Avery Gray posted a thing on her blog showing which celebrities she most resembled. I figured I'd give it a shot because everyone has certain celebrities that they're told they resemble, but I never hear the same name twice. So, let's let a computer decide.

According to the MyHeritage website, the eight celebrities I most resemble are...




Goran Visnijc? That's my celebrity doppleganger? Who the hell is that? I mean I see a VAGUE resemblance, but doesn't he have to be a celebrity in order to be my celebrity look-a-like? Christ, at least I have a blog. Maybe I'm his celebrity look-a-like.

My #2 match is Kian Egan. Who? He doesn't look the vaguest bit like me.

Now, as for Charlize Theron and Christie Brinkley, those are obvious choices. Dead ringers.

Harold Ramis? I guess we both have two eyes. Close enough.

Serena Williams? WTF!?

And the list gets rounded out with Anakin and Colin Farrell. I've read computer science papers that tried to prove that computers are incapable of generating randomness. I think this disproves those theories

Avery's list at least resembled her! I decided to pick another picture from the same date and try again. I wanted to know if the website came up with the same results twice, or at least did better the second time....



Ta dah!

Those people at MyHeritage really nailed it this time. I always thought of myself as a combination of Rosanna Arquette, Laura Branigan, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Mostly Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (obviously).

So, uh... that's me.

Here's a short list of jobs I would suck at:

• Ballerina
• Color consultant
• School spokesman

So, guess what I did for three hours on Saturday? I'll give you a hint, it didn't involve distinguishing between antique white and eggshell white or dancing on my hairy little toes. Instead, I was a spokesman for Daisy's elementary school.

The San Francisco Unified School District had a school fair this weekend, where representatives from every school set up a booth so that panicked prospective parents could ask questions about the schools for precious Gavin Jr. or little Hillary.

Of course I don't know the answers to any school questions, but when the PTA President sent out an email last week begging (BEGGING!) for volunteers, I raised my virtual hand.

"I won't know what to say!" I warned in my email.

"Just consider me an emergency backup!" I emphasized.

So, of course I found myself stationed at the school booth from 12:00 to 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, smiling at strangers and forcing myself to utter the words "Do...you...have... any... questions?" and then praying that they didn't.

Picking a school in San Francisco is a daunting task. There are language immersion schools, arts schools, charter schools, schools with good test scores, blah blah blah. Additionally, there's a super complicated and opaque equation that dictates what school a kid gets assigned to. The equation takes into account the parent's preference, their location, and various cryptic demographic factors. Most folks don't get their first choice, and even fewer end up going to their "neighborhood" school. The end result is that the school choice process is an astonishingly stressful one.

Imagine you're a parent trying to navigate through the byzantine bureaucratic layers. You go on school tours, you attend workshops, and eventually you go to the school fair, brimming with questions:

"What's the teacher turnover rate?"
"Is there an English Language Development program?"
"How many hours a week does the librarian work?"

Then, you encounter me. I know the answers to none of these questions. Instead you get to hear me say "It's a really good school!" and then I make up facts about the curriculum.

So, to the San Francisco parents who had the unfortunate luck to encounter me on Saturday afternoon, you have my sincerest apologies.

What is it about baseball players that only allows them to express happiness by gathering in a circle and jumping up and down? I could totally go for a pitcher-mound dance?

If I had to pick a theme for the last few days, that theme would be: DEATH.

But not in the bad way.

Last week I wrote about my upcoming battle against the jungle in my backyard and my struggles against the ant invasion in my kitchen. I am happy to report progress on both fronts (and by progress, of course, I mean death to my enemies, and by enemies I mean ants and pollen-producing plants).

Here's the ant update. I implemented the three-phase battle plan I discussed earlier. I secured the perimeter of the house with Raid. I set out ant traps to allow the little bastards to poison themselves and their queen, and I sprayed any kitchen counter encroachers with 409/Windex. The number of ants did seem to diminish over the week. Then, on Thursday night, something amazing happened.

