Hey there friends. I hope that you've had a happy weekend. As usual, it seems to have passed by so quickly. Our lazy Sunday is winding-down. After sleeping in, I had a happy day spending time with my wife and the baby. I was also able to watch Day 1 of the Grand Sumo Tournament in Osaka. Last night, some friends came over to our house for dinner. We had steaks, played Dance Dance Revolution, and we sang karaoke. We also were able to see how our babies interacted with each other. The...

Hello friends. I love blogging on JoeUser. I enjoy seeing "hits" and "comments" go up whenever I write a compelling article. For about as long as I have been using JoeUser, my blog has been in the top-ten. I really like being in the top-ten. Being there means that a lot of people who wouldn't normally read my articles can read them. With the ranking however, comes responsibility. If I want to maintain a top-ten ranking I had better not miss a day of blogging. All day long I am co...

Hi there friends! It is finally Friday. I am looking forward to a weekend surrounded by family and friends. Last night my wife and I took the baby along for dinner at Bonanza in Saint Cloud. Success! We had a good meal, and the service was good (as usual.) We both had steak and all-you-can-eat shrimp. The last time we went there (in December,) our meals didn't turn out so-well. I was a bit apprehensive before going back, but fortunately we were able to put the past behind us and wer...

As I was looking at my e-mail this afternoon, I saw that MSN was featuring an article on William Hung. (Mr. Hung is that funny Chinese guy who sang "She Bangs" at his "American Idol" audition.) Since his Idol appearance, William has done the talk show circuit, and has made an album, and a music video. He is quickly becoming sort of a pop-culture phenomenon. He is really using the Cheese-factor to his benefit. (I may even be tempted to get his record.) I visited his website at: h...

If you had read my last blog entry, you know that I wasn't able to see the show. American Idol has been bumped back to midnight in the Twin Cities because of the (inconsequential) High School Hockey Tournament. So if you want to read some good "griping," scroll down friends. Even though I haven't watched the show, I will still attempt a rudimentary review of the results. According to internet sources: Jon Peter Lewis was the fans' choice. Leah Labelle, George Huff, and Jennifer Husdon w...

I like to watch American Idol. I write about each episode on my weblog. Tonight's show (the wild card round results show) is being pre-empted in the Twin Cities market because of the Boys' High School Hockey Tournament. How many players are there on a hockey team? 20? Assuming that each of these 20 players have two parents, two teams worth of players amount to 80 people who actually care about the game. I would bet that the majority of those parents will be watching the game live. ...

Last night as I was driving home from work, I heard an interesting commercial on the radio. The commercial was done by a cable company advertising that Viacom channels have been pulled from our local satellite service. Apparently the cable industry sees this as an opportunity to regain new customers. This "conflict" intrigued me. Arriving home, I switched on the local CBS affiliate. Instead of CBS, there was a message from the CEO of the satellite company, urging us to call Viacom and...

Hi there friends. I hope that you've had a happy Tuesday. Here at my house, we've just finished watching the American Idol wild-card show. It was really fun to watch. Here is the show as I saw it: The first segment: Four contestants were eliminated. The four who were eliminated never had a chance to perform on the show. How disappointing for them. I thought that this segment was really harsh for the contestants who didn't make it. It really seemed as if the judges were pret...

Today at work (I work in an elementary school) one of my third-grade students began to eat a Tootsie Roll Pop. As he unwrapped the sucker, one of his classmates asked him whether he has an Indian on the wrapper. From there, the conversation progressed to what one needs on the wrapper to "win." Eventually it was agreed that the Indian should be shooting his bow at a star. I wasn't listening to the conversation long enough to understand what the kids expected to gain from an Indian wrapper...

Hey there everybody. How is it going? Today is one of those lazy weekend days that I like so much. I woke up late, and then I spent the day playing with my wife and baby, and watching television. The most ambitious thing that I did was to assemble a play center for the baby to sit in and play. Tomorrow I will be back in it (at work.) I will have to make sure that all my arrangements are in order for those god-awful state-mandated tests that we have to make the kids take. Those thing...

**Below is the original blog entitled: "I have been nominated for 0 JoeUser Awards." After posting it, I had learned (thanks to SPM) that I qualify under the "annoying" category.** GemCityJoe had a great idea. Make a sort of "academy awards" for our blogging community. People's blogs were nominated, and now the voting is taking place. It seems that my weblog is flying under the radar. I am nominated for nothing, yet I have reasonably good readership. (Possibly due to my non-bl...

One of our fellow bloggers who likes to call himself imaginit had a nice idea. He suggested that users of this weblog show what "the source" of their weblog looks like. I thought that was a pretty good idea. It is possible to learn a lot about a person by looking at how he or she decorates the workspace. This is where the Jamie Burnside blog comes from:

About six weeks ago, the Michael Jackson trial was pretty big news. I think that he was worth at least one segment every half-hour on most of the national news providers. Then Janet Jackson shows her boob on national television, Martha Stewart has her trial, Howard Stern gets censored, Mel Gibson releases the Jesus flick, and the Academy Awards came and went. With all of those other "distractions" it seems that Michael Jackson has fallen off of the radar. I wonder how long it will be f...

Hello friends! I hope that you're having a happy day. I am enjoying a day off from work. Since we had to work extra hours over the last two days for Parent-Teacher Conferences, today's break is our compensatory day. I sure needed it! Running around between three schools and rushing in and out of conferences is exhausting. I had two goals for myself today. Both of them required me to sit "on hold." The first goal was to contact the INS to check on my wife's permanent green card....

Before going to bed at night, I like to read something. Until recently I had been reading the "Harry Potter" series. Reading Harry Potter was great from the beginning. Since I had started reading the series after the fifth book had been published, I had the luxury of being able to start reading a new book in the series in succession as I had finished reading each one. Finishing Harry Potter left a bit of a void in my life. I needed something else to read. I decided that I would re-...