Sarah Palin Facts

There's a lot of blog traffic on the net about Sarah Palin. I don't have any new earth-shattering revelations to offer you, but I do want to share a good laugh with you.

Two bloggers that I read have made reference to the same site. First I read this post from Girl on the Right and laughed pretty hard. Then I read this post from CDR Salamander and laughed even harder. After reading the second one, I decided to go ahead and click on the link to Sarah Palin facts. I will add to GotR and CDR S's favorites a few of my own:

- Jesus has a bracelet that says, “WWSPD?”
- Death once had a near-Sarah Palin experience
- Sarah Palin can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves!
- in the original version, He-Man had the power of Sarah Palin, but the writers felt this would make him way too powerful
- When Sarah Palin booked a flight to Europe, the French immediately surrendered.
- Sarah Palin plays Whack-a-Mole with her forehead, and always gets a perfect score.
- Sarah Palin is actually Kaiser Sose.

And my all-time favorite so far:

- (SPOILER ALERT): Ted Moseby marries Sarah Palin. (I’m a big How I Met Your
Mother fan)

Friday night odds and ends

Okay, this writer's strike crap has gotta come to an end. There is absolutely NO REASON on God's green Earth that *I* should be familiar enough with my wife's soap opera (All My Children) to know the characters' names and basic storyline. I HATE that show.

You see, I've never been the one to turn on the TV or choose the show we're going to watch. I normally just sit here with my laptop and end up watching whatever LW turns on. Yes, there is some sort of bizarre local disturbance of the gravitational field in our family room and LW controls the TV remote. Most of the time, I don't mind. I mean, how else would I have discovered HIMYM or Amazing Race? (Only 2 shows left in this Amazing Race! Check it out this Sunday!) We also really like Numbers (geeky show where a mathematician helps the FBI solve crimes) and The Closer (Kyra Sedgwick's character Deputy Chief Johnson has an amazing ability to draw out confessions once she figures out whodunnit). Since the writer's strike has left us with nothing but reruns, LW has been turning on her soap opera after the boys go to bed. ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE WRITER'S STRIKE!!!

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LW bought a new board game to play with ES today. It's called UpWords. It's similar to Scrabble, but you can stack the tiles. Say the word "THIS" was on the board, and you had an A and a T in your hand, then you could put the A and the T on top of the I and the S to turn "THIS" into "THAT." It offers a LOT more flexibility than Scrabble. ES had a hard time with Scrabble in trying to find words that fit in the two-dimensional space on the Scrabble board. We played UpWords tonight, and he did really well. Neither of us branched out much on the board. We just kept building up and up and up replacing one letter here or there to change CASH into RASH into CRASH into TRASH. It was fun.

I know you all are dying to hear the score after ES beat me at Scrabble the other day. TECHNICALLY, ES "won" the game tonight, but it was with a lot of HELP from DADDY, so I don't consider it a detriment to my ego. (...THIS time at least).

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Funny Blog. I don't remember if I put a plug in before for this blog, but if you want a good laugh, check out Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper. She is a little bit vulgar or foul-mouthed at times, but she has a great writing style and some pretty funny stories. The first post of hers that I read was Holly Jolly Christmas, and I laughed pretty good at that one.

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Wii Play! Thank you to whoever recommended Wii Play to us. I think we actually got the recommendation from a couple of Wii friends. Plus LW liked the fact that Wii Play comes with another controller. It's a collection of games similar to Wii Sports.

There's a shooting game sort of like the old Duck Hunt where it goes through rounds of balloons then targets then clay pigeons to shoot at. Then, in the last round, there are a dozen of YOU (your Mii character) running around on the bottom of the screen, and these UFO flying saucers fly down and try to abduct the Mii's with a tractor beam, and you have to shoot the UFOs and save your Mii's. It's really funny to see the Mii's running around in a panic as the UFOs are trying to abduct them.

