Sorry for the hiatus, folks - I've been on a whirlwind Disney vacation with the wife & kids for the past two weeks (web-photos & review to be posted soon, as soon as I find some time - the home video was the first priority, since the kids enjoy watching that).

Anyway, I came home to roughly 3,500 emails (1,600 of them in the "not spam" category), of which a few contained blog worthy posts. If I'd been home, these would likely have been separate entries, but I'll just list them here for your amusement/enjoyment:

-- First, for those who live in or near Garwood, NJ, the band I play in, Midlife Crisis, will be playing at Crossroads on January 13th. The setlist is mostly 70's rock. The volume is mostly loud. Come on down & check us out.

-- Someone sent me a link to an online archive of TV shows. All I can say is, "Oh, my!" Some of the shows (e.g., "24") have been taken down for copyright reasons, but many, many others are up there. I'd say I'm surprised this site isn't more popular, but then if it was, I'm guessing it would cease to exist. Consult your ethics manual, and then click at your own risk...

-- For folks who enjoy such things, the History of Pop Music in 4 Chords. Warning: Contains Journey.

-- Regarding Time Magazine's Person of the Year, 2006 ("You"), a really awesome quote from Zach Klitzman, a student at the University of Pennsylvania (reprinted here without his permission):

This is awesome; now I can write on my resume that I was selected as Time Man of the Year.

Good point, Zach. Maybe I'll do the same...

-- This from a guy named Rob McKay on the Huffington Post:

It is 60 degrees on December 18th in New York City. I'm hardly relieved I didn't have to bundle up my daughter and trudge with her through ice and now to go see "The Nutcracker" today. The temperature is terrifying. I want to crack some sense into the nuts who tell us there's nothing to worry about.

Ozone, schmozone. Just enjoy the balmy weather.

Bush won't even use the term "global warming." He occasionally makes reference to the world's "climate change." Conservative politicians and pundits chalk up global warming to the next liberal bully pulpit, a rehash of "political correctness" or outcries from the "feminazis."

He goes on to give the standard schpiel about how global warming is real, the consequences dire, and how anyone who says anything differently is a neo-conservative, radical, religious Christian.

Guys like this really, really get under my skin. Not because I don't believe that global warming exists, or that humans are causing it. But because a single warm winter in a single city proves absolutely nothing about global warming. And to suggest it does is to go down the slippery slope of having to explain why a particularly cold winter in a different year or different city (anyone out there from Denver?!?) isn't equal evidence to suggest that the problem has magically disappeared.

No big deal when we're talking about warm winters, but it's guys like this who were standing in the flood waters of New Orleans 16 months ago, telling us how Katrina was nothing compared to what's coming, and how each successive hurricane season is going to get worse and worse because of global warming. So now that 2006's season has gone down as one of the calmest on record, the folks who should still be screaming about levee repair have no argument to make, and the folks who want to divert that money to other priorities are probably singing like songbirds on Capitol Hill.

Making the right argument with the wrong data is dangerous. It inevitably damages your credibility, especially in the long term. And global warming is a long term problem.

-- For those who haven't seen it yet, the full video of Saddam Hussein's execution by hanging is now floating all around the web. To be honest, it's not nearly as graphic as I feared it would be, but it does show the actual moment of death, so if that kind of thing makes you squeamish, click away...

-- On a somewhat related note, I found this cool site that allows you to download local copies of flash video from sites like YouTube and Google. It's pretty simple - you type in the URL from YouTube/Google, it gives you a download link from which you can do "Save Target As..." or whatever your browser calls it. The resulting file is an FLV file, which I was then able to play on my hard drive using this free, FLV player.

(For those who are wondering, I keep a folder on my hard drive of historically significant documents, pictures, videos, etc. I thought Hussein's execution ranked as one of those, so I wanted a local copy. This seemed the easiest way).

Anyway, that catches me up. How was everyone else's holiday?