Trip to Reno and Lake Tahoe

I really can't say enough about how much I love Lake Tahoe. It's just so magical to me to be able to swim in that lake. My family used to take trips there in the winter and we'd go skiing, but I had no idea how wonderful it is to go in the summer until Amy's brother moved out there. Here's to hoping we can make a trip there next summer. Below is our video of a trip we took out there in June of 2014 when we stopped in for several days to visit Dan and Sarah and then on up to Vancouver afterward.


Also, this is one my favorite videos. Maybe because it features me so much. I don't know. I just love the song and seeing that lake.

Detroit Rock City

Video of our summer out in Detroit in 2013.

May 2013 - Toronto

Road Trip Out To Michigan

Video of our road trip out to Michigan. This was the most daunting video project from last summer. I started with over 200 video clips and boiled them down to these 60 or so. This was a fun project though. The others should be easier from here on out.

Strung Out Live at the HOB Anaheim

So in case you were wondering, this is what a punk show looks like. This music is not for the faint of heart. Also, it has some language.

It's totally ridiculous that I still love going to these shows, but I just do. And it's equally silly that I actually have a group of friends that all like doing this too. At one point, before the show started, we actually counted how many kids we had between all of us and had a laugh about how much has changed over the years since we started going to these shows. (The answer is 13...with two on the way. Crazy, right?)

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.

Summer Has Arrived!

This is my jam lately. This album just released this past week. I'll take a closer look for y'all. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

So Good

I love B.o.B. This one will get overplayed for sure, but for now, I just love it. Something about his songs also lack the trashiness of other hip-hop artists. It's nice. I've loved his stuff from day one. Good stuff.

We're going to see Hunger Games tonight and go to the Colors Festival tomorrow, and maybe the Real Salt Lake game afterwards. So our weekend is pretty packed. Hope yours is a good one too.

It's Groundhog Day!

At first I was just gonna post this clip sequence set to I Got You Babe just because I love Groundhog's Day (the movie), and then I came across this article and it's kind of amazing how seriously some people take the movie.

I've always really liked, and it's funny how many little things I find myself saying that come from this one.

Paaaaaaaaastry?

Anyway, here is an article that talks about it at length, and an excerpt:

Personally, I always saw Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same in this story. That was Nietzsche’s idea — metaphorical or literal — to imagine life as an endless repetition of the same events over and over. How would this shape your actions? What would you choose to live out for all eternity? Others see Camus, who writes about how we should live once we realize the absurdity of life. But existentialism doesn’t explain the film’s broader appeal. It is the religious resonance — if not necessarily explicit religious themes — that draws many to it. There’s much to the view of Punxsutawney as purgatory: Connors goes to his own version of hell, but since he’s not evil it turns out to be purgatory, from which he is released by shedding his selfishness and committing to acts of love. Meanwhile, Hindus and Buddhists see versions of reincarnation here, and Jews find great significance in the fact that Connors is saved only after he performs mitzvahs (good deeds) and is returned to earth, not heaven, to perform more.

The burning question: Was all this intentional? Yes and no. Ultimately, the story is one of redemption, so it should surprise no one that it speaks to those in search of the same. But there is also a secular, even conservative, point to be made here. Connors’s metamorphosis contradicts almost everything postmodernity teaches. He doesn’t find paradise or liberation by becoming more “authentic,” by acting on his whims and urges and listening to his inner voices. That behavior is soul-killing. He does exactly the opposite: He learns to appreciate the crowd, the community, even the bourgeois hicks and their values. He determines to make himself better by reading poetry and the classics and by learning to sculpt ice and make music, and most of all by shedding his ironic detachment from the world.

We're watching it tonight. That'll be good.

On a related note, I finished the 7th and final book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which is proclaimed to be the magnum opus of all his work. I guess by now I'm a pretty big connoisseur of his work - I think I've read about 15 of his books - and I really kind of love him.

In one of his short stories he talks about how he actually believes a version of hell is having to repeat the same thing over and over. I don't think any of you are going to be reading any of his books anytime soon, so I'll spoil the Dark Tower for you: the gunslinger is doomed to continually repeat his quest to reach the dark tower forever, but with one caveat in the last few pages. He's actually atoned for one of his mistakes en route to the tower, so it's my contention that he is actually on his road to redemption.

Anyway, it's just interesting to think about how this relates to our everyday lives. While we don't repeat exact sequences and events in our lives over and over, but we do have similar trials and experiences through which we try and perfect ourselves until eventually we do overcome and find our own sort of redemption. Part of the human experience is being endowed with weakness and just general difficulty, and in the process of trying to overcome them, we find godliness.

So who knew Groundhog Day was such a deep movie? There ya go.

Breakin Up

Last night Amy and I watched 500 Days of Summer. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten about the movie. I was also surprised by just how good the movie is at depicting the ups and downs of a largely one-sided relationship.

