Seven years ago, Kelly and I adopted Ralphie, a dachshund with a really good temperament…for a dachshund. What that basically means is, Ralphie is very stubborn, doesn’t like to be trained, leaves “presents” when he is dismayed with us, thinks nothing of stepping on other dogs to get to his favorite spot on the couch, steals toys from the lil’est dog, O-Ren, and other stubborn like behavior. This is what he looked like when we adopted him (well, five months later):

and now…

Hard to believe it’s been seven years, but its’ been a pretty good seven years with the little ass.

At TAM6 I participated in the following demonstration:

(click here if the video doesn’t embed)

My brother and I, though, are so far in the back you can’t make us out. We did bend the spoons though, and the trick worked nicely.

…because apparently the FBI has time to investigate the recent leaks of new Guns n’ Roses tracks:

FBI visits blogger….

I guess this pretty much confirmsthat the tracks were legit, which is a cool thing, because they rock. I’ll post a review later.

Well, I’m back from TAM6, and it was probably the best overall TAM for me. The speakers were consistently interesting and I did get my interview with Michael Shermer. Because of his schedule and the setup of the conference I was only able to get 10 minutes, however, that is as many minutes as he appeared on The Colbert Report. I also found some new ideas for upcoming guests, and I hope some of those guests will be on in the near future.

I will write a guest by guest summary sometime, but for now, I will just say, it was one of the best times I’ve had learning about things ranging from real crime scene investigation to a spoon bending lesson from Teller. Just a great conference all around.

So, in short, episode 11 of the Libertarian Dime will have my interview with Shermer and our usual opinions on current events. TAM6 also made me more determined to keep going with The Dime, and to expand our offerings. And while I’m at it, I will need to plug my podcast again: http://thelibertariandime.mevio.com.

I saw a link to this story:

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/06/16/accidental-breast-reduction-hobbles-online-game-age-of-conan/.

I don’t remember a time in my life, teenager or not, where I would get outraged that the breast size of imaginary computer characters had been reduced. In fact, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t care. I have to admit, I cringed when I read, from the image it portrays of teenage male gamers. Ouch.

For some reason, the last couple years, I’ve had life changing events in the month of June. Two June’s ago, I married Kelly at the Stratosphere in Vegas. It was by far the cheapest chapel and had the nicest view. I can’t say that a whole lot has changed since then in terms of how Kelly and I act, but the tax benefits have been nice.

Last June, Kelly and I took possession of our first house, a 4900 square foot true ranch, that sits on 23 acre and has a 5 acre pond. I think we got it for a pretty good price, and I can’t imagine a house that fits our needs better right now. It has so much potential, so much in fact, that I often find it overwhelming in determining what we should do. I’ve already gotten very use to the expansive space in allows us to have, and I don’t know if I could easily go back to anything less than 4000 square feet. I know that sounds snobby, but that’s just how it is right now.

This June, I get to (hopefully) interview Michael Shermer this week at the Amaz!ng Meeting for my humble podcast, The Libertarian Dime. I believe I have more Schermer not-fiction books than I do of any other author, and I’ve subscribed to his magazine Skeptic Magazine for years, so this is a big deal to me. I’m obviously not a media person in my professional life, and my only in-person interview experience I have is grilling prospective employees for my company. Some of those interviews have gone well, some interviewees have emailed the CEO after feeling humiliated. So I guess my results vary.

All joking aside, I’m confident that it will go well. After doing eleven podcast episodes, my ease in doing a show has increased, and I’m a lot more confident in my abilities. I think it will go really well, assuming, I sack up and get the interview going.

The seventh episode is up now at http://thelibertariandime.mevio.com. The show continues to get better, and Jonathan and I continue to come up with more and more show ideas. I finally registered the domain “ldnetwork.tv” which is where we will eventually setup the new podcast network we’re launching. Bit by bit, here we come.

I listen to a lot of paranormal, conspiracy laden material. I’m a faithful listener of Coast to Coast AM, and I have a couple podcasts that I listen to now and then who talk about such things as alien-human hybrids, lizard men, human-ape cross breeds being used for armies here on Earth. Apparently, the Illuminati, Free Masons, Skull and Bones members, and “they” all want to crossbreed humans to create a super army to take over the planet. Well, if I were them, I would start with this particular being as a basis for crossbreeding:

This is Kaylee, by far the toughest living creature I have ever known. Over two years ago, her previous guardians abandoned her and two other dogs (one of which we also adopted, sweet Jayne), and it wasn’t until three weeks after abandonment that they were found. Because of her age, after being rescued, she was not easy to adopt out. The rescue group took care of her as best they could afford, fixing some of her teeth, getting her back up to a normal weight, and from what I can remember, working on her house training. Kelly and I saw her and Jayne on PetFinder.com, and wanting to adopt a pair, went out to meet them, and adopted them that night.

