Good grammar costs nothing, people...

but bad grammar can be seriously funny.

So, about 6 years ago, Listerine had this promotion where if you bought their mouthwash you got a free stopwatch/clock, presumably so you could time your swishing for the full 30 seconds. We got one. It came with instructions, which almost had me passing out from laughing so hard. I've kept them since then, fully intending to one day scan them and post on a web page.

Kurtis just found them (again), and I give up on scanning. I will now transcribe exactly what they say. Seriously.

(If you don't want to read it all, at least skip down to "NORMAL TIME SETTING". Please.)

(I swear, this is exactly the punctuation, spacing, etc. It's really too good to be true.)

--------

FUNCTION READING
Normal Display: Hour, minutes, seconds and day of week
Push A: For alarm time
Push B: Mode
Push C: For month, date, day of week
STOP FUNCTION
Push B for stop function
Push C for count & stop
Push A for lap & reset

ALARM & CHIME ON/OFF
Chime (******/[picture of bell]) on and off
In normal time hold A then push B.
When chime flag appears, chime is on; when chime flag disappears, chime is off
Alarm ([strange symbol]/[different strange symbol]) on and off
In normal time, hold A then push B
When alarm flag appears, alarm is on:
when alarm flag disappears, alarm is off

ALARM TIME SETTING
Hold B about 3 seconds or push B repeatedly.
Day of week flag above Monday flashes
Push C or A to change hour/minutes function, then advance figure by pushingA or C.
Push B to normal time.

NORMAL TIME SETTING
Hold B about 3 seconds or push B repeatedly.
Day of week flag above Tuesday flashes.
Select flashing digit(s) to be set by pushing C or A
Advance figure by pushing A or C
Select 12/24 hour cycle option in normal time.
Hold A then push B or when the time (hour) setting.
12/24 hour cycle option will appear alternately on every 24 hour cycle during hour advance Month and date interchange by holding C then pushing A
or cannot be changed.

---------------------
... OR CANNOT BE CHANGED!!!! Man, I just can't get over this. If I'm ever in a bad mood and you want to make me giggle, that's all you have to say.

.....now if only I'd gotten a picture of that old Burger King sign about getting your receipt....

...and, okay, while I was typing all this, Kurtis was doing something over my shoulder that I didn't really pay attention to. Turns out he was taking a picture, and it came out great, and I didn't really need to type all that, so here ya go:



He's really aggravating sometimes.

*sniff*

*sniff, sniff*

WAAAAAAH!

We just took down Asher's crib. He's been sleeping in his big boy bed for a week and a half now, plus the 5 nights in a hotel big boy bed in San Diego, so he was clearly ready.

Me, maybe not as much as I'd thought.

He's pretty pumped -- now his slide is where his crib used to be, and it's all fun and stuff. I'm not too upset, just, you know... my baby!

Sigh....

Voting by Gut

David Brooks (one of the NYTimes op-ed columnists) has an interesting piece this morning on "How Voters Think".

I bother to mention it because, since I sent out the update on our new website, several Rice friends that I haven't seen or spoken to in a long time have called me back up, and I've been fairly nostalgic the last week or two.

One memory I was cuddling up with yesterday was Doc C's class on Myth/Power/Value. I can't help but think that trying to codify and understand these concepts (which was getting more and more out of fashion in PoliSci while I was at Rice) is one way (a really good way, I bet) to help deal with the over-rationalization that comes with game theoretic (or even just issue analysis) models of the rational voter. Ultimately I'm not as pessimistic as Mr. Brooks about rationality (though the new research that comes out about how we make "rational" decisions is pretty disturbing to my view on this) but when he writes:

It is no accident that the major candidates in the Republican field are a pastor, a businessman and a war hero. These are the three most evocative Republican leadership models. Nor is it an accident that the Democratic race is a clash between a daughter of the feminist movement, a beneficiary of the civil rights movement and a self-styled proletarian. These are powerful Democratic categories.

