Catch a ride with Joaquin and me to see them!
11.18.2007
11.07.2007
9.14.2007
Brad Thompson at Grapefest 2007
Richard, Karla, Joaquin, Gaby, Diana & John went to Grapefest to see Brad and his band play original music on the Hummer stage. They opened for the Romantics (of which there is a video to come...)
Brad's music is really good! Check out this video clip:
Brad's music is really good! Check out this video clip:
9.10.2007
9.09.2007
Check out the latest pictures
Lots and lots of pictures have been uploaded. Make sure you check them out. Friends and Family see lots more... If you want more access and your are really a friend or family, email me, and I will get you that access.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
8.30.2007
Is this Music List sustainable? Not likely...
8.23.2007
8.01.2007
The Familia Perez Simpsonized...
Thought it would be fun to create Simpson avatars of the family:
At http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/ ... yes, i know Joaquin's avatar looks older, but they did not have a baby avatar... i thought maybe they would since Maggie is a baby... oh well.
here is the final product:
At http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/ ... yes, i know Joaquin's avatar looks older, but they did not have a baby avatar... i thought maybe they would since Maggie is a baby... oh well.
here is the final product:
7.26.2007
It's over...
...and it all ended really well! I am talking about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
"Wow!" is really all I can say! J.K. Rowling is a master author. She never sold out her characters for a cheap ending, but rather embraced the difficulty of finding true resolution for the story.
If you have not read it yet, I won't give any spoilers here... do yourself a favor and read it!!!
I will miss Harry Hermoine & Ron, but not too much, after all I can always pull the books off the shelf and read them again. And I do intend to, as soon as Joaquin is old enough to understand, we can read them together.
I look forward to reading Jo's next stories, as I am sure she has many new characters and adventures to take us on.
Thank you Ms. Rowling for giving us 7 wonderful novels about a boy who lived!
"Wow!" is really all I can say! J.K. Rowling is a master author. She never sold out her characters for a cheap ending, but rather embraced the difficulty of finding true resolution for the story.
If you have not read it yet, I won't give any spoilers here... do yourself a favor and read it!!!
I will miss Harry Hermoine & Ron, but not too much, after all I can always pull the books off the shelf and read them again. And I do intend to, as soon as Joaquin is old enough to understand, we can read them together.
I look forward to reading Jo's next stories, as I am sure she has many new characters and adventures to take us on.
Thank you Ms. Rowling for giving us 7 wonderful novels about a boy who lived!
7.25.2007
New Flickr Profile Widget
Check out the widget from bughugelabs.com . Pretty cool huh? And it links directly to my photos on Flickr.
7.17.2007
Homer Insulting Pagans Everywhere! :-)
Although I may laugh, can you imagine if it was Homer dressed as Muhammad or as Jesus? hmmm.... anyways... I am still laughing...Undated Beatwax handout showing a giant 180ft image of cartoon character Homer Simpson which has been painted with water-based biodegradable paint next to the 17th century giant which is carved in the hillside above Cerne Abbas, Dorset.
Original Article at ABCnews.com
7.16.2007
Uncle Renett & Floyd "Joy" Mayweather, Sr.
Uncle Renett sent us this picture of him and Floyd Mayweather, Sr. from Saturday night's PPV boxing bout in Biloxi, Mississippi. Pretty cool!
7.11.2007
Harry Potter's Editor
Another cool article about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows originally posted here.
The Wizardly Editor Who Caught the Golden SnitchI am ordering my copy soon... just waiting for Amazon.com gift card...By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 11, 2007; C01NEW YORK -- There are a lot of great things about being the Man Who Brought Harry Potter to America: You don't have to care about the latest Potter movie (which opened last night at midnight), for example, or the bazillion-copy print run for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (on sale July 21) or the Harry Potter theme park scheduled to go into competition with Disney World as early as 2009.
"The fact that there's a theme park has no effect on my life," Arthur Levine says.
Don't get him wrong: The veteran children's book editor -- who has his own imprint at Scholastic and who, in 1997, famously took a flyer on the first book by a British unknown named Joanne Rowling -- is far from ungrateful for the ridiculously pervasive cultural phenomenon Harry Potter has become. "That's what you want for every great book," he says. "To have an audience and have people talking about it."
Still, when Pottermania threatened to overwhelm the work that sparked it, Levine did what he had to do.
As an editor, he defines his job as finding writers whose work he loves, helping them write the best books they can and publishing them well.
"At some point I needed to pay a little bit less attention to the phenomenon," he says. "I'm not responsible for the phenomenon.
"I'm responsible for the books."
