Curious about the performance of your car, or any other for that matter, in a crash test? Watch crash dummy after crash dummy suffer serious neck injury in front and side impact crash tests. You pick the make,model and year of car but sadly not the face painted on the dummy. I, myself, would love to see Billy Crystal Dummy involved in a 60 mph side crash resulting in a serious explosion with 80 ft flames.


Web Junkie

Steve West scours the Web searching for interest or absurdity and then shakes his head ruefully when he finds it. Read more »

Respen-A Or Not Respen-A?

We got a prescription for the aforementioned drug and have been administering it to Olivia for one month now. The results are pretty mixed. There have been no side effects apart from some minor appetite issues but also not a whole lot of observable benefits. Go »

No Clowns On Halloween Allowed At My Door

Or "How Ronald McDonald Kicked My Ass" About ten years ago, shortly before Brenda and I got married, we attended a Halloween party at a friend's house. The primary reason to get together was obviously to dress up like we did when we were little but secondarily to get drunk as a sailor on shore leave. The standard "funny name" cocktails were offered like "sex on the beach" and "southern screw" and "raw sewage". Go »

Vacation Week II

Took the girls to a petting zoo where they could not only look at the animals but interact as well. Saw some things of interest to me; an albino peacock (well, I don't know if it was albino but it was all white); petted a llama (their hair is kinda rough); the world's fattest rabbit (big as a poodle!); pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, turkeys & chickens & roosters (oh, my); a beautiful garden of vegetables and flowers; and lots of ducks and geese. Go »

Book Autopsies

An artist named Brian Dettmer has a unique talent, at least I've never seen anything like it. Book autopsies in which he pares books to various levels and displays portions of their contents, words and illustrations, for an interesting perspective. Very clever. Go »

Modern Decision Making

Yesterday, I e-mailed a psychiatrist and a tattoo artist. Whoever gets back to me first, wins. And that's how we do self-care in the Year of Our Lord 2025. Go »

Thorough Movie Reviews Revisited

Are you one of the group of people, like myself, who insist that they are not influenced by movie critics and make your film choices based on whim, fancy, instinct or some other method completely unrelated to some "professional's" opinion? Perhaps you should visit this website where you can rate (not review) movies yourself, and compare the result with a series of national reviewers to see whose opinion most closely matches yours. Maybe that particular reviewer deserves a second look since you two seem to be on similar movie viewing wavelengths. Go »