An Obscure Taunt

My daddy is more perseverative than your daddy!

New Year's Resolution Possibilities

I need help choosing:

A: Mechanically read Ulysses by James Joyce.

B: Read and appreciate Ulysses by James Joyce.

C: Run the ING New York City Marathon to raise money for Autism Speaks.

D: Run the Bryan-College Station Marathon, don't raise money for Autism Speaks, and let my sister pay my entry fee.

I'm leaning towards option D.

This is not an Autism Blog

The last thing this world needs is another autism blog. I know my readers can appreciate this photo of my son sleeping on the floor next to a Bissell Little Green carpet cleaner without reading a thousand words of self-indulgent backstory. Just know it was all worth it!

Merry Christmas Pushers!

MO' MONDAYS - SECRET SANTA from BONES WHEELS on Vimeo.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

I offer this greeting because, delivered correctly, Merry Christmas Everybody! carries less baggage than either Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas ending with a period, dropping the everybody. I say it with an inflection that offers no firm insight into my beliefs regarding the existence or non-existence of Christ or even a triune god. Hopefully believers and non-believers alike can all appreciate my greeting for what it is, my wish that everybody is able to enjoy the holiday as he wishes to enjoy it, in peace, with family, food, fun, and some reflection too. Merry Christmas Everybody!

Culling Pandora

It's an art, Pandora is. It's mind is very complex, making the oddest associative leaps like predicting that someone who likes a Ronnie James Dio song from the 80s will also like an Alice Cooper song from the 70s. Thinking about it now, I guess there is some degree of commonality between the two, but it isn't obvious and the prediction was wrong, at least in my case. I did not like the Alice Cooper song. My Pandora strategy up till now has been to use as many as ten seed tracks and then use the like and dislike buttons to more precisely sculpt it's understanding of my musical tastes. This has not been working. It's as if liking one song and disliking what it thinks is a similar song confuses it and causes it to make crazy guesses, crazy wrong guesses. Today I tried something different. I left my disliked songs in place, because I still dislike them, but I cleared my likes from more than fifty to about ten. I also trimmed my seed tracks to just five. I'll see how it goes for a few days but I've been listening now for three hours without a single stinker. I think I might be on to something!

My seed tracks:

Bring Me To Life (Live) by Evanescence
Someone Like You by Adele
Jolene (Live) by The White Stripes
Covered In Rain (Live 2004) by John Mayer
Put Your Records On by Corinne Bailey Rae

If you have a mind to, create a new station called Dave Mows Grass with these seed tracks and you can hear what I'm hearing. Post your own seed tracks and artists and I'll give yours a try, too. It'll be fun!