Becky and I have spent the weekend at her parents’ place in Arizona, and we’ll be watching the Super Bowl here tomorrow on their giant TV. :) Here are some photos from the past few days…

While Becky drives, Toby rests comfortably in the spot where she almost the entire ride from L.A. to Phoenix: Becky’s lap.


You tell me: What the heck kind of vehicle uses tires this big?


Arizona’s trademark, a cactus, is silhouetted by the sunlight.


Becky’s mom gazes up at a giant tree-like cactus thingy (uh, yeah, that’s the technical term) at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.


A hummingbird at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.


Becky at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.


Me at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

Trojan quarterback Carson Palmer unveils his Heisman Trophy at a rally Jan. 22 honoring USC’s fantastic winter sports season. The football team’s Orange Bowl trophy and the women’s volleyball team’s NCAA championship trophy were also unveiled.

Sporting my new haircut and USC Orange Bowl t-shirt, I pose with a large tortoise at the Los Angeles Zoo. During our trip to the zoo Jan. 20, Becky and I also saw hippos, apes, a big cat, and a pair of kangaroos that, surprisingly enough, did not know how to rap. More zoo pictures coming soon (or whenever I have time to post them).

Mr. Bun was inaugurated as Adollya’s seventh president Monday, returning the Republidolly Party to power in the Blue House after a two-year absence. President Bun and Vice President Darla took the reigns from Dollycrats Oliver and Eeyore, whom they defeated in November’s national election.

Bun and Darla were sworn in by Supreme Court Chief Justice Darlene — an Oliver-appointed Dollycrat who also happens to be Darla’s sister — at a noon ceremony Monday. Outgoing President Oliver stood nearby as his successor took the oath of office, then shook paws with President Bun moments later, as seen below.

Newly inaugurated President Bun, his foot still on the Bible, turns around to shake Oliver’s paw after being sworn in Monday. At right are Chief Justice Darlene and, at far right, Bun chief of staff Madereine Rue. Vice President Darla, not shown, had been sworn in a few minutes earlier.

It was the fourth time in Adollyan history that the political parties have traded the presidency. In all cases, the transition has been peaceful and orderly.

In his inaugural address, President Bun said he would “devote the full resources of my administration to protecting Adollya from terrorists, invaders, and trouble-makers.” But he also pledged to maintain the country’s tradition of tolerance, invoking the memory of the human civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. — whose birthday is observed by a national holiday Monday — in saying, “Our nation is and shall remain firmly committed to Dr. King’s dream, the universal dream of equal rights for all humans, animals, and dollies.”

As the audience applauded heartily, President Bun eloquently added, “Squeak!”

I’m now webcasting live (sort of) from both coasts: I’ve got one webcam in Newington and another webcam in L.A.!

Los Angeles, CA - updated every minute (when online)


Newington, CT - updated every 5 minutes (when online)

Woohoo! I say “sort of” live because they’re updated by FTP at set intervals, as described above. Moreover, the L.A. cam (a.k.a. TobyCam) will probably be updated rather intermittently, at least while I work out the details of the connection, and in fact, it may not last long. So enjoy it while it’s here!

In other news, check out my parents’ eBay profiles: here’s my dad’s page, and here’s my mom’s.

Oh, and in honor of the holiday, if you’d like to download Martin Luther King Jr.’s entire “I have a dream” speech in MP3 format, here’s a site where you can do just that. (I know I plan to play the whole speech on my computer at some point tomorrow. Hearing Dr. King speak never fails to give me goose bumps.)

Here’s some food for thought: Which age group do you think is the most opposed to a possible war in Iraq? Go ahead, take a guess. Is it my generation, full of bleeding-heart college liberals? Or perhaps Generation X, those unapologetic cynics who are opposed to pretty much everything? Or could it be my parents’ generation, the onetime hippies who protested Vietnam?

No, no, and no. As it turns out, according to two recent polls, the age group most opposed to (or at least skeptical of) war in Iraq is the generation that really knows what war is: the World War II generation.

According to a poll in the Los Angeles Times, 54 percent of Americans aged 77 and older oppose the war, while just 35 percent support it. By contrast, among respondents of all ages, 58 percent support the war, and just 35 percent oppose it.

The Pew Research Center, meanwhile, found a 50-50 split among Americans 75 and older, compared with 2-to-1 support among the public at large.

The L.A. Times has a fine article in today’s paper discussing these findings. Two representative paragraphs:

The Rev. Bill Berglund, 82, was a Marine who served, proudly, in World War II and Korea. He entered the seminary in 1969 at age 49. He is not, however, a pacifist. Berglund said he would have fought in Afghanistan too, “if I weren’t so old and feeble,” and if they had let him on the battlefield in his golf cart. And he has not ruled out going to war with Saudi Arabia. “They financed 9/11, and their young men flew the planes,” he said.

