So we went to the Tennessee Aquarium this weekend. And once again, my six year old son proved he’s smarter than me.

On the way there, he saw a sign for the Aquarium that advertised their penguin exhibit.  Very cool, and he got excited.  He asked me if they had “Macaroni Penguins.”  I tried not to laugh, I mean really… Macaroni?  But told him we’d have to see.

We get there, and our tour guide takes us first to see the Penguins.  Now this is an overnight trip where we slept at the Aquarium and got to see all sorts of stuff behind the scenes.  So the boy asks again…  ”Will we see Macaroni Penguins?”

Since the tour guide would be dealing with kids all night long, I figured this is a good chance to see how she handles silly questions.  So I told the boy to ask the guide.  Which he did.

Imagine my surprise when she said “We sure do.  We have 11 adults and a baby.”

Wait.  There really are Macaroni Penguins?

So I ask the boy where he heard about them.  ”Diego.”

Score one for Nick Jr.

The post Why my boy is smarter than me. appeared first on Geek Palaver.

I posted recently on the combination of Twitter and 24/7 news adding to the feeling of desperation in the world.  A wise commenter posted that it isn’t that the world is getting worse, we’re just hearing about it all the time.  I couldn’t agree more.  And I have an example to prove the point.

Ask the random moderately educated person what is the worst school massacre in America is, and they will tell you one of a couple of things. Depending on their age, they are most likely to say Columbine or Virginia Tech.  A few might pull out the Texas Sniper.  Others will think of some incident they might have been involved in, however remotely.  They would all be wrong.

The reality is that the worst school killings isn’t ingrained on the public psyche because it happened in a time prior to world wide news coverage.  It happened on May 18th, 1927 in the little town of Bath, MI.  And there is a good chance you’ve never heard of it, unless you’ve heard me ramble about it.

Andrew Kehoe was upset about new taxes.  So to get even, he blew up the school in Bath.  He killed 44 people in two explosions during the school day.  He planned the attack for months, getting hired on as the schools janitor and spent 8 months wiring up the school with explosives.  An entire wing of the school failed to explode, or the death toll would have been much higher.  Kehoe also killed himself in the final explosion.  In addition to the deaths, Kehoe destroyed the majority of the school building and town leadership.  The last explosion, done via a car bomb just like in Iraq so even those things aren’t new, killed much of the leadership of the town.

Now this made the news.  It dominated headlines around the country for weeks.  But news was slow, pictures rare and unless you picked up the paper, you didn’t read about it.  News was a very passive thing then.  Today, we’d have live footage from helicopters, kids around the country would twitter about it while fifty people who just “felt bad” because of it opened up fan pages on Facebook.  A group in Iowa would set up a website saying that George Bush knew about it and helped plant the bombs.  Another here in Alabama would theorize on their website that it was really a cruise missile fired from the USS Ronald Reagan.

And it’s that difference that makes today’s world seem to be going to Hell in that proverbial hand basket.  It’s the same one we’ve been in for years, and fundamentally it’s a better and more comfortable basket than ever before but the complaint of a single occupant carries far more weight today than ever before.  I mean why make your friends depressed, when you can depress the whole world, right?

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Geeky Beer Service

Recently I was forced, on two separate occasions, to consider and report on my favorite bible verse.  I’m not a real bible verse kind of guy.  I don’t find a verse particularly useful and rarely find them meaningful.

This is not a judgement on the entire bible, rather it is how I look at individual verses.  A verse, taken out of context not only from the words written around it but the culture and time it was written, can come to mean anything to anyone.  So I’m more of a bible story person rather than a bible verse person.

But a bible story didn’t fulfill the requirements, so I went in search of a verse.  And I found one.  One that I can embrace and claim as my favorite.

Then I commended mirth, because a man has no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labor the days of his life, which God gives him under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 8:15

This is where the oft quoted phrase of “Eat, drink and be Merry” comes from.  And I happen to be a fan of all three activities.  And to know that God commands me to do them is proof that he loves us, is it not?  Or as another great American put it:

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Ben Franklin

So, that got me to thinking.  What else have great people had to say about this topic.  And by this topic, I do mean beer.  Because, if Mr. Franklin is right, and I’m not going to tell him he’s wrong, then beer is the de facto proof of God’s existence.

Abraham Lincoln had a high opinion of Beer.  In fact, he believed that enough beer could save our nation!

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.
-Abraham Lincoln

But it is not national leaders alone that understand God’s love through beer.  The common man can appreciate beer too.

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza
- Dave Barry

And of course, our own president can appreciate the miraculous powers of common beer.

I have always believed that what brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart.
- President Barak Obama
2009 Beer Summit

So if so many wise people can see that beer is good and godly, why is it so often looked down upon?  That is a mystery I’ve often contemplated, and I think I have some answers.

1. Beer tastes like horse piss.  It’s true, most American beer does.  Or worse, American light beer tastes like…  nothing.  Call me a beer snob, but I do not like the weak American style beers.  But attacking all beers based on the poor taste of a few is akin to attacking all religious people for the extra-bedroom activities of Ted Haggard.
2. Beer makes one silly.  But only if beer is drunk in excess.  Which should be measured by kegs, not cases, and by activity, not occasion.  I can’t help that pot bellied rednecks drink to much while watching football.  That neither lessens football or beer, both of which are Good.  Instead, it shows that rednecks really “get” the holy concept of “Eat, Drink and Be Merry.”  Instead of a negative, they should be held up as the example!
3. Beer is expensive.  But that’s just silly.  Beer is the single reason that mankind developed civilization.  Without beer, we’d all still be small clans of hunter-gatherers, or perhaps advanced to the point of quilting bees and scrapbooking.  But nothing civilized.

So let’s accept, shall we, that beer is holy.  And needs to, at times, be consumed.  For God did command it.

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