If You Strike Me Down, I Shall Only Become More Powerful-- Powerful Enough To Get The Breakfast Treats!

If you came here looking for this hilarious and thoughtful look at my ongoing battle with The Boy and breakfast treats, sorry! It's been taken down for inclusion in the next collection of essays, Genius Status Restored!, which will be available in the near future.

Until then, check out the other entries on this blog, or look at the books I already have for sale, including a prior collection of essays from this site, at my Lulu store.

And now a word from the rest of me

Hey, everyone! Did you know that in addition to Thinking The Lions, I write four other blogs? If you didn't, here's a sample of what you've been missing:


BABIES! BABIES! PETS! PETS!

This is another picture from the weekend of all the kids; we took them all to the local zoo, too. The younger ones were not very impressed by the zoo at all. My theory is that to Babies!, everything is all new. We grown-ups are used to seeing trucks and houses and things, so to get us excited, you've got to put a giraffe in front of us. But to Babies!, a giraffe is no more or less exciting than a Volvo. Mr F, shown here, did like the little turtle that was swimming around, and tried to touch it.

The title of this post refers to the brief argument/bet Sweetie and I made this morning

. . . . read more Babies! Babies! Pets! Pets!

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Nonsportsmanlike Conduct:


Tired of the failed MVPs? I know, like me, you never get tired of making fun of people who have achieved more success in one game than I have in my life. But I like to change things up, keep things fresh, put a little pine-tar on the baseball of thought that is this column.

As I was driving into work this morning, I heard that Plaxico Burress guaranteed a victory over the Patriots* this Sunday, going so far as to say that the Giants would win, 23-17.

... click here to read more Nonsportsmanlike Conduct

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UNDER THE EYES OF GOD:

How long had it been since he had seen another human being?

How long since he had talked to anyone but his own reflection?

How long since he’d seen the speck of reflected light in front of him, directly in front of him, and waved his arm ineffectively against the ether to see the speck blink in and out and realized that the star was behind him, and he was casting a shadow on the speck, which was reflecting the star’s light back when he was not interfering by waving his arm.

How big was it?

. . . Click here to read more "Under The Eyes Of God."

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THE BEST OF EVERYTHING:

I was alive when MTV first came out. I remember watching MTV with my uncle (who was just a little older than me -- those crazy Catholic families!) and my older brother (also just a little older than me) when I was about 16 or so, and MTV had been around long enough that the novelty had worn off.

This was long before I noted the trend in music videos that lets you instantly know, even with the sound turned off, what kind of music you're watching.

I just re-read that sentence, and had to stop and think whether it made sense. But it did. Imagine if you could go back in time say to Mozart, "There will come a time when you can use the phrase "what kind of music you're watching" and it will make sense. I bet I know just what he would say:

. . . .click here to read more "The Best Of Everything."

Announcing the First Ever Thinking The Lions Contest!

Yesterday, I put up the third in what will no doubt be a long-running series of posts, "Unraveling The Mysteries of the Universe." My favorite reader -- Mark, who I'd link to but he's all anonymous -- said in a comment that he's going to try to get a video of his two cars synching their blinkers.

And as I read that, I had a lightning-bolt inspiration. With a clarity of thought that I rarely achieve, I thought this: I'm kind of hungry.

I thought that because all I had for breakfast today was toast, and I missed it when it popped up, so I was late getting the butter on it and the butter didn't really melt in, so the bread was crispy and the butter was sort of paste-like. It was unsatisfying and I'm at least 2 1/2 hours from when I could reasonably eat my lunch. You just can't eat lunch before 11:00.

But I also thought: Mark, you're on to something. So here's the contest: Take a video of two cars' blinkers working together in unison and send it to me for posting here. The person who gets two blinkers to synch up for the longest will win a t-shirt or other object of their choice from the stuff I create-- see the gallery that's part of this post at the end. If two or more people tie in length of time, then I'll draw a name out of a hat. Bonus points and prizes for getting more than two cars so synch up.

Enter by sending the videos to me as an attachment at thetroublewithroy[@]yahoo.com -- you know to take the brackets out of that, right?-- or post the video on your own website, blog or other spot and link to "Thinking the Lions," but send me an email so that I can link to your site.

I'll take entries until February 29, so let's get going!

make custom gifts at Zazzle

Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe #3

When I find myself sitting at a stoplight behind another car, and we're both turning in the same direction, I like to watch to see if our blinkers synch up. I try to see if they will synch up. And they never do. The blinkers are always just slightly off, so they cycle through a rotation, matching up, then exactly opposite, and so on.

Which makes me then think that maybe the car manufacturers do it on purpose, in turn causing me to wonder why they would do that. Would there be some safety reason to not allow any blinker, anywhere, to operate on the exact same time scale as some other blinker? Is that true, in fact? Are car blinkers like snowflakes? And is that true about snowflakes? (That they are all different, I mean. I don't think snowflakes operate on any time scale.)

And lastly, I wonder what I would do if the blinkers ever did match up. Go out and introduce myself to the person? It seems like I should do something, if that ever happens.