Scott Cramer wrote this.

I just saw the Oliver Stone movie “World Trade Center”. It’s been almost five years since the September 11 attacks and somehow I totally missed the whole story about ex-Marine Staff Sargeant Karnes who drove to the World Trade Center site and was the man responsible for finding trapped police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno. And what about Chuck Sereika, a former paramedic with an expired license who was one of the other rescuers first on the scene to help the officers?

After getting home from the movie I started looking up some things online. Following is a quote from an article that helps explain why I might have missed Karnes’s and Sereika’s contributions.

But it’s also clear Karnes is a hero in a smaller, less national, less public, less publicized way than the cops and firefighters are heroes. He’s hardly been overlooked—the program I work for, 60 Minutes II, interviewed him as part of a piece on Jimeno’s rescue—but the great televised glory machine has so far not picked him. Why? One reason seems obvious—the cops and firefighters are part of big, respected, institutional support networks. Americans are grateful for the sacrifices their entire organizations made a year ago. Plus, the police and firefighting institutions are tribal brotherhoods. The firefighters help and support and console each other; the cops do the same. They find it harder to make room for outsiders like Karnes (or Chuck Sereika). And, it must be said, at some macho level it’s vaguely embarrassing that the professional rescuers weren’t the ones who found the two survivors. While the pros were pulled back out of legitimate caution, the job fell to an outsider, who drove down from Connecticut and just walked onto the burning pile.

Read the full article here.

Even with an event as historically significant and massively televised as the September 11 attacks, I’m shocked at how much media – and society – control what we hear and what we ultimately remember. Maybe if it had been Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan the “televised glory machine” would have been more interested.

I saw this at the meat counter. It was funny, yet disturbing (click the image for a larger version).

I guess I’m a hypocritical carnivore. I’ll eat it, but I don’t want to be reminded of what it looked like when it was alive!

Check this out… Download your next camera!

Linatree claims to have made the first free downloadable pinhole camera that you can print out, cut out, and assemble.

This is the coolest paper-based project on the web since Origami Boulder. 😉

The other night at bedtime, my daughter and I were playing a questions and answers game. I asked her, “What kind of things do you really like?”

Here are the things she listed – in order:

Princesses

Ducks

You

Hair stuff

Eye stuff

Makeup

Well… At least I got 3rd place. 😉

When you reach down to turn up the volume on the car radio and the knob won’t turn any farther, then you *know* it’s a good song. 😉

(“Land of Confusion” cover by Disturbed, in case you were wondering – and at the time this was written, you could stream the song from their site *hint hint*)

Okay, who knew? I guess I’ve had my head buried in the sand or something. Someone sent me a spammy message with pictures of an indoor ski facility in Dubai. Aside from the slanted “this is why gas is $3 a gallon so they can ski in the desert” message, it actually looked pretty darn cool.

Ski Dubai Resort Map (click for larger pic):

Ski Dubai Outside Pic (click for larger pic):

Ski Dubai Inside Pic (click for larger pic):

From the Ski Dubai official site, “Ski Dubai in Dubai Emirates Mall started in December 2005 is the worlds third largest indoor ski slope, measuring 400 meters and using 6000 tons of snow.” This place just opened up in December 2005 so I was giving myself a *little* leeway in not hearing the latest Dubai ski news, not being either a skiier or from Dubai – but third largest???

I did a little searching and it turns out these things are all over the place. It looks like the Dubai facility is the most grand (even if it is 3rd largest) but I’d expect that since it’s the newest.

So far as the spammy message I got showing the Dubai indoor ski slope and complaining about $3 per gallon gas, well, maybe we shouldn’t be so negative since we have our very own U.S. facility in the works. It will be part of a huge entertainment complex in the New Jersey Meadowlands and – insert American pride here – it will most likely blow the socks off anything anywhere else in the world from what I saw at their official webpage.

