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last night i was listening to my favorite podcast like a little kid when i found out i won a book! a few weeks ago the hosts of stuck in the 80′s played a short clip of an old TV show intro. they invited listeners to email the name of the show & then be entered into a drawing to win an autographed copy of 80s redux: your favorite musicians today. i figured out the clip was from AfterMASH, and entered the drawing. when i heard the podcast host say only one person got it right i squealed like a little girl.

most of the customers i saw yesterday at homer’s were off for labor day. i went into DJ mode & told chloé we should play appropriate songs for the holiday since we still had work. now don’t get me wrong– it was cool that i got to sleep in because the shop opened much later than usual, but work is still work. here’s a song medleyy that echoed our sentiments.

did some reading on the history & origins of labor day. i wasn’t surprised that the holiday we currently observe came out of strikes & riots 124 years ago. it’s surreal that 12 hour work days aren’t a thing of the past… for some folks, the struggle still goes on today.

…now he’s headless! well, as headless as a 4-year-old tries to be in public. jenny & i watched ryan for a few hours recently while his parents were working. he liked playing with the speak and spell that sara and i circuit bent & rewired last month. when we went grocery shopping he had to entertain himself, so he pulled his shirt up over most of his head. i’m not sure if he was trying to scare me or make me laugh… so i laughed.

tara, a bar of soap is the latest guest on everything is alive, the show where inanimate objects answer questions and tell stories. this week tara talks about the fear, apprehension, and indignity she suffers when a child says something bad. it was weird to hear that moment described from her side. previous guests on the show have been a pillow, a lamppost, and a can of generic cola.

bad can be a relative term, or it can just be… BAD. last monday, chloé showed me a picture of some men from the 1970′s dressed in polyester & macramé. she made a caption that read something like: “it was a long time before these guys had girlfriends.” it reminded me of bad album covers i’ve seen over the years. the two i’ve posted here are from a list of 20 on teamjimmyjoe.com. if you wanna see the other 18 click here, but be careful because there are some things you can’t unsee. the one below was in my parents’ collection.

last week i drove out to rich maxwell’s garage in shawnee. we rigged aluminum foil to trigger music and sounds using his marbles & my makey makey. once we put it together, we couldn’t believe how simple the concept was: the marble’s weight pushes two pieces of foil together (each piece of foil is connected to the makey makey), and we get audio! the next thing rich wants to do is trigger sounds & music from star wars!

it costs 25 cents for 8 shots on the sea devil game at papa keno’s, so you better make ‘em count. when one of those torpedoes actually hits a ship, you can hear the explosion & the screen goes red. i met some friends for pizza thursday night, and i didn’t see it until tanner said “what the heck is this?” i turned around from playing galaga & saw him looking at sea devil next to the whack-a-mole. i told him that it was an old analog game from 1970, something that was made before space invaders. the next day i went back with more quarters, and sank 4 ships.

i’m sure it didn’t happen this way– but when i see this picture from the years that jenny & i were volunteer youth leaders, the scene plays out like this:
it all started when someone said, “hey those concrete steps look like the ones that sylvester stallone ran up in Rocky!” then someone asked, “wasn’t that in philadelphia?” one thing led to another & before we knew it we were running up those steps wheezing, coughing & singing Gonna Fly Now.

even though spring is on the other end of the season cycle, a pillow has come to life on a podcast. dennis the pillow is the latest guest on everything is alive, a show where inanimate objects answer questions and tell stories. at the end of last week’s interview, dennis was asked if he could give some expert advice to people who have insomnia. he started lulling us all to sleep with a bedtime story about a magic horse, a twizzlers waterfall, and the aurora borealis. next week’s guest will be tara the bar of soap.