At some point or another, we all ask ourselves, “I wonder what it’d be like to be in front of a camera?”    Only a few of us are dumb enough to try it out. SO!   I give you my very first “vlog” (video blog).    May the snickering commence. For those of you reading this via reader, you may want to load this up into a web browser, or simply click on the following link to go directly to the YouTube video: Asshat on Camera © Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Pe... Read Full Story

Announcing: The First Annual Blog-Off for Babies! We’re having a Blog-Off and you’re invited to participate!   This contest will involve writing a blog post on your own blog, then reading and voting on the posts made by the other people participating.   At the end of the contest, the blog with the most points wins!     Prize money is awarded to the 1st and 2nd place winners! The other half will go as a donation in the winners’ names to the March of Dimes, a non-profit charit... Read Full Story

Today my Twitter On Paper arrived!   For those of you who don’t know about this project, a guy named Sam Potts in Brooklyn, NY, decided that he would allow people to request that he write down, on paper, any Tweet he had previously made and mail it to the requesting person, free of charge.   He has just finished the project, capped at 1,000 hand-written and mailed Tweets, and I am now possessing one of them because I requested one before he finished — this is so cool! So, hereR... Read Full Story

Bloggers of the World! I would like to run a Blog-Off:   a contest between bloggers with some monetary awards and some contributions to charity as a result (plus, fame, fortune, and lots of prestige), but I’d like to know how many people would be interested in participating.    If this sounds interesting, read on: The basic format would be something like this:    You get a subject and you have to write a blog post on your own blog about it by a certain day of the week.    Then everyone... Read Full Story

Of late I’ve become enamoured with a podcast called, “This I Believe“, which started back in the 1950s as a project to record audio files of people talking about what they really believed in the core of themselves; the beliefs that really mattered when it came down to the nuts and bolts of who they were. The early recordings (currently being played on the podcast as a revival and fundraiser) are more formal than the modern ones.    They are more prominent people of the times... Read Full Story

This weekend saw me spending a lot of time either being with my father or being a father which, if you consider, seems somewhat appropriate given the nature of the holiday. For the past couple weekends, Dad and I have been spending long hours replacing the old roof of his house with shiny new brown steel in one of our typical father-and-son construction ventures.   While we can certainly spend time with each other in other venues, this is a very comfortable one for the both of us — doin... Read Full Story

Time to pull out those textbooks, folks, and gear up for your next exam — this time, in theological engineering! (an oldie, but a goodie — let’s see what answers you can come up with!) THEOLOGICAL ENGINEERING EXAM 1 5 Questions, 60 Minutes Instructions: You may use a calculator, the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and the Book of Mormon. The speed of light is c and is always blindingly pure. Show all work. Notate all divine inspiration. For all problems, assume a perf... Read Full Story

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon Little boy blue and the man in the moon When you comin’ home Dad? I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son You know we’ll have a good time then This song has always brought a lump to my throat, no matter when in my life I have heard it (and yes, I prefer the Ugly Kid Joe version, thanks).    It’s not that I had a bad father when growing up — I had a great father.    But now — I have a wh... Read Full Story

For several years now I’ve been meaning to do something with the large pile of flagstone that’s been sitting out back, but never really made the effort to get something moving and in place. However, now with the advent of summertime and the presence of some cheap and willing labor (locationally-captive Aussie brother-in-law Sam), I decided it was high time to replace my old and worn wrought-iron fire-containment device with something a bit more robust and built out of good old-fas... Read Full Story

Earlier tonight my wife was well and thoroughly convinced that the mushrooms I ate at the supper table were going to finally off me in a blaze of culinary experimentation gone wrong and save her the trouble.   As it is now some 4 or 5 hours later and either I’m still here (no ghostwriting…yet!),  I’m afraid I’ve managed to twart untimely death once again and will still be around to annoy her in the morn with my insipid smiles and amateurish humors.   C’est la vie... Read Full Story