I love the method of story-telling in the film. I love both of the actors: Joseph Gordon Levitt is just always so good and Zooey is just perfect as the sometimes interested, but often distant not-quite-girlfriend. She's very selfish, but he's foolish for falling so helplessly. And the soundtrack is just perfect. Always, always love that.

As the movie proceeds, you get a non-linear story of what their relationship is like, jumping between different days, and early on he ruminates largely on the good parts, glossing over the many deficiencies that his relationship had, which doesn't really come until the end.

Without revealing too much (although I'd be surprised if anyone reading this hasn't seen that movie yet), the movie ends on an positive note, which makes it easier to revisit the movie because it doesn't leave the sour taste of disappointment with the viewer.

Mostly, it just made me really glad to be done with the dating part of my life and having to cope with the highs of potential and possibility, only to be met by the crushing agony of despair and dejection. I really am glad for the experiences that I had, and I think going through real, soul-crushing heartache is good because it gives you so much depth, I'm glad that whatever kinds of difficulties that are yet to come my way don't have to be of that variety.

Breaking up is just hard to do.

Lots of great scenes, but I'll just leave you with this one. I love how happy it is:

Magical Mystery Tour

Ours is continuing to Reno later this afternoon. We just spent a weekend in California with wonderful family and friends, attending an awesome wedding, and just having a great time. This weekend it's Reno. Two weeks it's Europe! Woo woo!

Life is just great. We have trips and such planned through the second weekend of October. Just about every weekend between now and then is booked and I just love it.

Something I've been wanting to comment on that I don't have time for right now: I have several friends getting back into lengthy relationships after having done the break-up and get back together cycle multiple times. Don't worry. It's not any of you that I'm talking about. I haven't even spoken with either of these people in months, but it still breaks my heart nonetheless. These are people who have been in relationships that have gone on for longer than a year and have broken up and gotten back together more than five times (which in itself should tell you something about the relationship, right? Stability, people! That's what we're shooting for with long-term relationships).

A word to the wise, or to the oft-lonely and broken-hearted: Do not get into or stay in a relationship because you're feeling lonely. The old adage, it's better to be in no relationship than a bad one, is still true. And it only gets more true with marriage. Be not faithless, but believing! If you think that it's God's plan for you to one day get married, then let his plan work itself out for you. The worst problems arise when we are trying to assert our will above His own.

I was talking to a friend of mine today and he's training to become a clinical psychologist. Not that it really makes him smarter about relationships, but he does spend a lot of time observing people. I mentioned this pattern to him and he said that he thought that people often get caught into bad situations when they can't envision for themselves anything better than what they're currently getting. Makes total sense, right? So envision for yourself great things! Envision for yourself happiness and security and a healthy life-balance and eventually you'll happen upon it. Don't settle for mediocrity, or think you can't do better unless that's what you really desire. Dream great things! Work towards that and you'll eventually find it.

Sorry for that. I just hope that we can all desire more for ourselves. I was talking with a coworker yesterday and he asked me simply, "what kind of difference do you want to make?" And then we had a long conversation about what we would like to do and the visions that we have for ourselves. It left me feeling inspired, and made me wonder how much alignment I've had in my life lately between my day-to-day and what I'm working for in a year, or five, or 20.

My mission president always used to say, "if you have petty thoughts, when will you ever have time to achieve great things?" Small minds live simple lives. Desire and yearn for great things! I think we all deserve it.

I'm done now. Have a great week(end), dear ones!




(I just love this song, Actually, this album. Just great. Beatles are great.)

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.

Life in a Day

One of my favorite blog reads these days has been the National Geographic Travel blog. I know that I've said that a few times before on here. They always post fun things on there, this movie trailer being one of them and I thought I'd advertise it for y'all. Something about it made me feel kind of emotional. It looks so interesting to me. And then I lamented that we don't really have more independent theaters around here even though the Sundance Film Festival takes place right around the corner from us. Weird.

A caption for the video reads:

What happens when you send a request out to the world to chronicle, via video, a single day on Earth? You get 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries. Producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald took this raw material — all shot on July 24, 2010 — and created Life in a Day, a groundbreaking, feature-length documentary that portrays this kaleidoscope of images we call life. National Geographic is bringing it to theaters starting July 24, 2011. Prepare to be amazed.

Amy and I went on a date with a couple that lives downstairs from us. They just got married about a month ago and I think we're going to become really good friends with them. Couples dating is really funny. We walked down one night and invited them to dinner and to play games with us and it felt like asking for a date. Amy and I had a post-game chat afterwards about how much we liked them. You know what else? They asked for the next date with us while we were still on the date, so you know that one went well. Plus, they friended us on FB the very next morning.

Really, we have been so blessed to have so many people around us that we love spending time with. We are never hurting for things to do or people to hang out with, and I couldn't love it more. The people in our lives are easily the greatest blessings that we have, of which there are many. It's really great.

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!