Cien? Si.

This makes 100 posts here at the blog. Here are a few that people have mentioned as favorites:

• A treatise on spitting
• Toddler potty humor
• Family stories
• Jack's growth in pictures
• Favorite comedy film quotes
• Life and death in one day

That's a suitably random and inconsistent grouping of "best of" postings for someone as weird as me. :)

Rodeo News

The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo has begun. This thing is absolutely huge, and is a ton of fun for the kids. It runs for about a month and started with a parade last week. For a few nights before the parade, ranchers and farmers come from all over the country to camp out in various places around Houston, preparing for the month-long show.

One of those campsites happens to be right behind our house, in the open area around the little league baseball fields. So last week, when people started showing up, we took the kids for a walk behind our house to meet some real-life ranchers. And their animals, of course.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a nicer bunch of people than these ranchers and farmers. They told us about their animals, played with the kids, and just displayed a genuine love for everybody around them. Why do you think that is? I wonder if life on the ranch just has a way of building character.

Physical labor builds strength of body and spirit. Cattle generations and slow-growing crops might have a knack for building patience. Weather, infections and pests may build a stoic acceptance of things beyond our control. Life outdoors might build a deep-seated appreciation for the beauty of the earth.

I may just be full of dung with all this, but maybe there's something to that lifestyle that provides some life lessons missed out on by urbanites. We'll be hitting the livestock show at least twice this year, and we can't wait! You may think it sounds boring or redneck, but trust me, it's like the best zoo in the world. I'll post pictures and stories after we've had our fun there.

Music News

On the way to the gym yesterday, a local radio station had "Turn Back the Clock" hour. Their first song was by the Smashing Pumpkins. Smashing Pumpkins for turn back the clock? The song they played was released during my senior year of high school. I guess it's finally happening... the bands I love are getting old. Good thing I'm not.

But everyone knows what the huge, huge, music news is from last week. No, it's not Brittany Spears and her new imitation of Kojak on crack. It was the bombshell that Van Halen was reuniting, again, with David Lee Roth, only to back out, again, on the reunion. You know, after the 14th or 15th failed reunion, the fans are eventually going to stop believing it'll ever happen.

I leave it to our tongue-tied President to speak for Van Halen fans everywhere:

What I See

Last time I posted this picture from the Hubble telescope, which shows an unbelievable amount of galaxies in a pinpoint of the sky. To give you a sense of scale, if our sun equalled one grain of sand, then the universe's stars would equal all the rest of the sand on all the beaches on earth. All of them. That's how big the universe is. For some reason NASA's image had a profound impact on me, and I wanted to get some of it out in writing. This is what I see.

I see the second law of thermodynamics at work, yet I see us breaking that law here on earth. The law says that heat and energy tend to disperse until they're in equillibrium with what's around it, like the warmth of a fire working its way through your house, instead of focusing itself three feet from the fireplace. Yet the human race continually harnesses energy for our own uses, often concentrating it exactly where we want. And we keep getting better at it.

I see a place where we are almost certainly not alone, but almost certainly are too far away to ever meet our neighbors. Going back to the second law, I think that our planet, our existence and our progress makes humanity special, but not necessarily unique. I see a place so big that it will demand technology far beyond today's science fiction to even begin exploring the closest quarters around us. I think one day our descendents will do exactly that.

I see a place that will teach us more about ourselves as we explore it. Finding "The New World" didn't solve all Europeans' problems, and it created many horrible new problems for Native Americans. I don't like the price that was paid for this land, yet I am acutely grateful to live in this country. Expansion tends to bring new situations to people, and these situations expose new character traits we may not have been aware of. This is when we learn and grow. There are human beings living on every continent of the world, living under the surface of the sea, and even living in orbit. When we combine this scientific knowledge with similar growth of the human spirit, life gets better.

Author Gregg Easterbrook has a wonderful thought experiment in one of his books -- if you could trade places with a random person alive 100 years ago, would you do it? How about 500 years ago? 1,000? In general, most people say no, because the average life today is longer, safer and better than it was back then. Again, in the midst of a massive universe, where energy tends to dissipate and unfocus... we're moving forward.

