International House Of Pancakes

We've been running a boys' household for the last 10 days. We've been doing a lot of cooking. We made dinner every night and many times we also cooked breakfast. The healthy kind. Pancakes with maple syrup and bacon strips and fruit juice. The boys enjoy making their own. That's even more fun than eating them.

Shopdropping

I am usually very much entertained by guerilla marketing techniques. Earlier this year, I wrote about a campaign by Cartoon Network that upset the city of Boston. Recently, there has been much attention for shopdropping. Instead of advertising or convincing stores to give some shelfspace, shop droppers simply place their articles in stores themselves. Hopefully that will draw attention and generate a buzz.

The New York Times ran an article about shopdropping this week. It featured a picture of T-shirts dropped in a Target store by an arts group in Oakland CA, the Center for Tactical Magic. The shirts season's greeting from the "three wise men": Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin.

Dear Santa...

In case you did not have a chance to look in our stockings, here's our wishlist. Hopefully you are reading this blog. We are a little concerned that you can't find our new house. We don't live in Atlanta anymore, and our subdivision is so new that it does not show on Google Earth or on the GPS navigator. Hopefully you will notice the outrageous Christmas lights on our house.

Holiday preparations

It will be a boy's holiday this year. Ina and her sister are in Indonesia. I will stay home with the boys. And the dog. We'll do skate parks, movies, and things around the house.

Greg and Sammy have been helping getting our home into the holiday spirit. Sammy made a nutcracker at school, and Gregory made his own Christmas tree out of coat hangers.

Sports Center

Today's week 15 of the 2007 season of the National Football League. Cincinnati already lost to their superbowl rivals the San Francisco 49ers. The Cowboys will play the Philadelphia Eagles, and the Jets will face the Patriots. Here's Sammy reading the complete schedule.

Cage dwellers

Until she's fully house broken, our puppy Carly stays in her crate for most of the day. Her only time out is for doing her business, for eating, and for playing with the kids.

The boys are supposed to be responsible and should teach her how to behave. That's not always working out. Many times the kids are actually copying the dog's behavior. As illustrated by this picture.

Doc Ock

Gregory has been experimenting with the copier lately. This is what he created with his Dr. Otto Octavius action figure. Dr. Octavius is better known as Doctor Octopus or Doc Ock.

President George W. Spiderman

I thought it was about time for some more artwork on this blog. Here's one of Sammy's recent drawings: a portrait of president George W. Spiderman.

Hair straightening

When I first met Ina and her sister Ima, I got stuck in a Jakarta bar for hours because of a thunderstorm. We could not leave because the rain would make their hair all curly.

In 1872, Marcel Grateau (a Parisian) used heated rods to straighten or style hair. In 1909, Issac K. Shero patented a hair straightener composed of two flat irons that are heated and pressed together. Almost one hundred years later, the flat iron is still Ina's preferred method of straightening her hair after having taking a shower.

Hair straightening is a time consuming routine, so there is plenty of time to watch some Hollywood celebrity gossip videos on TMZ.