ethan

Did you miss the DNC?

Well, after my big post about the DNC, I missed last nights coverage. I know, last night was the big one. But as you may know I have more important things going on:) But I still want to see some of the speeches. I found this website that has all of the speeches as quicktimes or as down loadable MP3s. Check it out:

http://www.dems2004.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter3.asp?c=luI2LaPYG&b=125919

The Complete News Skim

Jay Pinkerton's Weblog has a comic book on line it called News Skim. It's an odd collage type comic that mixes up pop culture and politics with bizarre results. Jay Pinketon is a writer who works for National Lampoon as well as other print work. I follow his blog regularly, he's pretty funny. But he's not for people who are sensitive to fowl language or suggested... uh stuff, in other words if your sensitive to that kind of thing, stay away. Otherwise check it out:

http://www.jaypinkerton.com/blog/archives/000858.html

Happy Birthday DAD!

Yep, it's my dad's birthday today. Everyone wish him well and visit his wishlist on amazon.

The DNC

So I've been watching the DNC.

I didn't expect last night coverage to be anything special. Monday night had Bill Clinton and I didn't think anyone could top him (man he's good, I miss him). But last night was great, one of the best.

All I have to say is: "Sign me up for Barack Obama for 2008!" This was the first time I've heard about Barack Obama, so I have to learn more about him. But his speech last night won my vote. If you missed it, check it out:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3624700

Teresa was good, she said some great things and will make a great first lady. But I didn't feel like her speech was all that exciting. The first part of her speech was good, and I liked the part about hoping one day intelligent women would be seen one day as intelligent people like men are and not as intelligent women. But I felt the second half of her speech didn't hold up or at least it dragged on.

Also I've been watching The Daily Show's coverage of the DNC, very funny, I'd recommend watching that as well.

If you missed Clinton's speech, you can find it here:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3621101

It's going to be weird when John Kerry gets there, I don't know if he can top what's already been said.

Down

So you may have noticed that this website went down. It was my fault, I lapsed on my subscription. But it should be back up for everyone. Sorry for the delay.

FINAL

I just finaled a shot at work yesterday. I don't know how to express how unbelievably cool that is. You see they gave me this great shot with lots of subtle acting in it, it was really cool to get because it showed that they had some confidence in my ability to pull it off. But I was a bit depressed about it, as cool as it was, I thought that there was no way I could finish it in time. Allison was sure to deliver the baby before then and then the shot would be handed off to someone else to finish it (the show must go on). This made me grumpy and would explain some of my prevous posts. But despite all odds I did finish it. I called up Allison and told her it was safe to uncross her legs.

The main thing is when we deliver our kid, I want to focus all my attention on her. I don't want to be distracted. I knew that if I didn't final that shot that it would be lurking in the back of my mind despite how much I try to push it out. I really didn't want that.

There's one weird thing that I learned about myselfe on this shot. They gave me three weeks to animate it, at first I really pushed myself hard to finish in those three weeks. I thought three weeks would be all I had left before our kid was born. But by the end of that time the shot was looking bad and I had barely scrached the surface. I started to assume that the shot was lost and I would never be able to finish it. This made me depressed but it also made me start to relax (if it was lost there was nothing I could do, bla bla bla). When I relax I do better work and I worked a lot faster. Weird hu? Now if I could just force myself to relax more often...

Veggie Gumbo

Last weekend I spent some time in the kitchen making some food for us to freeze. All of our baby classes said it would be a good idea to pick a recipe and double it. Then freeze half of it. That way you have extra food around. It's just a good idea to have some frozen meals around so you can focus on taking care of the baby. I decided to make Veggie Gumbo.






It's a recipe that I haven't made in a long time. I modified the recipe a bit to include shrimp and Veggie sausage.



I bought two pounds of shrimp. This drove the cats nuts, especially when it was cooking. When I was done I had to leave the pot on the counter top to cool before I could freeze it. Only one shrimp was nabbed and destroyed by Shadow.



