How can I say that? It's pretty easy if you use the transitive property. John McCain is against redistribution from the haves to the have nots. Halloween is about people that have candy giving it to people that don't. Therefore McCain cannot in good conscious support Halloween.
Don't believe me? Take transcripts from McCain's stump speeches and substitute candy for the words wealth or money.
That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your candy and giving it to someone else. He believes in redistributing candy.
Doesn't McCain realize that for kids that's a large part of what Halloween is about?
America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by giving our candy to ...[snipped]... "spread the candy around."
So the real question is: Why does John McCain hate Halloween?
And yes I'm joking, but it's really not that far of a leap from McCain's current arguments.
The kid's participated in the Vienna parade tonight with their school. We were told participation in the parade was mandatory, but there were a significant number of kids from the school that weren't there. The parade was a bigger event than I was expecting and even had Mark Warner in it (I've actually got a story for that, so someone remind me later and I'll put that up). The good news is the experience was so much better than the parade last year.
We showed up later this year, but still ended up standing around for about an hour and a half before we actually started moving. This year we were group number fifty-six (whereas last year we were in the high seventies). So even though we had to wait until close to eight before our group started moving, it was still better than the previous year. Add to that this year it wasn't pouring rain, so that was a bonus. There was some very mild rain that was on and off during the course of the parade, but it was so light I would hesitate to even call it a drizzle (rather than drizzle I would probably call it mildly annoying).
Since we had no idea where to park we conned Ken into letting us park at his place. We even got to see Amanda very briefly (she was also in the parade with her school), but they went their separate ways almost immediately.
Another nice thing about the parade this year was the kids got to choose their own costumes this year versus last year where all the kids in the school had to go as Powhatan Indians. As you can tell, the kids current fascination with Lego Batman ended up influencing costumes decisions. They also requested I walk in the parade in costume also, and how could I refuse. And since Catherine wanted to be Bat-Girl does this mean we're out of the Princess phase? I don't know the answer to that, but we can only hope.
Ginger made the kid's costumes herself and I personally think they look pretty good. Sadly only some of the adults knew who I was since these days a lot of younger kids don't even know about Batman and Robin being a team. Nor do they realize that typically Batman is the adult and Robin is the youngster so the "joke" was lost on a lot of kids. I had a lot of the kids asking me stuff like "Who are you suppose to be?" When I replied I was Robin the next question was something along the lines of "Who's Robin?" And after explaining that Robin is Batman's sidekick the invariable next question was "What's a sidekick?" Kids these days. No one's teaching them the basics anymore.
Grammy is up for a visit for a couple days. I didn't get any pictures though so you'll have to settle for this old picture I took of the Metro when we went downtown. I was going to have a really cute video of Catherine helping Ginger make some fried chicken from over the weekend, but Catherine decided she didn't want the video of her on the blog and refused to cooperate at the end (I had wanted her to say "It's shake and bake, and I helped" but she just wouldn't go for it). Trust me, it would have been adorable. But you can't make kids do what they don't want to do (well, you can, but then no one is in a good mood afterwards).
After church we went out to lunch. This turned into a marathon lunch session as the kids took forever and a day to finish eating (and truthfully they never did finish, we just got tired of waiting after a couple hours and went home). While there Quinn ended up needing an extended bathroom visit. Which meant I got to go hang out in the restroom for about ten to fifteen minutes while he did his business (bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this). So as I'm waiting he starts talking to me from in the stall.
Quinn: Do you have your cell phone?
Me: No, I don't have it with me. And aren't you a little busy to be calling someone at the moment?
Quinn: I wanted to call this fun number in here.
Me: What's a fun number?
Quinn: Someone wrote a fun number on the wall.
Me: What are you talking about?
Quinn: It says "For a good time call 703-###-#####". Can we write the number down and call it later?
Me: Uhhh, no. I don't think that's good idea.
Guess this is one of the downsides of him being able to read.
Included this picture of Catherine from last week. It's her wearing a dress Ginger's grandmother gave her. So folks in Richmond can show this picture to whoever needs to see it.
The original plan was the post for today was going to have a ton of photos from our Church's annual Fall Festival. There would have been games, pony rides, moon bounces, and all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately the poor weather conditions ended up causing the Festival to be canceled. Instead the kids spent most of the day playing with Nana who was up for a couple of days this weekend. I only got a picture of all of them right before Nana left on Saturday night (hence the reason the kids are in their pajamas and bathrobe).
Another post with nothing but a photo.
