By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.

Gratz to #1Animefan who graduated from middle school last night and scored an amazing 550 out of 550 possible points on hor 8th grade project/ autobiography.

I'm a proud papa.

We had to brave a frikkin' thunderstorm with threat of tornado (TORNADO!) to get to the ceremony. This is Oregon not Kansas, right? Although we do have a little dog...

(On a side note- I've been to tons of graduations and promotions and last other than my daughter looking beautiful and getting her degree the ceremony itself was especially ponderous. An hour of listening to the "popular" girls in the glass sing off key karaoke is not exactly highlighting the school's cultural and artistic offerings.)

Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.

Sakuracon...

What can I say? I had a great time, but #1aminefan had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the Seattle Convention Center when it was time to go. She told me early on that she was "in her element." I'll say.

We arrived early Friday and faced the only low-point, if you can call it that, of the trip. There seems to be something built into the nature of the these conventions where the organizers are genetically incapable of running an orderly registration. We waited in line six hours to get into this thing. I was cool until the very end when we were finally just a few feet from the registration counter but the convention workers kept bumping VIPS who had just arrived to in front of us. Thus the last hour in line was spent just a few feet from registration.

When I finally got up to the registration counter I didn't say anything until they insisted I pay for the whole weekend even though we weren't going to be there Sunday and we had missed most of the Friday events because of their lack of organization. I laid into the poor little volunteer but backed off failry quickly as it really wasn't her fault and this wasn't about me, it was about my daughter and she didn't care.

(This guy with the giant sword in the registration line was obviously compensating.)

Once we got into the Convention Center it was cool. #1Animefan was ecstatic, like a kid in a candy store. This thing was BIG. At least four times as big as the convention in Portland.


The first thing she wanted to do was head to the park attached to the center to join a "glomping game." "Glomping" means hugging in the cosplay lexicon. It was a hugging version of spin the bottle.

After that we headed over to the vendor hall to check out the swag.

About this time my daughter ditched me for some friends she'd made so I checked out the video game hall which had classic and newer games and systems. My favorite thing was this stage with Rock Band hooked up. They were running contests on the stage and the guys playing were really, really good.
They had tabletop and miniature gaming rooms, so I popped in those to see what they had. I was a little disapointed that Monsterpocalypse was a no show. I wanted to see that game played since I first read about it and this seemed like the perfect crowd to sell it to. Oh well.

I visited Artist Row. Great artists here.

The costumes were even more amazing than the last convention we went to. Some of the sights we took in...

(These guys were on hand-made stilts with air compressors. Pretty incredible.)

(Salt-bacon man was actually pushing product, not attending the convention.)

(There are even conventioneers in the trees.)

My favorite costume: this little girl in the Gir costume was arguing with her parents. I asked them if I could take her picture and they smiled and said yes. You can see by her face she wasn't happy about it.

It rains nine months a year in Seattle.

I'm off to Seattle with #1animefan for Sakura-Con.

I'll be the big one in the Ducks jacket not dressed like Sailor Moon. Although lord knows I have the legs to pull off a Sailor Moon costume. At least Mrs. Wormer says so.

We're missing something.

Health care is the issue of the day and nobody sums up where the lines are drawn better than dday over at Digby's place. Here's the quote from the GOP congressman dday is referring to-

REP. ZACH WAMP: Listen, health care is a privilege. […]

Health care is a privilege?

I subscribe to the best plan the Fortune 500 company I work for provides. My premiums are astronomical but I've always felt this isn't an area where I want to skimp.

Despite my premium plan the deductibles are killing me. I've got an 80/20 setup towards the deductible and then nothing after I hit $1000 for myself or $2500 for my family. I guess this is pretty standard.

When my 12-year old son took that hit to the knee playing football at the end of last year I had to pay about $100 bucks out of pocket for the intial co-pays for the doctor visit then X-ray directly next door. I then had pay $200 for follow-up within the next few weeks including minor physical therapy. Then his doctor insisted on an MRI. My portion of responsibility for that was $500 dollars.

I can't even imagine what this would have cost had he actually torn his ACL and needed surgery.

