Bob Hayes Online

Eight wonderful and fulfilling years. I love you, honey.

I have some very exciting news to share with my readers.

My daughter Stephanie, age 6, has just been informed that she will be admitted to the Oxford University class of 2024! What’s more, she’s been granted a full scholarship on the basis of her astonishing artistic talent (last week’s opus, “Car Made From Two Cardboard Boxes With Little Mermaid Plates For Wheels And Plastic Cups For Headlights”, has already been photographed for the cover of Artforum’s January issue), as well as being named a Fulbright Scholar for the year!

Some people might think that these awards and accolades are slightly premature, given that Stephanie was only 11 days into the first grade when the Oxford people began making their selections. Such resistance to the greatness and majesty of my daughter’s obvious, blinding talent is probably rooted in sexism. Clearly, when an artist and scholar of Stephanie’s power arrive on stage, quotidian considerations of measured accomplishment or observed success – on anything – must go by the boards, and only reactionaries rooted in an oppressive hegemony of dead white maleness would have any objection.

Since Oxford will be paying her full freight, she plans on using the Fulbright money to buy more Polly Pocket dolls. Even the greatest of our artists – and clearly, Stephanie has already ascended from merely human status into the realms of the demigods – continue to draw inspiration from the popular culture.

She might even create her next masterpiece around an Olympic theme.

Really.

My adorable six-year old was concerned about burglars and/or robbers. She said “I need something to use against them if they come.”

I said “you mean like a weapon or something?”

“No. I don’t want to do it myself. Something would do it for me. I would have like a metal detector all around the house, because robbers usually have metal. Yes. They have either guns or swords. Mostly swords. I would have a TV in my room and it would show what was in the detectors. And I would know if they were up to no good.”

I agreed that this was a sound concept.

“And then when I saw them, lasers would shoot out and kill them.”

As a geek, and as a heartless Republican, I am so doubly proud of my little robber-killing engineer.

Why, indeed. Someday there will be religion of gay rock-climbing Trek enthusiasts, and this video will be played each week at Sunday services.

Ann Althouse and her beau Meade have tied the knot, right here in beautiful Colorado (where the law permits people to conduct the ceremony themselves)! Well done, thou good and faithful bloggers.

Just click on it.

The guys who played D&D with Dave Arneson back in the day – and into the present day – are still at it. Heartening.

My current D&D group has been going for more than ten years. Same campaign, running variant timelines as part of a master story – very cool and fun. So far we’ve played with 2nd edition, 3rd edition, and 3.5rd edition rulesets. I wasn’t actively playing for a few years but have been back in for the last couple of years and it is still a blast.  Scary and cool to think about this group still going twenty or thirty years from now.

Ever get sick of the long anti-materialist “you Americans with your SUVs and your big-screen TVs” rants so popular among the hard economic left?

Him too.

Full of awesome. Go, read.

Many years ago, when I worked at Microsoft, I had a coworker and friend named Rangarathnam Gopu from Madras in India. Nice fellow, very talented software engineer. Over the years we lost touch; I heard vaguely through the grapevine that he had gone back to India.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine in Denver posted a note on his blog mentioning that he was traveling to India and asking for various bits of advice. I had no counsel, but mentioned in the comments of his blog post that if he was in Madras, and if he met a fellow named Rangarathnam Gopu, it would be nice if he would send my fond regards.

Yesterday I got an email from Gopu. He had been Googling his own name, as we all occasionally do (well, maybe not the John Smiths among us) and one of the top hits was, you guessed it, my comment. So he tracked me down via the comment, dropped me a line, and now we’re back in touch. Amusingly enough, he got sick of software right around the same time I did. His second career choice? Writer.

It’s a small world, if someone indexes it for you.