I see God in the picture. I see a being so incredibly out of my league that I'm sure he laughs at our petty doctrinal disagreements. Yet I believe he cares about us, and has placed some of his spirit in each of us, and when we pay attention to that, we improve. I believe we're a very important part of some kind of beautiful project happening in this universe, and it will be eons before we have an inkling of understanding what this is all about. I can wait, and I have faith it will be amazing.

I see strangeness, which makes me instinctively cling to what is familiar and what is like me. Namely, other people. Especially my family. Show a child the view from a skyscraper and they will grab a parent's hand and hold it tight. My emotional reaction to the Hubble's view is the same. It's a big, foreign place out there, and I'm glad we're in this thing together.

I'm a sub-atomic particle spinning around a single grain of sand, in the middle of all the world's beaches. And that suits me just fine. I hope to make my little microscopic neighborhood the best it can be. And have fun all the way.

Do you really know where you live?

At the end of this post is one of the most amazing pictures I've ever seen. It's from NASA's Hubble telescope, and shows levels of substance and activity in space that we've never imagined. Here's a little bit of background on the picture:

• It's focused on 1/10,000,000 of the visible sky, and what was thought to be a particular "void and boring" section of the sky. If you took a dime, drilled a hole in the "O" of In God We Trust, then held the dime at arm's length, this picture is of that tiny visible section in the "O" of the dime.
• Each light or speck in the picture is an entire galaxy. There are more than ten thousand of them in the picture.
• Our Milky Way galaxy has over 200 billion stars like our sun.

So basically, in the tiniest point of supposedly empty space, there are at least 2 quadrillion stars (that's a thousand trillion). The numbers are so big that they're basically meaningless to me. All in that little speck of visible space.

Douglas Adams is one of the only writers who can do it justice, in the introduction to his classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big
it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store,
but that's just peanuts to space."

So here's the picture. On Thursday night I'll write about what I see, but for a few days I'll just let it sit here so you can think about how it impacts you, if it does.

(Click on it for a bigger view)

Curse of the firstborn Birthday

Last year on Samantha's 4th birthday, I ran into this incident, a shooting and murder of a 16-year-old boy. It happened in the morning, so by the time the afternoon/evening rolled around I had been able to get removed from the investigation activities and try to give my daughter a fun BD party. She might've been able to tell that daddy was a little different, but I gave it my best to act "normal".

Yesterday was my nephew's 2nd birthday, and my brother had quite the stressors too. He works for ConAgra foods, and was recently promoted to the grocery division. Well, in the last week there have been two Class 1 product recalls -- one for meatballs and the other for Peter Pan peanut butter, which you've probably heard about on the news. He's only been in the grocery division for one month, and they've had two national recalls. One of his colleagues has been there for 20 years, and had only worked on one similar incident during that time. So of course my brother is absolutely swamped, on his son's birthday, with a huge business crisis that is not his fault, but is still his cleanup responsibility. Fun.

My birthday's in August -- I'm the firstborn. Bet my parents can't wait!

Julian news

Since I brought up the shooting, might as well mention a couple of the other related events from the past week. First, we've noticed a return of the graffiti in our neighborhood, some of it even on the school grounds. After repeatedly following the city's instructions on how to report this, and repeatedly being ignored, Jamie called the school directly.

Jamie got connected to a vice-principal, and urged her to prioritize the removal of the graffiti, especially after what happened to Julian. The VP answered, "Julian who??". Jamie reminded her of the shooting and death that happened less than 3 months ago, less than 50 feet from the new graffiti. The VP said, "Oh, that. Well, it was never proved that the incident was gang-related."

EXCUSE ME!??!? The boy was killed by confirmed gang members -- fact. Julian himself had gang connections, and used to run with gangs -- fact. Julian's tatoos were not merely decorative -- fact. How was that not gang related?

