Time to Disconnect

The bowling scene kills me. The idea is well executed and so true.

Social Media and Going Viral

I kind of love the latest internet videos that go viral and it escalates and the whole world starts uploading their own versions of the latest craze.

Just two weeks ago it was the Harlem Shake:

And lately it's been this:


Social media is such an interesting thing to me. There are all these ways in which people can connect with each other. A year ago it was just taking pictures on your phone and the ease with which different fads spread like planking. And now with how easy it is to do videos, you have these kinds of things that pop up.

I really kind of love it. At least for the five minutes that it's popular.

YOLO

These guys just make me happy. Their humor isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's definitely mine.

Call Me, Maybe

A friend of mine did a post on the phenomenon of this song recently, and I wanted to jump on that train too, but missed the boat. Then I took a car ride to an airplane...I have derailed...

...and I'm back!

Okay, his post is here. His brother did a video too, and it's actually pretty good. I don't know anyone in it, so I can validate him in that respect. Anyway, there are a number of covers/parodies...

This one got the ball rolling:





And this one got a lot of attention too:




As did this one:




And now there is this one that I think is really fun:




Has there been another song that the world has heard more times in a several month span like this one? I don't think so. It doesn't hurt being the catchiest song ever.

So Awesome

Have you seen this already? It's probably the coolest, sweetest thing I've seen in a long time. And I don't even feel like it's been that long since I've seen some great things too.

I love that camera view showing her. Getting married is just the happiest thing in the world. Some friends of ours just recently got engaged and we're just so excited for them, and of course, it makes me think about my own wedding day and how wonderful that was. I'm so glad I married one of the happiest people I've ever met. It just makes every day so much brighter.

Disco Dayz

I have had a number of phases with music. I don't know where it came from because nobody in my family is really an audiophile, but I've just always gotten into different kinds of bands, music, etc.

My junior year of high school Dave and I started hanging out with these two girls and somehow I just got sucked into Disco Saturday nights, then that evolved into my picking up various disco classics.Yvonne Elliman is still at the top of my list for all things disco, but today Donna Summer passed away after her fight with cancer. The cancer won.

She was pretty great in her heyday.




Anyway, that got me thinking of SYTYCD and then I got all kinds of excited about it. You what else? I actually ran into Orem native Ryan Dilello at the gym a few weeks ago. Small world.

Daily Dozen

I think for almost the last year now I've been looking at Nat'l Geo Traveler's Daily Dozen. They are reader/viewer submitted photographs from around the world, and they have new ones each week. I thought that I used to like photos, and then I met the Walton family, and now my appreciation just doesn't compare.

Anyway, we've had a fun house guest these last few days and he was showing us the other night some of his latest pics. They, of course, are really good. So impressive.

Anyway (again), I came back this week to the daily dozen and some of these I thought were just so cool. Just yesterday we finally got back our GoPro after sending it in for some warranty servicing, and for a moment I actually thought that it might have been lost in transit, but it showed up in our mailbox much to my delight. I'm so excited to have it in Havasupai this weekend.

So this first photo was actually taken from a GoPro sequence. How awesome is this?

The eerie Northern lights:
Although the size of the waves might make you think that these kids are about to get swallowed up and drown in the depths of the sea, you can see from their expressions that those kids are actually playing in the waves:
I'm really excited to be headed down to Havasupai this weekend. We have a fun group, and it's just a good setting for some great photography and videos to be had. Stay tuned!

Kersploosh!

Can you believe this character....




Is the same as this one...




Or this one?



For the record, I actually really, really love the TV show. It's so campy and goofy and just wonderful. And, I also really loved Michael Keaton as Batman, way more, in fact, than Val Kilmer or George Clooney.

Anyway, just that first clip was awesome, and then it blew me away to think that these were all supposed to be the same character. For the dorks out there who read this, they're all correct. Batman in the comics was at one point that campy, cartoony character, but then in the 80s Frank Miller reinvented him as the dark character we've become more familiar with in his graphic novel, The Dark Knight returns. There ya go.