As I entered the kitchen to get myself a TV snack (mmmmm, chocolate), I spotted an unusual creature on the kitchen floor. It looked like a super ant. It was mostly ant shaped, but longer. It appeared to be the queen ant, and she was walking really strangely, almost staggering.

This was it! The queen! The final battle! The boss battle of ALL TIME!

I grabbed a newspaper and rolled it up. Then I juked to the left, the feigned right, then backed up slightly, then stutter stepped to the right. She had no idea what she was up against! After I dazzled her with my footwork, I slammed the newspaper down on her regal antly head. She was dead. Death to the queen. God did not save her.

The following day I saw two more ants and I windexed them away. Since then, nothing. I'm not fully ready to declare victory because it hasn't rained in over a week, so they may return the next time their home gets wet, but until then, HURRAY FOR ME! DEATH TO ANTS!

Meanwhile, I've been destroying plants in my backyard. I spent hours today chopping down foliage with loppers, shovels, and saws. My tender little computer programmer hands are scraped and blistery.

Then, after hearing from 4th Sister and everyone else about how my great composting pile will really just turn into a rat nest, I decided to throw some money at the problem. I bought an electric chipper and dragged it into my yard. So, after cutting down bunches of branches, I ground them down into tiny little wood chips with my handy dandy chipper.

I've done various gardening tasks during my 30+ years. I did a fair amount when I was a kid with my father, and I've done the odd day here and there in my own house since then. I can honestly say that feeding branches into a chipper and watching them turn into tiny little bits is the most satisfying yard work I've ever done. I can't make plants grow very well, but I sure as hell can kill them well now. I can kill them to smithereens!

So, I'm winning TWO land battles. Look out, Asia!

At no point during the day do I ever say to my self, "Self, let's find new chores to do!"

There are already plenty of maintenance chores to do in my day. I wash the dishes. I brush my teeth. I randomly bark out nags to the child. These things take too much time already. Not a day goes by when I don't consider saving time by combining chores, like, for example, pissing into a catheter while making the bed. Obviously that combination was a joke (I never make the bed), but you get the idea. Too many chores.

Hank, on the other hand, is all about big projects. She's always thinking about plans for reorganizing the house, getting a new husband, or alchemy.

"So much lead!" she'll moan, and, suddenly she's drawing matter transmutation diagrams in bed. One day she'll invent husband alchemy and *poof* this blog will be replaced by a much better one.

Anyway, the other day she decided to look at our backyard. She saw this:
The vaguely trapezoidal area outlined in black is our backyard. You can see the dirt and construction trash on the top level, and then the rest of the stuff in upper 2/3rd of the outline is the lower part of our sloped backyard, affectionately known as "the jungle".

Shortly after we had our yard landscaped (about 5 years ago), I realized that I had more backyard than motivation. So, I concentrated on keeping the top level alive, and I left the bottom 2/3rds to die. Today, as you can see, either because I am incompetent, or because nature has a sense of humor, the top section is almost entirely dead, and the bottom part has flourished into a nearly impenetrable block of foliage.

Hank brought a landscape designer to the house a couple weeks ago and they examined the yard (from a distance, of course). The landscape designer determined that in addition to our yard being a visual blight, nearly every single plant in there produces pollen and is a contributor to the hay fever suffered by Hank and Daisy.

So, all but six of the plants must go. The idea is that we'll remove them, somehow, and replace them with plants that are non-allergen-producing and easily maintained. I'm thinking that that kind of magical bush is made of concrete, but I'm not a big fancy landscape designer, so Hank is ignoring my advice.

The to-be-removed plants vary in size. The smallest ones are about as big as me, and the biggest ones are the size of a small car. Somehow, they all need to disappear. Complicating this effort is the fact that we have no side access to our yard. All of these plants either have to go through our house, or we have to take advantage of our neighbor's access through their psychotically clean garage. Both of those options give me hives (as do several of the plants in our yard). So, we brought in a professional "hauler" to give us a quote on removing and hauling away the jungle. His estimate came to $1,100.