Since injuries are a constant risk of sports we're seriously reviewing the financial risk having all three of our kids play sports expose us to. Youth sports must also be a privilege.

Eight years ago I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and now sleep with a cpap machine glued to my face. Yesterday, I went in for a follow-up and my machine is so old they have to do another sleep study to see what settings it needs. As I made the appointment I asked office scheduler what the study would cost under my insurance. The study itself is an outrageous $2000 so my out-of-pocket will be $400 dollars. By way of comparison I spent $15 dollars on my first sleep study.

I'm not sure I can afford this new study. $400 bucks is a lot of cash and I have other bills. Apparently sleep, a healthier heart and better productivity during the day is also a privlege for those with excess cash.

I'm well aware that my financial and health care challenges are miniscule next to what other Americans face. To many of Americans- being cancer free or getting the meds to slow the progress of MS or Aids and the rising costs of same are their own lucky privlege. These Americans would probably gladly change place with me and my medical bills given the choice.

The for-profit private health care system in this broken. As the president said today it's choking the economy to death. It's beyond obtuse to argue otherwise. It's ridiculous to accuse those of us who already pay too much of our ever shrinking income of being spoiled children. It's willful ignorance.

The 'Wizard of Wall Street' strikes again!

If I have to read another variation of the "Obama's tax cuts will only save me $14 bucks a week, big deal" meme I'm going to do that magic trick Heath Ledger uses in the "Dark Knight" on myself. Seriously. I have the pencil ready on my desk and everything.

Who the hell thinks $14 dollars a week won't help them out? Is everybody as rich as Paris Hilton? Or just conservatives?

I make a pretty good salary but even then I did some quick math and that money could mean a lot of good things for me. In a month that increased cash could do any of the following...

• Fill up my gas tank twice.


• Buy all the bread and milk on my grocery budget.


• Pay for that oil change I've been putting off because I was short on cash.


• Pay for one of #1Animefan's visits to her counselor since the insurance won't cover it.


• Pay for my wife's medicine prescription.

I could go on but you get the idea. I wish these aspiring Mr. Howells who apparently light cigars with $100 dollar bills would just shut the hell up.

Baa-ram-ewe! Baa-ram-ewe! To your breed, your fleece, your clan be true! Sheep be true! Baa-ram-ewe!

Obligatory 1000 post critter pictures.

1000 posts. That's a hell of a lot of bad grammar, poor spelling and improper punctuation. :)

NAME: Little Joe, AKA "Rasputin."

TURN ONS: Supergoat brand oats, wild blackberries, being scratched between the horns, pellet pooping wherever I please and staring at the two-leggers with my devil eyes.

TURN OFFS: Wasps, dogs, flooding in my pen and amorous hillbillies.

HOW I GOT HERE: A farmer gave me away.

QUOTE: "Feed me or die."

NAME: Mathilda

TURN ONS: Napping, sitting on the couch with Dean with my head on his shoulder, chasing my people's car across the highway.

TURN OFFS: Fireworks, thunder and amorous little dogs.

HOW I GOT HERE: I was adopted from the Humane Society after they caught me and my mom running wild through the park.

QUOTE: "It's all good."

NAME: Sheba

TURN ONS: A full bowl of dog food, my best friend #1Animefan and chasing my tail.

TURN OFFS: An empty dog food bowl, grouchy little dogs and having to go outside when it's cold.

HOW DID I GET HERE? I'm just staying temporarily while they find me a new home. Going on five years now.

QUOTE: "What? Hey, look there's something shiny."

NAME: Spike, AKA "CMD" (Chihuaha of Mass Destruction), "Little Devil," "Mini Monster," "Spikerdoodles."

TURN ONS: Playing fetch with my red ball, push my red ball into the people's hand so they'll play fetch, finding my red ball after they've hidden it because I'm annoying them.

TURN OFFS: Being put in a cat carrier (it's so humiliating), having Dean take something out of my mouth that I'm not suppossed to have and my nails clipped.

HOW DID I GET HERE? They paid good money for me from a breeder. Suckers.

QUOTE: "Okay, you die and you walk away with a severe limp."

One of us died tonight. Somebody knows why. Somebody knows.