Here's the recipe if your interested:

Veggie Gumbo Soup

(I find that this recipe needs a lot more salt and flower then it asks for. I also find it is best to cook the rice separate and serve the gumbo and the rice separate. This keeps the rice from getting too water logged.)

1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon unbleached white flower
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups chopped onions
1 teaspoon dried thyme
3 bay leaves
5 cups water or Basic Vegetable Stock
3 1/2 (1 28-Ounce can) chopped plum tomatoes
2 green bel peppers, seeded and finely chopped
3/4 cup uncooked long-grain white rice, rinced well
1 1/2 cups sliced okra, cut crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick rounds
1 teaspoon salt or more to taste
fresh-ground black pepper to taste
4 cups coarsely chopped mustard greens or kale
Hot chilly sauce, to taste

Variation:

Added Veggie sausage and/or chicken
Add 1 pound peeled large shrimp (you can take the tails off by hand if you'd like...pansy)

1-In a large, heavy-bottomed sauce pan, heat the butter over medium heat. Add the flour, and stir with a wooden spoon until the roux turns light brown (it will brown further over the next few minutes, raux can quickly cross the line between brown and burnt to watch it). Add the garlic, onions, spices and thyme. Stirring constantly with a spoon, cook the mixture for another 2 to 3 minutes, being careful not to burn it.

2-Add the water or stock a cup at at time, stirring with a whisk to prevent any lumps from forming. Then add the tomatoes, peppers, rice, okra and salt and pepper. Bring the soup to a boil, then turn the heat to low, cover the soup, and simmer it for 30 minutes. Add the mustard greens or kale, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Taste, add the hot sauce, and adjust the seasonings if you like. Serve the soup hot.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

Allison and I just finished watching Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.

Outfoxed is a excellent documentary about Fox News. There's so much to say about it I'm not sure where to begin.

Fox News is definitely not "fair and balanced," it's not even news! And after watching this documentary I think it's safe to say that Fox news is out and out propaganda for the current administration. The documentary shows that Fox News even gets it's daily scrip from the current administration. (I don't want to say that the current administration is Republican, because they don't seem to be showing Republicans like behavior.) In fact you can argue that Fox News handed the presidency to GW. Fox was the first to unfairly declare him the winner and all the other networks followed suit. The truly scary thing that the movie shows is other news sources have started imitating Fox in order to keep up. CNN is just like fox these days so is MSNBC, ABC, you name it.

Outfoxed is good, but hard to watch. I don't watch Fox News for a good reason. It's in-your-face, it's angry, lots of flashing logos. It's just hard to watch. Outfoxed has a lot of Fox News potage, you you kinda have to watch it.

Now it's hard to say that Outfoxed is a fair and balanced reporting of Fox News, but Robert Greenwald does an excellent job of showing you information. Unlike fox news, he backs it up everything he tells you.

Now the interesting thing to me is the fact that Robert Greenwald didn't clear any of the potage of Fox news from the Fox News corporation before using it. Mr Greenwald claims that he's using this photage under the terms of "Fair Use". And he's certainly correct. You can't make this kind of documentary without showing Fox News. You need the lights, the sounds, the graphics. Robert Greenwald's idea is to get the film out there as fast as possible and let people decide for themselves what they think. That's why it's out on DVD before it hits the theaters. If enough people see it he can use that to sway his side for "Fair Use" if he tries to show it theatrically, it'll get shot down before it even hits the screen.

That's why I encourage you, if you are at all interested in this movie to go pick up a copy of it. You can buy it off the Outfoxed website or on amazon for 9.95 You can also see the trailer for the movie on it's website:

http://www.outfoxed.org/

Also the people who helped put the movie together got so obsessed with watching fox, they formed their own blog:

http://www.newshounds.us/

The Daily Show

The Daily Show as been getting better and better. They recently did a show on the Election/Terrorist scare. It's a must see show. You can check it out here:

http://video.lisarein.com/dailyshow/july2004/elections/

I have to warn you, the files are rather large, you might want to save them to disk (click on the link, then right click->save link target as.. for each mov) and watch them later.

