As it were...

Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a The Rock, was a professional wrestler who jumped into acting (short jump, I know), and has done far better than I ever expected him to. Most of his stuff I've enjoyed in the "potato chips for the mind" sort of way. The Scorpion King reminded me very much of Conan; fun, simple, crazy. He's going to be in some interesting movies coming out soon, and I hope he doesn't mess them up.

Billy Batson and the Legend of Shazam

I watched Shazam! when I was a kid, and loved it like crazy. I don't remember a lot about it, but I hope it doesn't disappoint.

Race to Witch Mountain

I also loved the Witch Mountain movies from the 70's. Here's hoping it's cool.

Get Smart

This is already out, but I haven't seen it yet. I never expected to see him in it, I hope it's good.

I didn't say much besides pointing them out and hoping they don't bite, but I think it's interesting that he's in three movies in close succession that I'm interested in.

In school a slash and dash is when you go to class, sign in, and then leave. Only once have I ever done it, my second year of college. It was spring, the weather was amazing and my friend (Kip) and I went to class. We fully intended to stay. There were no plans to dash. We signed in, found our seats (by the open window) and sat for a couple minutes. I looked at Kip and said "Do you really want to be here?" He said "Nope".

"Wanna get out of here?" I asked.

"Yep" he said. We were deep conversationalists. So we split.

We got about 40 feet down the hall and Kip looked at me and said "Dude. We just slashed and dashed ethics class."

"Wow" I said. "Do you want to go back?"

"Nope" he said. So we went and played golf on my other roommate's Apple II.

Normally I hate taking stupid little test to find out what kind of N I am. This one looked fun though, so I did it.

I take comfort in the fact that History/Literature is my highest score.

When I was a kid I watched the same cartoons every other kid did at the time; all the Hanna Barbara cartoons, Super Friends, Johnny Quest, and all the Warner Brothers cartoons. I usedto worry that my kids would never get the same quality of cartoon that I had, but the next few stories should lay that fear to rest for all of us.

A few weeks ago we were driving to IKEA and we drove by a car dealership that had a huge inflatable purple gorilla on the roof. I said "Hey girls look! When I was a kid I used to watch a cartoon about a giant purple ape" and Molly interrupted and said "Yeah dad, Grape Ape, we love that cartoon".

Then a while ago the girls were talking about super powers, and what powers they'd like to have, or even share. I said "When I was a kid I used to watch a show call the Super Friends, with Batman and Superman, and Wonder Woman, and there were some twins that shared power." Molly said "Yeah, and they had a monkey named Gleek, and when they wanted to change they said 'Wonder Twin powers, activate!', and the boy almost always turned into some kind of water.". She was well aware.

Finally, the other day I caught Molly quietly singing to herself "Hong Kong Phooey, number one super guy. Hong Kong Phooey, quicker than the human eye."

How do they know all of these you ask? Grandma has cool TV with Boomerang, a channel that shows all the old greats. Thank heavens they spend so much time in front of the TV.

I can't find my copy of Cryptonomicon, and I'm pretty sure I loaned it to someone. Any of you out there in reader-land have it?

I got Firefox 3 running on my desktop here at work today. About half of my extensions didn't work, including some show-stoppers. The good news is that I was able to go directly to the web sites for them and get new versions that the addon manager didn't find. Here they are:

• html validator
• firebug
• measureit
• tab mix plus

The real downer was del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager that I use. They actually made a new version for Firefox 3, but it makes you go through a configuration system that is broken, and can't complete. The only option given at that point is to restart Firefox to uninstall the extension. Additionally it resets my toolbar options to the default, giving me a google box and taking away my New Tab button. What a huge pain. </whine>