What a treat last night. We left Mason at home (with some helpful neighbors), and I took Tricia out to her post-Mother’s Day present. We went to Culinary Classes at the Rosebud. Rosebud is by far our favorite Italian Restaurant(s) in Chicago. They open up their corporate kitchen and have their top chefs teach people how to cook their signature dishes. We watched them cook, then we ate the results. Oh my Gosh. I’ve never eaten so much in my life. We learned to make coconut shrimp, Louisiana chicken gumbo, crab cakes, steak au poivre with french fires and sesame Chinese green beans, and apple crisp. For $75 a person I’d recommend coming to Chicago for a cooking class and skipping the restaurant altogether. It’s just as much fun, you learn something, and you go home with t-shirts and other crap. Yummmmm…..

Thank God my brother-in-law keeps me up to date on geek world. I think I’ve found my future hobby. Packing computers into humidors, toasters and lunchboxes. This looks like so much fun. I’d love to have something far cooler on my desk than even the latest Mac enclosure. How about a vintage radio, or a model General Lee that is my computer. Anyone have any cool ideas? Walt?

So I’m sitting here bored, can’t sleep, thinking of what I want to do with my life, when it dawned on me. What am I doing going to volleyball nationals when I could be playing professional Air Hockey. As the site says “Many people have a misconception about Air Hockey as a sport.  Air Hockey involves strategy, conditioning, stamina, practice and for tournament success, the ability to perform under pressure.  These are exactly the qualities necessary for success at most sports involving athleticism.”

Much to my amazement, there are professional tournaments right here in Naperville. Since my wife bought me a regulation table a few years ago that proudly adorns my basement, I haven’t been taking the sport seriously. hmmm…I better reconsider. Better yet, I’ll start training the boy now to be an air hockey champion. Aim high Mason. Check out the videos on this page (2000 Texas State Championships). Riveting…

I’m just curious if online music is ever going to work. I’m sure that people were saying that when CD’s first came to market too. I was an early adopter of MyMP3.com when you could load a CD into your drive and “Beam it” to them to prove that you owned it. Then they would unlock it for you, and let you play it from anywhere. Now you’ve got services like Rhapsody and Pressplay that are testing out similar subscription services.

I think my problem with them is not their offering, it’s the state of current music devices. For someone to feel like they “own” music right now, you’ve got to physically have it on one of many different harddrives in your digital music life. I’ve got one at work, one at home, one on my MP3 player.Then I still have my car CD changer, and my home stereo components that aren’t hard drive based. I’ll get used to paying 99 cents per song when I get to the point where I can have it in my own online harddrive, that isn’t owned by any particular music service, it is owned outright by me. It is my physical hardware that is broadcasting my music collection to me only, to any of the devices in my privately purchased world. The music quality can’t be like today’s “streaming” sound either (unless it is today’s broadband variety which sounds pretty good). Anyone have a better idea?

In my quest to have a completely redundant home computer, and actually surpass my PC with a far cooler Mac, I added another component to my G4 that I got from my dead dot com. I added these bitchin’ speakers. They sound incredible! $99, and worth every penny of my Christmas money. Now I can actually hear the sound in my iMovies, and I’m going to move exclusively to iTunes from my WinAmp PC crap.

It’s just too bad Michael Jackson is such a freak. He really is talented, and his early 80’s music is my favorite. Especially when I hear it play on the radio of my “Banshee” in GTA Vice City. But, I am so over his plastic face, and his reculusive lifestyle. For a guy that sings (sang) pop-music, he is awfully alternative.

I’m so very full of chili from our groovy SuperBowl Party. It was definitely the Grand Opening of our basement. Hard as we worked to make it all nice down there, everyone still congregated in our kitchen. There is an amazing gravitational pull in the kitchen of of our house. Next time we are going to install a tractor beam in the basement to offset the kitchen. Hindsight is 20/20.

A TMP lunch o’ fun. We went to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday for some quick culture and a bite to eat. I’m just stoked that our fine city has such a museum, and the Archigram exhibit was pretty fascinating. To top it off, we ate at Puck’s at MCA, and the Puckster himself was there! Thanks for the salad Wolfey. I wonder if I should name my next kid Wolfgang just so I could call him Wolfey?

I never even saw the show last year. I must have been properly brainwashed by the media into watching it. It was actually pretty good. Although what passes as ‘smart cinematography’ is oftentimes us looking at a scene from through the slats in a chair. Nice overt use of the handheld camera though. Much easier to swallow than Blair Witch project. Stupid as it seems, I also watched the 3 minute commercial afterward by the sponsor, Ford. I actually think that’s not a bad idea. I watched the commercial because I appreciated the company that gave me the entire show uncut. Would somebody PLEASE give me a Bills game unedited by commercials. I’ll watch a 2 hour commercial for the flowbee afterwards if I have to.

I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a co-worker sparked by her surprise that I went and saw Barbershop (which has a pretty cool movie site). She is black, and I am white. She was surprised that I went to see a “black” movie and really enjoyed the “black humor”. I had the frustrating realization that my attitude toward black people is as much a matter of not growing up in a very mixed neighborhood, to not making a lot of friends with black people, to listening to rap music, but not really “understanding it”. It’s not that I am consciously different. It’s that I am subconciously different. Likewise, I’m fascinated by my co-workers point of view having lived in Europe for some of her life. She’s used to people being judged by different points of view, not different skin colors.

So her struggle in fitting in with the American “Black Community” is to pass judgement the way they do. Her opinion differs with that community oftentimes. This is a theme hammered upon in the movie. It is only within the context of the Barbershop that the black people voiced an opinion that differed from the Black Community at large. My co-worker’s story of black people she knows being offended by these opinions-like Rosa Parks not being any more influential than any other black person that got kicked off a bus in the 60’s, illustrates the homogenous opinion sometimes offered by the Black Community.

My struggle is to understand others in a much more meaningful way. Specifically, understanding the roots of modern attitudes about each other that goes beyond the civil rights movement. If anyone has some good reading on any issues surrounding this topic, let me know. By the end of the conversation I was convinced that she is a human, and so am I. Our struggles are humaan ones, not black and white ones.