#1Animefan loves to use make cute videos mashing pictures of Pokemon or our dogs with music. She's gotten pretty good at it with my favorite being our Chihuahua/ Pekingese Spike to a James Bond "Thunderball" soundtrack.

I recently helped her set up an account on YouTube so she could post and share her Pokemon videos. She has a small circle of like-minded friends online that do the same thing. The videos these guys pass back and forth are about as cute and innocuous as you can find.

A couple of weeks ago I was surprised when I was uploading one of her videos for her and it was immediately spiked by YouTube for music copyright infringement. I was impressed that they had software in place which identified the song that quickly (curse the geek that coded that software to Vic 20 hell.)

I assumed at the time that the music we had on our PC that she used was not legit. I have a ton of music on the thing and not all of of them were purchased through iTunes. Ahem. I've also noticed licensing issues when you rip older CDs to the computer. So the solution would simply be to find a licensed version of the tune she used and redo the video.

Last night she logged on and found that YouTube and pulled the other video she had up, which I'm fairly certain had a licensed tune playing in it. So I looked into this and found she wasn't alone. Thousands of videos have been automatically pulled lately. It looks like the YouTube forums have been temporarily shut down because of the resulting uproar.

Turns out the music in both videos was owned by Warner Brothers who very publicly split with YouTube at the end of the year because they didn't feel they were getting enough revenue off the ads on the site. Google/YouTube then put their wonderful ContentID code into action to strip mine YouTube of any WB artist content. I do mean ANY WB content. Characters in an original skit talking with a WB owned song in the background? Gone. A snippet of less than 10 seconds in your video of a WB owned song? Hasta la vista, baby.

I wonder if Warner Brothers gets the irony of Fox suing them over the distribution rights to their "Watchmen" movie. Probably not since it's only the film consumers that are hurt by that lawsuit with the movie being delayed.

I'm no lawyer but these latter examples seem to fall especially under Fair Use to my untrained eye. It would be difficult to identify any financial damage to the artist and the people who post these videos certainly aren't seeing financial gain. What's really egregious is that there is no opportunity to petition YouTube with that argument, nor a mechanism to ask the artist for permission to use the music.

Since these types of homegrown videos make up the bulk of the videos on YouTube I cannot see how it can survive under these sorts of restrictions on content. Oh well.

We all know people in our lives that like to complain that government stifles creativity and is too restrictive on freedom. I've spent my adult life watching corporations constantly doing things that screw consumers. From where I sit they're the ones that take all the fun out of life.

Oh, that's a wonderful place to start! Once you meet someone, you never really forget them.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving besides the fact we spent it with my Mother In Law.

The real fun was Saturday when we had don snabulus, Ladybug, Overdroid, Swinebread and Swinebreadina and Swinebread Jr. out to Faber University for a second Thanksgiving. Swinebread Jr. is just about the happiest baby I think I've ever ever met. This leads to all sorts of embarrassing mugging by the adults trying to get him to laugh some more.

Overdroid ran a round of old school Call of Cthulhu which was pretty fun. It's odd getting old enough to have our kids play with us. We stopped the Deep Ones from destroying Los Angeles with a tidal wave. Not that it would've been much of a loss to the world had we failed...

Besides getting our geek on we also spent a lot of time checking the score of the civil war as my Ducks destroyed the cocky OSU Beavers. Even though the Ducks have been spotty this year I had a feeling it would go this way despite home field advantage for the Beavers. This was the biggest game of the year for the Quack Attack and the Beavers would have a tough time not looking past their in state rivals.

Overdroid's girlfriend wisely decided that playing role playing games might not be the best use of her time while she was visiting so she headed downtown to the Portland Art Museum. Even though we're no Seattle, we have a pretty nice art museum which left her impressed.

Lest I forget: happy birthday to #1Animefan who turned 14 yesterday. You're my little sunshine, hon. Here's a Hayao Miyasaki video for you--

Look at Mr. Addams. He's always developing outside interests.

We have three kids. Our middle child (13) is just about the sweetest girl you could ever meet.

