The Eclectic Mix

You stand warned: I will not be blogging tomorrow night. Unless it rains. Or some other unforeseen act of God swoops down upon me during the seventh-inning stretch.

The fact is that I–and probably Patrick– will be in the grips of extreme hyper-happiness over our first chance to finally catch a game at Target Field tomorrow night. Remember: these were the tickets we won in the drawing at Sunrise last fall. And…They’re…AWESOME! Even without being there yet, I know they’re awesome, simply because we’ll only be six rows removed from the field itself. Just a decent throw away from beaning Justin Morneau as he patrols first base. I will, in short, be content.

Hell, I’ll be glowing.

So you’ll get the short end of the stick. Because baseball, and especially an opportunity to watch said game from seats as nice as these, are far more valuable to me than you readers are. Well, wait. Maybe that didn’t come out quite right. Let me read that for a sec…Nope. I got it right the first time. I’d rather watch the game than blog to you people about it.

It’s all about priorities, right?

Sure, you’ll get the photoblog update Friday night, after I’ve had the opportunity to go through the pictures and just soak them in. I might even give you the edited highlights of the evening.

But, as they say in infomercials: “But wait! There’s more!”

Saturday afternoon, Patrick and I get to reprise the visit. No, not to the same seats. These will be in the upper deck down the right-field line, but still…Baseball+new ballpark+outdoors+me and Patrick=happy time. The weekend’s posts will practically write themselves!

So now you know. My preemptive warning to you has been issued. Perhaps I’ll get really nerdy and tweet from the game…Who knows? (Go to my Twitter feed, just in case.)

Stay tuned!

See you Friday night/Saturday morning!

I’m back. After over a week. If you missed me, I apologize. If you didn’t, then you didn’t care anyway. So that’s all we shall speak of that.

It’s the middle of a holiday weekend. And those always seem to get lost in time for a bit–Saturday’s normal to a point, but you know that you get a bonus “Sunday” after the usual Sunday. Sunday is just weird because it’s not Sunday, at least not in the sense that Monday is a back to work day. And Monday is a freebie, that is, the full day of leisure given over to not working but preparing for the Tuesday that is the work week’s Monday.

I love those sort of circular paragraphs.

Anyway, having lost track of what day of the week this is, let’s continue, shall we?

During the hiatus, the girls turned ten. Patrick was confirmed. Our family grew by two hamsters. It got unbearably hot for a couple of days. And at least for tonight, it’s cooling off for some nice sleeping weather.

I’ve watched one movie, with another hopefully in the hopper for tomorrow at some point. Last night, as a family movie, we watched G-Force. An ironic choice, given the addition of rodents to our happy abode.

G-Force is one of those movies that’s created by adults for kids and their adult handlers to waste 90 minutes on in the search for easy entertainment. As such, it mostly works.

It’s the story, as far as it can go, of a group of guinea pigs that have been trained to be special operatives for the CIA, and their funding has been cut, and they need to prove their value to the government that has gone so far to create them. In the process, they get stripped of their special government-funded technology and get split up and need to meet back at their nerdy scientist-leader’s home to go forward and do a mission to prove that they’re actually worth something.

Yes, it’s a Disney film. Yes, all the guinea pigs are computer-generated. Yes, much of the humor is sophomoric. Yes, you know how it’s going to turn out the minute the movie starts. And that’s OK, because the movie wasn’t made for me. It was made for the kids to enjoy and laugh at, especially when the three stupid mice in the film yell “poop in his hand, poop in his hand!”

It is exactly what it’s meant to be. And as such, it’s good, but not great. They didn’t try too hard to make it great, but they didn’t mail it in, either. So it deserves all three stars it gets. Three out of Five Stars.

So now I’m back to the blogging thing. Hopefully daily. Give or take life and stuff…

Enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend.

See you tomorrow.

This being a national holiday–opening day–I’m taking the night off to watch the Twins game…Enjoy the silence on your end.

See you tomorrow.

Ah Spam. That magical, mystical, mystery meat everyone either loves or hates. Put me in the love column. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Rather, it’s the spam that has come to embody junk e-mail. Or, in the case of those of us who run blogs, the junk comments that hit the site. As we all know, some spam always manages to avoid or do an end-around on whatever spam protection you might have, so some gets through, leaving us with a whole heaping serving with spam! So, pull up a plate, kids. It’s time to taste some site spam and answer those deep questions they contain!

Let’s break these into categories. The first is the flattery spam. Perhaps I’ll call it the flaspamery. Mmmm…Goes especially well with barbecue sauce and potato salad. Or poach it and serve with eggs!

Ah, but anyway…Flaspamery…They butter you up, get you nice and happy, then hit you with the link. To illustrate, I’ll call on our friends from the “buy-cheap-generic-viagra-online” website:

Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.

Well, gee, thanks. You almost turn my pretty head with your flaspamery. But in response to your question, no, I’m not a professional journalist. Nor is nearly anyone else in this country due to layoffs and the continuing struggles in the media industry. Professional journalists are becoming an endangered species, being replaced by right-wing pundits, former politicians, bloggers, former professional journalists and every teenager with a cameraphone. Oh, wait…Bloggers…Guess I might be a journalist after all…Well then. Good point, “buy-cheap!” I do write very well and I must be a professional journalist. Now pay me for my journalism!

So, on to the second type of spam, confrontational spam. Or confrospam. Confrospammers send a message taking issue with your subject, which is never actually stated. Let’s let “offshore-account-opportunity” share the next example with the class, complete with creative misspelling:

I believe your facts or analisys are incorrect on this issue and you need to revisit this topic. Yet I continue to be a fan of your site and have it bookmarked in my browser of choice.

