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Behold

My son, Kyle. Born at 3:51 p.m.

Tuesday Travel Photo (No. 188)

Last October, we spent the weekend in Chicago so that my brother and I could then take a road trip to South Bend for USC's 38-0 win over Notre Dame. That evening, we spent time exploring the north side of Chicago with our wives and daughters. I love evenings in Chicago. Chicago is a great city to walk around in at night. One of our favorite destinations is the water tower district along Michigan Avenue. The Hershey shop is there, and the American Girl Place is right around the corner, and every imaginable high-end retailer is somewhere along Michigan Avenue, within walking distance. The John Hancock Center looks down on it all.

Across Michigan Avenue, the world-famous Chicago Water Tower, the only major structure to survive the great Chicago fire, is quite popular as a photography object, but I also like this building across the street, at 821 North Michigan Avenue. It houses the Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, built in 1869. The architecture is the same as its more famous mate across the way. The buildings are a perfect compliment to one another.

Towers aren't everything. You need pumping stations, too. This is a good one, don't you think? I know Oscar Wilde once stated that the Water Tower looked like "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it," which I assume he meant negatively, but Oscar Wilde's tastes and mine never have been that similar.

Let Puppies Have Puppies, or Your Lipstick Prices Will Go Up

I am opposed to AB 1634, the proposed California Healthy Pets Act. If passed, AB1634 would require almost all dogs and cats in California to be spayed or neutered. I think that encouraging people to spay and neuter their pets is good. Giving people benefits for spaying or neutering is good. But making it so that no amateurs can ever breed a litter of puppies or kittens is an unreasonable restraint on personal freedoms. I've never abandoned a litter of puppies to a dog shelter, but if I want to breed my dog, I should damn well be allowed to do it.

But if personal freedom is not enough to inspire people, maybe fear tactics will work better. Because, as this recent blog post from the OC Register demonstrates, if this bill passes, your lipstick will become more expensive, and fish food will be affordable only to the super-elite.

Every week, a truck pulls up to the county Animal Shelter in Orange. The carcasses of some 400 dead dogs, cats, bunnies and other unlucky creatures are loaded up. Then the truck hauls them to the West Coast Rendering plant in Vernon.

There, the remnants of Fido and Fluffy (alongside the carcasses of slaughtered cows, pigs, chickens and restaurant scraps) are essentially cooked at very high temperatures for hours. What happens then?

• Frothy fat floats to the top of the stew, eventually making its way into lipsticks, lubricants, polishes, waxes.
• The harder fats settle in the middle, eventually appearing in soaps, candles, drugs, gummy candies.
• The densest stuff falls to the bottom. It’s dried, squeezed, dried again and finely ground, to create a protein powder that becomes a key ingredient in animal feed. The meat and bone meal made from ”companion animals” isn’t supposed to make its way into feed in the U.S. But protein meal containing Fluffy and Fido sells overseas, where it’s apparently popular for fish feed on fish farms.

Wait. WTF? Did I read that right? Gummie candies? Our freaking gummy candies are made of fat from the boiled remains of animal shelter discards?

I think I'm about done eating delicious gummy candies.

What is going on with Scott Wolf?

The InsideSocal USC blog, written by Scott Wolf, is going downhill. What was once a blog full of interesting information, sprinkled with a few bad predictions, has now turned into a collection of cheerleader photos and unfunny snarky remarks, such as this gem from yesterday:

Since UCLA banned the Song Girls and band from playing at Pauley Pavilion, perhaps a compromise can be struck for next year's game at the Galen Center. UCLA can bring its cheerleaders and leave its band behind. in return, incoming USC guard Romeo Miller can perform at halftime at Pauley Pavilion.

Not very clever. And more than a few bloggers are noting his immature fascination with college cheerleaders. (See, e.g., http://www.ducksportsnews.com/blog/2008/07/daily-news-usc-blogger-obsessed-with-oregon-cheerleaders/)

Finally, he doesn't really know his shit. In one of the Q&A's last week, a reader asked:

Q: What non-BCS teams have a shot at making a BCS Bowl this year ala Hawaii in 07-08 and Boise St. in 06-07?

Scott replied:

A: I don't really think any non-BCS team will but if I had to pick one, I would probably say South Florida.

