it's a rough life

I'm posting this from the Atlantic Ocean.

My team and I are being held captive on a luxury liner, being forced drink strawberry daiquiris against our will.

Well, ok, we're actually stuck in our cabins writing code, and let me tell you it's really hard to work in the midst of over 3000 people who are all on vacation. It makes a guy want to take one.

A couple of cell-phone pics here. Have fun back in Nebraska.

they don't fall down

My good buddy Tim has spent several years teaching English overseas, first in South Korea and later in Japan. When he came back to visit, he would bring gifts from afar: wind-up toy cars shaped like blocks of tofu for the kids, and for dad a magazine that one might find in the hands of men on public transportation systems. (I couldn't decipher the text, but I believed it to be a treatise on the pursuit of education and tartan pleated skirts.) The coolest gift, however, was a Daruma Doll.

A Daruma Dolls can be thought of as early Weebles, in that their traditional design allows them to right themselves if tipped over -- a property they inherited from the little rolly polly priest dolls that preceded them. This signifies tenacity, which is important in light of the doll's intended function.

The doll comes with blank eyes. One is supposed to envision a goal, and color-in only one of the doll's eyes. The second eye is to be decorated only when the goal has been reached. Our doll was given one pupil and a gnarly network of veins on the sclera. The goal: to be rid of our burdensome plastic debt.

The doll did not survive to see with its second eye. During a fit of compulsive cleaning, I'm told, the doll was accidentally swept from its perch only to shatter in an impact that overwhelmed its resilient nature. The body was disposed of before an autopsy could be performed.

If that doll were here to speak for itself, it would be telling its story while I was holding a Sharpie to its second eye -- as of today.

evel knievel's last jump

Kyle, the youngest of my three sons, has been asking whether we have a video camera. He "needs" one because he and his friends want to videotape themselves performing some damned-fool jackass bicycle stunt and put it on YouTube.

Not wanting to see such an energetic young boy spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, I did my best to channel the living spirit of Alberto Gonzales, saying that I had no specific recollection of whether or not we own a video camera and, if so, where it might be. (Translation: If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, go on ahead, but don't expect me to hand you the gun.)

And then I quickly changed the subject: "Have you ever heard of Evel Knievel?"

Kyle had not heard of him, but Erik (his next-elder brother) had. I let Erik describe to Kyle who this Evel Knievel fellow was, and we talked about Evel's insatiable passion for performing death-defying jumps -- each one more spectacular and dangerous than the last.

Erik said that Evel was killed while performing his last stunt jumping umpteen cars on his motorcycle. Now I had no specific knowledge of Evel's death -- and I suspected that I surely would have heard about it in one of the many Darwin Awards pages floating about teh interweb -- but I was not going to challenge the veracity of of that part of Erik's biography of Mr. Knievel.

It took all of my parental strength to silently swallow my wikipedia reflex. It was better to allow Kyle to think, even if for just a moment, about the fragility of life.

The first item on my agenda the next day, of course, was to hit the WP to learn the truth about my childhood hero. I remember being an anklebiter around the time Evel attempted to jump the Snake River canyon. I remember thinking how superhuman the man must be to recover from breaking his back and attempt such a thing. I remember wishing that his original plan of jumping the Grand Canyon hadn't fallen through.

I am happy to report that Evel Knievel is still alive. Not only that, but he announced on April 1st of this year that he plans to make one final spectacular jump. His announcement was met with some skepticism, as you can imagine, since he made it on April Fool's Day -- a day you're supposed to suspect that everything you hear is a prank. It seemed much more likely that Evel made this announcement in the same spirit as Alanis Morissette's hilarious cover of Fergie's My Humps, which was released on the same day.

But Evel, ever the consummate showman, maintains that it's no joke: he fully intends to straddle his spirit-cycle, throttle it up to superluminal speeds, and jump all the way from this mortal coil into the kingdom of heaven, after having passed his Mammon-following ass straight through the eye of a needle -- a feat he hopes will be made possible by an 11th-hour religious conversion with Pascal's Wager as its foundation.

No, I'm not making this up. Death-defying indeed.

What do you say: will he make it?