if your strength is based on fortune cookies, then you will be unsatisfied with life

"if you are unwise with money and time, you will spend your life"

"get some sleep"

Origin of the Cookie Monster

Changing topics - The Cookie Monster will no longer sing "C is for Cookie" but instead sing "Cookies are a sometimes food." This is in response to the increasing number of morbidly obese children.

The temptation is great to come up with easy answers as to why more and more children are obese. The stupidest and most offensive of the common explanations are contentions along the lines of:

1. Children are lazy. With respect to motivation, children like adults have a range of motivation. Some are lazy, some are extremely motivated. Human nature hasn't really changed much over the last few decades so the conceit that children are lazier now than in the past is a combination or arrogance and nostalgia. As in "Kids these days are bad! When I was a kid, I was full of VIRTUE! What kids needs are a good BEATING because THAT'S WHAT I GOT." "I thought you said you were full of virtue, why did you need a beating?" "BEATINGS BUILD CHARACTER!" (Note to self: When building a straw man, make sure that said straw man is as comical as possible)
2. Children are spoiled. If only the wealthy were getting morbidly obese that might be true, but its not
3. Children don't like to eat nutritious food. Children will eat whatever their parents eat.

The stupid answers out of the way, Sesame Street seems to be honing in on something which I think is correct: Helping children to adopt healthier eating habits and giving children more opportunities to develop exercise habits is a societal problem.


In fact, everything that I've said so far is a digression from why I posted this. What I meant to say was "If they are going to mess with Cookie Monster, couldn't they teach him proper grammar?"

My LARC exam is in 5 hours. Back to the flash cards!

2x Banal

1. I'm sure the The Elkridge Hollerer reads more like The Elkridge Least Common Denominator at times. I'm trying to write occasional things that I might mention in an everyday conversation, but the conversation might be with family, friends from Rice, or friends from DC, and not be too embarrassing/revealing/unprofessional if randomly discovered via the mischief of the Internet by those who don't know me as well as do friends and family. So it probably is banal at times. But then again, the Panama Banal was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century; there's worse company to be in.

More to the point, it's a way to keep in touch, and I hope that it's not so dull that my friends would just as soon not read it.

2. They're not all that long, but I can't bring myself to post the full lyrics to Rush's "Working Man". The first verse is more than enough:

I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin’
Yes, I’m workin’ all the time

Diary of the Last Czar

Nicholas II kept an unbelievably banal diary that is nevertheless fascinating because historical events later put them into context. No Trav, I'm not calling the Hollerer Banal (although comparing you to Russian Royal would be a heck of a way to do it, it'd be the opposite of what I call "a left-handed compliment" [insert appendage joke with antonymns here]) all I am saying is that I've now seen a bunch of blogs out there and most of the Diary format ones are really boring, even if they do have famous people writing them. The must interesting ones have some narrower theme (or themes) to make them of topical interest, even if the people are terribly boring. Case in point (sorry Louren) Wendy's Knitting Blog features a person who is practically a charicture of unexciting but she manages to capture what is interesting about her hobbies and in the process makes for fairly compelling writing.

Anyhow it's not so easy to have a good theme. And despite what TGI Friday's may have you believe "electic" is not really a theme.

Why William writes

I felt a pang of guilt when I read William's last post. I felt like I had let him down, depriving him of inspiration (however unclear the inspiration may have been). But there's no point in dwelling on that; I haven't not written out of lack of desire, but out of a lack of time to think on anything coherent, and not wanting to merely offer a daily report of what I've done.

I'm writing this, though, to point out why William ought to be writing - because it delights us to read it. I don't claim to get the connections, or the point at all, all the time, but that's not why we enjoy William's commentary, written or otherwise. I'm sure that we'll still derive that pleasure from a "narrower and more serious" topic - though a food inventory might be beyond even William's talents - but I don't want him to lose sight of it, either.

Bad grammar begs the question

Now and then I look back at old posts and see distracting grammatical errors. This could be a seperate thought about my posts tend to be stream of consciousness and that the omitted words (often verbs) or the correctly spelled but incorrectly used (e.g. when I say Please No instead of Please Note) or my mysterious use of punctuation makes an important comment about my thought process. But really... it says that I don't do a good enough job proofreading before I post (if I proofread at all) and its not charming when I do it, its distracting, as all bad grammar is distracting.

This gets to whether or not I should edit old posts. The answer is "Yes but I am too lazy to do it" but eventually bad grammar begs the question, "Why should I edit my blog and why should I continue to do this blog?"

Honestly, I can't think of that many good reasons to do this blog. The original main purpose was to to make posts that were more or less in direct response to what Travis posted, even if the connection to what he posted was less than clear. And in my own style, I've gotten very meta on the levels of parody. Clearly, however, at some point I just started blogging for the sake of blogging... more or less the reason why most people blog.

