KingLou Drops Science 2.0

discovery world - not so great. over crowded. Not finished. Real focus on the members and their special privileges like classes and labs and so on. Great for the involved parent or class but only so so for the visiting parent. I did see a kid learning to ride segway which I thought was pretty cool. There was also an aquarium built into discovery world.

Aquarium poorly marked and also unfinished. The giant boat that was suspended from the cieling that you could go on and work the ropes on was a big hit. So was aquarium although small. Mysterious 3rd floor "Pilot House" was not visited. Only accessible via he elevator and no one I asked knew what it was. I assumed it was either a restaurant or more naval navigation themed area. I passed because it was getting to be lunch time. So Ace and I went to perennial Milwaukee eatery "Ma Fischers". When Jodi and I lived in Milwaukee we ate there pretty much every weekend. It's one of the only good Greek style diners on the East Side and it's been there for as long as I can remember. I got a burger and Ace decided and actually ordered for himself some spaghetti. The real surprise was that my lunch came with a free cheese tortellini soup and that Ace actually ate quite a bit of it without any begging from me. His only request was that I remove the carrots, which is weird since he likes carrots. I didn't complain. I just kept giving him soup.

After that we headed to the Anodyne Coffee Shop. I tried to leech some WiFi from there but it was yet another example of the monetized hotspot. It appeared to be an open access point but when I opened my browser I got a splash page for WEBbeams cafe hot spot provider. I went in to grab a mocha but decided to just not bother with asking about the WiFi. I have made it 3 days without getting online in a major way and I have survived. Phew!

Went out to dinner with Kate & Bill (the couple that came to the beach this summer)at long time friend DJ Brooks restaurant "The Good Life" right down the block from where I used to live. Its a Caribbean restaurant and it's DAMN good. I got the Jerk Chicken platter and it was food that a human deserves. Then we went to Bayou which is just down the road and had desert. Our friend Bill's niece works there and she is a pastry chef. I had a great banana pudding thing. Turns out she didn't make it but that didn't matter to me. It was seriously yummy.

We came home to find my father-in-law passed out in front of the couch again, Asleep with remote in hand.

My in-laws were nice enough to show me their lovely x-mas card from the Bush family. I was informed that the cards used to have a bible passage in them but because the democrats complained it was removed. Opening the card revealed that there was indeed a bible passage. It was then pointed out that it was too small now. So small because the democrats had reduced the focus of Jesus on Xmas. I was also shown the lovely 2007 Bush Calendar the got which shows the retard-in-chief with kids and other bullshit. It came with a letter from Laura Bush thanking them for their important donations and of course with an opportunity to donate more. It kind of made me angry but what can you do. My Mother-in-law complained that the quality and size of the xmas card had declined. I suggested it was because they spent so much money on Iraq that there wasn't any extra for a nice card. Then I suggested that they should try borrowing more from China for next years card. These jokes were met with stony silence.

My father-in-laws modem also took a shit today. The last time I was here I suggested that he run an auto-update that kept popping up on his windows piece of shit. After we did it totally barfed and needed to be re-installed. Total fiasco. This time I moved some useless desktop icons to the trash and suddenly his modem starts to die. "What happened to my icons! My modem isn't working!" of course these things are connected. I was waiting to get the blame again but I was able to convince him to call tech support. Of course this meant I had to call tech support. They determined that the modem was actually 99% chance dead. So he wen and bought a new one at Best Buy and lo and behold it fired right up and he's back on the web and happy. Only then did he admit that the modem had been crapping out on him for two weeks.... Nice.

Milwaukee Condo explosion. So many condos and they all have one thing in common. The buildings are hideous. Just weirdly angular and plain in a gross way. They are also being jammed everywhere possible. I will say this about Milwaukee. Its quality of life has gone up by like 300% since we lived here. Stuff to do, things to see, it's pretty much amazing. Some kind of major re-zoning must have happened because it's great. Jodi still wouldn't live there unless she was forced at gun point but that has more to do with the past than the present IMHO.

Back to NYC day. We finally went to George Webb this morning and I had a delicious sausage scamble. Of course now I feel totally ill. I think it has more to do with last nights three beers and the rich deserts than the hyper good/greasy foodstuffs I just ate. Today my father-in-law's printer stopped working. Not my fault! I think he needs a total system upgrade. I of course would like him to get a nice new Mac Mini or iMac but instead he will probably buy something from Best Buy. Of course if he bought a Mac I'd be cursed with the tech support calls for eternity.

I am currently at my in-laws house in Milwaukee. There are some wifi signals leaking in to the house and they are insecure but they are too weak for me to leech from. There are actually more secured than insecure which I thought was interesting. Seems that the days of the ignorant wifi sharing rube are reaching an end. People are actually reading their router manuals and setting a password. Of course if you are cool you just leave it open but only allow your MAC address to use it. Oy Glayvin.