At the end of the school year last year we had one of the teachers at her middle school call us up and tell us she was worried about her. Our daughter seemed a little withdrawn, shy and didn't seem to have a lot of friends. This teacher was concerned that there may be a an issue that would cause our daughter to get "lost" as she advanced into high school.

We had always known our daughter was a little behind socially but she's also very smart (an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokemon and anime for instance) and a voracious reader, if a bit disorganized in her studies. Her grades haven't been stellar but her standardized testing has been pretty good. We took her as a bit of an egghead who was sometimes unfocused.

But this teacher's concern forced us to reflect on our daughter and any little clues that there might be something else going on . Long story short- after a series of tests and psychological profiles she was diagnosed with mild Asperger's.

(As an aside let me just say that my wife owe and enormous debt to this public school teacher. She didn't have our daughter in class at the time and met huge resistance from the powers that be and fellow teachers in pushing that our daughter be tested. Because our daughter would sit quietly in the classroom and not cause trouble she wasn't considered someone with a social disorder by a few of the her teachers.)

Reading through the paperwork compiled by the district doctor and the counselors in their diagnosis was both enlightening and heartbreaking. At one point during an interview our daughter asked the doctor "if they could teach her to make friends." That's a gut-punch for a parent.

Going into this school year our daughter is meeting with specialists and learning how to socially interact with her peers. The district has been great in accommodating for this after the initial diagnosis. We are all looking forward to this year

Which brings me to yesterday. For months our daughter has been planning on attending Kumoricon, the local Anime convention in Portland. My wife had to work so I got tapped to escort the little mynx to the festival.

I'm going to be perfectly honest here. I love my daughter but yesterday I really didn't want to go to this thing. I had a hellish week at work and personally am not a huge fan of that particular style of animation. But I sucked it up like a good dad and off we went.


I'll do a little report with some more pics sometime later but let me just say that the convention was absolutely wonderful. There were costumes galore from Star Wars to Disney to Sailor Moon. The whole thing had a circus atmosphere that was infectious. I have never been around a more joyous group of people in my life. Everywhere you went people were breaking into song or dance. The convention-goers took over the park across from the hotel and it turned into one big anime party. These guys are just happy to be alive.

But what really made the day worth it, what really touched my heart was how my daughter (Now "#1Animefan" by her convention badge) took the whole day in. She was walking on air from the minute we parked the car. She danced (danced!) the Carmelldansen, chatted with other friendly people that shared her interest in anime, played Red Rover with a group of Pikachus and pretty much went crazy with fun.

For the first time in a long time (maybe her life?) she wasn't the odd man out. She had met 10,000 other "#1Animefans." She was in her element. She was happy. She was with friends.

She's not alone and that means the world to her and to her parents. Everythings going to be fine.

I never touch spirits. Have you some milk?

A strange moment of zen this weekend.

I was driving the kids downstate for a young cousin's birthday. In the back seat my oldest daughter and son were screwing around with the laptop she got for graduation and for high school. They were watching the original batman show on DVD.

We were going through a small town that was having some sort of festival. From the back of the car we heard the theme from the start of the show ("Atomic batteries to speed. Turbines to power. Nanananananananaa...")

My middle daughter who is sitting next to me in the front seat goes "there's the batmobile."

I said "what the heck do you mean batmobile?" and turned to look at what she was pointing at.

We saw this...

There was a ton of traffic and by the time I got the car turned around to get back into town to see if we'd had a shared hallucination, the batmobile was gone.

Holy now you see it, now you don't!

And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me.

My middle daughter who is a 7th Grader just brought home a "Dear parents" letter from her science teacher which concluded with the following paragraph--

"Finally, I know that astronomy teaches on some subjects that may be considered sensitive. We will be discussing the formation of the universe and the big bang theory. If you are uncomfortable with your student learning about this please sign and return the bottom portion of the page. I will give your child an alternative assignment and they will not be held responsible for the material on the test."

We checked the district webpage and could find nothing on science curriculum so we're still trying to find out if this was the district or just the teacher heading off on his own tangent. Either way we're alternating between bemused suggestions to each other of funny replies ("As pastafarians we believe the world was created by the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and would like our daughter to opt OUT of your big ban propoganda") to complaints to the district.

What do you guys think?