Jamie was upset enough to then call Anne Clutterbuck, who is on the Houston City Council and has been very helpful and vocal about turning around the neighborhood and the schools. Anne couldn't believe what the vice-principal had said... then Anne laid this gem on us: "Of course it was gang-related. Julian was lifting up his shirt and showing those guys his tattoos when he was killed."

I can't believe I never thought of that. Julian's shirt had no holes in it, but his chest and stomach had bullet holes. The only way this was possible is if he was lifting up his shirt when he was shot. It makes perfect sense, but I'd never figured out why his shirt was in perfect condition.

The graffiti's still there, on the baseball dugout at the high school baseball field. Their season starts soon.

As a final note on all this junk, here's a picture of a Christmas ornament we made for Julian last year. Our church displays two trees every holiday season -- one is a "family tree" and the other is a "remembrance tree". This ornament went to the latter:

Favorite dialogues -- Action Films

No one-liners, these are my favorite verbal exchanges in action movies. And no, they’re not from memory – I definitely solicited some help from the internet:

Quigley, Down Under
They’re stranded in the Australian desert, and she’s “half a pebble off plumb”, or not quite right in the head, hence her name:

Crazy Cora: You know, if we're lost, you can tell me.
Matthew Quigley: We're lost.
Crazy Cora: I can take bad news. Just tell me straight.
Matthew Quigley: I don't know where the hell we are.
Crazy Cora: No sense takin' time to make it sound better than it is.
Matthew Quigley: I reckon we're goin' in circles.
Crazy Cora: Wire things up and I'll see right through. So, just tell me honestly. Are we lost?
Matthew Quigley: Nope. I know exactly where we are.
Crazy Cora: That's good, 'cause, frankly, I was gettin' a little worried.
Matthew Quigley: Don’t know where we’re going, but no sense bein’ late…

The Last Boy Scout
Grizzled private investigator Joe Hallenbeck meets Jimmy Dix, former NFL quarterback:

Joe Hallenbeck: Leather pants.
Jimmy Dix: Yeah.
Joe Hallenbeck: What's something like that run?
Jimmy Dix: Six-fifty.
Joe Hallenbeck: Six hundred and fifty dollars?
Jimmy Dix: Yeah.
Joe Hallenbeck: They're pants.
Jimmy Dix: Yeah.
Joe Hallenbeck: You wear them?
Jimmy Dix: YES.
Joe Hallenbeck: They don't, like, have a TV in them or something?
Jimmy Dix: Nope.
Joe Hallenbeck: I am very old.

Tango & Cash
The movie’s title is the last names of two cops, played by Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone. In this scene they’re talking to a witness that was just interrogated by Cash (Russell):

Witness: Detective Cash assaulted me. He put a chair on my chest and sat on it.
Gabriel Cash: [Tango looks at Cash accusingly, Cash shrugs] I couldn't find a piano.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
With Sean Connery as Indiana’s dad – a perfect casting decision:

Professor Henry Jones: They're trying to kill us.
Indiana Jones: I know, Dad.
Professor Henry Jones: This is a new experience for me.
Indiana Jones: It happens to me all the time.

Speed
Two police officers discuss interesting tactical scenarios:

Harry Temple: All right, pop quiz. Airport. Gunman with one hostage. He's using her for cover; he's almost to a plane. You're a hundred feet away. Jack?
Jack: Shoot the hostage.
Harry Temple: What?
Jack: Take her out of the equation. Go for the good wound, he can’t get to the plane with her. Clear shot.
Harry Temple: You’re deeply nuts. You know that?

Lethal Weapon
From a time when Mel Gibson was much less controversial:

Martin Riggs: I do it real good, you know.
Roger Murtaugh: Do what?
Martin Riggs: When I was 19, I did a guy in Laos with a rifle shot at a thousand yards in high wind. Maybe eight or even ten guys in the world could have made that shot. It's the only thing I was ever good at... Well, see you tomorrow.
Roger Murtaugh: Yeah. See you then.

The Matrix
Great movie, with admittedly disappointing sequels:

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.

So how about it, action buffs? What are your favorites?