I hear echoes of Doc C. The idea that voters just make emotional snap judgments isn't the only explanation of the above; MPV is too.

I shouldn't write blog entries at 7:15 in the morning. They're too serious.

Videos of Asher

Here's something new: videos!

Asher is following nicely in his father's video game footsteps:
Asher playing Wii

And, Asher enjoyed his Christmas carols:
Angels from the Realms of Glory
Angels We Have Heard On High

If you have trouble playing these, try installing Quicktime.

Corrections to Kurtis's Post

Well, honey, you tried. :)

Asher was born after 18 hours of labor and 4.5 (!!) hours of active pushing. He was 9 pounds 2 ounces, not 6 (thank goodness, is what I say!).

Alas, I got my PhD in June 2007, not 2006.

I'm now interviewing, looking for more permanent academic jobs -- if anyone has an in at a good liberal arts school, put in a good word for me!

What are we doing?

Britton's comment reminded me that many of you to whom I sent email about the death of our website probably haven't heard from us in a while, so here's an update (I'll let Sharon fill in details if she feels like it.)

Asher was born on July 5th, 2005. He was nine pounds and six ounces (Sharon may correct the ounces, but it's around there) and after actively pushing for three hours (!) they decided Asher wasn't cooperating or was too big so they did a C-section. He barely missed being a 4th of July baby, though that's fine by us.

Sharon finished her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in June 2006, and took a one-year position at UIC here in Chicago. The original idea was to look for jobs during this year while I worked at the U of C and took care of Asher.

Just then (I'm writing like Mark this morning, because I'm teaching Sunday School in less than an hour) the IT department at the U of C re-organized, and my new boss didn't want to let me work from home at all (I had been working from home three days a week, but could've done with fewer.) So I started looking for a different job, mostly to show how I was underpaid, and use that as leverage to bargain for a new work at home agreement. Instead, my new boss stood firm, and I took a new job at a place called Jump Trading.

Like the name sounds, it's a financial firm. I work on writing infrastructure for them: very low latency multithreaded networking stuff in C++. It's fun to be doing hard core programming again, but as a result we had to put Asher into day care. We like the facility, and he seems to have adjusted, but it was a pretty sad day for me, since I'd gotten to stay home with him so much before then.

That brings us to the present, though I've left a bunch of stuff out. Have a great Sunday.

Updated Pictures

It had been a long while since we'd put up any pictures of Asher even before the old site died, so Sharon and I went through and pulled some of our favorites from the last year and a half (yes, it's been that long) and here they are:

Asher Interim Pictures

Old Picture Galleries

So I've started moving over some pictures that were on our old webpage, and I thought I should go ahead and put a link here before someone (that means you, mom) complained that the old pictures were gone.

Our Picasa Web Albums Space

Elephants!

So, here is our first non-test posting to our new blog. I'm kinda sorry to see our old website go, but frankly if this is what was needed to get me to stop worrying about tinkering with it and move on to actually putting things up for friends and family to read, then so be it. It's the end of an era, but <insert your favorite endings/beginnings quote>.

Asher and I got to go to the San Diego Zoo while Sharon was doing the joint math meetings thing. We got the much better end of the deal, and while the San Diego Zoo was not as impressive as I expected, pretty much getting to see actual animals is enough to make Asher's day. Of course, his favorite was getting to see the hippo poop.

Yeah, sorry son. When you're an adolescent we'll talk about what chores you must do to make me remove that from our blog. This, of course, assumes that I won't lose all these blog entries by then; yeah, I should face it: odds are pretty high you don't have to worry about this one.

But, in the immortal words of Aaron Sorkin's Casey McCall: "I have a typewriter and I'll use it as I see fit."

Points for me: I got to use the word typewriter in the first real posting on our new blog.

Let's See if I Can Do This

So, here I am, posting to the blog.

Test Post

This is a test posting to the new McCathern family blog.