### bieber

while mar loves glee, owen loves justin bieber. i learned this the other day at breakfast when he was singing a song that i hadn't heard before. when i asked him about it he told me it was called "baby" and he'd heard it at a friend's house.

o (upon seeing a youtube video of bieber): is that what justin beaver looks like?
me: yup
o: he's a kid, not a beaver?!?!
me:(lmao) yup
o: oh, i thought he was a beaver who could sing. you know, like a cartoon fantasy!

-----
the next day, again about "baby"
o: do you think that justin bieber made up this song by himself?
me: i don't know, maybe. likely, he is singing words that someone else wrote
o: or maybe he had a dream about the song and just woke up singing it
me: maybe
o: how does he sing soooooo good?

Anonymous said…
Too funny! The "beaver" part cracked me up, too. Katie's kindergarten teacher told me that she's moderated lengthy conversations in class about whether his name is Bieber or Beaver. :)
Amy P said…
HI-larious!

Tell Owen that his Auntie Amy can sing pop music with him ALL THE TIME.
mama mia said…
Bieber is hot to kinder girls, especially ones that love to sing while working...I have developed an allergy to "baby"because of my constant exposure to it.
Bonzer said…
Next thing you know, O is going to want a Bieber haircut.

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…