Question: Is the christmas video of the kid going bananas over some toy in a box in that commercial real? My father-in-law says it is. I don't think it is possible for it to be real. The toy is called something totally generic like Robomega. I suppose the toy could have been replaced digitally. The reaction just seems so over the top that it can't be genuine. Apparently it's some original video submitted to some video blooper show. Seems phony. Especially both the kids flipping out over the same thing. Kids usually don't want or care about the same thing. Plus it's a boy and a girl about 3 years apart. Why do I care? I don't know. Why do you care? Fuck you.

EDIT! It was real. HERE IS THE ORIGINAL VIDEO

So the xmas booty list for 2006. Video iPod. Jodi went overboard and bought me a gift that she knew I would dig to offset a recent series of mistakes on the gift level. She went the extra distance and got it engraved so that I couldn't return it. This shows how well she knows me. I probably would have returned it because I think Apple is coming out with a new widescreen video player soon enough that this one will be obsolete. Either way it's very cool and I spent a good portion of the evening converting my ripped movies into iPod format with iSquint. Mostly for Ace's benefit but also some movies for me. As luck would have it as I tried to watch my first video on the plane to Milwaukee today the fucking thing froze and was stuck for about 7 hours. I finally was able to get on the webz on my father-in-laws computer and figure out the "un-fuck" sequence of random button pushes to bring it back to life.

xBox360 from my mom. My mom is the big gift champion. She always comes through. I have managed to not buy or play too many games on my original xBox which I got specifically to be ready when Halo2 came out. Since Halo2 came out I have played it almost every night for at least an hour. That is pretty retarded. Anyway now I am ready for Halo 3 to come out in November. I haven't really had a chance to get too into the xBox360 because everything I wanted to do involved downloading some content and that was insanely slow. to start the madness I got Gears of War, Call of Duty 3 and NBA Live 07. the NBA game is a call back to when I gave a shit about the NBA. Before the rules cracked down on the Knicks hard fouls and before the days of televised games only involving The Lakers or Rockets or Mavs or Miami or Detroit playing "insert West Coat team here". I think the Bucks have been on National TV one time that hasn't involved a playoff game. I look forward to playing all these games when I have the time....!!!

I also received in no particular order. A Cartoon version of the 9/11 report, a calendar of Bushisms, bike clothes, new glove/mitten hybrids, sweatpants (haven't had new sweatpants in like a decade), a twinkie cookbook (this was a dig from my mom to my brother from the time that I tricked him into eating a twinkie I had filled with taco meat) and other stuff which I cannot recall at the moment but which I equally appreciated.

The only thing now is that I need to buy myself the year long Lynda,com membership with tutorial files. I am truly poor.

On the plane flight out to Milwaukee we sat behind a family which a sick kid. This girl was coughing like she had tuberculosis and she did so without covering her mouth. Not only that, her parents didn't give a shit that she was coughing out on everyone. I can only hope that she wasn't contagious because if she was it was like hyper negligent behavior. They also had a laptop that they let their kids watch some old scoobydoo cartoons on but for some reason they elected to have the DVD player controls visible the whole time. Sorry, I can figure out how to stop my DVD's without a graphic display up the whole show.

Tonight we went to the Organ Piper for dinner. We went really early. Like 6pm and it was packed like a saturday night. Literally bursting with kids and overwieght freaks. The pizza is decent. The real draw of course is the Wurlitzer organ that is expertly played by the insane kids that they hire to play it. My father-in-law was saying there is a new chain out here called Papa Murphy's where you go and pick up the pizza and bake it in your oven. They are really focused on the home based experience and how cheap it can be. Comparing a fresh cooked meal and one you bring home and eat with a $5 6 pack of miller lite seems incongruous to me. And yet it was made. As with all discussions the point was made by one in-law and then the other. They like to parrot each other. They do it seperately and together. It's very much like the fox news they love so well. The stay on message. For example my mother-in-law mentioned that they saw the Rocky movie and it was good. Not going to in an oscar but a good time and the kind of movie you can take anyone to see. About an hour later my father-in-law said almost verbatim the exact same thing to me. It's really an interesting phenomena. Jodi and I probably do it too but I haven't noticed it.

I can't be sure but I think my father-in-law just turned the heat down on the thermostat AFTER I just told him that Ace is feeling sick. In fact I heard the heater shut off. I assume he just wasn't thinking. I know for a fact that he likes to keep the house pretty ice cold at night. I was just driving his car and I noticed that he keeps it at about 66 degrees. Thats a nice temp for the summer but when it's 38 degrees out thats not so much better. Okay it's better than 38 but you get my drift.

day 2 started off shitty. On every other trip we have ever taken to milwaukee Jodi and I have taken Ace to George Webbs for a nice greasy breakfast. For some reason this trip she totally forgot that tradition and decided that we had a discussion and agreed that we were going to stay in an eat even though there was only eggs and cheese to eat. In actuality there was no discussion. I asked incredulously if we were actually staying in for breakfast and she didn't respond.

I wanted to get out the house like crazy in general due to the busy-ness of my in-laws in their manic over-preperation for the coming family festivities. There is ritual over preparing of food in massive quantities to be done and we can't help at all so I choose to get lost. We drove to the Mayfair Mall so I could go to the Apple Store and buy the travel adapter for my Video iPod. I found what I was looking for with no problem. As always my Apple Store experience was less than amazing. I have unrealistic expectations that people there will be drawn to me and my Mac zealotry. Inherently they will know that I am a mac nerd and be cool with me. Instead the employees are usually not all that knowledgeable and I end up helping customers or whatever. Not very cool.

