Author: admin

I love a good party. I love going to one and I especially love throwing one. Every few years my eldest shifts his behavior far enough into the green to have a party. Now, on the eve of his eighth birthday, I find myself communicating with companies in China in hopes of procuring Beyblades wholesale. Why? I think this year’s party is going to be an all out Beyblade tournament!

Beyblade is a game and TV Series that was popular a few years back and is currently experiencing a resurgence amongst select kids from 4-12. The game is a trumped up version of tops. You purchase a metal top and a plastic stadium and you spin your top in hopes of surviving longer than your opponent. I’ve tried the game with varying degrees of success. It lacks the poker-like strategy of Pokemon, but it is pure physics. The tops have a finite number of variables that determine weight, spin direction, defensive posture, attack speed, etc. You can change out parts and create a bey that does what you want it to do and in a team battle the variables and strategy increase.

This is going to be a fun one.

Listening to Sabriel and Pao cover Gnarls Barkley in a sweet, soulful way reminds me of how powerful music can be. Music is said to be a top memory trigger; right up there with sense of smell. Music transports me to the past, but I also think it defines eras in our lives. Thriller (Jackson) was an era. As Time Goes By. Everyone can tie a significant period of their lives to a song. It may not be the pop hits of America, but there is a collection of sounds that form the melody of our lives.

My songs largely come from Boys II Men, Bon Jovi, Jason Mraz, and Biggie Smalls. There was that period where D’Angelo laid down the soundtrack to all of my amorous affairs. There was the dark period when I fell victim to Slayer and their ilk, only to float back to the surface of normality with Metallica.

These days I groove to the tunes of Maroon 5, Kanye West and Jay Z. Jason Mraz is always on the playlist, and it could be he more than any other that defines my 30s.

Some Thoughts:

1. Survived the week before school with minor scrapes and bruises. No significant sleep occurred, and I did jam about a year’s worth of pedagogy into my brain over a 84 hr stretch. How much will stick? At least all the stuff that made it into my syllabi

Chad “ochocinco” Johnson is a man without a home. His wife took everything in his private life and his professional life was stripped away by the Miami Dolphins. Now, Coach Philbin claims the release was about more than the alleged abuse. I believe him. Watching Hard Knocks taught me that Johnson has lost confidence in his ability more than anything else. He is a receiver in need of a revival, and a place like Miami, where he would be the feature, is not it. Johnson needs a team with a solid, established QB and a system built around simple routes, and YAC yardage with a seasoned qb who can bring him back to where he needs to be.

Yes, I am talking about Manning. He can rescue the kid better than any. The Jets would not work at all, but the Broncos and the Texans are the teams I see benefiting from an ochoing.

Some thoughts:
1. Here is a bit of web laundry. I am seriously considering moving the old talislegger site to this medium in order to unify the site experience. It is a laundry matter, because it merely involves putting in the work to get it done. More importantly, it is about finding the time to do so and preserve some of the awesome imagery that reflects the web stuff I have gathered.

2. I have not been very loyal about the reflection and waivers from the perspective of the days these things happen. Sounds like something that should be solidified, but when an idea hits…

There is a moment where I don’t know him. When his eyes squeeze shut in anger. When disappointment colors his cheeks red and he howls at the the sky. The whole of him curls around my leg, maple skin soft, the flesh beneath not yet knotted by life’s travels. my skin is darker, traveled. My fingers knotted and knowing as they slither into that spot just above his breast.

I spent some time on the CNN.com site and then some more on the international version of the same, and fox news, and even msnbc. I was curious to know what qualifies as news these days. News, in the modern vernacular is merely what information is trending, or being viewed or noticed, enough to be considered headline news. This ‘news’ varies greatly from site to site. One key distinction was between CNN, where the headline story was an opinion piece questioning whether Paul Ryan was for or against Ayn Rand, and the Fox piece that, surprisingly, fact checks Paul Ryan’s budget plan claims.

All sites saved space for images and talk of Miley Cyrus’ side boob, which speaks volumes of the effect that sex has on the media conversation. However, the real interesting part is what constitutes news for these sites. Internet, and to a lesser degree television, news has a direct link to the customer and the customer’s reading habits. News is then filed, even created, according to the needs of the audience.

That is a scary reality. That means that there is no impartial baseline determining relevance based on universal criteria. Heck, maybe there never was.

Some thoughts:
1. Dr. David Katz, editor-in-chief of the journal Childhood Obesity is uncomfortable with the Nike commercial I mentioned yesterday. He doesn’t like how uncomfortable the kid looked and how far from great he is. Well, that is the damn point. Greatness demands sacrifice, and that kid inspires greatness.

I am genuinely looking forward to the semester if for no other reason to discuss the polarization of the American commercial. I say polarization because what I perceive to be as a greater divide between the way commercials are scripted these days. On one end of the spectrum we’ve gone off the deep end with the oversexualization and even the dumbing down of women. It didn’t start with Axe commercials, but they remain the greatest example (save for a handful of beer commercials that are simply nuts).

Axe actually plays both sides here. They recently released a new ad, which doesn’t show skinny ultra-attractive women. Instead in focuses on a man who turned a girl he liked into a  pedestal piece. He talks about how putting her upon high made him feel powerless and how he changed his behaviors, so he would never feel like that again. This is the other side of the media message. This idea of change comes from within is echoed by the Nike commercial that shows a fat kid striving to be healthy. These commercials are a small yet powerful counterweight to what we normally see, and what we normally see is getting more drastic.

A downside of posting from the iPad is the inability of the software to record a blog until it is actually posted online. I wrote this post much earlier in the day and a child took hold of the device before the post went to print. What followed was ten minutes of writing lost. I suppose tonight is the 20 minute rule. I also suppose the loss is fitting, because it echoes what I want to share.

What is a life well lived? According to Kobe Bryant it is a life that is about triumphing over adversity and achieving the dream. What happens to most of us is not the Kobe story, but a sadder refrain in which we constantly devolve our dreams until that are shallow husks of what we thought could be. Yet somehow we cling to these husks and attempt to call them a life well lived. Perhaps we she call them the chance not taken. This has been marinating for some time as an emerging theme in my coming fantasy novel (coming when I release it from the prison of my subconscious to run across the pages free). The revision of dreams and life happiness to something more manageable and reachable is nothing shy of an acceptable cop out.

I don’t mean to see the world die unhappy, but I wish people fought harder to become who they are truly meant to be. That fight, I believe, is a life well lived.

8:33 on a saturday sleepover night. I am quietly debating the virtues of being a shut in. The truth is If you have a big enough house and access to amazon.com the need to leave your house is greatly reduced. I have several friends who telecommute and I myself practice that lifestyle in the summer months. I realize this conversation is triggered by the sleepover. Having 4 boys in place makes one consider the life of a hermit. There was even a moment when I shoved them outside towards the evening sun, shut the door, and observed a very brief moment of silence.

My wife is searching online for weed killer. In her summer mode she turns into this green-thumbed goddess driven to make her house a better place. Now that summer is, in the work sense, a bemusing memory I wonder how long it will take for her to shift back into that hard charging student mode that also makes me smile.

Seriously, I am out of words tonight. I think this many kids in one space is damaging to the ability to think.

When I was a kid I used to play this game called ‘Who Are You?’ The goal of the game was to decide what superhero you most wanted/intended to be like. It is a common game; almost a meme in the way it moves from generation to generation. My kids play the game without ever being prompted by me or my wife to do so. When I played I wanted to be Batman. Over time I wanted to be Robin. Now? I don’t know. The difference has to do with a deeper understanding of what the game means to me now. It ties into that idea of potential and how I view myself.