The Birthday

I took a photo to document what I look like at the age of 47.

Cleo is at Outdoor School, Iris is over at her friend's house, Amy is at work and I'm taking the day off (though I was involved a little bit this morning).

Tonight we have a reservation for dinner at Castagna. It's nice to be home and not at work. Although Friday is usually the day I clean the bathroom (if you must know). I will go for a walk, I will play with my two-string guitar, I will putter away the day and reflect on how truly fortunate I am to have parents who are not insane, a wife who is wonderful and not insane, two daughters who are a delight to be around and not insane, a good arrangement with my brother and his family who live close by and are not insane, several friends and co-workers who are not insane, a nice place to live and, soon, a new pair of glasses.

Stanford on iTunes

I spent a little time today checking out Stanford's cool iTunes thing.

I listened to most of a free lecture on Jesus, the first class in a course on "the historical Jesus." The downloads are free. This particular lecture, like most, is maybe 45 minutes long, maybe an hour. I have two more on the laptop, one lecture called "Why Do Baseballs Have Stitches?"

Who knows if I'll ever actually have time to listen to a lot of the lectures. Lyle says he downloaded a movie. I'll have to check that out. He's always ahead of the curve. Kind of spooky, really.

Anyway, all that education from Stanford for free!

You see, you don't pay for the education, you pay for the document that says you got the education.

Friendship

More hard-hitting satire!

That Exciting GOP

I saw four minutes of the Republican debate. What a yawn. Old, white men preaching imminent doom with phony optimism, to sum up. Oh, yeah... and attacks on Hillary Clinton, no matter what the question is.

Rudy Giuliani just made the statement that more than 2% of the Gross Domestic Product goes to "lawsuits." I guess it's easy to hate lawyers (hey, Hillary is a lawyer! But... wait, so is Rudy), but tossing that number out there doesn't make ME think "oh, people are suddenly lawsuit crazy." No, it makes me think, "when there's less government regulation of industry, there are more torts and thus, more lawsuits." But then, thinking is a bad idea at such an event.