* * *
Walk into Scholastic's Soho offices and you get a dose of Harry the Phenomenon right away. Above the first-floor security desk, a video loop trumpets the seventh and last Potter book with a series of heavy-breathing questions:
"WILL HOGWARTS REOPEN?"
"IS SNAPE GOOD OR EVIL?"
"WHO WILL LIVE, WHO WILL DIE?"
Upstairs, in the spacious room where the interview takes place, the atmosphere is calmer. Illustrations from classic children's books cover the walls: "Where the Wild Things Are," "Make Way for Ducklings," "Goodnight Moon."
Levine is 45, with short, graying hair and a ready smile that contains just a hint of the cat who got the cream.
He can't talk about what's in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," of course, but he's dying to. Tell him that some Potter-savvy teens have urged you to brush up on the nuances of Horcruxes before plunging in and he laughs infectiously.
"You'd better!" he says.
Levine's life story should be an inspiration to English majors everywhere.
He grew up in Elmont, Long Island, right on the edge of Queens, with a doctor father and a mother who was a teacher and an artist. "I always was an English kind of guy," he says, and he read "really broadly" from an early age. Among many beloved books he mentions are Russell Hoban's Frances stories, Michael Bond's Paddington series and fantasies by Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin.
At Brown he majored in English and creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry. After graduation, he signed up for the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, a well-known first step toward entry-level publishing jobs. When he completed it, the director asked what part of publishing he'd like to be in.
"I said, 'I want to be a children's book editor,' " Levine recalls. "And he said, 'Don't do that. You will never get a job.' " There weren't enough of them, it seemed, and their occupants seemed never to leave.
Here comes that smile again: "I'm glad I didn't listen to that one particular piece of advice." G.P. Putnam's Sons hired him as an editorial assistant a few months later.
For the first decade or so of Levine's career -- during which he also worked at Knopf and Dial -- he mostly did heed another bit of conventional wisdom. The word then was that fiction for children, especially in hardcover, didn't sell.
On one level, this was fine with Levine. He had his mother's love for art and he'd chosen children's books in the first place because "for me, it was poetry and art together." So he made his reputation with picture books.
"I was known for 'Mirette on the High Wire' and 'Officer Buckle and Gloria,' " he says.
Yet he also displayed, from the beginning, an instinct for fiction that would sell.
In that initial Putnam job, he happened to be the first to read "Redwall," by Brian Jacques. "I was over the moon," he says about the opening volume of what would become an immensely popular series. When his boss wouldn't go for it, he asked permission to take it down the hall to Philomel, a Putnam imprint. Much later, when he was heading the children's division at Knopf, he enhanced his reputation by acquiring Philip Pullman's celebrated "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
This track record gave him some credibility when -- in the spring of 1997 -- he flew off to the Bologna Children's Book Fair and fell in love with a pre-adolescent wizard.
* * *
Barry Cunningham is one of the only people in the world who know what Levine was feeling when he read J.K. Rowling for the first time. Cunningham is the Man Who Bought Harry Potter in the First Place -- for Bloomsbury Children's Books, a then-tiny British outfit, in 1996. He really liked Rowling's manuscript, especially the relationships among the characters and the way they showed "the power of friendship" -- but that didn't mean he thought it would sell much.
After haggling with her agent for what he says "must have been fully five minutes," he bought the manuscript for a sum in the low four figures. Then, worried about his impecunious new author, he advised Rowling to get "a proper day job."
It wasn't Bloomsbury's responsibility to sell the U.S. rights to Harry. The company didn't even own them. But when Levine showed up in Bologna seeking future classics for his new Scholastic imprint, Bloomsbury's rights director gave him a set of Potter galleys. He read them on the plane home. When the book came up for auction, he kept bidding until, at $105,000, his last competitor dropped out.
"I would have been willing to go further than that if I had to," he says.
Levine must have told this story a thousand times by now. But there's still excitement in his voice as he describes how he got instantly hooked -- "first chapter, first pages" -- on Harry.
"I remember I loved this story of a boy who is treated very badly and really made to feel insignificant and powerless," he says. "And then, out of the blue, comes this invitation out." Not only does the invitation promise escape from a life of constant abuse by the "family" that wishes you were invisible, but in your new, magic world, you are already a legend and destined to become "a person of great stature."
There's also this fantastic sport called quidditch, which you turn out to be better at than anyone in your whole school. Who couldn't relate to that?
"I wasn't neglected. I didn't sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. My family loves me," Levine says with a laugh. "That doesn't mean I didn't feel invisible and I didn't feel powerless and I didn't have the fantasy that I would be recognized someday. This is something we all share."