But ask Berglund, who lives in a retirement community in Elizabethtown, Pa., about Iraq, and he all but bristles. “I am dead set against it,” he said. “It is a needless exercise of power by a certain group of people in Washington.”

Very interesting.

On the other hand, there may finally be a smoking gun, and I’m not talking about those chemical warheads. Also, the U.K.’s liberal Guardian is apparently supporting war, and that’s saying something. (Both links courtesy of InstaPundit, which also has a ton of antiwar protest pics.)

On a totally unrelated note, did you hear the one about the guy with monkeys in his underpants on a flight from Thailand to L.A.?

All right, the story goes something like this. A few days before leaving Los Angeles for winter break, I was walking back toward my Troy Hall apartment one afternoon. As I approached the front door of the building, which a one cannot open without swiping one’s USCard (the university’s student ID card, pronounced “U-S-C card”), I reached into my pocket, took out my wallet, opened it up, and — I swear to God — pulled out my USCard. I had my card in my hand, and was about to swipe it when, voila, someone from inside the building opened the door to walk out, letting me in without swiping my card.

I proceeded to walk to my room, pick up my New York Times outside the door, open the door with my key, say hi to my roommates, walk into my bedroom, and put some stuff down. Then, wanting to head over to the building’s mail center to pick up some packages, I checked my pockets to make sure I had my USCard (which you need to pick up packages). To my surprise, I couldn’t find it.

Remembering that I had taken it out of my pocket in preparation to open the building’s front door, I concluded that it must be in my apartment somewhere. So I looked — in the pile of stuff I had put down, inside the New York Times, in the cracks next to my desk, on my bed — basically, in every conceivable place I might have plopped it. But I couldn’t find it. I even looked in the hallway to see if I might have somehow dropped it on the floor between the front door and my apartment door. Nothing there, either.

Utterly perplexed, I finally had to give up the ghost and move on to other, more important things; this was exam week, after all, and I had studying to do. Still, I couldn’t understand how the card could be so thoroughly lost. But, bowing to the apparent reality of its disappearance, I went down to the USCard office just before heading home and shelled out $15 for a new card. It didn’t occur to me to ask the people at the USCard office to look in their stack of lost cards, because I was certain I knew where mine was: in my apartment, somewhere.

Despite getting a new card, I continued to hope I might find my old card again, because it has on it my $95 activity sticker, which gives me access to virtually all USC athletic events, as well as a copy of my yearbook, and that sticker cannot be replaced without re-purchasing it. But finding the old card, at least anytime soon, seemed unlikely; I had looked everywhere for it.

Fast forward to yesterday, more than a month after losing my old card. I needed to put some money on my discretionary account, so I went down to the USCard office in the afternoon to transfer $100 from my feebill to that account. On a whim, while I was there, it occurred to me to ask whether they had my old card in their lost-cards stack. I thought for sure this would be a fruitless effort, because my card was in my apartment somewhere, but since it crossed my mind, I thought, eh, why not? So I asked, and so she looked in the stack.

And there was my card.

How did it get there? I have no idea. My roommates wouldn’t have brought it in if one of them had found it; they would have just returned it directly to me. I suppose I could have dropped it in the hallway between the building door and my apartment door, but I searched that area within 10 minutes of when I would have dropped it, so someone would have had to pick it up awfully quick. So perhaps I never had my card at my apartment in the first place — perhaps, when I took that card out of my wallet, prepared to swipe it to open the doors, it wasn’t my USCard at all, but some other plastic card, and I didn’t get the chance to realize it because the door was opened for me.

I don’t know. It’s a mystery that will probably never be solved.

Now I have them both in my wallet:


But the important thing is, I have my card back, which means I can go to the basketball game against Arizona on Thursday. :)

Yesterday in men’s basketball: Pennsylvania 99, USC 61.

That’s right, the Trojans were creamed by the Quakers (5-4), an unranked, thoroughly mediocre Ivy League team that boasts losses to such powerhouses as Drexel and Delaware. And the game was in Los Angeles, for heaven’s sake. USC is now 6-5, with notably ignominious defeats at the hands of Rhode Island, UC Santa Barbara, and now, Penn. Hey Trojans — how do you spell NIT? (And guess what: On Thursday, we get to play #2-ranked Arizona. Oh, goody.)