Those are U.S. dollars.

So, guess who is going to try and remove all those plants himself with his tiny little computer programmer arms? No, me! Then, instead of hauling them all away, I'm going to create a giant compost pile, which has already been given the moniker "mulch mountain".

This plan can't possibly fail.

Of course, I may need to start crapping while brushing my teeth to make the time for this effort, but if it'll save me $1,100, it's worth it.

Hilarity will ensue.

What does it mean to be a man?

I'm not talking about puberty or bar mitzvahs. I'm talking about when your mindset changes from the carefree thoughts of a boy to the responsibility-laden reflections of a man. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly that change takes place. For some people that day is when they first get a full-time job. For others, it's when they accept the financial burden of home ownership. For many, it's when they become a father.

For me, I think that day was a few years ago when I decided I would start eating brussels* sprouts again.

I've never been a very picky eater, but ever since I was a kid, brussel sprouts have been on my Yucky list. I happily avoided them for decades, but then one day in my early thirties, I decided it was time to try them again. It wasn't that I though they had suddenly become delicious behind my back, but it didn't seem very grown-up to continue childhood eating patterns.

I ate a few that day and found that although they weren't as bad as I recalled, they were still fairly unpleasant. Although they get props for having a unique taste, that taste is a little bitter and not very enjoyable. Regardless, I recognized that they were good for me, so I've added them to our regular shopping list and they've become a couple-times-a-month staple on our dinner table. It was the manly thing to do.

Then, last year, we went out to dinner at a highly touted restaurant called Firefly. I deliberately ordered the roasted brussels sprouts appetizer just to see if this well regarded kitchen could turn even unlikable brussels sprouts into something tasty. I was amazed to find that they had succeeded. They were clearly brussels sprouts magicians.

Last month Hank tried her hand at roasting brussels sprouts (instead of the usual steaming we do). I was delighted to find that she had suddenly become a brussels sprouts magician.

The truth soon dawned on me. Brussels sprouts are DELICIOUS if you roast them. Somehow, the roasting (lightly coated in olive oil, with a dash of salt and fresh ground pepper) takes away the evil bitterness and replaces it with an unexpected sweetness. I guess they get carmelized or some such kitchen nonsense.

They're now my favorite vegetable. I steal some off the rack when they come out of the oven, and I pop an extra few at the end of my dinner. It would be a minor stretch to say that they're like candy, but they're pretty damn good. I look forward to eating them. Yummy!

It's like I'm a boy all over again.


*Holy cow, I just learned that they're called brusselS sprouts and not brussel sprouts. Thanks, Google, but crikey, when did that happen?

I've tried being calm. I've tried logical discourse. I've tried yelling. I've tried limb-breaking violence. None of those have worked. I am normally a patient and loving man*, but I've been ignored for two solid days now. The sanctity of my home has been violated for too long, so it's come to this.

I will kill them.

I will kill their brothers, sisters and cousins. I will kill their parents, children, neighbors, coworkers, and lovers. I will kill them all. I will kill their queen.

An Open Letter to the ants in my kitchen:

Dear ants,

Do you remember Friday, October 19th? You probably don't. It was probably just a day, like any other day, where pheromone X led you down path Y to food item Z. In this case, however, path Y led to my kitchen.

I thought we had a deal. The deal was that you stayed out of my house, and I stayed not killing you. Now, I understand that mistakes happen. I'm sure that the construction in our house (and by construction I'm referring to the weekly visit by a subcontractor where he hammers a single nail into a piece of wood, and then carefully removes the nail so as to leave no trace of any progress) has disturbed your normal foraging paths. Also, the beginning of this year's rainy season has undoubtedly thrown your usual methodical food gathering patterns into disarray.