Sasha and Twitch

One from last week's performance episode. I love Sasha, and anything that Twitch does has me sold too. It's just another one of those where everything just intersects perfectly - dancers, choreography, music, and performance. Loved, loved, loved this one.

Field of Dreams 2

Loved this video.

Field of Dreams 2: NFL Lockout with Taylor Lautner from Taylor Lautner

"I walked through two miles of cornfields. Let's play some football."

The most interesting thing though: Dennis Haysbert as this generation's James Earl Jones? I like it.

Party Rockin

A few things I wanted to post:

• I've totally gotten Amy into So You Think You Can Dance. It's kind of awesome. The show is promoting a national dance day on July 30, and they have several different tutorials on dances to learn. I'm hoping that we'll really do it and get into it. Start with this video if you're interested:

• Over at Powerline, I read this blogpost about the conservative case for taxes. I thought it was really insightful. Here is a key excerpt:
  

  But here’s the case: one problem with our current tax policy is that at the moment the American people as a whole are receiving a dollar of government for the price of only 60 cents.  (I don’t say a “dollar’s worth of government,” but let’s leave that snark for another time.)  Any time you can get a dollar of something at a 40 percent discount, you are going to demand more of it.  My theory is simple: if the broad middle class of Americans are made to pay for all of the government they get, they may well start to demand less of it, quickly.
  
  There’s corollary point to this.  Back in the Reagan years, there was a vigorous internal debate about whether to resist tax increases because “starving the beast” would hold down spending.  But evidence is now in: this strategy doesn’t work.  My witness on this point is the Cato Institute’s chairman, William Niskanen (who was chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers at one point, and a person whose libertarian credentials are hard to beat). Niskanen noted this striking finding [1] in a Cato Policy Report a while ago:
  
  In a professional paper published in 2002, I presented evidence that the relative level of federal spending over the period 1981 through 2000 was coincident with the relative level of the federal tax burden in the opposite direction; in other words, there was a strong negative relation between the relative level of federal spending and tax revenues.  Controlling for the unemployment rate, federal spending increased by about one-half percent of GDP for each one percentage point decline in the relative level of federal tax revenues. . . One implication of this relation is that a tax increase may be the most effective policy to reduce the relative level of federal spending.
  
  Other economists have reached the same conclusion [2].  In other words, if you want to limit government spending, instead of starving the beast, serve the check.  (Well, I can hear everyone now, there’s goes your invitation to Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings! True that.)  Right now the anti-tax bias of the right has the effect of shifting costs onto future generations who do not vote in today’s elections, and enables liberals to defend against spending restraints very cheaply.  Time to end the free ride.

• An article over at NRO talks about a case of overly restrictive separation between Church and state. Article is here. An excerpt:
  

  This isn’t the first episode of such trouble. In May, with the approach of Memorial Day — always a day of proud and sorrowful reflection at veterans’ cemeteries, typically characterized by invocations of God’s mercy and His blessings on our country — Ocasio required that the ministers who planned to speak at the cemetery submit their proposed prayers to her in advance. Pastor Scott Rainey of Living Word Church did so, and was told to revise his prayers to be more “inclusive” — by excluding specific reference to his own religion. Appealing to the VA in Washington, Rainey was referred to a deputy in the general counsel’s office, who backed Ocasio.
  
  Rainey took his case to federal district court in Houston, where Judge Lynn Hughes sharply rebuked the VA and Ocasio, issuing a restraining order against them on May 26. As Hughes said in his opinion, “the government cannot gag citizens” in the name of “some bureaucrat’s notion of cultural homogeneity.”