I’ve been a real jerk this week.

As some of you may know, due dates are an arbitrary thing. Doctors don’t really know when you are going to give birth. There’s a four week span when they suspect that you are going to give birth. The due date is just the date smack-dab in the middle. I like to refer to that four week span as our due date zone.

When Allison and I started to approach our due date zone, we started to get really excited. In fact about a week before our due date zone we were packed and ready to go. Sure there were a few things we hadn’t really taken care of yet, like the baby monitor and a few minor things around the baby’s room but we knew that four weeks was a long time. Most first time moms deliver about eight days past their due date. So we knew we had a bit of time before she made her appearance, and we could still get stuff done.

We also knew that you could only be on edge and excited for so long. At some point you just have to relax and let things happen. Now, relaxing doesn’t mean everyone around you is relaxing. In fact I think that everyone at work assumed that Allison’s due date zone started when she took off from work. Most people were surprised when I told them that we had not reached our due date yet. In fact life at work has stared to get really annoying because of this fact. This week I couldn’t walk from my desk to the bathroom without getting stopped by twenty people who all ask me the same twenty questions. This drove me mad because I was always giving the same twenty answers, which meant I was repeating myself a lot.

Add that to the fact that work for me hasn’t been all that easy this week. As I said before I’ve been struggling to get to know the new characters and the new directors, new style, new everything. Allison can attest to this fact. If I’ve had a frustrating day, I’d come home all grumpy and all I’d want to do is sit around and not talk. On a good day I come home cracking jokes.

Well one grumpy day I had a friend come ask me how Allison is doing and if there were any contractions yet. Well I was fed up. This was a close friend of mine so I thought I could be open with her. I kindly explain my situation to her. Mostly I just wanted to bounce my thought off of someone to see if I was a jerk for even feeling this way. Apparently I am a jerk. After explaining my situation to her she immediately gave me a face, ran to her desk and started instant messaging her other friends in the office. You could hear them typing to each other and giggling.

Clickity clickity clickity click

Tee he he he

Clickity clickity clickty click

Tee he he he

There wasn’t much I could do but let my ears burn. It was pretty easy to see that while I was the but of the joke that yes, I was also being an jerk.

The thing that I’ve come to realize this week is the fat that I have friends and family who are excited about the fact that were going to have a baby. There’s not a lot of ways for them to express their excitement so they ask me questions. If all I can do is politely tell them the same story over and over, then I’d just have to get used to it.

I know it doesn’t end here. Once our baby enters the world there will be a whole new set of questions, and a whole new set of stories to tell. It’s good to have friends, and I hope that they’ll allow me to be an jerk, as I figure this stuff out.

In the meantime I have a whole new slew of questions that are being asked of me. They all have to do with me snapping to my friend about asking how Allison is doing:)

One Hit Wonder Followup songs

I love McSweney's:

P O S S I B L E F O L L O W - U P S O N G S
F O R O N E - H I T W O N D E R S .

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/onehit.html

Out Foxed

I heard about this on "On The Media" over the weekend. It's a Documentary on Fox News called: "Out Foxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"

You might ask yourself how he got Fox to give him the rights to the news clips that he used. Well, he didn't. He knew that there was no way that Fox would ever let him use those clips, so his idea was to make the DVD and get it out there and then deal with Fox News and the ownership issue. I'm interested to see how it turns out.

Check out the trailer:

http://www.outfoxed.org/

Reading Books and Other Escapism Stuff

I just finished Cory Doctorow's Book Estern Standard Tribe. Its a quick read but its very good. It's a science fiction book that takes place in the very near future. It's all about the development of chat-rooms, cell phones, and redesigning things. Very geeky I know. But I like Cory's way of not describing every little thing and allowing you to figure it out as you go through the book. That way of writing has a strong draw to it, you want to keep reading so you can figure out what the heck he's talking about. Very few authors can pull off writing like this without being annoying. The only people I can compare it to are: Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. The next book I'm reading is "Treasure Island," mostly due to the fact that I really enjoyed the film "Pirates Of The Caribbean" and I'm in the mood to read more about Pirates. And after that I plan on reading "Choke". The Defective Yeti gave "Choke" a interesting review so I'm going to give it a go.

