Watching Marx Brothers A Day At The Races with my two year old. She likes it. But asked me, “Daddy, why doesn’t that man talk?”

Two nights ago Scarlett had her first nightmare (that she could articulate to us). She was screaming for us to come and then hyperventilating as she told us what was scaring her. I won’t share the exact details, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with the fact that she saw Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast that day.

No problem!

But kill an elk? You are going to get convicted, you monster!

Jurors deliberated for about four hours before convicting Sam Carter on all nine counts he faced, which also included forgery and tampering with evidence.

Carter shot “Big Boy” the bull elk with his buckshot-loaded shotgun as it grazed on fallen crabapples, and then called in a friend and fellow officer to help remove it as horrified neighbors watched Jan. 1, 2013.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My brother Dan recommends a lot of stuff to me. I don’t always have the time or money to get to it right away, but when it comes to books, music, and comics I’m usually very in sync his recommendations. (At least when it comes to his recommendations to me, it’s been a bit spotty in the other direction) Examples of good recommendations include World War Z, Chew, Jonathan Hickman’s body of work, and Lucky Boys Confusion. Dan recommended the Thursday Next novels years ago. (At least five because it was way before Scarlett) I recently got a $10 credit on B&N Nook books so I went and grabbed the first book, The Eyre Affair.

For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.

Yesterday I saw the new Star Wars trailer. I told my wife I was disappointed that if they were going to have a black Storm Trooper, they didn’t pick Donald Faison. His Storm Trooper on the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials is my favorite part of the specials. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this sentiment.

Other thoughts:

• I’ve seen images from the trailer along with the quote from Spaceballs (which did have black storm troopers) “We ain’t found shit”
• So are Storm Troopers no longer Fett clones? Or is he just dressed as a trooper like Han and Luke did in Ep 4?

Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.

Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.

Homeland by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow - you upset me so much. Your books continue to rock. But, recently, you’ve gotten too real with your stories. They are still awesome stories. But they upset me because they make me feel impotent. All the ideas in Little Brother, For the Win, Homeland, and even Makers just remind us how stuck the system; how our momentary wins are usually negated within days and months.(eg The Occupy Movement) Please take a break and write something like DAOINMK or EST again.

The Intern’s Handbook: A Thriller by Shane Kuhn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a meta-fiction work of art. It is told from two perspectives - that of an assassin writing a guide book to future assassins at his firm, HR, Inc and that of an FBI investigation into our main character. The premise is that the firm takes advantage of interns being unnoticed, but key to any business to allow them to assassinate some very powerful people. Our main character, John Lago is on his final mission because he’s 25 and, in his words, “that’s the oldest someone will accept that you would work for free.”

Can you erase us from the Mr. Do! Top scores? AAA is me from when I didn’t know how to change the letters.