Scott said that South Florida has the best chance of any non-BCS team to make a BCS bowl next season. South Florida. Which plays in the Big East. Which is a BCS conference. And this guy gets to vote for the AP Top 25! He often has misspellings and grammatical errors in his posts, too, which would be no big deal for a typical blogger, but this is a blog for the Daily News, written by a guy who gets to cast an AP ballot.

Oh, Scott, if your former high school newspaper sports editor could see you now, he'd be embarrassed.

What a minute. I AM his former high school newspaper sports editor.

Yeah, I'm embarrassed.

USC Football Tickets

Single game tickets went on sale tonight at 8:00 p.m. I picked up a set of four tickets to Ohio State, and another four for Cal. I'll buy the rest from scalpers. The Ohio State game quickly sold out. Tickets are still left for Oregon, Cal and Washington.

Thoughts on the Mid-July News

Fraudulently blaming stores and restaurants for tearing your suit pants is a poor way to fund your UFO hoaxes, but some people have to learn this lesson the hard way.

This lesson should not have been learned the hard way: When you give a stabby would-be baby thief a slap on the risk, it's just a matter of time before she shows up at a hospital with a baby dangling an umbilical cord, while the real mom lies dead in her apartment with her hands tied together and her belly ripped open. Tecvnically, the police haven't come out and said that the dead woman at the perp's apartment, with her uterus ripped apart, is the real mom, but they've disclosed that the dead woman "may" be a clue as to the mystery baby's identity. Nice police work there, guys.

Do you wish you were a billionaire? Move to Zimbabwe. If someone drops a Lincoln penny on the ground, and you pick it up, you're a billionaire. That's right, the new $100 billion note is worth $1 U.S.

So there's a guy busy setting a Guinness World Record for sitting on his ass in the seats at the Rose Bowl. I didn't know they had records like that. I'm not sure if they have a record for sitting on your ass on the field at the Rose Bowl, but if they do, I'm guessing that the record-holder is Chad Henne.

Year in and year out, USC keeps recruiting like fiends. Already, they have verbal committments from four of the top 20 players from the class of 2009. I wouldn't be surprised to see one or two more, including Manti Te'o, who could be the next player to wear number 55.

Notre Dame hired a lawyer to be their new athletic director. It makes me wonder if I have a shot at Mike Garrett's job someday.

Year in and year out, the Clippers mismanagement dooms them to eternal failure. This year, while most teams other than Memphis are out improving their teams, the Clippers got dumped by Elton Brand and Corey Maggette, signed Baron Davis, Marcus Camby and Kelenna Azubuike, and gave up on Shaun Livingston, Dan Dickau, Boniface Ndong, Smush Parker, and James Singleton. Next year, their starting lineup is going to be something like Chris Kaman, Marcus Camby, Al Thornton, Baron Davis and Eric Gordon, with Tim Thomas and Cutino Mobley coming off the bench. That is a lottery team, not a playoff team.

I heard an interview on KLAC wherein a gambling expert said that in one season, there were 22 games in which NBA officials Tim Donaghy or Scott Foster worked games in which the lines moved more than once and more than three points before the game. Each of the 22 times, the big money side won. In general, whether the favorite wins is a 50/50 proposition. That means that 22 out of 22 times, the big money moving the line won, which is like having a coin come up heads 22 times in a row. The odds of that are about 4.2 million to one. No wonder Congress is thinking about looking into it.

Nancy Pelosi has jumbo coconut balls. You have to have some serious huevos to call a president with a 32% approval rating a "total failure" while you yourself lead a Congress with an approval rating of just 9%. To put that into perspective, King George III enjoyed a 15%-20% approval rating in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War (see Calhoon, "Loyalism and neutrality" in Greene and Pole, A Companion to the American Revolution (2000) p.235).

Holy crap, that "racist" New Yorker cartoon that depicts Barack Obama sure has caused an uproar. It's enough to make you wonder how outraged people would be if someone used racial stereotypes in a cartoon about John McCain. Wonder no more. Rolling Stone ran one last month. Pretty much nobody said a thing about it. Strange, no?

PETA just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Their latest outrage to rage against is a 27 year old story about a tarantula's pincers being removed so that an actress wouldn't feel so anxious about using the spider in a film scene. "We protect spiders from being surgically altered, even if it takes us 27 years." That would be a good slogan. Next month: PETA exposes George Washington for stepping on a roach the day he chopped down the cherry tree.