Gah! I got so busy with working until 3 AM Thursday night (I guess it was really Friday morning) that I forgot about the blog. So nothing to update for yesterday and all I have available to me at the moment is this picture for your enjoyment. It's from downtown DC.
So I watched the Incredible Hulk tonight. I managed to get really lucky with having a Netflix rental return on Tuesday which was the first day the DVD was available. This is the rebooted / do-over version with Ed Norton. There were some nice tidbits in opening credits. They pay a lot of respect to the original reference material in the credits mentioning Rick Jones, Leonard Samson, Nick Fury, Stark Technologies and SHIELD. Most of these things don't get any serious screen time in the movie itself though. The idea of this Marvel movie shared universe is interesting though since you do see Stark Industries mentioned. I was a bit disappointed though that since I watched the non Blu-Ray widescreen edition I didn't get to see the alternate opening with the brief Captain America cameo.
The movie itself is okay I suppose. Not a ringing endorsement I know, but honestly I've never been a huge Hulk fan (one of the reasons I didn't go see this in theaters I suppose). Something about a character whose whole schtick is simply to get mad and wail on their opponent just doesn't do anything for me (I was never a huge wrestling fan either). The Hulk has always been more of a cautionary Frankenstein tale than anything else, but they've removed some of that since his origin is no longer based on being created by a gamma bomb he worked to invent and instead is now along the lines of the old TV show where he simply sat in a chair and got bombarded by radiation. And speaking of the old TV show, there are more than a few nods to it in the movie from Lou Ferrigno having a bit part as a security guard to a variation of the theme playing as Norton walks along a road.
The film ignores the whole aspect of the Hulk being all the repressed rage Banner has in a primal and uncontrollable form. Here the Hulk is more a raging force of nature instead of a fragmented personality. And I wasn't thrilled with how at the beginning sequence they went out of their way not to show you the Hulk and keep his look somewhat secret and hidden in shadows. I mean we all know what he looks like, why the forced suspense? They also seemed to go out of their way to create a bad guy for the Hulk to fight. Try not to think about the fact that were it not for the Hulk the bad guy wouldn't wouldn't exist. And really in this case, who is the bad guy? I could easily argue it's the Hulk himself since when he roids out he becomes a raging behemoth that causes massive property damage and wanton destruction.
I had heard there were a lot of disagreements between Norton and the director on what the vision for the movie should be. I'm not sure how that ended up changing the movie, but I could tell that from watching the movie though there doesn't seem to be a clear vision for Hulk. The CGI Hulk is done well enough even although in my opinion they did have problems with scenes where Hulk isn't raging. The action scenes are passable, but I enjoyed the middle fight the best where Hulk was fighting the Army better than the climax fight where he fights his new nemesis. The one thing I did like about this version was Hulk finally got a couple of speaking lines. Not many mind you (I think there were less than a handful), but at least we got to hear a "Hulk Smash" even if we didn't get to hear him call someone a "Puny Human".
So to summarize, the movie gets a rousing "meh". It's too bad Marvel initially sold the movie rights for some of their characters to other studios. It would have been cool at some point to see Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man and the Hulk characters all together in a movie at some point. At least we'll get some of that since the movie makes it's obvious their current strategy is to build up to an Avengers team movie.
Tuesday's are art class day for the kids. Today they drew leaves. Most of the leaf drawings were of oval shaped leaves, but in the midst of those drawing there was the one above from Catherine. As she explained it that's her school with trees on either side and her outside the school. Why are there holes in the trees? I don't know. Maybe those are squirrel holes. And the front of the school does have four glass doors (two sets of two), so that explains why there are so many doors (I think).
Today was also the kid's school picture day. It'll be interesting to see how those turned out. Last year they took them outside in front of some leaves, but yesterday it was a bit colder so I don't know if they were outside or not. From dinner conversations I know the full class shots were taken indoors, but I don't recall if the individual ones were or not.
We had our first serious frost last night. This morning everything was covered in a thin layer of ice crystals. It was very pretty, but if there was some way to get the same effect without the cold that would be good.
So here's a question for you. Oil prices are now around $70 a barrel. That's about half what they were at their peak price a while back. And yet gas is still over $3 a gallon, which is about 3/4 of what the highest price was. How is that the price of gas can increase quickly enough to insure that companies producing it don't lose money, and yet when the costs of the materials go down the price doesn't come down anywhere near as quickly (if it ever does). Could it be that the oil companies are simply leaving it high to bring in even more profit because they can.