And it was just the beginning of Rowling's appeal.
"I remember loving the humor, thinking she is so funny," Levine continues, "and thinking that here's a rare range of talents in a writer: somebody who can engage me emotionally and yet who can make me laugh. And whose plot is really driving me forward."
Levine makes the point that it was a tremendous advantage for Rowling to have lived with her characters for so long between the time she conceived of Harry (1990) and the time the first book was published in England (June 1997).
"She was building the rest of the story, figuring out the whole arc of Harry's experience," he says. It was only after Levine himself finished the final book that he fully understood "how carefully and deliberately and subtly all the clues and pieces of information have been placed and built from one book to the next."
Rowling's characters, too, benefited from the extra-long development time.
"She didn't just meet these people," Levine says. And all of them -- minor characters as well as major -- get steadily more complex as they mature.
Harry, Ron and Hermione, for example, reach the disorienting peak of adolescence in different books and experience it in distinctive ways. Harry hits it in the fifth book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," morphing into an angry, self-centered teen prone to lashing out at the unfair hand life has dealt him.
"I loved that!" Levine exclaims, clasping both hands to his heart, when the subject comes up.
He was as surprised as any ordinary fan, he says, by plot and character developments as they arose. Which is exactly how he and Rowling wanted it.
"I'm not her collaborator. I'm just the stand-in for the reader," he explains. She doesn't need him to shape her story. His job -- along with Rowling's British editor, Bloomsbury's Emma Matthewson -- is to say, "This is how I reacted."
Sometimes, he would say, "I do not know what's going on here," and Rowling would say, "I didn't want you to have that reaction at this point, so I think I'm going to move some information."
At other times, when he asked about something in one of the earlier volumes, she would say, "That's a good question. I'm okay with your wondering that here. I will answer that in Book 5."
* * *
Long before Book 5 came out, of course, Harry the Phenomenon had turned into the wand-waving equivalent of Godzilla. No one -- perhaps least of all Potter's creator -- had ever thought he could get so big.
Scholastic publicity director Kris Moran remembers accompanying Rowling to Worcester, Mass., for the first bookstore signing of her 1999 American tour, shortly after her third book was published here. "What's going on?" Rowling asked as they approached the store, where they could see that a crowd had formed. "Is there some sort of sale?"
Then came the screaming and the chanting of her name.
A year later, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" became the first Potter book to have its release coordinated worldwide, causing midnight Potter parties to spring up everywhere. Rowling gave up touring. Meanwhile, the initial Potter movie, scheduled for release the following year, threatened to drown her sensitive young wizard in marketing hype.
It was around this time that Levine decided he'd better not let Potter the Phenomenon go to his head.
For a while, he'd felt as though he were living his own version of the Harry Potter story: Mild-mannered editor becomes publishing wizard. "I can still remember thinking: 'Wow -- even more people have discovered Harry Potter,' " he says. But eventually he decided "to be happy whenever something great happened" and then to bring "my focus back to where it needed to be."
On the books.
Which, he maintains, are what's driving the phenomenon in the first place.
Ask Levine what made Harry Potter a hit and he'll talk about Rowling's appealing personal story (Single Mom on Dole Pens Fantasy, Changes Life), which helped get her the kind of media exposure most unknown authors of children's novels can only dream of. He'll also mention that Harry appeared around the time kids were beginning to communicate their enthusiasms, not just on the playground, but online at sites like Amazon.com.
Yet these things are just reasons for people to pick up the books, he says. It's what happens when they read them that counts.
So what's it like to be Arthur Levine at this climactic Harry moment, with the last book in the series so close to publication and his job finally done?
"I feel very, very proud of J.K. Rowling and what she's accomplished," Levine says. "I feel really proud to be associated with a group of such strong books that have brought so many people pleasure."
He hopes and expects to edit Rowling again.
And yet: His days without Harry make him smile, too.
He and his partner have a 3 1/2 -year-old son and, "like, 4,000 picture books" to share with him. They've just gotten into "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel."
He's got other authors to be really, really excited about. One is Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan, whose wordless narrative of immigration, "The Arrival," he calls "an unbelievable book."
Another is Irish writer Roddy Doyle, whose latest, "Wilderness," is on Levine's fall list.
"Roddy Doyle! Well let me tell you about Roddy Doyle. I can't believe I'm so lucky as to be Roddy Doyle's editor," he says, sounding like a man whose life would be totally charmed even if Harry Potter had never walked into it.
"I just pinch myself, it's so cool."
7.10.2007
Fainting Reflex
From my Uncle Dave in Colorado:
Scary... but at least we know about it now...