A warning has gone out letting lobster eaters know that it might be unsafe to eat tomalleys, which are the disgusting green innards of the delicious lobster. Who the hell eats that crap anyway? If it's white and clean, eat it. If it looks like a sac of bile, leave it in the shell. Of course, if you are a good Jew or Christian, you don't eat lobster anyway, because, like gay sex, eating lobster is an abomination unto the Lord. So you eat neither the nasty bile nor the delicious white tail meat. Mmmm. Delicious white tail.

The Most Popular Video of All-Time

It finally happened today. There is a new most popular video of all time on YouTube. For a long time, it was the Evolution of Dance.

Now, inexplicably, it's Avril Lavigne's music video for the song Girlfriend. Go figure.

Not far behind, also inexplicably, is a six second video that purports to be Britney Spears across the pool at a hotel, wearing a red bikini. It has an average rating of one and a half stars, and is entitled "YouTube Worst Video of All Time~ vote 1 star, leave comment".

Actually, the news stories and the YouTube page telling you that Girlfriend and Evolution of Dance are the most-viewed videos ever are lying. This one has about four million more hits.

I don't see what makes it so great, but Girlfriend and the Britney Spears video suck, too. Go figure. For what it's worth, the most popular video of the month is the new Jonas Brothers video from their Burning Up album.

Not my kind of thing, but the girls sure do like it.

Would You Buy This Essay?

DirectEssays.com offers you "Immediate access to over 99,000 high quality term papers, research papers & essays!" The best part is that, before you waste your money on this crap, you can see a short summary of the paper you are going to purchase, plagiarize and submit as your own work. Check out this gem of an excerpt from a paper on Jackie Robinson:

The youngest of five children, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Georgia on January 31, 1919. At the age of 18 months, his sharecropper father left the family, distraught from the reality of his sixth child which he claimed he couldn't afford. His mother, Mallie, on the verge of insanity, moved the family to Pasadena, California to live with her brother and found work as a domestic housekeeper. While growing up with a psychologically abusive uncle, Jackie rarely....

The sample's introductor paragraph, which I did not quote, is terrible, too, but this one is just crap. So, he's the youngest of five children, but his father left the family "distraught from the reality of his sixth child which he claimed he couldn't afford." So did dad leave over having five kids, or was he the youngest of six? Or the fifth of six? And I could forgive an essay that screwed up on whether to say "whom he claimed" or "who he claimed", but "which he claimed"? And did I read that right? I could swear I just read that Jackie's father left his family at the age of 18 months. Was he even old enough to ride a bike at that age?

And they want money for this.

It should come with the following disclosure: "This essay is ideal for 'D' students who don't want to submit 'C' quality work that would arouse the teacher's suspicions."

Dad's New '29

This sweet ride is my dad's new 1929 Model A Ford woody. Pretty cool, huh?

The Best Places to Live in the U.S.A.

According to Money Magazine:

1. Plymouth, MN

2. Fort Collins, CO

3. Naperville, IL

4. Irvine, CA

5. Franklin Township, NJ

They actually go all the way from 1 to 100. This is as far as I cared.

Lex TV 176

Here are another dozen interesting or amusing videos:

If you get investment advice from Jim Cramer, you are a fool.

Will the Internet die in 2012?

When you get punk'd in Venezuela, you get seriously punked.

A girl crawls into a stuffed toy vending machine.

Miss Piggy gets R-rated in her new music video.

The new Clone Wars trailer is awesome.

The first YouTube video. Yawn. At least it's short.

A Land of the Lost Sleestak scene. Detroit Piston Bill Laimbeer was one of those dudes.

Triumph and Dave Grohl.

Remind me again, Reality Show Contestant, are you here to make friends?

A dog running beside a car. A dog in a car watching some running dog he wants to get.

The amazing Fish Pen. I wonder if they're still in business.

More About the Jonas Brothers

I had no intention of actually attending this Jonas Brothers concert Monday night at the Honda Center. When my younger daughter said she didn't care about going, we decided to sell one pair of our floor seats and let the older one invite a friend. I was going to take the girls to the show, and stay in the car and read while they enjoyed the concert. Then my buyers, three of them, all flaked out, and I was stuck with four floor seats. So we decided to use them.

