An instant classic from the Busch Gardens log flume, with Jay Wilson and myself. This one was just too funny to leave behind.

Believe it or not, being a member of junk-mailing lists, in particular those targeted at consumers of high-end "lifestyle" products, can be good. Being a close friend or relative of a person on those lists can be even better. This second approach has gotten me past the door of a surprising number of product launches, luxury car test drives, and top-shelf whisky tastings, usually in the company of my cousin Torm, whose tastes are somewhat better funded than my own and whose addresses are in somewhat wider circulation. But it was this October that Torm, my friend Jay Wilson, and I headed south to the Homestead Speedway to participate in the ultimate free-of-charge luxury-goods marketing event: the Audi Driving Experience. Click on the link to read more and be prepared to accept that all Audi requires from you is a driver's license and the flimsiest pretense of being richer than you actually are to stuff your head into a helmet and set you loose on a racetrack piloting several hundred thousand dollars worth of powerful machinery.

Mr. Mark Miller, true friend, pipe-crawling engineer, vagabond musician, gentleman-scholar, got married this weekend to his girlfriend Nicole in a lovely ceremony followed by a crazy party and supported by three days of various other entertainments. Per request, I am providing here a copy of my toast:

I was woken one day by my father, who had been visiting my house. He asked me about my tomato crop. I am no gardener and went outside, mystified, to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, growing in a line on a patch of sandy dirt outside were 10 or so tomato plants, many with small green fruit already in evidence.

We stood around scratching our heads until one of us spotted the obvious. The long narrow barren patch in the middle of my lawn had been caused by our sewer pipe rebuild of a month or two previous, in which we replaced with PVC an ancient tar-paper pipe, ruined by tree roots and leaking torrents of sewage into the ground. We turned this fertile soil over with shovels in the course of digging out the pipe and refilling the ditch, and the current theory holds that this brought close to the surface tomato seeds planted there by the old method that fruits of all kinds evolved to exploit.

That's right! WE planted them, every time we ate tomatoes and flushed the remains. Although some members of my family have expressed uneasiness at the history of this harvest, I'm sure that they'll taste far better than the supermarket product, cruel suggestions of the flavorful terroir coming through notwithstanding.

UPDATE: April 7, 2006

Fruits are being harvested and indeed they do taste better than commercial ones, like a typical tomato but more. Apparently we "planted" no less than three varieties: cherry tomatoes, nice mid-size round ones, and some kind of lobed Ugly-Ripe looking tomato.

Unfortunately, maybe 10% of my produce has been lost to boring fruitworm. Infuriating! Lecture me all you want on Organic Gardening, you lose your harvest and you'll be just as ready as I am to gas em' all and let God sort em' out! For now I've settled for moving the plants to the backyard (away from the sewer pipe insect-incubator) and tying them up higher to a plastic fence which I've installed (also keeping out marauding possums).

I went with some people associated with FAU fencing to Disney MGM Studios in Orlando for the 2005 Star Wars Weekend, a nice event for Star Wars geeks, although not everybody was quite as hardcore as we are. When one of the “crowd control” stormtroopers cracked “He hasn't been the same since he hit his head on that bulkhead” the entire audience was silent except for the five of us, laughing and cheering maniacally. Regardless, a good time was had by all; pictures follow.

A mob at the Star Tours attraction.

Meeting the characters is a cool feature of Star Wars Weekend; Vader was by far the most popular.

Emily, wearing the coolest Star Wars T-shirt EVER, tells Greedo what's what.