Another ouch, in women’s basketball this time: the Women of Troy (6-9) lost to archrival UCLA, 72-64.

I miss football season already.

Well, I’m here. :) After staying up all night packing, I slept through almost the entire flight both from Hartford to Cincinnati and from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. In the latter case, I literally went to sleep over Indiana and woke up just east of Barstow, Calif. Now I’ve been reunited with Becky and Toby, and I’m slowly unpacking and settling in. I can’t believe this is the last time I’ll be returning to L.A. to start a new semester at USC!!

Anyway, I have a ton of pictures to post (the Rowland rally, in particular), but I also have a ton of stuff to do over the next few days, so the website is not exactly going to be my priority. But I’ll try to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

In the mean time, keep visiting our new AdollyaCam, a webcam of our front yard in Newington.

Well, I’m off. Plane leaves for L.A. (via Cincinnati) at 1:30 PM Eastern time. I won’t be posting from airports and such, because I don’t have my cell phone. Adios…

Oh, and check out the new webcam at our Newington house showing the front yard and Hartford Avenue.

Players battle for a rebound during overtime of the Newington High School girls basketball team’s Jan. 10 conference showdown against the Platt Panthers of Meriden. The Indians beat the Panthers, 48-44, on the strength of late clutch shooting, and improved to 4-5 overall, 2-1 in the CCC South. The undefeated, #10-ranked Newington boys team also pulled out a nailbiter against Platt.

Jen’s 7-year-old cousin Caitlin smiles in a picture that she took of herself, using my digital camera, on Jan. 9. Here’s a less blurry picture that I took of Caitlin cuddling with her Pooh bear.

InstaPundit says Hamas’s message to Iraq about suicide bombing is not a new idea; Iraq “has already made preparations for this sort of thing, without striking much fear into Americans’ hearts.” Well, I’m a little scared.

I’m even more scared about this: possible suicide bombings on American soil. I’m slightly less scared about this: possible attacks in Zanzibar. Then again, I don’t live in Zanzibar.

Scariest of all, though, might be the INS’s ongoing effort to register all foreign nationals from countries that are deemed potentially dangerous. I believe the administration is doing this with the best of intentions, but imagine what uses such a list might be put to in a nightmare scenario.

Let’s say terrorists release anthrax in Chicago, set off a dirty bomb in New York, and bomb the White House, killing thousands –”another 9/11.” Or, worse, let’s imagine that they manage to smuggle a suitcase bomb — a “small” nuke — into the country, and they set it off in Washington. Hundreds of thousands die, the government is paralyzed, and America goes into a true state of seige. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that a virtual police state would emerge, at least in the short-term. And, lo and behold, we have this nice little list of Muslim immigrants. Do you feel you can confidently assert that it wouldn’t be used to stage a repeat of the 1940s Japanese internment camps? Because I sure don’t.

I hated it when anti-war liberals and overzealous ACLU types used the “Japanese internment camp” line in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when it was quite clear we were not moving in that direction. But I fear we could be one major attack away from going to a far, far worse place than we can presently imagine. (Have you ever seen “The Seige”?) And since another major attack is very possible, I think it’s prudent to wonder about the possible unintended consequences of creating what could become a convenient list of undesirables.

None of which would necessarily mean that the list is a bad idea, if its benefits actually outweighed its potential for misuse. But I’m not sure its benefits are terribly great. Think about it: are terrorists really going to walk down the local INS office and register? Of course not. They’re going to stay at home, stay in secret, and keep plotting. And unless the INS has suddenly become a lot more competent that its current reputation would suggest, the terrorists probably are not going to get caught. More likely than not, this registration thing is just going to result in more deportations for minor immigration violations (such as the new crime of failing to register) and very little actual progress in the war on terrorism.

On a considerably lighter note, eBay has removed a family’s offer to sell itself to the highest bidder. Like the song says, only in America.

Saturday weekly traffic record with 584 hits — as of 4:12 PM Pacific time Friday — breaking the old mark of 561 unique hits from Dec. 15 through Dec. 21. The record-breaking 562nd hit came from a Mac user at 11:55 AM Pacific time who searched on HotBot for Wesley Clark, a possible Democratic presidential candidate.

JABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip (AP) - The militant group Hamas, which has carried out scores of suicide bombings in Israel, urged Iraq on Friday to copy its tactics and send thousands of attackers with explosives strapped to their bodies into a battle against the West. “We call on the Arabs and Muslims to burn the land under the feet of the American invaders, especially our brothers in Saudi Arabia because this war is not against Iraq, it’s against the Islamic nation,” Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi told a rally in this impoverished shanty encampment.

Oh, joy.