People in glass houses (building mammoth entertainment complexes and indoor ski slopes of their own) shouldn’t throw stones. 😉

It looked like an innocent bunny lawn ornament. Until we picked it up…

I was getting into my car and a “FOR SALE” sign caught my eye on the motorcycle in the next parking space. “$1,600 + Helmut”??? I got a chuckle out of the misspelling. Maybe the rider had taken one too many spills without his “HELMET”.

However, when I looked at the pictures again later…

…maybe not! 😉

I was feeling a little under the weather so I put a movie in for my daughter and layed down on the couch. Part way through the movie she came up to me and said she’d take care of me.

“Aww, cute” I thought.

She proceeded to climb up on top of me sticking her knee into my upset stomach and squishing my arm. “Ooph!” But it was only for a second and she settled in.

“Let me look at your eyes.” she said. Then she pressed her thumb into the top of my right eyelid and peeled it up and around the back of my head.

“A little more gentle doctor!” I told her.

“Okay.” She took the other eyelid and peeled it up only so far as my forehead. Then she put a small plastic compact on top of my left eye with the mirror facing down. As I peered into my eye at close range she told me to “Say ahh!” and looked into my mouth. “I know what you need to feel better.” she told me, and then disappeared up the stairs. “You need a baby in your stomach. That will make you feel better.” she called down.

“Huh?”

She came down the stairs with one of her babydolls and shoved it underneath my t-shirt. She crawled on top of me again, and this time pushed the “new baby” into my stomach with her knee.

“Ooph!” I repeated. “Careful doctor.”

She then pulled the blanket down off the back of the couch to cover me up – taking special care to double it up on top of me so as to block out 100% of the very nice feeling air conditioning. “Whew…”

“Here Dad, lift up your head.” and she pulled my head up off the pillow. She took out a plastic silver beaded necklace with a large purple jeweled amulet and secured it around my neck.

“Thanks honey.”

“You nap Dad. You’ll feel better now.”

As she went back to play with her Barbies and watch the movie, I laid my newly bejeweled head back down on the pillow and closed my stretched out sore eyelids imagining how funny I must look underneath a ton of blankets on a hot summer evening with the air conditioning blowing.

But you know what? I have to admit that my eyelids, once they snapped back into place, totally took my mind of the headache that I had. And the plastic babydoll under my shirt felt nice and cool against my skin, plus the pressure of the blankets and babydoll on my stomach made the queasiness feel better.

Who knew? My six-year-old daughter the doctor, that’s who. 🙂

I’m at work and I walk into the men’s bathroom. The door isn’t even closed behind me and I notice that the whole room smells like something dead rotting. All I have to do is a simple in and out with nothing stinky involved, but anyone seeing me come out of the bathroom and coming in next is going to think that *I* have something evil and decaying inside of *me* and that I’m the one who contaminated the public restroom. Sigh. Don’t even get me started about the people who leave pieces of toilet paper all over the floor. Is it really that hard to hit the bowl? On second thought, it’s probably the same person and even he is trying to escape the odor as fast as possible. Well, at least they flushed. I think.

I saw a big bright pink cardboard display of makeup at Walgreens with a full size headshot of Jessica Simpson and a “50% OFF” clearance sign.

I never used to mind her when I thought she was at least trying to be a role model to young girls. Heck, even when she was doing the ditzy blonde “buffalo wings – I don’t eat buffalo” thing, she was still almost the girl next door.

But geez… Dukes of Hazzard bimbo, sexy Pizza Hut commercials, public affairs, lingerie shoot in Maxim… Her whole image in the press is all about “me me me” and “look how pretty and famous I am”. It obscures any good works that might be out there and her ditzy behavior just starts looking moronic.

So I see the sign and think, “Too bad Jess, you discounted yourself as a human being, the rest couldn’t have been far behind.”

4th of July – Independence Day – We shoot off fireworks to celebrate our independence and freedom. It’s a celebration of and for the U.S.A. Right?

In the middle of our family fireworks, one explosion sent a small package skyward. As it started to fall back down again, a small parachute opened and a series of flags drifted gently to the ground.

