Last week Safa went the Nashville Children’s Theater drama camp and learned the fundamentals of theater. As her group’s project, they put together a performance of Horton Hatches the Egg. Safa was cast as Lazy Mayzie, the bird that is tired and bored sitting on her egg and asks Horton to do it. Pictured […]

Remember “Grasshopper, snatch the pebbles from my hand” Master Po in the memorable TV series “Kung Fu” starring David Carradine (Grasshopper) as the Shaolin master wandering the wild wild west reluctantly kicking cowboy butt when the need arose, which was always during the last 15 minutes of an episode, and always defeating the six-guns? And […]

There are a lot of reasons to have a pond:

1) The cooling effect amid a heat wave like the present one.
2) The soothing sound of the waterfall trickle.
3) Good karma for providing a home for fish, frogs, dragonflies, snails, bees, hornets, water lillies and lots of another plants (assuming plants have Buddha natures; I assume […]

I have good excuses now for not reading nearly as many books as I intended so far this year. Of course, the first excuse is that I’m a slow reader. The second is that I was reading Cryptonomicon, which is a zillion pages long. And finally, the really really good reason is because I’ve been […]

According to this AP article, a survey done by the AP-Kyodo News indicates that 60% of Americans polled believe that WWIII is likely within their lifetime while only 33% of Japanese polled believe this. Is this a function of Japan’s atomic-and-fire-bomb-induced pacificism and American warmongering or are Japanese just more optimistic?

BusinessWeek just published their 100 top global brands for 2005 and if you want to see an injustice just take a look at where Apple is in relation to Microsoft. Apple has been in the mid-40s for the last few years and has reached #41 now. Microsoft has been sitting at #2 forever, behind Coca-Cola. […]

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Last weekend I noticed unfamiliar charges on one of our credit cards. Sure enough, some asshole had gotten a hold of our number, no doubt floating in cyberspace. There were about $1500 in charges, I think, some of which were posted and others pending. All of the […]

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is perhaps the most entertaining film I’ve seen this year, alongside Kung Fu Hustle. Johnny Depp does indeed play a subtly sinister and delightfully whacked-out Willy Wonka reminiscent of Michael Jackson and crossed with, as the NY Times opined, Mister Rogers and Truman Capote. But the focus of the film […]