For no particular reason this morning I got to thinking about the Charlie Brown comic strip & have come to a deep, dark personal revelation. Charlie Brown has the worst parents ever.

I am going to ignore the fact that we cannot understand what his parents say in the cartoons. A friend of ours is dating a guy whose parents are from Russia & she says they often speak their native tongue that she cannot understand. This could very well be the case with CB in which his parents are speaking some strange muffled trumpet language from their native land. To be honest, since all the adults in his cartoon world speak this language, it brings up the issue that we have never really been deliberately told he lives in America. It could be that the children speak in English among themselves because of their nation’s desire to expand its economic & worldly position through the adoption of a more popular international language.

My reasons are really centered around the fact that his parents do not assist him with his recurring problems & low self-esteem.

For god only knows how long, Lucy has taken every chance she can to pick on Charlie Brown. From pulling the football away from his kicks to berating him for humor’s sake at her Psychiatry Stand, this girl has hurt him physically & mentally for years. While many parents try to teach children to handle their own problems with bullies, even the most resolute of parents would have to step in at some point if the bullying continues for too long. His parents, though, just choose to ignore the issue leaving their child to the cruel whims of his best friend’s sister.

In addition to this, the boy went bald at the age of 5. Let me repeat that - FIVE. A guy in my high school went almost as bald as can be at 18. He was less than thrilled about it & it did not really help his self-esteem at all. Now while the 18 year old can attribute this to male pattern baldness, I know of NO five year old bald children. This brings me to the dreaded conclusion that he is suffering from a disease of some sort which his parents choose to ignore. If this is the case, I fear for him getting pneumonia as that is most likely a death sentence to our comic strip hero.

That said, can’t his parents buy him a toupee or a wig or something. It would definitely help his self-esteem to know people are not staring at the sun reflecting off his skull.

Continuing on the parents not buying him things. It is quite obvious that Sally is getting preferential treatment in the family. She always has clean pristene dresses on & her hair is done very very nicely. Given her age, I am apt to suspect that the hair is her mother’s doing on a day to day basis. I am unsure what our young hero has done to lose the good favor of his parents, but they make little to no effort to hide that all their free money is being spent on their daughter. Just look at the Christmas Pagent. Don’t you think his mom or dad could have given him just ten or twenty dollars to buy a somewhat decent Christmas tree. While his friends were very encouraging to help him turn the poor tree that he could afford into something nice, it is obvious he knew he could not turn to his parents for help on this matter.

Although this is my first run at the parenting thing, it is quite obvious to me from the above examples that Charlie Brown’s parents are not living up to the societal expectations for a parent. I for one intend to do better.

On the way to work today, I saw a billboard advertising something to the effect of “The ONLY direct flights from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv” for El Al Airlines.

Somehow — I suspect that there are a lot of empty seats on those flights right now.

Every morning, I attempt to turn off my alarm clock with the power of my mind - under the extremely unlikely pretense that I might have developed telekinetic powers through the night. This way - should it happen - I will not have wasted the day picking things up with my hands.

Courtesy of Ace.

In a bizarre celebration of Belfast’s industrial heritage, a Northern Ireland artist is planning to tow an iceberg to the city that built the Titanic.

Read more here

This story is just plain wrong….and then it gets worse.

CNN.com had a really interesting article discussing tectonic plate movements and the recent earthquake in Southeast Asia. It explains how Sumatra moved sixty feet north & then goes on to further explain the general directions that each plate is shifting. Now mind you, these plates move maybe a few inches per century which is why this particular quote struck me as funny from the article:

“Australia, meanwhile, is on a collision course with southeast Asia.”

If you know anyone who lives down under, tell them they have about 250 million years to get everything tied down before impact.

Anyone interested in the article can read it here

With the election less then 24 hours away, political ads for candidates and propositions are in full swing. As I was driving to work today, every radio commercial break had at least one politically motivated ad. One in particular caught my attention though. The ad was for a California state proposition about some government funded healthcare reform package blah blah blah etc etc etc. (I’ll be very honest here. Except for the Presidential race, I don’t know a thing about any of the other races or propositions.)

Back to my point - at the end of the particular ad in point, they listed the 20 odd organizations & individuals who are backing the partisanship of that ad. This one listed a whole bunch of groups I have never heard of. The group that caught my ear when I heard it was the “California Restuarant Association Pact” or when abbreviated - CRAP. This struck me as particularly funny since it is a food service organization. I wonder if they thought it was funny when they chose the group name or if every person in the room during the brainstorm meeting just missed it altogether.

Anyway, be sure to get out and vote. Even if you don’t want to vote, just go sign an empty ballot & make your point that you are choosing to abscend.

This video is just - well - you will just have to see for yourself to understand.

It’s a wonder one of the major studios hasn’t picked this guy up yet.

I have had many of what I commonly refer to as “Simpson moments” in my life. Not OJ Simpson where I savagely murder an ex & then hire a slew of lawyers to get me off the case, but the Fox Network cartoon Simpsons. The Simpson Moments occur when something happens in my real life that seems to have been ripped straight out of an episode of the Simpsons.

Given the number of episodes they have made of the Simpsons, most of you are probably thinking “Geez, these happen to me two to three times a day,” but I am not talking about the more common moments of the show like discovering your baby shot your boss.

The most memorable & my favorite to relate was while in Florida, riding in a car with my parents, my grandmother, & my wife. I don’t remember quite how it happened, but somehow or other we got to talking about movies. This conversation occured:

Grandmother: What is that movie where they are driving the bus?
Me: Speed?
Theresa: Yeah Speed.
Grandmother: No. I don’t think that was it. It’s the one where they have to keep the bus going fast or else it will blow up.
Theresa: That was Speed.
Grandmother: No the one where they have to keep the bus’s speed over 50 miles an hour and they are driving all over the city
Me: It was Speed.

My second one just occured recently. I think I met Grandpa Simpson. I told a short story. They responded with a long drawn out ramble that went nowhere with no particular direction nor point, ending the story precisely where it began and then telling it over again. I have summarized it as this:

“That reminds me of an interesting story that happened to me once. Well, it doesn’t so much remind of the story as it was just on my mind. Also the story isn’t so much interesting as it is long and boring.”

Thus it is my life has come to imitate the Simpsons…I am hoping next my life will begin to imitate other tv shows like the MacGuyver where I will be forced to save the world using only a playing card, an egg & a roll of duct tape.