Fukudome is the man...unfortunately the Cubs ended up losing the game. I wish I was in Chicago.

What do you think about the Kindle?  The explanatory video here makes it look amazing. Among its features are that you can have newspapers automatically sent to your Kindle every morning, you can email (for a charge) you personal Word documents, and all your purchases are backed up on Amazon.com.  Then again, these types of commericals are supposed to make it look appealling.

If I ever decide to get this, I'll wait a year or so until the price drops. Do you know anyone who has this, or do you, yourself, have one? 

Holy cow, it's been a long time since I updated this thing. 

The baseball season is officially under way. 

Can you believe it's been a HUNDRED YEARS since the Chicago Cubs won the World Series?  It looks like we have a pretty decent team this year.  We have solid pitching, depth on the bench, and if the new player from Japan Kosuke Fukudome performs well, the offense should be powerful. 

I'm not going to get my hopes up though, because, well, you can argue against 100 years of losing.  But we'll see.....

 I spend a lot of time sitting on the bench on our lanai, reading:

Sometime we make homemade sashimi (raw fish):

Or interesting soups:

Sometime I like comfort food on the weekends:

Of course, I wash it down with sophisticated grape juice:

Of course, I spend a lot of time online:

Or watching my favorite DVD's:

Simple stuff, but relaxing!

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Whoa, how does this guy do this?

Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away at the age of 69.  The beginnings of my geekiness probably stems from the hours and hours...and hours I spent with my friends playing Dungeons & Dragons.  Mr. Gygax was a visionary and even his name, Gygax, somehow sounds like the name of a wizard or other such fantastical figure.  While I loved D&D, I'm not sure that I can call it "life changing," as this excerpt from CNN.com mentions:

"Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gygax said. "He really enjoyed that.""

Frankly speaking, while I did played a lot of D&D and I happen to be a lawyer, I'm not quite sure how the two are related.  Unless...figuring out how to avoid hidden pits instilled in me the reasoning skills needed to analyze a case...or those hours casting imaginary spells gave me the negotiating skills necessary in court...or maybe dealing with nasty orcs helps me deal with nasty judges today. 

Whatever the case may be, I'm sure Mr. Gygax is resting in the big dungeon in the sky. 

If you're rolling your eyes at another geeky post by Sammy....I SMITE YOU WITH MY +4 DAGGER OF INVINCIBILITY!!!

Jerjonji wrote about the first year of marriage and it got me thinking about mine.

My wife and I were married in the summer between our junior and senior years of college in Tokyo.  It was complicated because we had to deal with my parents who were against our union.  I remember a lot of heated international phone calls where my mother would end up crying or yelling.  My father also was not happy. My cousin also suggested that my wife was a fraudster who was using me to get to the U.S.  We went ahead with the marriage anyway.  We flew out to the American Embassy in Seoul and an intake clerk officially married us - no family or friends, just the two of us (we still haven't had a ceremony).

In hindsight, I can see why a parent would oppose our marriage. We were both students and we didn't go through the usual community process of involving families and friends in a ceremony, wedding shower, etc.  There were a million reasons why we shouldn't have gotten married.  And there is no doubt that my judgment was clouded by naivety, youthfulness, and rashness. But I would do it again in a heartbeat.  To live is to hurt other people, whether intentionally or unintentionally.  We can have the most compassionate and benevolent of intentions, but the limits imposed on us by human nature are such that some degree of friction is inevitable.  Don't we ultimately live alone and die alone?  Aren't you, alone, ultimately responsible for the choices you make in life? In my opinion, it is folly to let anyone, even parents, interfere in such a personal decision as to who to love and who to marry.  

As you can tell I take a rather liberal view of my relationship and duty to my parents. I probably don't honor them to the extent required by conventional wisdom.  I value their input but do not take orders from them.  But I love them in my own way and I will not let anyone disparage the choices I made and lessons I learned during that First Year. 

All things considered, I'd like to think that things turned out pretty well, but that's just me...