July 10, 2007The original article is here.
Cases
Saving a Child, Scaring a Parent: A Fainting Reflex
By JORDANA HORN
My 3-year-old son Zev sat up in his hospital bed, eyes open wide. He could not get over the fact that he was being allowed to eat as many Oreos as he liked and watch “Blue’s Clues” in bed. I could not get over the fact that contrary to what I had thought a mere two hours earlier, he was not dead.
The day had started out typically enough. When Zev, his younger brother and I arrived at Wednesday morning gym class, a bit late, the kids were already running on an inflated track, a sort of elongated, roofless moon bounce. When they got to the end, they jumped off the track, landing about one foot down on a foam block. Needing no excuse to run, Zev took off like a freight train and threw himself onto the track.
Suddenly, he started to cry. Jumping off the track, he had overshot and struck his rear end on the foam cube before landing on the floor on his feet.
I went to comfort him, sure he would bounce back, as it were. After all, it had been a short fall, and the cube was just foam. It might have startled him, but it couldn’t have hurt him badly.
But his sobs escalated, and his breathing grew jagged. I tried to calm him down, but to no avail. This was unusual. Zev is normally an easygoing child; tantrums are rare. His upset was disturbing, but not as disturbing as what followed.
In my embrace, without any warning, he went limp. I tilted myself back to look at him. His eyes had rolled back into his head. His face was covered with a sheen of sweat and had gone from pink to whitish-gray. I heard something loud, horrible and relentless in the background. It took me a minute to realize that it was me, screaming.
I have never had a near-death experience. But holding my limp child up by the armpits, begging someone to call an ambulance, as the rest of the class watched — my younger child included, his hand being held by the instructor — came as close as I ever want to get. I felt as if my whole life was there in my son’s pale face. Please, please, please be alive.
Another mother came over and massaged Zev’s jawbones. I had no idea what this was supposed to do, but it seemed better than doing nothing. Just as an ambulance pulled up to the building with sirens screaming, Zev opened his eyes. His pallor faded slowly. He looked exhausted. His hair was wet from sweat. My face was wet with tears. He had been “out” for the longest minute and a half of my life.
“I’m tired,” he said, and tried to lean into me. I held him up.
“Who am I?” I asked.
“Mommy,” he said, in the weary tone of someone who’s been on the witness stand too long.
After a 10-minute ambulance ride that seemed much longer, trying to keep Zev awake by reciting “Where the Wild Things Are” from memory, we got to the emergency room. By the time the doctor saw us, Zev seemed a little sluggish, but fine. He was responsive. It was as if I had dreamed the entire scenario: he had no memory of it.
The shocking jolt of hitting the foam — not even enough to cause a bruise — was enough of a surprise to cause a condition called breath holding. Zev’s sobbing, the doctor explained, had made his chest wall expand until the pressure had compressed his vena cava and restricted the blood flow to his heart — and therefore to the brain. This set off a protective fainting reflex.
Breath-holding episodes like this always stop spontaneously; there is nothing to do but wait them out. I had never heard of the phenomenon before. But the doctor assured me that it was not unheard of, and that the most harm done by a breath-holding episode was to the parent having to witness it. I concurred with that diagnosis.
A child has this reflex only until age 5, so I have just two more years of potential scares ahead of me. Apparently, according to my Internet research, if you want to test whether or not your children have the reflex, you can trigger it by pressing on both of their eyeballs. I don’t recommend it.
Jordana Horn is a lawyer and a writer in Short Hills, N.J.
Scary... but at least we know about it now...
7.06.2007
Goodbye, Harry - Stephen King's Farewell
Stephen King always writes the best Pop columns in Entertainment Weekly -- the original article is here.
I will be in line too - pre-order line... Did you order your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
yet???
The Pop of King
Goodbye, HarryOur columnist knows from writing his ''Dark Tower'' series that every story needs closure — even if one ending can't please 'em all
By Stephen KingI'm having a day of mixed feelings: happy because I'm reading the manuscript of a novel that's full of magic, mystery, and monsters; sad because it will be finished tomorrow and on my shelf, with all its secrets told and its surviving characters set free to live their own lives (if characters have lives beyond the end of a novel — I've always felt they do). It's called The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, and it will be published early next year.
Did you think I meant the final Harry Potter tale? Don't be a sillykins — not even your Uncle Stevie gets that one in advance (although I'm sure you agree that he should, he should). But I expect to face the same feelings, only stronger, when the pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows dwindle down to the final few. Hell, I had trouble saying goodbye to Tony Soprano, and let's face it - he was a turd. Harry's one of the good guys. One of the great guys, in fact, and the same holds true for his friends.
