Menagerie

Since I started this blog I have been focusing on quality over quantity. Sometimes it is hard to stay politically correct and keep from offending someone, and this narrows my choice of topics to "burn on" (to steal a phrase made popular by T.V.'s Jim Rome).

Having said that, here is a list of things I am thinking about right now, in no particular order and in no way related to anything other than random thoughts floating in my head.

Yesterday I was accosted at MIS by GropeZilla. The whole incident was caught on tape by my friend who was trying to capture a posed pic of me in front of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. merchandise trailer. I was just goofing off with a funny pose in front of a huge picture of Dale, when from out of nowhere I feel someone come from behind and mount me! We are fond of such silliness in my family and group of friends so my first thought brought to mind my brother trying to sneak into the pic. As such I began to reach down to grab hold and complete the pose. Providence stepped in just before I grabbed a handful, because I had looked up and noticed that all members of my party were present and accounted for in front of me. Hmmmm.

As I turned around I noticed that a women had made the best of an opportunity to make her friends, and subsequently my whole group, almost die of laughter. Thank god I did not grab hold. As luck would have it, when I handed my camera to my friend I had left it on movie mode, so the whole thing was captured on a 20 sec youtube worthy clip. Thanks must go out to my wife who quite calmly muttered under her breath after seeing the clip, and did not try to track down GropeZilla. Honey, I love you. Thanks also to dad for a great day!

I can not believe the summer is almost over! Where did time go? I guess hours of watching my daughter saturate herself with slobber while trying to master the "motor boat sound" has made time fly by. This past Saturday I had the opportunity to return to a class held at the hospital for prospective dads. This time I was the "veteran" returning in glorious fashion to regale the wide eyed group of newbies with tales of meconium, afterbirth, epidurals and other things that would make most young men queasy.

It was a lot of fun to share my experience and answer questions as a respected member of the dad community. They hung on my every word as I remembered how I felt only a few short months ago when I was in their seat. I assured them that the head would not fall off when they picked baby up (one of my irrational fears as a newbie) and told them they would get through this just fine. Emily screeched and fused the whole time, so I am not sure how effective my message was, but it was fun none the less...

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that social networking software such as Facebook exists? I am on the fence. I am a late adopter (I only started because I had to give a presentation on it at the library, so I would have felt hypocritical to teach it without using it). I like some of the features, for example I just last night discovered a long lost high school friend, but it also has some drawbacks.

Advertising, the double edged sword. Your page is farmed for keywords, your birth date and gender provide key demographic info, your likes and interests page make you all too easy to target. Yet, without these advertisers willing to pay top dollar for this market research that is worth its weight in gold, things like Facebook would not be free and probably would not exist.

Another disturbing trend that I am almost against (read: I will apply it to others but object to it being applied to me) is the use of Facebook as a pre-job interview discovery tactic. Today, a student inquired about an open position I have. So I "Facebooked" him. He is a friend of a former student I had employed and I got the skinny on him. No need to interview him. It is a bold new world we live in!