There's a matching game where it will show a crowd of Mii's, and you have to find the two matching Mii's in the crowd before the time runs out. There's also a tank game and a fishing game that I like, too.

The only thing I DON'T like about Wii Play is that you're limited to only TWO players. When you play two players though, you can play any of the games on the disk and it keeps a tally of how many games each player has won during your session.

Saturday morning odds and ends

LW: First, I've been remiss in saying what an AWESOME wife I have. I really do sincerely appreciate everything she does for me and the boys, to include making us AWESOME dinners. Two nights ago she made us that southwest chicken stoup again. Man I love that stuff! Last night she made some really good baked dijon salmon from a WW recipe.

Blog Wanderings: I ended up on one of those blog-wanderings this morning where clicking on one link took me to another link to me to another link. A couple of items of note:

- My Wonderful Life had this post on Dec. 7th. The first picture on that post is one I had seen before, but it all has new meaning to me now. That is the drydock where the MSP now resides. It's pretty weird looking at it and seeing a WWII battleship and two destroyers in it, and in shambles after the attack. I think RM1(SS) commented on this in my earlier post about the drydock, but it didn't really sink in until I saw the picture on MWL's blog.

- Have You Met Ted? I don't even remember what sequence of blog links led me here, but I found this blog on all things HIMYM. From there, I discovered a link to...

- Barney's Blog. This is pretty funny. If you're a HIMYM fan, you can just hear Barney saying these things he's written into his blog. If you're not a HIMYM fan... WHY THE HECK NOT?!?!

- Oh, I also found some pretty funny HIMYM t-shirts on this website.

Shipping Things to Hawaii: I do not wish to call out or chastise any particular member of my extended family (because it's been more than one person who's done it), but in the future, please consider asking me to pick up whatever you would like to buy as a gift for one of us here on the island. As the Christmas gift packages start to roll in, I am suffering from a case of "sticker shock" seeing the amount of money some of our family members have paid in shipping. It would have saved a lot of money to just buy it here on the island.

Movie Reviews: LW and I watched a couple of movies from Blockbuster this past week.

Last night we watched The Guardian (Kevin Costner, Ashton Kutcher movie about U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmers). I had mixed feelings about it. I did enjoy watching it, but there were some elements that got on my nerves though.
- Alternative Title 1: Officer and a Gentleman II. Lou Gossett Jr. and Richard Gere weren't available to shoot this requel (note, it's not a sequel, it's a requel because it's just telling the same story over again in a slightly different setting, but with all the same plot elements), so they got Kevin Costner to take Gossett's place and Ashton Kutcher to take Gere's place.
- Alternative Title 2: Top Gun II. They took Richard Gere's character from O&aG and gave him the arrogance and "did you figure it out yet?" attitude of Tom Cruise from Top Gun.
- Blue on Blue: I did not like the way they portrayed the Navy. A couple of the coasties went into a "squid bar" where a bunch of Navy guys in wash khakis and utilities were hanging out, drinking beer, and shooting pool. They got a very, "we don't serve your kind here" response and got into a bar fight with some of the Navy guys, while some fat Navy captain sat at his table and watched. Are there REALLY places like that out there? I just don't see anything like that happening in today's Navy or Coast Guard.

The other movie we watched earlier in the week was Casanova. It was pretty funny and enjoyable to watch. From reading other reviews, I see complaints that it's not historically accurate... but what movies ARE historically accurate??? It's meant for entertainment. I really felt like I was watching a Shakespearean comedy. The plot was a very traditional theatrical comedy.

Weekend Recap

The weather was kind of blah (by Hawaii standards) on Friday and Saturday, with dark clouds and sporadic showers, so I didn't get out hiking or snorkeling like I had wanted to. Besides the Pacific Aviation Museum and jogging the bike path that I wrote about on Friday, we played some video games and I managed to finish watching Season 2 of HIMYM on DVD and caught up on Heroes on the NBC website.