When we arrived, we got a bit of a surprise regarding our seat location. We were in the 12th row of the front left section, but the floor seats actually began with row 10. It turned out that Disney Channel was filming a 3-D Jonas Brothers concert movie to be aired in January, and to make it more interesting, they took out the first nine rows, moved everyone else back a few feet, and filled the area around the stage, including a long catwalk that stuck out of the middle, with teenage girls. According to a security guard I talked to between the opening act and the Jonas Brothers, the general admission stage area was filled with paid extras. Hundreds of little girls making scale. It made sense. Disney could completely control the behavior of the fans seen in most of the footage, making it safe for the band to use the catwalk, to spray foam on them, and to interact with them. The pit area had lots of grownups with bullhorns, a lot of water buckets and cups and other things one might need in a workplace. All the girls up front seemed to have cameras and glowing lightsticks, and they were all very well behaved. Yes, they were definitely planted.

The big, big, big downside of all of this was that people who had floor seats in the first nine rows got screwed. They showed up, made their way to the floor, and were handed new tickets, generally in the 200 sections. According to the same security guard and his buddy, they were all pissed off beyond belief. They thought they were getting punked. Some raised a pretty big fuss, but apparently, the language right on the ticket says they can screw you over like this.

Still, imagine if you had dropped a ton of cash on 2nd row floor tickets to see the band that my daughters think to be "way, way bigger" than Hannah Montana, only to arrive and be sent to mid-section loge level seating. Sure, they offered you the $40 or so in price difference between what you bought and what they charged for tickets in the crappy section where you got redirected, but big deal. You expected to be in the first few rows. Suddenly, you are in lousy seats way off to the side. You'd be pissed, too.

We, however, were not pissed. It was abundantly clear, once we were down there, that being in the 12th row would have meant my younger kid wouldn't have seen a damn thing, but now that row 12 was row 3, she could see quite well, and eventually, they let her hang out in the front row, where she could see even better. As the band got ready to take the stage, the big screens kept flashing text messages that girls could send in from their cell phones. A bunch of them said things like "OMG OMG, Scream your head off if you love Joe!!!!" And then the place would get crazy loud. Dudes with boxes and boxes of various kinds of glowsticks came around passing them out like free Halloween candy, but mostly just for the kids on the floor or near the floor in the 200 level. Right before the lights went back out, Taylor Swift walked in front of us, and all the girls freaked out. She's rumored to be dating one of the band members. Then the lights went out and the band started playing. To my surprise, I recognized the song. Something about the way they roll. They had at least twelve other musicians up there with them, too.

This is as good a close up as I could get.

The band could come way out into the audience with that catwalk. Essentially, it took up what was supposed to be the best seats in the house. Front and center. While it probably made for good TV, I thought it was kind of a chickenshit move that must have come from a Disney suit. I couldn't imagine U2 or Depeche Mode or the Rolling Stones pulling that kind of crap on their best fans.

In addition to the presence of many, many video cameras, obscuring people's views, hovering over the fans like creepy robots, one of the oddities that came with the filming was that there were several interruptions in the show. They played three or four songs, then it all came to a stop. The band left. Costumes were changed. The band spokeshole took the stage and tried to get everyone to scream louded than last night's crowd. Sometimes, they played video clips while we waited. The gaps were short, no more than a few minutes. But they were many.

During one of the breaks, we were entertained by two more songs from the opening act, Demi Lovato. She's in something called Camp Rock on the Disney Channel. She performed well and I enjoyed the songs, even though I'd never heard them before.

One of the video breaks told the story of how the youngest one, Nick, found out last year that he has Type 1 diabetes. That was a bummer. Then he came out and played piano, performing a song that he wrote about the experience. It was a little over the top, but pretty good, frankly, for a teenager writing and playing his own material and trying to perform it inspiringly.

At one point, the band did something that absolutely confirmed for me that the girls in the pit were performers. They brought out hoses, and started shooting foam all over the pit area. It'll probably look cool on the 3-D screen. After a few bursts, just about all of the girls ended up covered with white spots of foam. If they were just concertgoers, I suspect that they would have been all, "OMG. OMFG. WTF? I'm covered in like foam, all over my brand new dress." But they all took it in stride. Such professionals.

Some of them even went out and got towels (see the one with a towel around her neck, heading back into the pit?), so no one slipped on the floor. And lots of them who got foamed in the face had headed over to the water coolers for relief from a styrofoam cup.