Since then, Kaylee has had two dental surgeries, one in 2007 and one just two weeks ago. The last one from two weeks ago is what convinced me she is the toughest being I’ve ever known. What the dentist told me made me realize how much tougher dogs are than humans. Let me explain. First, a previous dentist didn’t remove some teeth properly, so she had roots that were starting to abscess and probably starting to cause her pain. She had a tooth that was cracked and had a root exposed. One of her upper canines was completely dead, and the tissue around it was so damaged, she had a oral-nasal fistula. In short, her mouth was connected to her nose through the top of her jaw. She also had an abscessed bone from where the fistula was. The other upper canine was starting to go that direction as well, but the dentist was able to do a bone graft and save the tooth.

He told me flat out, that he believed there was no way she wasn’t in constant pain. Dogs can’t communicate to us directly, and if it hadn’t been for the in-depth x-rays we had done, no one would have known. Kaylee’s personality is such that you would have no clue. She’s a sweet dog, who just loves to be around us (Kelly more than I by far), and she is nice to all the other dogs. She doesn’t bark at people, despite all the problems she must have had with her previous guardian. She just loves to be loved. Oh, and eat. She loves to eat, and despite all the pain in her jaw, never stopped wanting to eat. Never a yelp of pain when she chewed, and never a bit of hesitation when you put the food bowl down. When I had a cracked tooth, I had to use an oral anesthesia to numb my tongue just to get through the day. She had abscesses and fistulas, and she acted like they were no big thing.

Two weeks ago, as I picked her up from the dentist, she looked a little tired after the surgery. The dentist warned me to keep her away from the other dogs for a little bit just to keep her comfortable. Five minutes after being home, just a few hours past surgery, she was begging to go outside and run around with the other dogs outside. And we let her. She ran all around the yard, did her back rolling on the grass, and had a great time. If humans had had the equivalent surgery, they’d be on the couch in a stupor recovering from the drugs. Not Kaylee, she was back to normal.

She is so touch as a matter of fact, that we barely notice a change in her attitude even though she is pain free now. She somehow was able to deal with all the pain and discomfort in a way that I don’t understand.

In conclusion, if the powers that rule the world from a shadow government ever cut me in and ask my advice, I’ll just point to the lovable rat terrier we call Kaylee. It doesn’t get any tougher than her.

After a length hiatus caused by my move into my new house, I’ve redone the look and feel of HellFood.com, to be more like a periodical than a personal blog. There will be new food reviews, more links, and now monthly Hellfood features where I will do extra research to explore a topic of interest to Hell Food readers.

So click on over to the new Hell Food!

Well..I’m a day late. Let me explain.

Anyone who knows me and my wife, know we’re atheist. On the Richard Dawkins scale of atheism, I rate even more atheist than Dawkins himself. I don’t think we should be discussing if there is a god or not, I think we should be discussing why people even ask such a silly question to begin with. Why don’t we debate the existence of pink, winged, unicorns while we’re at it?

Now I despite being an atheist, I’ve always celebrate Christmas, because my parents did. They never baptized me, never sent me to church, and never said anything either way when it came to religion and the connection to Christmas. You could say I had as secular a Christmas as one could have. Considering how commercial Christmas is now, and the litany of secular traditions now associated with the holiday, I never felt uncomfortable celebrating.

This year, however, in honor of our atheist convictions, we changed up the holiday. For starters, the central figure in our holiday is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all the accompanying traditions. Pasta and pirates play a big part in Pastafarianism, and Kelly really decided to go out all this year to celebrate the holiday we now call FSMas as well as the celebration of the first holiday in our new house. You can see all the decorations she did up here: Flickr Set. I think you will be impressed at the depth of her devotion. In addition to the name change, new decorations, we now celebrate on the 24th. The 24th is for presents, the 25th is for relaxing and using said gifts. The traditional FSMas meal is vegan lasagna with vegan tiramisu.

Because of the rather large purchase we made this year (our house), we kept gifts between us rather small putting a roughly $100.00 limit. Kelly early on went slightly over, so the limit ended up being $110.00 or so. When asking me what I wanted for Christmas, I kept telling her over and over again, all I really wanted was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. I thought it looked fun. The though of seeing a grown man play a small toy guitar was too much for Kelly apparently, and she said no way would she get me that game. Later, on a South Park episode featured GHIII and pretty much mocked exactly the same things Kelly did. So I thought my chances were pretty slim or non of actually getting it.

To my surprise, when I opened up my gift (it was the only gift), I saw GHIII staring back at me. The only thing I wanted, right there. Kelly had basically been messing with me the whole time, and actually bought the gift pretty early on. Apparently, the Wii version was hard to get (as all thinks Wii are), while PSIII versions were aplenty. I played about for about an hour and a half yesterday, and damn, it really is fun. It takes a little while to get used to it, but you can get sucked into the songs pretty easily.

Oh, and I really do look ridiculous holding a toy plastic guitar, but I really don’t care. My hope is that Kelly also likes the game, and we go and get a second guitar to play co-op career mode with.

For Kelly, I bought her 2 Wii games, Mario Party 8 and Resident Evil IV: Wii Edition. The ResEvil game is one of the highly rated games on the Wii, and has been called a modern classic, so I hope she really gets into it. We played Mario Party 8 and got pretty sucked into it. I know the reviews were kind of middling for the game, but those seemed to be from people who played the previous games, which we haven’t. It’s all new to us.

So that sums up our celebration of FSMas I think. Not sure what we could do for New Year’s Day, but we’ll see!