Saturday, LW went on a shopping marathon and out to dinner with her friend L. While LW was gone, I took the boys on a bike ride out on the bike path. ES rode his own bike and I pulled YS in the trailer behind my bike. We rode out 1.5 miles to a park with a playground where the boys played for a little while. Then we rode half a mile to Best Buy to get some replacement headsets for our XBox. Then we rode the last mile home for a total of 3 miles.

I think ES is ready to have the training wheels removed from his bicycle. I really don't think he needs them anymore, and they're pretty beat-up and about to fall off on their own. I've been trying to talk him into letting me take them off, but he hasn't gone for it yet.

After we got back from the bike ride, I had a family movie night with the boys and we watched Over the Hedge. The boys had seen it before, but I had not, and L's husband keeps telling me funny scenes from the movie. I really liked it and laughed a lot. "Hammy" the squirrel was awesome, especially after drinking that fully-caffeinated soda.

Sunday though, the weather was perfect - mostly sunny but not too hot or humid. We loaded up our camelbaks and headed over to the Friendship Park in Kaneohe to hike the upper loop trail (the last blog post I wrote about this park, we only hiked the lower loop).

The boys on the trail.

It was only a one mile hike, but it came with 227 feet of elevation gain. We parked the car at 295 feet and the highest elevation we got to was 522 feet.

Altitude profile from our hike of the upper loop.

There's a beautiful panoramic view of Kaneohe from the top of the Friendship Park upper loop trail.

Me and YS hiking toward the summit.

Gumbo night was tonight at the home of one of my JOs. Mark and Denise took the carcass from our turkey on Thanksgiving home with them and used it to make turkey gumbo tonight for dinner. They invited everyone from the wardroom over and had a pretty large turnout at their place tonight. The gumbo was excellent. I never knew what roux was before Mark explained to me the finer points of making gumbo tonight.

Amazing Race: Man, those African dance-contest judges were just FULL of personality weren't they??? (sarcasm) They weren't exactly Simon, Paula, and Randy. At least Simon and Randy listened to Paula. The two African men judges didn't seem to listen to any of the ladies' opinions - not that any of them were all that talkative. (Note: I wrote this as I was watching the show and BEFORE anyone on the show made any references to American Idol).

Chuck

It's nice being back in a regular routine at home (as opposed to being on deployment or our hectic preparations for interfleet transfer or driving the boat halfway around the world, etc). I'm catching up on some old shows and picking up a new one - Chuck.

I thought it was pretty funny when I Googled "Chuck" the top two links that came up were to this new TV show on NBC. Chuck is a regular geek who works at "Buy More" for the "Nerd Herd." I missed the beginning, but somehow he is in an accident that results in the contents of some super-secret national intelligence computer being downloaded to his brain. Now the NSA has put an agent in as a "coworker" of his, and the CIA has put in an smokin-hot blond agent at the nearby Weinerlicious as protection for him. There's all sorts of spy-story action, intrigue, explosions, gun-fights, etc, but all with a geeky sort of slap-stick to it. It's like a geek version of Alias. (I was never a fan of Alias, although LW was an Alias addict). Chuck is actually a pretty darn funny show - check it out!

My other addiction right now is Heroes. Thanks to Bubblehead raving about it, and reading a WIRED magazine article about it while we were on deployment, I decided to pick it up season one on DVD. I've been watching about one episode per night, and LW is being so kind as to set up the DVR to record the new season when it starts.

We've also got the DVR recording our other favorite show, How I Met Your Mother. I'm dying to watch season two on DVD. In case you haven't seen it before, HIMYM is narrated by the main character, Ted, telling his kids about his love-life and how he met their mother. Sounds odd, I know. It's actually really funny. LW sent HIMYM Season One with me on deployment, and we watched it in the wardroom in the evenings after dinner. I got the whole wardroom hooked on it. It became required viewing for newly reporting officers (including the PCO) so that they would understand our vocabulary - for example: "suit up!", "high five!", and "legendary!" Or, when someone is consciously deciding to procrastinate a project, "Let Future-XO and Future-CO worry about that." Then later, when the previous procrastination came back to bite us, "Darn it Past-XO and Past-CO!" Anyway, I was out at sea while season two was on, and it just came out on DVD. I've got it in my hands now, but I'm being good and waiting until we go out to sea this week so we can watch it together in the wardroom (LW already watched season two while we were out at sea). After we get through season two though, I'm not waiting around on the rest of the wardroom to watch season three on the DVR.

