His reputation as a steely, inscrutable intergalactic soldier of fortune has earned him a special place in the vast coterie of characters from the films.  I was a fan from the beginning, when he first appeared as part of the infamous Christmas Special in 1978.  I raged at his apparent and appalling demise in Return of the Jedi.  I suffered through the garbled course of events that attempted to explain his origin in the second trilogy.  But my connection to the character remained. 

With an equal balance of love and those above-referenced injustices in mind, I’d like to present my latest creation, The Ballad of Boba Fett.  I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. 

For those of you who might be interested, “Behind The Ballad of Boba Fett” contains further musings on my complex relationship to this enigmatic character.  It immediately follows the poem.

The Ballad of Boba Fett

In a galaxy far, far away

I’m talkin’ way, way back in the day

Audiences encountered 
An ace bounty hunter

Called by the French Boba Fett.

(note:  rhyme Fett to "away" and "day":  i.e. "Fay")

The rest of us are willing to bet

That his name is pronounced Boba Fett

Which just goes to show 
The French don’t know

Good consonant etiquette

Either way, though, doesn’t matter

-Call it crepe or pancake batter-

The dread name of Fett 
Once said, ‘twas met

By footsteps as wanted men scattered

A Little Thursday Silliness, Uh-huh-huh

Sometimes ideas come from a couple of pretty strange bedfellows getting busy on the Posturepedic of your mind.  Today’s post is an example. 

Yesterday, I was playing with my daughter Maria on the floor in her room with her Disney collection of characters.  Well, actually, she was playing.  I was in limbo, awaiting orders to let me know what my next playtime move would be.  I was lucky that day; she was letting me have Jasmine from Aladdin, who she knows I’m partial to. Usually I get stuck with the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, or the Pocahontas figure that won’t stand up on its own.  Anyway, her characters (always the blue-dress version of Sleeping Beauty and usually someone like Belle from Beauty and the Beast or Snow White; today it was the pink-dress Sleeping Beauty) were engaged in an extended conversation about something Rapunzel apparently did or said, and so my mind was left to wander on its own for a few minutes.  My thoughts turned to Whitney Houston, who had just passed away last weekend, and how great a voice she had.  While I was doing that, Maria accidentally pressed a button on the Fisher Price Little People barn with her foot, causing it to spring to life with a lively rendition of “The Farmer in the Dell.” 

Well, these two totally unrelated things somehow tangled themselves together in my mind, and by the time I was able to restore some order in there, I was left with the thought, “What would some of the great singers of the past sound like singing nursery rhymes?  I immediately began to pine for such a collection of songs, but of course, no such thing exists.  So I made one up.

Preconception classes

So I’m reading the paper the other day and run across this story about a new birthing center that they’re planning to build here in town.  The term ‘birthing center’ was not a familiar one to me, so I read on, hoping to enlighten myself on the details.  The article began to describe the services offered, and the very first thing they mentioned is that it would provide preconception classes.  Well, there was something that grabbed my immediate attention.  Preconception classes.  Now there's an idea whose time has come.  There was a contact number listed with the story, and in my excitement I immediately reached for the phone to give them a call.  Anything that had to with preconceiving was something I had to look into. 

I dialed the number and spoke with a kind woman named Mindy who works for the foundation that’s building the new center.  The following is a word-for-word transcription of our conversation.    

Mindy:  Hello, thanks for calling the Inner Child Foundation.  My name is Mindy.  How can I help you?

Me:  Hi, Mindy.  My name is Kevin, and I’m very interested in signing up for one of your preconception classes.

Mindy:  Oh, that’s wonderful!  I’m so glad you called.  We’d be happy to help you out with that.

The interview

Continuing on with our theme of January being the month in which we look back at the past and also look forward into the future, I’ve decided (in consultation with my California Psychic) that now is the perfect time for the first ever thunderstrokes interview. 

So who will be the lucky person to serve as the subject for thunderstrokes’ inaugural interview?  Well, that honor can logically go to only one individual:  me.  That’s right, I’m going to interview myself. 

Now this idea may seem strange, but it actually makes sense.  Interviewing myself will allow me to go on the public record at an early stage about the blog, its humble beginnings, and the notable achievements of the first six months.  It will also help to reinforce the edifice of plausible deniability I’ve constructed to combat the rampant rumors that I am, in fact, the Batman.  Plus, this exercise will undoubtedly be helpful in preparing me for my future as a bestselling author, when I’m sure to be inundated with interview requests and invitations to presidential retreats. 

Luck, as I once heard a very small and wise person not named Yoda say, favors the prepared. 

The 1st Annual Jannie Awards

The new year is a time to look back as well as forward.  This impulse is nothing new; the historical record tells us that civilizations going back to the ancient Romans did the same thing.  In fact, the Romans had a god named Janus, and his identifying characteristic was that he had two faces, and could see forwards and backwards at the same time.  Janus was the god of doorways, of entrances and exits, bridges and transitions.  He is the god after whom the month of January is named, and so it seems perfectly fitting that we spend a little time now looking back, assessing where we stand today by remembering those we have lost over the last year. 

As a way of acknowledging and celebrating some of those public figures whose lives and/or work have affected us (alright, I’m just speaking for myself) in some discernable way, I’ve decided to start a new tradition on the blog, the first ever January awards, which we’ll call the “Jannies” for short.  The thing about a Jannie is that it can only be awarded posthumously, to someone who has died during the course of the previous year.  This is a remarkably smart decision on my part, as it saves a tremendous amount of money on the costs of buying actual awards, renting a hall, sending invitations, catering, and rounding up sponsors to donate swag.  The downside is that the odds of some famous celebrity getting drunk and flirting shamelessly with me in front of my wife are almost nil. 

the butterfly hole

There are many connections between this and the last post, "a funny thing happened on the way to a life."  They are companions in a way, but I imagine the differences between them will stand out more than the similarities.  