I get this. I'm a reasonable man. However, all that being said, get the fuck out of my kitchen.

Lord knows I'm not the best communicator. I'm sure Hank has dozens of stories about times when I was unclear about my feelings or what I needed done to my penis, but I think I made my point clear on Friday morning when I killed every single one of you in sight. I sprayed down hundreds of you with counter soap and then squished any stragglers with my thumb. Was that not effective communication? Do we need to do some mirroring exercises?

Echo this back to me: I will kill you all.

If there was some pheromone I could spray on the ground with my butt to convince you to leave, I would do that for you. Like I said, I'm a reasonable man. However, although my butt does emit a variety of unpleasant odors, none of them have convinced you to vacate my kitchen, so I've moved to Plan B. That's the plan where I kill you all.

Today I stocked up on Raid Ant Spray. I used that to spray the perimeter of my house. If you're outside of my house, you should probably stay here. If you're already inside, then please come and enjoy some death.

I also bought ant traps. They are filled with death and are quite delicious. I encourage you to share some of the deathiness with the queen. Please.

I'm also fully loaded up on 409. That's the stuff I keep squirting that kills you. Remember dying today? That was the 409! It's the last line of defense. It's also quick and kind of fun.

So, pick your poison, ants. I've got three ways to kill you, not including my blood-thirsty thumb or my "pheromone" filled ass.

Death to the queen,
Mike

* Literary license

This is the post where you start to hate me (more).

Daisy has been watching a new reality show called Kid Nation. (See, some of you are hating me more already). The premise is that they've taken 40 kids ranging from 7 years old to 15 years old (roughly), stuck them in a ghost town, and let them mostly manage things for themselves. They cook and clean and do some basic commerce.

Four of the kids are on a "town council" and they're tasked with making a couple of decisions on behalf of the other kids each episode. Often this includes choosing between two rewards, one of which is usually an instant gratification (e.g. a pizza party) and something more "responsible" (like a microwave oven). The town council usually makes the "responsible" pick and the rest of the kids moan and groan.

The theme of last week's episode was religion. and then the reward choice ended up being a decision between having a 9-hole miniature golf course installed in the town and receiving a set of holy books (a few Bibles, a Torah, a Koran, etc). The town council decided to let the masses vote, and in an outcome that I assume was dictated by savvy casting directors, the kids picked the holy books.

I discussed the show afterwards with Daisy.

"So, which would you have voted for?" I asked.

"Oh, the holy books," she replied quickly.

I was horrified. MY child wanted holy books? Most parents want their kids to share their religion and I'm no different except that my religion is the absolute absence of religion. Daisy saying that she wanted a Bible is like the son of a Fundamentalist preacher telling his father that he's an atheist, and gay, and likes my blog. It's that mortifying.

Daisy saw my eyes bug out of my head.

"But, daddy, I LIKE books! I like reading!"

I shook my head in dismay.

"Oh, baby, these are not the fun books you normally read. I mean, there's some pretty interesting stuff in the Old Testament, but mostly these books are REALLY boring. He begat him who begat her who begat that guy who begat the other guy. They're filled with stuff like that."

Daisy shrugged. "I like books."

That night in bed I turned to Hank.

"Hank! Daisy said she'd choose the holy books! I mean, I know that mini golf is a pretty crappy reward, but what if she really becomes religious one day?" I whined.

"Oh, it's inevitable."

"What? Why?"

"She's a joiner. She loves to join clubs. Joining a religious is part of the natural progression." Hank stated very matter-of-factly.

I moaned my disapproval.

I dread the possibility of life with religious offspring. So, now I'm undertaking Operation No Religion. What I haven't quite figured out is what tactic to take for this effort. Do I:

A) Tell her what I really think about religion (in a sugary sweet and palatable way) ?

or

B) Assume that all kids do the opposite of what their parents want, and use reverse psychology?

