Kids and I went to see Chronic-WHAT-les of Narnia tonight. I downloaded the SNL Lazy Sunday mp3 to listen to on the way to the theater. (The kids have seen the SNL video so they got the joke.) I told them we should stop by Dari Mart to mack on some cupcakes but we ended up skipping that. Usually we stop by 7-Eleven and buy food to sneak in if I don’t feel like paying an extra $15.00 for a combo and candy. But tonight I splurged. Anyway, the movie was great.

Earlier today we went to McDonald’s for lunch. Since I’m not a big fan of McDonalds (aside from breakfast) I stopped by the Taco Bell drive-thru for tacos which I ate inside. I’m so rebellious sometimes. The kids saw somebody they knew from school there so Payton was at their table for awhile, ranting on about what he got for Christmas and other random things. At one point, his rants shifts into, “And last week my dad was on TV and we got to sit in the studio but his part on the show was really SHORT!” which is about the time I made him come back to our table. Makes me wonder how many other people he’s told about this since Thursday.

That addictive Java thing from the previous entry - I spent probably 3 hours on that on Christmas day/evening. Jammie laughed at me that night when I told her every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was multi-colored sand falling in front of my eyes. I showed it to the kids this evening and they each spent probably 90 minutes on it until we left for the movie, then another hour on it when we got home from the movies. They were each on separate laptops, showing each other tricks with it all evening.

SPEAKING OF EVENINGS! I’m reading Tom Sawyer this week. It’s a great story. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it before but very little of it seems familiar to me. Near the beginning of the book, Mark Twain makes a reference to “evening” and there’s a footnote on the bottom of the page by him, informing us that “evening” is a word that southerners use to refer to the afternoon. Or something like that. Kind of interesting to think that a word as common as that wasn’t very well-known 100 years ago. The book is so dated that it’s hard for me to tell when he’s being serious or not. Like, almost everyone in the book is incredibly superstitious and it’s funny to read about. But I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny or not. I’m sure it’s exaggerated at least a little but he’s either trying to make the kids way too cute (in a Family Circus kind of way) or kids were just really stupid back then. I blame lack of TV/internet.

SPEAKING OF OLD-ASS WRITINGS! Jammie got me the 1953 War of the Worlds DVD. I didn’t even know they had DVDs in 1953! (yuk yuk) But I watched it Sunday and it ruled. Oh wait, I think I mentioned all this in my last entry. Anyway, I also listened to the original Orson Welles radio play which was included on the DVD. And that was just as great as the 1953 movie and the book. So far I’ve really liked that story in every incarnation I’ve seen/heard it in. And as I listened to the radio play, I read about all the havoc that it caused when it aired which was pretty amusing. The United States got punk’ed by Orson!

Click here for the page that I read as I listened. For those that don’t know the story, it was a fake news program that caused everyone to think that New Jersey was being attacked by Martians. All kinds of mass hysteria and stuff. I remember something similar happening in the 80’s when a fake news program on TV showed an atomic bomb going off, I think in South Carolina. I half-believed it at the time. I think I still have a copy of that on VHS. Oh, I just did a Google search and found it on wikipedia! Here it is. It was called Special Bulletin and it caused a little bit of a panic too.

So yeah, it’s 1:12am and I’m going to bed.