Well, that's just not good enough for me. Therefore, I am annoucing that I will eventually abandon this blog. When that happens I will do at least one and up to all and maybe exceeding all of the following:

1. "Reset" this blog to be blank and then it will be 3 of 4 2.0: Louren's Blog
2. "Reset" this blog and decide on a specific topic and then only blog about that topic. Top topics on my list at the moment would be:
a. Commuter Notes and Parables. I drive to work, I drive from work to school, and I drive from school to home. This is about 2.5 hours of driving every day. I have different thoughts about the nature of morality that occur during these times and these thoughts take the form of cartoon strips. I made a bunch of cartoons like this when I commuted to and from my job in New York and then I added some more to that collection when I was a senior at Rice. So this would be a good place to take the blog, althought I would probably change the URL
b. I have a private food blog that I'm not using. If I can get disciplined to start blogging what I eat then I think that would be of some personal benefit.
c. Something else that is both a narrower topic and more serious.

I'm phoning it in.

At lunch today, we discussed A blog entry from The Sneeze about cognitive dissonance inducing intercontextuality. My riff on this was that there is actually a food called Fruit Leather which could be made by ... well follow the link. Anyhow Fruit roll-ups are not meant to be fruit but are an artifice of fruit leather and that the whole thing was somehow the simulacrum of the essence of Cinderella.

Its really funny that the whole time we were talking about Cinderella, since it turns out that the sneeze was talking about Rapunzel. It means that the difference is insubstantial for purposes of this discussion.

The outcome of this discussion was that culture can only eat itself for so long before it is completely consumed and that at some point someone needs to come up with a new idea.

And I have one... No actually I don't

The new-fangled, spangled, bangle, dangled from the Punic Tunic of Munich

Dora looks like Meowth

Meowth is #052 in the Pokedex.

So I have my answer about what Dakota will remember about her 4th Birthday:


Castillo Bouncy! 

I imagine that the Ancient Egyptians were going for the bouncy castle of Dora the Explorer when they instead built the Sphinx. Close, but it tooks several more centuries for art, culture, history, marketing, and hair dryer technology to align just right for civilization to produce the great portable Dora the Explorer bouncy castle.

Dakota's answer

I like that Dakota thought, then began her response with the exclamation, "I know!" as if the question were part of an oral exam, with one right and many wrong answers. She's like a tiny version of the resurrected Spock (in Star Trek IV, I think), taking "How do you feel?" bang on the nose. Unlike Spock, however, she can answer the question! Gracious, she's smart.

"Dakota, how do you like being four?"

I asked my daughter as I was putting her to bed. She rested a pensive forefinger against the corner of her mouth as her eyes scanned the ceiling for an answer.

At least she exclaimed, "I know! You decide every day that you love it for being four years old!"

Although I understand that she simply didn't parse the question in the usual way, I was nevertheless unprepared for her to give such an abstract answer.

I still have memories of my own fourth birthday. It was the first summer that we were into the new house and my parents invited all their friends for a party on the patio. I got so many presents I was completely disoriented. It was one of the few times that we opened up only the top half of our double-dutch doors. What a strange thing to remember!

I wonder what Dakota will remember. Somehow, I think that she will remember Jason.

Happy Birthdays Trav and Eric!

Ok, so Trav's is a little (ok, a lot) late, but Eric's is early. Does that balance it out?

Ya'll missed an awesome Beer Bike. But we cheered our hearts out for you at beer bike. Or "the bicycle race" as it was called in front of Dakota, so she doesn't talke about something with beer in the name at school. Ollie and Laef looked great, and Melissa's belly continues its expansion, and Melissa continues to make pregnancy look oh so easy!

Jones wins again!

Yo. 


I crush you with my thumb. 


Jaberwocky Oligarchy Necrophilia Eat Sh*t 

Nealry finished my brief. Time to get ready for beerbike

beerbike 2005

Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like

You say black I say white
You say bark I say bite
You say shark I say hey man
Jaws was never my scene
And I don't like Star Wars
You say Rolls I say Royce
You say God give me a choice
You say Lord I say Christ
I don't believe in Peter Pan
Frankenstein or Superman
All I wanna do is

Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my
Bicycle races are coming your way
So forget all your duties oh yeah!
Fat bottomed girls they'll be riding today
So look out for those beauties oh yeah
On your marks get set go
Bicycle race bicycle race bicycle race
Bicycle bicycle bicyI want to ride my bicycle
Bicycle bicycle bicycle
Bicycle race

You say coke I say caine
You say John I say Wayne
Hot dog I say cool it man
I don't wanna be the President of America
You say smile I say cheese
Cartier I say please
Income tax I say Jesus
I don't wanna be a candidate
For Vietnam or Watergate
Cos all I want to do is

Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like

"Bicycle Race" by Queen

Grrrrrrrrrr

Li Family Portrait