Its not like I am not aware of my own problems. It am acutely aware of the fact that I notice stuff others don't. I am just unable to make forceful statements as to what I think needs to happen. So instead of saying "Okay, Ace just dropped that lollipop. Lets get him a new one because when we open this one it will probably be all smashed inside the wrapping." I say "Well that broke" but let Jodi pick it up and buy it for Ace and act like an asshole when it's true. Which it was. Thats also kind of what happened with the breakfast thing yesterday too. I felt it should have been obvious but instead of saying "Well I was expecting to go to george webb for breakfast because we always do" I said "you want to eat at home? whatever." See, instead of "whatever" I should have said anything else. ANYTHING!

Both nights so far i have stayed up and watched TV from the kitchen while my father-in-law sleeps on the couch. He watches history or science shows and passes out and snores like no ones business. Both nights I have changed the channel on the TV to something more interesting to me. So instead of watching a show on Australia's killer spiders I watch Conan O'Brien. Both nights, within 5-10 mins of these shows being on he wakes up and abruptly shuts the TV of with a kind of "What the hell?" Then he walks past me and turns the thermostat down.

So wer'e almost as xmas 2006. It's been kind of weird. For some reason it's been kind of depressing. Not very Christmas season feeling at all. Somehow we managed to get our buying out of the way early.

OH! I saw that crazy computer voice reggae singer guy on the train to Ted's infants birthdays. I had just been thinking about him that day. Wondering if he was still doing that insane singing into his tape recorder and being totally oblivious to the fact that the entire train of people is laughing at him. Unfortunately I couldn't really concentrate on the lyrics this time because som idiot woman kept trying to talk to me about whatever the hell was on her mind. She said stuff about her granddaughter and stuff about her job. I could barely understand her because she seemed tobe leaving important parts out of her stories. Like what the fuck they were about.

If you don't already you should be listening to The Sound of Young America. It's a really great podcast about stuff that is awesome. It regularly interviews hilarious people. I listen to it on the way to work. Whatelse do I listen to? Oh I listen to This Week in Tech, Democracy Now & Left, Right & Center. I listen to more but those are the ones I look forward to.

Team Fernandez appears to have survived it's rookie season of The Project. I am pleased. Especially since I pretty well unknown on the improv scene it was kind of a nice validation.

What up party people? December has rolled on into the room. The city has gotten cold but not too cold. I am not in full grip of the xmas present panic but I feel it germinating in my gut like a seed for a beautiful anxiety plant. I am going to take a couple of days off to actually do the shopping this year. I have a bunch of accumulated vacation days and I never get sick so I'm going for it. By the way if I get sick in the next week I am going to be the most jinxed fucker ever. And as I lay in my bed moaning I'll be like "WHY DID I TYPE THAT ON MY BLOG? WHO GETS DENGUE FEVER IN DECEMBER!!!" Thats right. I predict I will get the breakbone fever! Back to present talk. Jodi keeps telling me that she bought me some crazy expensive thing which is making me nervous. I know it's not an xBox360 because I don't think she would do that to herself. I asked for that from my mom anyway. Unfortunately I have made Jodi totally gunshy on buying me presents because of this Fathers Day and a few other times. This last incident I was sleeping late and she basically woke me up and jammed gifts in my lap while I was half asleep and got furious at me when I was less than appreciative. I recall barely even being able to open both eyes to focus on the gifts. They were all related to my newish at the time bike which I was not really crazy about. So it all came together as a big disappointment storm that made it the worst fathers day on record in History. If you want my guess Jodi bought me something technological that I don't need but will probably think is cool. Video iPod? Maybe. PSP? Doubt it but that would be pretty cool, too. :p

I've been listening to a lot of Mike Nelson's Riff Trax lately. Pretty funny stuff. Too bad it's not on TV MST3K style. He's a pretty hilarious dude. I listened to a really good interview with him on Something Awful. Whatelse... oh yeah. Listen to the Sound of Young America. It's a podcast. Great interviews with super funny people about things that are awesome. I've also been listening to "A Special Thing" which is a very random podcast. One day it was a hilarious interview with Jim Gaffigan and the next it was a walking tour of LA. Apparently the Ripley's Museum there is terrible and will make you feel ill. It was an entertaining listen though. Sounded like a tour my friends and I would have. Just a lot of riffing and goofing around.

We went back to the Brooklyn Children's Museum last Saturday for a kids birthday party. It was pretty fun. They had a private party room. Of course some nutjob mom just walked on in off the street and let kid start to join the party in the middle of some arts & crafts activity. She was asked to leave. It was kind of a weird moment. I am glad that never happened to me as a kid. Blech. Ace got to touch a few more animals. He's touched more animals in the last 2 months than I have. This time he touched some kind of spiny lizard and a boa constrictor. He has not asked to have either as a pet. I am relieved.