The sense of sadness I feel at the approaching end of The Monsters of Templeton isn't just because the story's going to be over; when you read a good one - and this is a very good one - those feelings are deepened by the realization that you probably won't tie into anything that much fun again for a long time. This particular melancholy deepens even more when the story is spread over multiple volumes. I felt it as I approached the end of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, more strongly as I neared the conclusion of Frodo’s quest in The Lord of the Rings, and with painful keenness when, as the writer, I got to the end of The Dark Tower, which stretched over seven volumes and a quarter century's writing time.
When it comes to Harry, part of me - a fairly large part, actually - can hardly bear to say goodbye. I'd guess that J.K. Rowling feels the same, although I’d also guess those feelings are mingled with the relief of knowing that the work is finally done, for better or worse.
And I'm a grown-up, for God's sake - a damn Muggle! Think how it must be for all the kids who were 8 when Harry debuted in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with its cartoon jacket and modest (500 copies) first edition. Those kids are now 18, and when they close the final book, they will be in some measure closing the book on their own childhoods - magic summers spent in the porch swing, or reading under the covers at camp with flashlights in hand, or listening to Jim Dale's recordings on long drives to see Grandma in Cincinnati or Uncle Bob in Wichita. My advice to families containing Harry Potter readers: Stock up on the Kleenex. You're gonna need it. It's all made worse by one unavoidable fact: It's not just Harry. It's time to say goodbye to the whole cast, from Moaning Myrtle to Scabbers the rat (a.k.a. Wormtail). Which leads to an interesting question - will the final volume satisfy Harry’s longtime (and very devoted) readers?
Although the only thing we can be sure of is that Deathly Hallows won't end in a 10-second blackout (you're going to hear that a lot in the next few weeks), my guess is that large numbers of readers will not be satisfied even if Harry survives (I'm betting he will) and Lord Voldemort is vanquished (I'm betting on this, too, although evil is never vanquished for long). I'm partly drawing on my own experience with The Dark Tower (reader satisfaction with the ending was low - tough titty, since it was the only one I had); partly on my belief that very few long works end as felicitously as Tolkien's Rings series, with its beautiful pilgrimage into the Grey Havens; but mostly on the fact that there is that sadness, that inevitable parting from characters who have been loved deeply by many. The Internet blog sites will be full of this was bad and that was wrong, but it’s going to boil down to something that many will feel and few will come right out and state: No ending can be right, because it shouldn't be over at all. The magic is not supposed to go away.
Rowling will almost certainly go on to other works, and they may be terrific, but it won't be quite the same, and I'm sure she knows that. Readers will be able to go back and reread the existing books - as I've gone back to Tolkien, as my wife goes back to Patrick O'Brian's wonderful sea stories featuring Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin, as others do with novels featuring Travis McGee or Lord Peter Wimsey - and rereading is a great pleasure, but it's not the bated-breath, what’s-gonna-happen-next suspense that Potter readers have enjoyed since 1997. And, of course, Harry's audience is different. It is, in large part, made up of children who will be experiencing these unique and rather terrible feelings for the first time.
But there's comfort. There are always more good stories, and now and then there are great stories. They come along if you wait for them. And here’s something I believe in my heart: No story can be great without closure. There must be closure, because it's the human condition. And since that's how it is, I'll be in line with my money in my hand on July 21.
And, I must admit, sorrow in my heart.
I will be in line too - pre-order line... Did you order your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
yet???
7.02.2007
I'm Back!!!
It's been a while and I apologize for the long wait (to those of you who actually read this...) but I have been busy with helping out with Joaquin and such... having a new baby in the house can be a lot of work for those of us who live with him, but I am glad to say that we have finally got everything very close to being situated. For example, Joaquin is now sleeping in his own room (the nursery), which was converted from the guest room early last month and the office was combined into a new guest room (with much moving of furniture)
Hopefully we will soon have all of the left overs from the "old" office out of the garage and Richard can return to parking his MINI there. (right now it sits outside every night during the wonderful rains we have been receiving here in North Texas. It just keeps raining and raining and raining. Makes it hard to do the "duty" runs outside...So anyways, I am going to try and make sure that this gets updated more often and with Richard's help, get some pictures uploaded to the Flickr site. there are lots of cute ones of Joaquin, I am certain you will just love them!
Also, I wanted to let everyone know I found the coolest news about an old Anime cartoon being made into a live action movie... its looks awesome...
http://speedracerthemovie.warnerbros.com/Be sure to check it out! and check back here soon for more updates about me and my family!
1.15.2007
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