Ninja Pajamas, and other good things.

Ayric: "If you had children, I would have to call the CDC."
Me: "The CDC? Centers for Disease Control?"
Ayric: "Yeah, because...you're...mentally ill."

Today I was making beef stroganoff, which involves cooking ground beef in milk and sour cream. Simmering flesh in the milk of the same beast. Something about that seems...wrong

The other thing I hate is when a product is "new and improved". It's like the company is saying, "Haha, sucker, you bought a crappy product for so long, and you didn't even know it, and now you have to buy more of our crap so you know what you were missing! Sucker!"

Those zany folks at JibJab who brought you "This Land is Your Land" have come out with a new 'toon, I'm not going to spoil anything, but trust me, it's worth watching!

"What would Love do?"
- The gayest bumpersticker in the world, spotted by Ayric and Phil in, of course, Eugene, OR

Things I know about, that other people tend not to know about, that there is really no point in knowing about, but I know about anyway.

Baseball's version of Secret Sauce

Did you know that a brand new baseball is virtually useless? They are very shiny and slick, and therefore slip and slide out of pitcher's hands and their perfect whiteness can blind batters. In 1920, Ray Chapman became the only modern major leaguer to die as a direct result of being hit by an errant pitch of a too-shiny new ball. After that point, baseball folk tried rubbing down balls with everything imaginable, tobacco chew juice, mud, and shoe polish included, to take the sheen off of the balls, and, in a roundabout way, save lives. Nothing worked quite right.

Finally, in the mid-1930's, a fellow by the name of Lena Blackburn went in search of the perfect mud for baseballs. After harvesting, straining, the addition of a secret ingredient, and aging, this special mud becomes the mud of choice for all major league teams, and is now a part of the Baseball Hall of Fame as well as listed by name in the Major League Baseball Rules. The location of the mud source is a closely kept secret now in it's fourth generation.

More than you ever wanted to know here:

An undated A/P article and commentary by baseball fans

A picture of Lena Blackburne and a short history of the mud

The official site of baseball rubbing mud where you can order your own lovingly hand packed tub of the magic stuff that is a consistency somewhere between "chocolate pudding and whipped cold cream."

Tontie, one of my all time favorite Flash Games Of The Day is new and improved! V1 is awesome! Whack-a-mole action on Here are some of the improvements I've discovered:

- Treasure Chests appear and when you hit them they will reveal upgrades including the new:

- Ice Hearts which protect your life hearts from being depleted, yet allow you to continue to rejuvenate life. They "lock down" your hearts and blows to your life deplete the ice evenly instead of sucking away at your hearts.

- Life hearts purchased from the tree store come *filled* instead of empty as previously.

- There is a pause button! Yay!

- You can revisit your death point 10 times to try again. You return to the same condition you were at the beginning of the level that you died at.

Caveats for play:

- There is a new beast on level 10. I won't give away too many details but study the level beginning graphic and be prepared to try the level several times.

- If you open a treasure chest, be careful about what you might pick up: It could be a downgrade.

Pikopiko hammer factor: 8/10

Just got this in my email today, and found it interesting:

I'm trying to get all this political stuff straightened out in my head so I'll know how to vote in November. Right now, we have one guy saying one thing and the other guy says something else. Who to believe. Let me see if have I got this straight?

Clinton awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Yugoslavia - good...
Bush awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Iraq - bad...

Clinton spends 77 billion on war in Serbia - good...
Bush spends 87 billion in Iraq - bad...

Clinton imposes regime change in Serbia - good...
Bush imposes regime change in Iraq - bad...

Clinton bombs Christian Serbs on behalf of Muslim Albanian terrorists - good...
Bush liberates 25 million from a genocidal dictator - bad...

Clinton bombs Chinese embassy - good...
Bush bombs terrorist camps - bad...

Clinton commits felonies while in office - good...
Bush lands on aircraft carrier in jumpsuit - bad...

No mass graves found in Serbia - good...
No WMD found Iraq - bad...

Stock market crashes in 2000 under Clinton - good...
Economy on upswing under Bush - bad...

Clinton refuses to take custody of Bin Laden - good...
World Trade Centers fall under Bush - bad...

Clinton says Saddam has nukes - good...
Bush says Saddam has nukes - bad...

Clinton calls for regime change in Iraq - good...
Bush imposes regime change in Iraq - bad...

Terrorist training in Afghanistan under Clinton - good...
Bush destroys training camps in Afghanistan - bad...

Milosevic not yet convicted - good...
Saddam turned over for trial - bad... Ahh, it's so confusing!

Every year an independent tax watchdog group analyzes the average tax burden on Americans, and then calculates the "Tax Freedom Day". This is the day after which the money you earn goes to you, not the government. This year, tax freedom day was April 11th. That's the earliest it has been since 1991. It's latest day ever was May 2nd, which occurred in 2000. Notice anything special about those dates?

Recently, John Kerry gave a speech in which he claimed Americans are actually paying more taxes under Bush, despite the tax cuts. He gave no explanation and provided no data for this claim.

Another interesting fact: Both George Bush and John Kerry are wealthy men. Bush owns only one home, his ranch in Texas. Kerry owns 4 mansions, all worth several million dollars. (His ski resort home in Idaho is an old barn brought over from Europe in pieces. Not your average A-frame). Bush paid $250,000 in taxes this year; Kerry paid $90,000. Does that sound right? The man who wants to raise your taxes obviously has figured out a way to avoid paying his own.