Choice 'A' seems more reasonable, but maybe I should treat this like I just found her with a pack of cigarettes. Maybe I should make her sit down and smoke the whole pack at once. I could buy a Bible and we could have mandatory Bible study each evening, where we read or smoke a page each night, until she rejects it out of sheer boredom.

This may not be the typical parenting issue, but I can assure you that it troubles me.

I got nothing today! Usually that stops me from posting, but not today. Today, I just feel like typing.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!

It's the classic typing sentence. At cocktail parties analysis of this sentence typically centers on the fox, who gets top billing. For my money though, the real intrigue starts when you get to the lazy dog. I mean, my god, how lazy would a dog have to be to just lie there while a streaking fox hurdles over him. It's not that the dog is sick, or tired, or generally incapable of following the most basic built-in dog instinct: chasing. It's just that the dog is that damn lazy. Epically lazy.

That's pretty impressive. Daisy would dig that dog.

Meanwhile, someone got to my blog today by searching on outty vaginas. Outty vaginas? I've seen my share of vaginas. Before I settled down with Hank, my legendary womanizing acquainted me with ONES of vaginas, so I know of what I speak here. Also, according to Yahoo, I am the #5 resource on outty vaginas, so I command some authority on the topic:

If you are looking for an outty vagina, you are looking for a penis.

And on one final note, if you really want to creep me out, file your nails. FILING A BODY PART! That is just an inhuman act. Oook.

Hi!

If you got to this blog by searching on "San Jose Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon" and "Official Pacer" and "Ran that one mile too goddamn fast" and "Asshole", congratulations, you found my blog!

I am so sorry. Last year I did a REALLY good job of pacing. I came in exactly on schedule, and my mile split times were consistent, bordering on metronomic. You should have run with me then. I was awesome. This year? Aw-something, but more "ful" than "esome"

The first couple miles were a little slow. I was so busy chatting the first mile that I didn't even see the Mile 1 marker, so I didn't get a chance to check my pace until two miles into the race. By that time, we were a surprising 45 seconds behind schedule. Doh!

My pacing partner and I agreed to pick up the pace a little bit. At the third mile marker we were.... still 45 seconds behind schedule. Doh! As it turns out, locking into our race pace was a little trickier than I had planned.

By mile 6 we had shaved our deficit down to 20 seconds and were running at a slightly faster pace. At least it felt like a SLIGHTLY faster pace. As it turns out, we were running about 50 seconds too fast.

50 seconds is a ridiculous amount to accidentally shave off a mile time. We blew that mile. It's like going to a target range and aiming your gun at the cardboard cutout of the rapist, and then accidentally shooting yourself in the throat. It's that big of a miss. We looked around after that mile and noticed that our little pack of people that had been pacing along with us had somehow disintegrated. Only a few stragglers remained.

Ugh.

After that we locked into our pace pretty well. We were about 30 seconds ahead of schedule, so we slowed down enough to eat up a few of those seconds each mile. We managed to reconstitute a bit of our "pack" of runners, but some members of the original group were nowhere to be found. I can only assume they were crying pitifully into their cups of Accelerade, demoralized by the departure of their "supportive" pacers.

We did have some successes. We had a lovely call-and-response cheer going in the first mile, and near the end of the race we successfully motivated a whole bunch of people to speed up and pass us by (which was pretty cool). We ended up coming in a mere four seconds ahead of schedule, and afterwards, a few people thanked us for our support and general pacing efforts, so it wasn't a complete disaster, but that one speedy mile will haunt me for the next year. 50 seconds! Crikey.

If I don't have my ability to be on time, what do I really have in life? Sure, my health and family and blah blah blah, but I LOVE being on time.

So, runners of San Jose, I apologize. Give me another chance in 2008.

Love,
Mike

We were talking about name-calling the other night at dinner. I decided that the conversation required some of my patented home-spun wisdom.

