Over at ThinkGeek I stumbled on the smoke ring gun. I was "I gotta have" at first sight. I mean is shoots cool, floating smoke rings!!!

Well, it arrived in the mail yesterday and the kids and I have almost gone through a whole bottle of smoke fluid (which is A LOT of smoke rings). So standing over the stairs (where there are overhead lights that make the rings stand out) you can find us shooting smoke rings.

There is a "speed" setting on the gun which sets the speed that the smoke rings speed away from the gun. The current game is to shoot a slow ring then switch to fast rings and try and shoot through the slow moving ring.

The TechTV interview of us has been showing around the world. They say they have a large presence in Asia. I can believe it since I’ve been chatting with people from Indonesia and Hong Kong. Some nice email and pleasent chats from people around the world.

Give a man a fish and he owes you one fish. Teach a man to fish and you give up your monopoly on fishing.

Spent the night blogging...

Almost wet my pants reading Scylla's halarious story on The horror of blimps over at The Straight Dope.

Back To Iraq 2.0 is by a former AP reporter and he relates stuff he's heard from his contacts. It's more news from the ground rather than the "news" and position statements that we usually get from the US press. I don't know what his position is but this is the raw news.

Speaking of raw news, don't forget Warblogs:cc.

Picture Yourself has a cool concept of a collection of pictures of people taken by themselves. The 800+ entries there range from the introspective to the nerdy to the just fun.

I’ve been grumbling about all the talk shows on the radio. Even the music stations I usually listen to are now full of talk shows. One does this show around home commute time that’s just a bunch of guys just sitting around and shooting the bull. Now, radio people are not dummies and they have done the listener numbers and they must have concluded that these shows make money. So, I was thinking about whether the RIAA was soaking up so much money that it was cheaper to just have people sit and talk rather than play music or any other rational reason that would explain all this talking and lack of music. Last night I was riding home about 10pm and trying to find some music and I kept finding the music stations with talk shows. Why no music? Arghh. Then it struck me, maybe the audience doesn’t want music. Maybe they want to talk. Or, at least, hear other people talk. What if the reason that CD sales are down is because a new generation of listeners does not hanker after the “golden age” of music but instead hankers after conversation and interaction? There is some sense to this. Just like my parents witnessed TV shows changing from variety shows to sitcoms, I am watching sitcoms turn into reality shows. MTV doesn’t play music videos – they now play “road” shows. Radio is not a music source, it is a conversation source. And that doesn’t even get into the Internet and chat and blogs. Maybe the type of content is what’s changing. Maybe people these days want talk.