Category Archives: a picture is worth a thousand words

Happy Birthday, United States of America!

What better way to celebrate Independence Day by watching this clip from Independence Day again?

WE WILL NOT GO QUITELY INTO THE NIGHT!
WE WILL NOT VANISH WITHOUT A FIGHT!

We are going to live on. We are going to survive.

Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!

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What better way than to read The Declaration of Independence again? Really carefully this time.

What better way to celebrate July 4th by reading this again?

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Or to imagine what Ben Franklin’s Facebook page would have been like?

Befriending a Founding Father

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Or to participate in your hometown Fourth of July parade?

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Unknown Mami

Reporting, live (kind of), from the Hometown Fest

July 2nd.

The party goes on…

Happy Birthday to Lindsay Lohan and Larry David. They should hang out together more.

Happy birthday to Hermann Hesse. To this day I am sometimes still Emil Sinclair looking/waiting for my (inner) Max Demian. Thanks a lot, man.

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The following is my entry for this year’s Pulitzer Prize. As Bob “Elvis” West says, Thank you. Thank you very much.

Dear @Wired. Meet Georgia O’Keeffe.

In addition to Threadless Tees, I also try to seem young and hip and on top of things by subscribing to Wired Magazine. Although I have been caught in this conundrum of inadvertently outing myself as an old fart by actually subscribing to the print edition. Seriously, who subscribes to print editions of magazines any more? And since I am in the confessional mode, I may as well tell you that I still buy music CDs. Yup. I am single-handedly supporting the dinosaurs.

That being said, until the day I can sit in the open (in my own house, mind you) reading without being bothered, I will always prefer papers to hard metal/plastic. They are just a lot easier to read in a locked bathroom, with the fan on to drone out the incessant, “Mom. Mom. Mommy. Mommy. Mom. Mama.”

As always, I was happy to receive my latest Wired. I skipped the important article on Sergey Brin’s search for a cure for Parkinson’s Disease and tore immediately into the shopping feature (Shut up!). I saw this and my inner 16-year-old boy made me choke on my cocktail:

ETA: Of course the Product of the Month is a super duper $2,000 sub-woofer for your home theatre, Beolab 11 by the revered Bang & Olufsen.

You said it. Not me.

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Ok. Not to be sexist or anything, I am going to guess that the department that worked on testing, rating and writing about the 39 summer gears is mostly male. So nobody snickered or doing a Beavis & Butthead’s “Hehehe.” Is it just me? Really? I am very impressed.

Let me break it down for you…

You know Georgia O'Keeffe?

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Georgia O'keeffe. The artist famous for you know who-who...

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Come on! I cannot be the only one...

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In order to drive my point home, I have taken the liberty to dress the “Tulip” up…

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Ta da!

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Oh please please please don’t let me be the only one…

CODA on 7/7: I am happy to report that after almost 1 month, I am finally “vindicated”… This picture is now on Wired.com and the comments proved that well, it does not take any imagination to see this fancy sub-woofer as a, eh, modern piece of art…

Rainbow

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After I dropped off my 7 year-old at his Taekwondo class, I had less than an hour to drive, grocery shop, drive, unload groceries, stuff 99% of the groceries into the freezer portion of our refrigerator, and then drive back to pick him up. As I pulled up to the stop sign inside our neighborhood, I caught my breath when out of the window I saw the rainbow.

Seeing a rainbow always makes me want to cry and at the same time, jump up and down.

I thought about getting out of the car to take a picture of it, but I didn’t want to be THAT MOM again. I drove faster than I should have. I wanted Mr. Monk to be able to see the rainbow.

He did.

It felt wonderful to bring him the rainbow.

Sundays In My City

(Actually these pictures were taken this past Friday…)

This post should be titled:

I went to the Chicago Hawk’s Parade and all I got was this set of lousy pictures showing the bottom of the Stanley Cup!

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Ta da - Stanley Cup

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Stanley Cup! I saw it, kind of

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Chicago crowd

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Real fans. Not like those bandwagon jumpers

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Ticker-tape Parade

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Whenever I manage to get my acts together or am not too embarrassed to backdate my post or decide to overlook my poor photographic skills, I participate in Unknown Mami’s

Unknown Mami

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It is obvious I have been having too much fun with this Welcome-to-the-21st-century COOL photo editing website picnik.com. Because they have been acquired by google, I know they will not be doing evil with my photos…

Weekends are sacred

Weekends are sacred even though there are errands to run and housework chores to do.