Umm… What the heck? Since when did China and Japan co-celebrate all the ideals and freedoms of our 4th of July holiday? AND their flags get top billing over Old Glory herself?

I’m not mister patriotism…

…but c’mon! Redneck Monster Trucks and Nascar would make more sense than China and Japan! I’m surprised the fireworks company didn’t engineer it so that the American flag caught fire on the way down.

Sometimes my imagination takes over at the grocery…

Can’t you just hear them sizzling on the grill? 😉

I found an instance where “the 5 second rule” for food hitting the floor doesn’t apply.

My girlfriend and I were preparing a cheese fondue. She was carrying over the package of special (meaning more expensive than you’d normally pay for) crackers we were going to use for dipping. The package shifted in her hands and dumped a good portion of them on the kitchen floor.

I hurriedly picked up the crackers and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll eat these ones.” I knew full well that she never lets food that hits the floor go anywhere but the trash can.

“Ok.” she said.

About halfway through the fondue, I said, “So, since these were more expensive crackers, the 5 second rule doesn’t apply?”

She looked at me with a little half smile.

“And,” I added, “it’s okay for *me* to eat the floor crackers? You were actually *counting* on me to say I’d eat the floor crackers, weren’t you?”

The smile never leaving her face, she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, I swept.”

“No you didn’t!”

In a very childlike “oops you caught me” voice, she replied, “Yesterday…”

“Uh-huh,” I said as I continued eating my floor crackers – dipping each one that I’d picked up off the floor into the same fondue pot that she was using. “Don’t worry about it.” 😉

Does anyone else look in the toilet before you flush or am I just weird and all alone on this one? You know, like looking in the Kleenex before you totally crumple it up and throw it away. I *KNOW* other people have done this because I’ve seen them. The toilet thing… well, I’m not planning on watching anybody anytime soon. I just have a hard time believing that among the five billion people on this planet that I would be the only one. So this leads me to think that if I’m not, then maybe someone else has noticed the same thing I have with some toilets.

I’d swear they have a little porcelain trap door or something in the bottom.

Bear with me (yeah, ha ha, I said bear – get over it) here. When you are concentrating on your “effort” – let’s just leave it at that or who knows what search engines will pick me up for – and you receive the “plunk” sound of object meeting water, then you *know* that *something* is in the bowl. I mean, duh, right? So, you stand up, lean forward, whatever your style is, and before discarding cleaning materials into the bowl, you look to see what you accomplished. And you see… *nothing*! It’s almost like being cheated. C’mon, I did the work, now I want to just see the finished product before I move along! Like, 9 out of 10 times, there’s some evidence. It’s not like I want to take a snapshot or something, but when it’s there 9 times and then suddenly the 10th time nothing is there, well, aren’t you at least curious?

At first I just figured they rolled down and into the very back of the pipe but you just know from the tone of the “plunk” – and especially if there’s bottom splash factor in effect – that there is, like, *no way* it’s hiding in the back of the pipe! I don’t see any rabid carp swimming around the tidy-bowl-blue anywhere – so, what? Is this like the washer/dryer sock mystery? The missing pen dilemma?

Actually I hope not. I still sometimes think maybe it’d be fun to find the planet where all the missing clean socks go – all smelling of spring breeze dryer sheeets – sitting by mountainous piles of pens in all the colors of the rainbow. Now, however, if objects aren’t in the bowl and I havn’t flushed ’em, then I’ll wear one sock and go back to using pencils before I set one foot in any weird universal lost-and-found! So, yeah, I’m pushing for the porcelain trap door theory.

Some days you’re the artist.

Some days you’re the sidewalk.

The fine print reads:

Land includes spacious underground workshop complete with latest alien technology. Germ free alien autopsy room kitchen newly tiled to cover up green alien goo. Will throw in fixer-upper UFO German concept car no charge.

I’m *SO* calling my realtor!

Looks more like a one fingered salute to Stevie Wonder.

Maybe they shouldn’t have hired a blind graphic designer.