• I read a pretty cool article on ESPN about what The Decision (Lebron's televised decision to choose the Heat over the Cavaliers) looked like through the eyes of the kids at the Boys and Girls Club where it was televised from. It was a really fun look, and it also reminded me of how important the Boys and Girls Club was for me when I was growing up with two parents who worked and no one else who could look after me in the summers. I still even remember one of the guys that I really looked up to - George Gorey. I ought to look him up. It takes a village...and I feel like I had all sorts of people that I owe so much to because of roles that they played for me during my childhood. Here is the article.
• A friend of mine will occasionally send out songs or albums that she's really into, and I do the same thing every time. I'll just set it aside for a month or three, start get into the music on my own, and then remember that she sent it to me way before it all got big. That's happened at least three times that I can think of right off the bat. Anyway, the latest is this song. And I just love love the video.
  
And that's all I got for today. Have a great weekend, y'all!

I Got You

In years past, I used to blog pretty regularly about So You Think You Can Dance. I had review posts of the show. I've seen a live taping. I even went to the tour a couple years ago. And then they had it on straight from summer and in the fall season, and it was just too much. I liked it as my summer show because there wasn't much else on, and I liked leaving it there. Plus, having it back-to-back like that was just overkill for me. I saw a few last summer, but not much more. I don't even know who won.

I wouldn't quite say I'm back all the way into it, but I do still really enjoy the show. I think it's so fun, the dancers are so impressive, and I just love dance as an art form and as an athletic sport. There is so much to it, and so much expression that comes through it.

Anyway, this past Wednesday had one routine that really impressed me. I watched it again just a minute ago and it still gives me chills every time I watch it. I'm a sucker for the lyrical hip hop routines that Napoleon and Tabitha come up with, and I just loved the concept for this one, the dancers, and the music. It takes a lot to have a stand-out performance because you need the right intersection between all of those factors. Plus, Melanie is just adorable. Lots of impressive dancers this season. I think this one got it:



It's awesome, right? I just love that one. I'll probably even watch it again once I'm done writing this.

Well, this is me signing off for the weekend. Time to head back to California for Summer Christmas, catch a ball game, some beach time, and hang out with some of the people that I love most in this whole world. I'm so excited for it.

I probably will have one more post coming this weekend in honor of the 4th because I have been reading some interesting articles related to our country's military, so maybe check back in a few.

Oh, and I better give a shout out to Canada day. Lots of great things happening this weekend. Have a great holiday, dear ones!

Do you have $100k I Can Borrow?

Or if you're looking for early Christmas presents, this is on my list:


I also like this video from the same guy:

We Party Right

We just got back last night from a trip to San Fran to visit Greg and Laura, in what is now a visit with family and not just friends (what the?...). Amy and I chatted briefly on the ride back from the airport about the trips we've been able to do this past year (since Memorial day of last year):

• Zion on the Walton Utah family vacation of a lifetime.
• Moab to go canyoneering with Mike.
• Moab again with our ward.
• Summer Christmas in California.
• Vancouver for my first visit to Canada over Labor Day weekend.
• St. George to run the marathon.
• Thanksgiving at home.
• Post-Christmas and New Year's in Vancouver.
• President's Day in California.
• Cancun on our honeymoon.
• Back to Vancouver for an open house.
• Again in Cali for another open house.
• Goblin Valley a couple weekends ago.
• San Fran this past weekend.

Most of that is dominated by trips back home, but I think that's totally cool. And that doesn't even include trips we've made on our own (twice more to Cali for me, and a , California, Chicago and Japan for Amy's work) or the few that we did just after we started dating (Vegas, Cali, Zion). That makes for 90 hours of car rides and 10 different flights in the past year for us. Kind of crazy, right?

I'll post more on the weekend once Amy finishes editing the photos, but we had so much fun with Greg and Laura. They live in such an awesome location in the Presidio, and San Francisco is just such a fun place. I dated a girl who was from that area and I got well acquainted with SF in that time with her so I've never lost that affinity for it. Plus I had a cousin who lived up there for a bit. It's just a cool, different place.

Anyway, we have a lot more planned this upcoming summer. The preview goes something like this: Cali again for the 4th, Reno Walton family Vacation of a lifetime, Cali again for a Redford wedding, and...drum roll, please...Europe in the fall! Woo woo! We just booked that one on Sunday. Throw in some more camping trips in there and that about rounds out our travel plans for the summer.