If Shel Silverstein wrote about the topic of discovering yourself (and it's entirely possible he did), it might have sounded something like this... 

the butterfly hole

For years I would watch the butterflies

that randomly flitted by

never really knowing what they were

bits of magic in the sky.

Where do butterflies come from?

As a question I thought it quite fair

until I discovered a hole in my head

hiding right beneath my own hair!

Now a hole, people say, is a bad thing,

something that ought to be fixed.

Walking 'round town

with a hole in your crown

is just no way to go

(this we all know)

unless you’re a whale

or an ‘o.’

Candy Smackdown 2011 - Results

For those of you who have gotten caught up in the Arizona Republic’s Candy Smackdown Madness (and from the looks of it, that’s about 5 of you), I just wanted to post the final results, and see how my skills as a candy competition prognosticator stack up.  I will tell you that things did not go according to plan.  My plan, anyway. 

REGIONAL FINALS

In the Vampire regional, I had Peanut M&M’s advancing over Nestle Crunch.

Actual voting result:  Nestle Crunch over Peanut M&M’s

In the Mummy regional, I had Butterfinger giving ‘the finger’ (couldn’t resist) to the Heath Bar.

Actual voting result:  Butterfinger over Starburst

In the Ghost regional, I had Twix beating Take 5.

Actual voting result:  Hershey chocolate bar over Kit Kat*

*Twix lost to Kit Kat in the first round. Anyone who read my initial bracketology report knows how strongly I feel about that match-up in the first round.  Kit Kat derailed Twix, and from that point on, this bracket was a complete disaster for me.

In the Witch regional, I had Milky Way advancing over Hershey’s Kisses.

Actual voting result:  Hershey Bar beat Milky Way*

* Hershey Bar and Hershey’s Kisses were also matched up in the first round, and I went with the Kisses, because as everyone knows, Kisses are cuter.

Halloween Candy Smackdown 2011

The Arizona Republic just started a great contest called “Candy Smackdown 2011.”  If you’ve ever played, or seen, a March Madness bracket, this is set up exactly the same way, except instead of college basketball teams, it’s got a 64 different brand names of candy.  The slots aren’t seeded, but each candy faces off against one other candy in the first round, with the winner advancing to round 2.  There are four rounds, with the final two candies advancing to the “Candy Smackdown Championship” to decide the winner.

Voting for Round 1 has already started, and continues until Round 2 begins on October 10^th.  The Scary Sixteen voting starts on 10/14, the Eerie Eight on 10/17, the Freaky Four on 10/19, and Championship Round voting begins on 10/21.

Check it out, and make your first round selections:  AZ Republic’s Candy Smackdown 2011.

Being the astute candy bracketologist that I am, I went ahead and completed my brackets in advance, all the way through the finals.  I’ll share the results of the final three rounds with you here.

We’ll see how I do against the voting public. 

Full Body Scans Ending?

This post marks the beginning of a new section on thunderstrokes called Free Radicals.  Free Radicals is the name I'm giving to some of the strange, spontaneous and/or random things that enter my head.  They generally fly directly in from the atmosphere, but for some reason don't fly out again.  Instead, they ricochet around inside my brain, damaging healthy cells and causing premature aging until I finally crack my head open and let them out.  They are mostly fragments of ideas, or small bursts of writing that I can't, or don't want to, turn into full-blown posts.  Since, strictly speaking, I didn't create them, but merely caught them, like a social disease, I assume no responsibility for their quality or appropriateness.

So I was driving Jessica to school today, and heard a news story on the radio about those full body scanners at the airports that everyone’s been complaining about.  According to the story, the TSA has begun replacing the extremely accurate 3D scanners because of the public outcry.  

This was the most innocuous of the images I found when I googled "airport full body scanners." There are others.

The way it was described on the radio, the new generation scanner eliminates the provocatively realistic images and instead shows stick figures.  Arrows point to areas that need to be checked further. 

Woody's castle

My two-year-old daughter has been on a Toy Story kick for the last, oh, three or four months now I guess.  Actually, it started with Toy Story, but has since expanded to include The Incredibles, Shrek, and just recently, Monsters, Inc.   It has reached the point where she can tell me what movie I’ve put in just from the first image that appears on the TV after starting the DVD.  She’s taken to reciting certain lines from memory, and re-enacting scenes from the movies with her Fisher Price little people.  I realize that some people may object to my parenting style and claim that this is not a healthy way to raise a child; I say it’s got to be healthier than living in a closet, which is where she’d be if I couldn’t get her off me for a few minutes at a time.  I swear it’s like having a spider monkey with attachment issues. 

Happy Dayz - Whoa! or is that 'Woe?'

Took this picture around 35^th Ave and Thunderbird a few days ago. . .

All right class, did anyone notice a problem with this sign?

That’s right, the name of the place is “Happy Dayz Learning Center.” “Dayz.”  With a “z.”  Now, I don’t want to get all curmudgeonly here, but do we all still agree that the word "days" is spelled with an “s” and not a “z?” 

Yes, I know the kids these days for some reason find it appealing to replace "s’s" at the ends of words with "z’s."  Zorro wanna-be’s, I suppose.  I wouldn’t even pause to comment on it, except for the fact that they call themselves a learning center.  Not a daycare center for preschool children that ends with the first day of spelling, not a become-a-hip-hop-star center, a learning center.  How much hope can you possibly expect to have for your child’s purported edification in a place that has chosen to call itself “Happy Dayz?”   They might as well have gone the rest of the way, and called themselves “Happy Daze,” because I’m guessing only the parents who are in one will put their kids there.