You'd think that with a baby arriving at any second (really, It could be any second) I wouldn't be reading science fiction and pirate books. That I'd be reading more books about babies and child care. Truth is, I have been. I have a small hillside of books and magazines that Allison and I have been going though. Allison and I took our last child care class last week, we learned how to change a cloth diaper and everything. But at this point I have to say, I'm all child cared out. Allison tells me she feels the same way. We've been doing nothing but read and talk about babies for months now. Now we're ready to just get the child out into the world and move on to the next stage. That last child care class was really hard on me. It's all been theory up tell now, I know things are going to be different in reality, and I'm eager to get on to that stage. Part of me feels like I should be reading more so I don't "screw things up" with the child, but at this stage, I just can't do it any more.

The other thing is I just started working on this new film. It has a very different style then Shrek. Which is a good thing. I really, really, really like the new style. It just the kind of thing that I've been wanting to do for years! But I'm having to switch gears. They gave me this great shot, it has lots of acting and emoting and stuff. Everything that an animator dreams about getting. But I'm working on it like a race car driver with lead weights in his pants and training wheels (sorry, I know that analogy makes no sense). I just can't go that fast because I'm having to relearn a lot of things, and I've never been too quick to learn stuff. And on top of that I might not be able to finish the shot because, as I said before, Allison could be having the baby at any second now. Which means I'll be at home with the baby and someone else will finish my shot. I understand, the show must go on, but the shot is a mountain I'd like to conquer, I’d hate to not finish it! I’d feel like I never got the chance to finish learning what I needed to learn from the shot.

So all of that leads me to one thing when I come home from work. Escapism. With the pressure of becoming a new father, and the pressure of having to perform at work both coming to a head...I try and relieve some of that pressure with a bit of escape. If I can come home and escape with some pirates or a good romp in the future for a couple hours each day, then I'm one happy camper.

I noticed soon after my brother had his baby, that he too started to read a lot more. He said it's because you just don't get a chance to go out as often as you'd like, but I think I'm starting to understand why.

4 Day Weekend

Shrek 2 has made more then 400 million. That's more money then any animated film has ever made. That's not counting how much money it'll make internationally and how much money it'll make on DVD (when it comes to DVD). It's now safe to say that Shrek 2 is a Billion dollar enterprise. Because of this, they gave us Friday off.
We already had Monday off. Not because we made the company even more money, but because of the fourth of July. Well, technically the forth is a Sunday, but they don't want to go into holiday deficit. Because of this major faux pas, I got a four day weekend this weekend.

Not that I'm complaining mind you.

I like my days off, but when it's July and your home with a pregnant wife that means it's list time. And this weekend, boy did I have a great big list!

Most of the list, obviously, is about the upcoming spawn. We're looking at buying a four door car from someone at work (it's very difficult to put a car seat in the back of a 2-door car). I've been painting a mural on the wall. We had to pick up some curtains and curtain rods for the baby's room. And cleaning, lots of cleaning. When you've been living the swinging party scene as long as Allison and I have, there's a lot of stuff you need to clean before you're expect to bring a baby into the house.


But that didn't stop us from having Muffins. Every Saturday morning, Sunnyvale has the Farmers Market. And every Saturday morning you can find Ethan and Allison waking up, driving four blocks from our house to the market for Crepes and a look at what's fresh in "fruit and vegies" this time of year.

Well I can tell you, we've officially entered Blueberry season. For six measly bucks (that's less money then we made from one person seeing Shrek 2) you can buy a huge bag full of blueberries, about a quart of blueberries. That means we've had blueberry pancakes and blueberry muffins, blueberry you name it.

Everyone needs to take time out for fresh blueberry muffins! They're made from SCRATCH!