One last thing. Since Amy is the one with all of the photos, I'm just going to link to her posts that give the visuals on everything we've been up to, for whoever may be interested:

• Weekend with Molly and Foster.
• Camping in Goblin Valley.
• Field seats for Real Salt Lake.
• Thanksgiving Point Half.
• Open House in California.

I'll probably just link to her blog once a month or so for the pics.

Around the World

I started subscribing to the National Geographic Travel blog a week or so ago and now it's one of my favorite reads each day. There are so many cool things happening all over the world, and they get a pretty good run down on a lot of those things, but, of course, being National Geographic, it also means that there are some really cool pics.

Anyway, they included this quote by Mark Twain today:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

One of today's posts had a link to another site where another guy documented some of the extreme things he did in New Zealand. The guy posted this video of his experience riding on the world's largest swing:

If you can understand what they're saying, the swing operators are pretty funny. It'd be fun to do that and just mess with people, if a little harsh in their language, but what would you expect from guys like that? Or is that an unfair characterization? (Here is the original post.)

Also, the person who writes the Nat'l Geo blog is hosting one of the sessions for Meet, Plan, Go. People are gathering in more than a dozen different cities to discuss how to go about taking significant amounts of time off to travel the world. The author himself (herself?) took off a year with his family - including two kids - to travel the world. Cool, right? These meetings will all be happening concurrently on October 18th. The closest one to here will be in Las Vegas, but there is one in LA.

...when are we going to Europe?

Did you know?

Did you know it's National African-American Women's Fitness/Alcohol Awareness/Cancer Control/Car Care/National Card and Letter Writing/National Child Abuse Prevention/Confederate History/Couple Appreciation/International Customer Loyalty/National Decorating/National Donate Life/Emotional Overeating Awareness/Fresh Florida Tomato/Grange/Holy Humor/National Humor/Informed Woman/Jazz Appreciation/National Kite Month/National Knuckles Down/National Landscape Architecture/

Month of the Young Child/National Occupational Therapy Month/National Pecan Month/National Pet First Aid Awareness/Pharmacists War on Diabetes/Physical Wellness/National Poetry/Prevention of Animal Cruelty/Rosacea Awareness/

School Library Media Month/National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention/National

Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) Education and Awareness/Soyfoods/Straw Hat/Stress Awareness/International Twit Award/Women's Eye Health and Safety/Workplace Conflict Awareness/World Habitat Awareness/National Youth Sports Safety Month?

Seriously.

So celebrate by working out with your favorite female African-American/abstaining from alcohol/eating more antioxidants/writing a card or letter/not visiting your creepy 55 year old single uncle/setting our your General Lee bust on your lawn/sending flowers to your favorite couple/buying your favorite product/decorating your home/donating to pro-life campaigns/putting down that gallon of ice cream/eating a Florida fresh tomato/working on your personal garden/telling a religious joke/telling any joke/enlightening a woman/listening to Duke Ellington/flying a kite/playing a game of marbles/redesigning your front yard/babysitting/helping a stroke victim learning to walk/having pecan pie/putting a bandage on a kitty/not eating so much fatty food/going out for a run/being gentle with your skin/visiting your local library/not allowing your sorority sister to go home with that creechy guy from alpha beta omega/having safe sex/having Silk with your cereal/wearing a straw hat/meditating and breathing deeply/celebrating your favorite twit/not poking girls in the eye/mediating problems in the workplace/visiting a zoo and reading National Geographic/encouraging your local high school to wear safer football helmets!

Please appreciate the effort I put into doing that for you. Please. Sorry that I didn't bother to link something to every day. I just chose some random ones. But you can look it up. April really is the month for all of those.