They had a lot of microphones in the audience, recording the sounds noise. For some of the sing-a-long parts, they shoved it right in the grill of the girl in front of me. They didn't point it at parents. If they had, I'd have clammed up. I sang like the house was mine when it happened to me in the front row at Depeche Mode, but last night, honestly, I only recognized about five of the songs, and I only knew the words to one of them. This is the photo of the guy who mostly handled the noise around our area. I like this shot. It almost looks like he's holding up a miniature Jonas Brother with his mic.

This was the treat of the night. To the surprise of no one who saw her walk in before the show, Taylor Swift took the stage in a "big surprise" for the movie. While I was out buying water and gatorade, plus a bag for the programs, she sang her current top ten hit, "You Shoulda Said No," which is setting some sort of record for the most top ten hits on a debut, or by a teenager, or by a woman, or something else that Taylor Swift is. It was a real deja vu moment for me, because the first and only other time I had seen her perform was in January, while I was still aching from my first surgery. Like then, I was exhausted. Spent. Sore. On drugs. But happy because of the unusually great time my girls were having. Then the funniest part of the night came. Taylor Swift left. And it got quiet. Then one of the brothers started sort of kissing the audience's butts about how great they were. How they were way better than last time. How they love coming to California, and to Orange County, how they get treated like they are home. And they got everyone screaming. He then told us that they wanted to shoot Taylor's song a second time. So even though we knew the surprise, when Taylor gets announced, we have to act surprised and go crazy. After all, it's a movie, so we gotta all be actors. So they bring her out again, and everyone acts surprised, and she sings her hit song a second time with the band. And she did it well.

The show wound down with a couple of songs I recognized from the Disney Channel, including SOS and one other I forget. They did some tricks for the camera, like playing and singing from these high rising foot platforms. I would have passed on the high platforms if I was them.

It didn't take long for the camera with video to get their amateur clips onto youtube. Who knows how long these will last, but here are a few. First, here's the dude explaining the filming of the movie and trying to get people to do what the movie people want us to do.

This view sort of shows what the stage looked like. We were three back from the mass of moshers around the extended stage.

Later, acting surprised for Taylor Swift's [second] surprise visit.

The only downsides for the night: it was hot. And there was a girl in front of us with a giant pink sign that said "backstage passes", in an failed effort to get some. She didn't hold it up all the time, but she held it up too often and too long. It could have been worse. Walking around outside, it seemed like every other girl had a sign or a painted message on her shirt. We mostly had painted shirts in front of us.

There was only one part of the show I didn't like. A brother tries to get the parents, maybe 1000 of us, probably less, to cheer. "How many parents are having a good time?" then ... almost nothing. A polite smattering of applause. "You can do better than that. How many parents are having a good time?" Weak applause again. "Oh, come on, I know you're not that old!" Old? Did that punk just call us old?

And I formed the words in my head and on my lips. Close enough that the little turd could hear me. "FUCK YOU, young man!" But the words stayed in my mouth. Too many little girls who don't need to hear that. But I thought it. Oh yes I thought it. I may be old enough to be the real dad that they never knew, but that doesn't mean I'm too old to rock, if you're rocking with my kind of stuff. Not crap like "Year 3000"

Come on guys. The Year 3000? "I've been to the year 3000. Not much has changed but they lived underwater. And your great-great-great-granddaughter is doing fine." ?? What kind of crap lyric is that? Not much has changed except this water life? Dude, living under water is major change. Substantial. And your great-great-great-granddaughter is going to be living from somewhere like 2090 to 2175. In the year 3000, her grave is going to be 800 years old and probably buried in ruins of a city with another city built over it. That's a dumb line. It's not as dumb as Sade's "Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago," but its almost that dumb.

Getting out of the place at the end of the show was fast. After the second song of the encore, they introduced the band members, took bows and all that. It looked like a legitimate good night, rather than a faux finale, with another encore available for the begging. So when the band left, we almost literally sprinted up the stairs. By the time we got to the top, the lights were coming on. We went straight for the t-shirt stand, before the 20 person lines formed. We got shirts quickly and some other stuff and went to the car. The exit in the back corner of the lot was putting people directly onto the freeway ramp. Three cars merging, and that was it. Less than a minute from buckling up to hitting the freeway. That's how you end the night!

Thanks to my daughters who helped put together the pieces of this post.