Aside for HIMYM fans (skip ahead if you've never watched before): Incidentally, if you are already a HIMYM fan, the DVD has some really cool special features on it. For example, there's one video-collage of Barney's many variations of the "high-five" in rapid succession. High Five! Phone Five! Low Five! Little Five! I was surprised how many there were. There is, likewise, another video collage of all of Barney's different "Suit Up!" moments. In the interviews with the cast, they said that the "legendary" thing was totally unintentional. It looks like they have some similar things on the CBS website for season two, but I'm not going to watch those until I finish watching season two.

Oh, here's a great little 2 minute sample of HIMYM (and some of our wardroom vocabulary):

You gotta love YouTube!

Speaking of DVRs... What on earth did we do before the days of DVRs??? The first time I really realized the impact in had on our lives was when LW flew up to meet me for a port call in Bangor, WA a couple of years ago. My eldest son's favorite cartoon back then was called Max and Ruby (about two rabbits). It came on at like 6 o'clock in the morning, but it didn't matter because the DVR was set to record it, and our eldest could watch it whenever he woke up and whenever else he wanted to during the day. Well... fast forward to us sitting in the Navy Lodge in Bangor. Eldest says, "I want to watch Max and Ruby." LW and I tried to explain to him that it just wasn't on at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This was just a totally unfathomable concept to the poor boy. "Just push the buttons!" he would say, holding the remote control out for us to do the magic that made Max and Ruby appear on his demand. We quickly learned that when going on trips, we have to bring DVDs of the kids' favorite shows with us.

I must admit, it's rather nice not having to watch commercials anymore... most of the time anyway. There are those annoying times, like tonight, when you catch-up with a live show and can't fast forward anymore, then you have to sit and wait. LW and I have been known to hit the pause button and go do stuff around the house and come back a few minutes later to resume watching time-late so we can fast-forward through the commercials.

We're finding that we miss our Dish Network. LW wasn't sure if it would work in Hawaii, or if Navy Housing would allow us to put up a satellite dish, and thought the local digital cable would be fine. I do NOT criticize her at all for her decision to sign up for the local digital cable while I was gone. Unfortunatly, the cable service here is totally LAME. The DVR is very non-user friendly. It won't auto-tune to the shows you tell it you want to watch, it only flashes a reminder to tell you something is on. When you hit the channel guide, it just shows ALL the channels that exist, regardless whether you subscribe to them or not, and it won't let you set up a short-list of your favorite channels to quickly browse. So I'll skim down the channel list and say, "Oh, I wanna watch that!" and click the button, and an error message will pop up that we don't subscribe to that channel. Gee, thanks. Plus, we have separate DVRs in each room and have to set up each one individually if we want to be able to watch a show in any given room.

So I'm going through the process of getting Navy Housing to approve putting in the Dish Network satellite dish so we can get back to having a favorites-list and a dual-tuner / dual-recorder DVR that'll feed both the family room and the MBR TV. I think the housing office's rules on applying for installation of a dish violates the FCC rules and constitute an "unreasonable delay," but I'm going to try and get it approved peacefully / without raising a ruckus.

It actually comes out to be about the same price per month as the digital cable here, but with so much better functionality. There are some sunk costs in terms of the installation fee for the digital cable, but there was no way for us to know in advance how bad the cable service was here.

I wonder how many states are changing their official "state flower" to the satellite dish? I know I heard the joke in California when we lived there. Then I heard the same joke in Virginia when we lived there. Now we're about to help the "flower" infest Hawaii.