On a related note, tomorrow is Obsura Day. The day is about celebrating the world's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. 109 cities are participating and there is a whole range of events and activities available tomorrow. There aren't any around Utah, unfortunately, but LA has several and so does Vancouver. Click on the link above to find out if your city has any special events. The best part? A lot of them are free. Some examples include:

You can descend into the catacombs below Naples, Italy with an art historian; tour Mary's Gone Wild Folk Art & Baby Doll Museum in Supply, North Carolina; experience the powerful Saltsraumen Maestrom near Bodo, Norway; visit Tesla's laboratory on Long Island with GOOD editor Ben Jervey; sneak around the Haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado; go behind the scenes of the Cycladic Museum in Athens, Greece; poke around in the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things in Lucas, Kansas; check out the birthplace of the Internet in Los Angeles with Matt Novak of PaleoFuture blog; pass through secret doors on a treasure hunt at the Mansion on O St. in Washington, DC. And much, much, much, MUCH more.

HT to the National Geographic Travel blog. They have some really awesome posts on there. Check it out.

Pick up your trash, please

I was watching ESPN while home for lunch today and I saw this story on Outside the Lines that actually put me to tears. Just a couple posts ago Laura made this comment:

emotions people get from sports has always been such a crazy phenomena to me. we get so upset, elated, etc for something that we can't control at all and doesn't personally effect us at all in our lives. don't get me wrong, i love it, but it is a funny thing. whenever the lakers win and matt is super excited i always tell him what a great job he did and how proud i am of him and how he cheered so well. because, you know, it is funny.

I'm taking this out of the context of her comment, but I just wanted to say that sports has a tremendous effect on our personal lives. If I could write one book in my life it would actually be about the far-reaching effects that entertainment, and sports in particular, can have in our lives. For those who won't follow that link above, which is probably just about all of you, it is the story about a little boy who is suffering from a disease that affects 1/4,000,000 people, that causes a child to age prematurely, at 10x or more the natural rate. But this little boy was just the sweetest little guy, and the only thing he wants to do in this whole world is play baseball.

I still remember seeing Kirk Gibson's home run in the '88 World Series. I remember Francisco Cabrera hitting the single that won the NLCS for the Braves in the bottom of the ninth that scored David Justice and Sid Bream. I remember Bo Jackson ruining his hip against the Bengals in '91. I remember Scott Spiezio and Darrin Erstad hitting home runs to bring the Angels back from the dead in 2002. I remember Robert Horry hitting that three to swing the series back to the Lakers in 2002. I remember Jason Lezak closing in on the French from what should have been an impossible distance for the US to pull out that particular relay in the 2008 Olympics. Just to name a few moments.

Yes, my existence has just about nothing to do with the success or failure of an organization that is ultimately run for pure monetary profit, but how that team fares in its season of play has profound effects on the escape that I have from my day to day routine. It has profound implications for some person who might have little else to look forward to then the next morning's box score when that person will look to see if his team won or lost the night before.

I know that's not what you were really getting at, Laura, but I just wanted to make a point. It does matter. It matters a lot to some people, as it turns out.

On a different note, I loved this bit from Jay Nordlinger:

Finally, there is a long letter that I wish to share with you. I’ll do a little “Keep reading” thing, because, as I said, the letter is long — but well worth the time, I think. In Impromptus, I tell a story about a man who bent down to pick up a penny. This item has occasioned a lot of mail, actually. And here is the letter I wish to share:

Dear Mr. Nordlinger,

I had a father who almost always picked up trash on the street when he came across it. During all the moments I witnessed these acts, it never occurred to me to ask him why he did it (when virtually everyone else ignored the stuff).

Thirty years later, out on a run in my neighborhood, I saw some trash and was moved to pick it up. It happened that I had recently been fired from a position despite the fact that I had performed extremely productively. I was in a state of mind that had me wondering about my worth. It occurred to me that, despite being unemployed, I could still be a good father, husband, friend, and citizen. Before, I might have done what my father did, with regard to trash, unthinkingly. Now I was doing it to soothe my soul, so to speak. If all I did was improve my neighborhood an iota, I figured I was still “productive” and “worthy.”

