Best news story of the week

It came from Dayton, Nevada, where a boy was having his sixth birthday party with his kindergarten class. During the party, people brought in a big, wrapped box. The boy unwrapped it and inside was ... his father, just back on leave from Army service in Iraq.

The photo from the Nevada Appeal is wonderful.

Sophisticated in Sac

We have had a cultural weekend.

Enjoyed a lovely concert performed by the Sacramento Baroque Soloists on Saturday night: Vivaldi, Bach, Telemann and more.

Then today, we finally saw one of the Oscar-nominated films, Slumdog Millionaire. Given the dreary topics of some of the other nominees, it's hard to see how this one could lose and I know I'll be rooting for it.

Best New York Times story of the week ...

... is about funny place names in Britain. The story was filed from a village named Crapstone.

Don't know if the Times is trying to lock up the 13-year-old boy demographic, but the story certainly appealed to the 13-year-old boy in me.

Here's one of the wonderful photos from the story:


It also includes a helpful map to towns or villages including North Piddle, Pratts Bottom, Ugley, Titty Ho and East Breast.

Thank God for England!

Weird dream

For some reason, I dreamed that my wife and I were playing cards with two young men. This is particularly odd because we don't play cards and even gave away our card table the other day.

When it came time to start the game, I encouraged one of the men to cut the cards. Instead of doing that physically, he decided to visit a Web site: cutthecards.com

Just for the record, there is no such site ... undoubtedly, because it's a stupid idea conceived in a dream state.

Perhaps I dreamed about this as a result of seeing a PBS program about American comedy that included a feature about the great Harpo Marx. In one of the film clips, he's in a saloon and a couple of guys at a card table tell him to cut the cards. Which Harpo does, all right ... with a hatchet.

A big day for the old Southsider

My late father grew up on the south side of Chicago, rooting for the White Sox and the NFL Chicago Cardinals. I'm sure he was excited when the Cardinals won the NFL title in 1947, before they moved to St. Louis and then to Arizona.

He'd be amazed to see the way things stand now, with the Cardinals headed to the Super Bowl for the first time ever and a fellow Chicagoan and White Sox fan about to be inaugurated as the nation's first African-American president.

He would have been pleased by all of it.

More Chesleys?

Apparently, there's been a big increase in the number of newborns named Barack, for obvious reasons.

I wonder if there's be a similar surge in the name Chesley, after the heroic landing of the crippled jet in the Hudson River by Chesley Sullenberger III.

I wish I had a panda blog ...

... because if I did, I could post this funny line from Conan O'Brien that I read in the newspaper this morning:

"In China, a panda has bitten a visitor for the third time in three years. People who saw the attack described it as horrifying and absolutely adorable."

We are now Mac people

One reason posts on this blog have been few and far between is that our old computer was terribly unreliable. For many days, we were unable to log onto it at all.

So today, we went out and got us an Apple IMAC. It is even up and working, with a minimum of cursing (related to hooking up our existing printer to it).

We look forward to many years of trouble-free computing. 

One interesting ergonomic side-effect: The new machine has a 20-inch screen and I've found myself with a sore neck from looking up at it. We will have to sit on a phone book or get a taller chair, I suspect.