Weekends are sacred despite gymnastic practices, Taekwondo lessons, religious education and Chinese school.

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Weekends are sacred because we didn’t realize how much fun it is to fly a kite.

Now we know.

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Weekends are sacred because we ended the perfect day with a broken kite and a kite gone missing after it broke away and flew off into the clouds.

We are going to get more.

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Weekends are sacred even though sometimes daddy is flying out to yet another foreign country on Saturdays or coming home on Sundays.

Weekends are sacred exactly because he travels so much that we need to use our weekends wisely, not squandering.

Weekends are sacred even though sometimes mommy has to fly out on Sunday night (or the night of Memorial Day) to be in another city by a certain time for some meeting that she would rather not be part of because she starts missing you when she is printing out her boarding pass.

Weekends are sacred even though because the city we live in only has two seasons: Winter and Construction.

Weekends are sacred because we only have one month of spring and one month of fall that are ripe to make perfect days with.

Weekends are sacred because the reward of pedaling uphills inside the woods of Morten Arboretum is a series of downhill turns with the sound of the wind and the clack clack clack of the coasting bicycle wheels accompanied by your screaming

WWWeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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Weekends are sacred because our tree is just big enough now to support a hammock.

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Weekends are sacred because we are a family of lazy souls living a packed life.

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Weekends are sacred because when it comes down to it what we really want to do, after all this…

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Is nothing at all.

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Nothing is better than doing nothing.

Weekends are sacred.

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Unknown Mami

WTF Wednesday: There, I fixed it (A Pictogram)

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico gets bigger and bigger... Nobody knows what to do yet...

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As Lagunatic suggested, the execs should go clean up this mess...

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Srly. You can't make this shit up. The Onion is not as creative as this one.

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Hope springs eternal

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore.
What future bliss He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

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Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

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Living in Chicago teaches you that even though there seems to be no end to the miserable winter, spring will arrive eventually. And when it comes it is the most glorious, blissful sight.

It teaches you to appreciate spring when it finally arrives overnight, without warning, because it soon disappears as stealthily and as suddenly as when it comes.

It teaches you to be grateful to the wonders that are unfathomable yet are within your reach.

It teaches you the strength of human spirits and will, part of which depends on our ability to forget the physical pains and sufferings that we went through even while we have vivid memories of the ordeals. Of which, child birth is a prime example: if we could remember the pain physically, we would have all stopped at one child.

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Warning Signs: To hell in a handbasket

I know that the Catholic Church, and many other Christian churches, has a complicated relationship with Science. So I appreciated the fact that they DO indeed include Science in the curriculum for Catholic schools. In the public schools that my kids have been to, Science has always been taken as a given. There was never an attempt to try and define “Science” before the kids started taking science classes. This was why when I chanced upon the display of children’s works in the hallway of this Parochial school, I was absolutely intrigued. However, I still don’t quite understand what was going through the teacher’s mind when s/he decided to ask the children in a parochial school to make posters on what they think “Science is…”

Was it done with a sense of self-awareness and irony? Most likely not. How many other people that passed by this hallway actually noticed the irony in these innocent words of children with alarm and fascination the way that I did?

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No wiser words have been spoken in this hallway...

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Science is... What?

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The other day as I was driving by the same school and church, my oldest pointed out this sign to me. We thought it was hilarious. But of course, I have an out-of-whack sense of humor which alarmingly is being passed down to my children. As I am heading to hell in a handbasket, please heed my plea that my children however are innocent victims of nurture and nature.

Srly. I thought you are supposed to teach people to be nice, at least when you are right outside the church...

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This brings me to several of my favorite warning signs:

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From our beloved The Bloggess

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I srly want to post this in my house. Like I said, I am hell bound...

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Warning: Facetiousness Ahead

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Update: I believe someone at Huffington Post is spying on me… Two days after I published this post, they came out with “The Craziest Prohibition Signs: Who Would Try These Things?” Really, when you post a question such as this in your title, you are just daring people. Here’s looking at you, kid…