A silly little mind game, sure. However, that perspective helped me manage my period of unemployment and, I believe, helped me in the interviews that finally secured a much more lucrative new position.

But that’s not the end of the story. I continue to pick up trash, which means I keep an eye on the ground. As you can imagine, I’ve come across a fair amount of coinage and also bills, which I’ve always considered God’s little way of “repaying” me (not that I ever needed such “encouragement”). Recently, I found a diamond earring. Unable to determine its owner, I gave it to my wife, who was happy to receive it, and wears it happily around her neck. Value? I have no idea, but what it represents to me is incalculable.

So I guess you could say my father’s humble civic actions turned out to be an immensely important gift to his son. It helped me get through my biggest professional challenge and led to a change in perspective which has fortified me for the last 20 years.

How do you like that? Not so much a letter as a testimony.

Before I was in high school, I used to think that it was hilarious to litter, and mostly in egregious ways. All my friends did, and I knew other kids when I went to college that thought the same thing. Then I served a mission in a third world country and I saw how awful it makes everything look. I basically grew up, and guess what was the first thing I noticed and was most grateful for when I got off the plane in Newport Beach, CA? The cleanliness blew my mind, and now I never want to be that person ever again. Then I worked as a janitor and later as part of the grounds crew at BYU and actually kind of liked trash duty and making things nice. Now I pick up stuff all the time around my neighborhood because things are always flying out of people's trash cans up here.

I think it matters. I think it all matters a great deal.

Lastly, I think it's a Bon Jovi weekend. Have a good one, y'all!

Ahhhh, the weekend

I am just diggin' on this song lately.


Oh man, I'm so excited to be done with this week. It's been long in a number of different respects, and today's stuff ended sooner than I had expected it to. I'm excited for TCU to beat Utah tomorrow. I'm excited to just kinda hang out and do whatever. And I'm excited to work on my Dougie.





See y'all later!

Hey Party People

I have gotten away from blogging and I actually really do miss it, but it's a busy season for me. A few things:

• I just got back some fresh data at the COB, and this is my first project that is all on my own. Since I started here I've been working on projects that the other intern hadn't finished yet, so I feel like this one is kind of my baby, and I am really excited about it. It's just really cool to be tapping into the pulse of the church, you know?
• I was feeling entirely overwhelmed yesterday and stayed up until way-too
  -late-o'clock last night, but somehow today I feel rejuvenated. It's nice to feel empowered, and I know that I have higher powers at work to thank for that.

Two nights ago Amy and I went to Salt Lake and ate here:

It was very tasty, very affordable, and very quaint. Then we went and saw this:

This is fast becoming my favorite Halloween activity, besides the blood and guts and dressing up of Halloween itself. The show is always so fun, it's in an awesome theater, and it is just really entertaining. Worth the price of admission. We would have gone here following the show (probably my favorite little bakery in the world) with some friends, but then winter happened.

Friday Round-Up

A couple of awesome things from around the web:

• Check this out. A student Rick Rolls his professor by hiding the lyrics of the Rick Astley classic along the entire left side of his paper.
  
• And this from an old Bill Simmons' article where he creates a vengeance scale.

  In 1988, Harden knocked out two of Largent's teeth with an illegal hit and put him on the IR for a bunch of games. The next time Seattle played Denver, Harden picked off a pass intended for Brian Blades and looked like he was going to score, but Largent scorched his way across the field and just destroyed Harden with a devastating and perfect-form tackle. Largent hit him so hard that the ball came loose and Largent recovered it. The hit was so nasty that it was a part of NFL telecast montages for years afterwards. Later, Largent called it the favorite play of his career. And this guy is in the Hall of Fame. Whenever sports vengeance is mentioned, that hit stands out for me. Totally legal and totally bloodless.

The hit comes at about 0:09 and the replay where you get the full feel of the impact comes at 1:14. My favorite part is that Largent was so focused on destroying Harden that it takes him a second to notice that he jarred the ball loose, and then he gets up after the play is dead and stares him down. Just so awesome.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!