"Daisy, did I ever tell you what I used to say to kids who called me names when I was little?" I asked, planning to tell the story regardless of how she answered.

"No"

"I used to say this, 'I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me...'" and I made a helpful gesture showing something ricocheting off my chest, "'and sticks to you!'" and I gestured triumphantly back to Daisy, clearly demonstrating how the attempted hypothetical insult had backfired.

I beamed at Daisy. She eyed me warily.

I beamed at Hank. She smiled back at me encouragingly, the same way you smile at a three year old who shows you a pathetically unrecognizable finger painting of a dog. Yes, Mike, you're a very good daddy.

"That's what everyone used to say, right, Hank? It was what we all used to say when someone called us a name."

"That's right," she said supportively.

Daisy looked unconvinced.

"But then, it's like you're calling THEM a name. Then you're the name caller. We're not supposed to call names." Daisy replied.

"No. Nooooo. No, that's not it at all. The OTHER person is the name caller. You're just bouncing it back to them. " I explained.

"I think she's got a point, Mike" Hank interjected. "It kind of is like you're sinking down to their level."

"No way! You're not calling anyone names. You're just rubber here. Rubber can't help but bounce things back. Is it your fault you're rubber and they're glue? They're idiots for throwing names when you are so very bouncy and they are so very sticky."

"What if it's a trap?" Daisy asked.

"A trap? It's not a trap. It's rubber and glue. It's physics."

"No, what if they insult you just to make you say that rubber thing, and then once you've bounced the insult back to them, then they tell the teacher that you called THEM that name. They've trapped you!" Daisy leaned back in the bench, envisioning the punishments that would rain down on her upon the execution of the rubber/glue gambit, and shaking her head at the sudden turn of hypothetical events,

"She's right," Hank agreed.

Unbeekeepinglievable. This is not a world I want to live in. Kill me. Kill me, now.

This coming weekend I'm going to be a pacer for a local half marathon race. I was going to write a blog post about what that entails and why I think I'll be good at it, but I already wrote that post last year. So, let it suffice to say that I'm going to pace again this year and although it'll be hard to do it as well as I did in 2006 (when I crossed the finish line EXACTLY on schedule, to the exact freakin' second!), I plan on having another successful run.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw the movie "Into the Wild" this Saturday night. Hank had heard that it was good, and that's all I really knew about the flick going into it. She showed me a newspaper ad that was filled with words like "Astonishing!". I can't recall ever actually being astonished by a film, but I understand that words like that are the currency of the reviewing business. It's the same force that drives restaurant reviewers to describe a piece of chicken as sublime.

Really? Sublime? The chicken? Huh.

Anyway, some of my favorite movie experiences have been when I sat down in a theater with zero expectations or knowledge of the movie. Sadly, that wasn't to be the case here. As the opening credits rolled, I saw that it was written by Jon Krakauer.

Jon... Krakauer....

Some synapses in my brain fired... slowly. Eventually they connected with a few other synapses, who told two friends, and soon the correct information was dug out of semi-dormant nooks in my brain. I had read this book, or at least sizable chunks of it. The ending of the book popped into my brain.

Doh! I knew how this movie ended! Stupid semi-dormant neurons should have either stayed awake or stayed asleep!

It was still a good flick though. Solid performances and satisfying characters. Sublime.

What's this strange thing in my living room?


Is it:

A) The plastic bubble where we keep Daisy so she won't eat peanuts?

B) My hyperbaric programming cage?

C) Our pet, The Blob?

Oh, Blobby, how I wish that it were you. Instead, the answer is D -- none of the above. It's the plastic "wall" that separates the part of the house where we live from the part of the house where the contractors pretend to add another room to our house.

This job started back in March, and according to the "schedule" it should have been finished about three months ago. Of course, anyone who has ever worked with general contractors, knows that you don't believe their schedules. Even though IT'S THEIR JOB TO SCHEDULE THESE THINGS, you regard their schedule with the same skepticism that you would if your dog had come up with the remodeling schedule.