Oh yeah? Well bite me, mister I-can’t-be-bothered-to-actually-read-the-site-before-spamming-it! Sucking up after flaming my entry isn’t going to get you anywhere. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’ll get nailed by more confrospam taking issue with this entry. Pfft. Just like ‘em.

There’s the “spam for spam’s sake” spam, which henceforth will be simply be spamspamsakespam. These spammers don’t even bother making their spam even look like something that might even be vaguely human. So I guess in that sense, it’s closer to real Spam than most e-mail spam…Yesterday’s example:

Get cheap prescriptions online from Russia!

I’ll admit that I’m of an age that’s still vaguely suspicious of the Russians, and them selling cheap prescriptions online is more disturbing to me than it might be for most people. But I guess we should applaud their capitalist, entrepreneurial spirit…So, good job! Now get the hell off my lawn!

And the final type is the misdirection spam. Misdispam, we’ll call it here…Mainly because the more I look at that word, the more I think it’s the name of some horrible infectious disease.

Misdispam tries to distract you and misdirect your attention…Hopefully to their site, where you’ll not only be sold some uber cheap drug alternative, or pick up a virus, or both. Let’s let “russian-babes-looking-for-young-studs” be our poster child for this one, shall we? (Again, leaving the creative misuse of the language intact)

I have been reading your blug for a long time and believe have you good ideas that you should expand sharing with others. I have found a site with many others with same mind as you at this site: [site address redacted because even if it is a real link, it's just wrong]

So that’s where it went. I want my mind back…It’s done enough expand sharing with others for one lifetime. And if it ran off with a blug, I’ll really be pissed. But maybe on its way home it can pick up some Spam. I think I’m hungry.

See you tomorrow.

As much as I might hate to admit it, recent events, combined with my need to spill mind to screen has brought in quite a collection of new readers. Well, and Jenni regularly linking to my blog on her Facebook page has probably been the biggest cause as well…Nonetheless, to those of you who are newbies in these parts, welcome. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. I’ll just break out in a cold sweat with the added pressure.

Just by way of perspective, somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 new sets of eyes have planted themselves on this very screen over the course of a week. Okay, well, not this particular screen, unless you’re sharing with someone, but…Aw hell. You know what I mean.

So, here’s the grand re-re-introduction to the site and the players, just in case you didn’t buy the program on the way into the stadium.

First off, in case all of the info contained below escapes you somehow, you can now find a permanent link to a Q&A post from a while back. This link is at the top of the right-hand column. No need to click it now, though, as most of that info will be here.

So, on to the cast of characters:

I’m Paul, your (occasionally, or usually) genial host. I try my best to blog six days a week (last year, I posted almost 300 daily entries), so you’ll almost always have something new here to read, and it might just make you feel better about your life in the process. Aside from my duties here, I pretend to be the ringmaster to the clan I affectionately refer to as my family–a group which encompasses my wife, son, and twin daughters. And I’m finding that I am beginning to embrace the grumpy old man side of my persona, especially since I turned 40 back in August. I work as a mild-mannered tier 2 tech at a help desk for a major metropolitan employer during the day, and occasionally do the quick-change to become superdad and/or superhusband when needed. But shh! Don’t blow my cover!

I’m married to Jenni, my wife of 15 years, best friend for just a couple of months shy of 18 years, and all-around great listener to my less-than-interesting work stories. She’s a student at Luther Seminary, learning how to cram all kinds of learnin’ about God and Jesus and stuff like that into the heads of American youth. Well, it goes deeper than that, but this is about all you’ll get in this snapshot. In addition to her studies, she works one job on campus, another job at a church not too far from here, and tries to sandwich in time with the kids and me, too. Holy cow…I’m tired just describing that…Oh, and she’s got her own blog here at Lathropworld, where she reviews the many books she reads. Check it out. It’s how I do most of my reading.

Patrick is the boy. Our son and constant companion for 13 years. Sometimes, I like to say he followed us home from North Dakota, but I guess we kind of had something to do with that. He’s an 8th grader at Roseville Area Middle School, doing 8th grade boy things, including demonstrating just how frustrating and intriguing teenagers can be. His current life goals include becoming a comic book artist and playing saxophone for the University of Minnesota Marching Band.

Hannah and Zoe are the biggest surprise to hit our lives, ever. I like to say that we aimed for two kids and missed, but now that we have twins, I wouldn’t trade our little genetics experiments for all the tea in China. They’re nine-years-old, are 4th graders at FAIR School Downtown, and have me living in constant fear of the teen years. But I still find them incredibly intriguing, for no other reason than it boggles the mind to think that two people, born at almost the same time, of almost the same exact genetic soup, can become such different individuals. I know…Well, duh! But that’s just what it is.

As a family of five, we’ve discovered that the world isn’t designed for families of odd numbers larger than 4. But we’ll get over it by the time one of the kids moves out.

Pippin is my cat. She turns 19 in April, and seems intent on making sure I never forget she’s still here. Oh, and she talks to me in my dreams from time-to-time, and the best(?) of those dreams occasionally make it into entries here.

FDS is an unusual character who shares the stage here. Frau Doktor Shrinkenminder is my therapist, which just brings up a whole batch of questions, trust me…Some long-time readers have asked why I talk about her and my therapy here, and the answers are simple and complicated at the same time. It’s simple because I actually find the whole process or therapy a little funny. And complicated because FDS actually thinks writing about my life is therapeutic. Anyway, you’ll find her influence hear mention of her in here a lot. Oh, and in case you don’t get sarcasm (which is ever-present here), FDS is not her real name. But as far as you’re concerned, it is.

So there you go: what you need to know to find your way around here. Welcome to all of you who are new here. Hope you stick around and read on. It’s mostly fun writing this stuff, and I hope it’s equally (mostly) fun reading it. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow.