Dear Discovery Channel

Where did you go wrong? When I was young you perked my interest with quirky animals, spectacular glaciers and an endless universe. Now you are plagued with "reality". The worlds deadliest most explosive dirty robots is inspiring no one but future frat boys and over sensationalized couch potatoes. For shame.

Was it the Eco Challenge that corrupted you? Or was it the taste of network TV ratings that pressured you to degrade? Perhaps a single digit channel number was something you were never meant to have.

Alas, it is to public broadcasting that I must return. PBS, perhaps I will pledge money to you next year.

Q: If everyone passes the buck (loan), who ends up with it?

A: The taxpayer.

Ok... one more...

Yeah, I'm bathing in the kitchen. So what?

Misc Photos

Family hike at Heather Meadows.

It's raining... time to cover up

The resemblance is scary...

Sam and Makena... yeah, that's pretty cute.  Hands where I can see them, Sam.

Drill, drill, drill? Really?

There seems to be this misconception that drilling for more oil will miraculously fix our current economic crisis (trying really hard not to place blame...). You don't just wake up one day, decide to drill, and tomorrow have 20% more crude. It takes a many years, even decades to see the return on a drilling investment (as a nation), an investment that yields absolutely no technological advances in the way of sustainable energy. So, instead of investing in renewable energy now, we are supposed to invest in oil so that in 10-20 years we'll be worse off than we are now? This rattles every fiscally conservative born in my body... not to mention the environmentalist ones...

I want to remove our dependency on foreign oil as much as the next man, but replacing it with a dependency on our own (limited) supply doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it, and at a huge cost to future generations.

More over, it *might* be nice to save some of that petroleum for things other than fuel. Plastics and many other vital products require oil as well. We might not want to burn it all.

Man, my political to baby post ratio is on the rise... more light hearted stuff to come...

Quote of the Day

We've all heard this quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Today I heard an awesome adaptation to suit the current administration:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Nice.

Makena's 2mo Doctor's Apt!

She's perfectly healthy, but the vaccines she got today did not make her very happy.  In fact, the screaming was something to behold, not to mention the shade of red she turned.

Here are her stats:

Head size 50th percentile

Weight 90th percentile at 12lbs 9oz

Length 95th percentile at 24.25 inches

Well, at least we know she's getting enough to eat ;).

Why are we so concerned with winning the war?

The GOP is boasting that their candidate(s) won't stand for the US losing a war and that the Dems have a "defeatist" attitude towards Iraq. To that I say, and? Who's keeping score of war wins and losses anyways? Is there some kind of prize later that I'm not aware of? Do presidents get bonuses for declaring "mission accomplished"? This is not a football game!  What's going on here? Am I going crazy? Do they not even have to talk about why we're still at war despite being less safe now than we were when we started this insanity?  Is there no accountability in this country?  No, let's just ignore injustice, chant "U-S-A", and all will be well.  We've become a nation of war mongering Frat boys.

Do you know how much alternative energy and healthcare you can buy for 2 trillion dollars?  Well, I can't tell you because we burned all that money in Iraq.

I might be oversimplifying things, but I see is 80K in US debt per household, 10s of thousands of bodies in Iraq and no end in sight. This has to stop, it's madness.

Super-senior discount at Baker

John McCain, you're in luck:

http://www.mtbaker.us/prices_pre_passes.php