"Rover," you'd say patronizingly, "Suuuuure you'll be done in June. Who's a good-at-scheduling boy?"

But even though everyone knows that dogs suck at the logistics of scheduling subcontractors, somehow you delude yourself into trusting their sweet Golden Retriever eyes, and you fork over the big bucks. I mean, our contractor is really nice! And he seems very loyal too! The truth is, however, even the Border Collie of general contractors is still going waste months of time chasing their own tail instead of installing dry wall. Thankfully, cynics like me don't even trust Border Collies, so in my mind I doubled the time estimate that our contractor gave us.

One of the first things our contractor did was remove the outdoor staircase that gave us access to the backyard and the part of the house that they're adding. So, weeks would go by at a time when we had literally zero visibility into what they were doing. This was a brilliant maneuver on their part. Were they really building a room for us? Was it a dog fighting pit? Was this some reality show where they were trying to test our ability to trust them? We had no idea. Touché, Rover.

It's mostly been downhill since then. Occasionally there'll be a flurry of constructive activity, and then silence for weeks at a time. The last time I heard any work being done it was because they were removing the indoor staircase they had recently built. Apparently it didn't pass the city inspection. Sweet. Prior to that moment, I didn't think construction could go any slower. It didn't occur to me to factor in DEstruction.

So, that's what's up with our new room. In a couple weeks, this job will have taken double what they originally estimated, cruising right past the generous deadline I had in my head, and there's still plenty of work left to be done. Granted, the dry wall is up, but I'm sure it's just a matter of weeks before they take it back down again.

I hate contractors.

I'm no stranger to hyperbole. It can be great for making a point. For example:

George W. Bush is the stupidest anti-christ-iest President in history!

See, on the surface that seems obviously true, and even digging several levels deeper, it's impossible to disprove, but scholars from the future will eventually determine that as far as antichristiness goes, it's a tie between Dubya and Grover Cleveland. Non-consecutive terms? Devilry!

Usually I'm the guy debunking the hyperbole. I'm the snopes of exaggeration, applying the magnifying glass of qualitative analysis to human excitement. For example, I went running with my running group on Saturday. Partway through the run, one woman asked if I had seen Pam recently. I said that I hadn't seen Pam in months. Five seconds later, Pam biked past us.

The woman flipped out.

"No WAY!" she screeched. "I can't believe Pam just rode by! That was the weirdest thing EVER!"

"Ever? Weirdest thing ever? Nah. Weird, but not THAT weird." I panted.

"COME ON! THAT WAS THE WEIRDEST THING EVER!" she insisted.

"Are you kidding me? You saw someone from our athletic club, at a time when we exercise, in a place where we exercise. On a scale from 1, where 1 is 'I had cereal for breakfast', to 10, where 10 is 'Aliens just landed on earth!', where does this really fall?" I asked.

"Oh, nevermind."

That's why I don't have many friends. Anyway, Daisy saw the Nancy Drew movie a few months ago.

"How was it?" I asked.

"Great!" she enthused.

"Oh yeah? How great? On a scale from 1 to 10?"

"10!"

Whoa! A 10! Daisy really liked that movie, I thought. A month later she saw the animated movie, "Meet the Robinsons"

"How was Meet the Robinsons?" I asked

"Pretty good."

"How good is pretty good? On a scale from 1 to 10?"

"9."

Nine! Dang. She really liked that movie, I thought again. I continued this data gathering over the months, polling Daisy for numerical ratings each time she saw a movie. Without fail, each movie registered a 9 or 10. Only the movie "Sky High" deviated from this range, coming in at a SpinalTapian 11. It would appear that the Daisy Scale for movie ratings starts at 9 and goes to 11.

What have I learned from all this? Two things:

1) Humans can't be trusted.

2) It's going to take a long time to squeeze all the enthusiasm out of my eight year-old daughter's body.