I thought maybe we could start something like this here. Sometimes, it might be religious. Sometimes, sacreligious. Sometimes, serious. Sometimes, funny. If you like it, let me know.

Today’s thought comes from Muslim Poet Rumi:

When the ocean of Mercy begins to foam,

even stones drink the water of life.

The face of earth becomes lush green,

the dead wood springs to life,

the lamb and the wolf together play,

the despairing becomes valiant and strong.

-Rumi, “Mathnawi”

This quote seems appropriate as the decimated country of Afghanistan begins to rebuild itself, hopefully into a more peaceful nation. It also helps to remind me that despite the cold and wet weather of winter, the rebirth of Spring is just around the corner.

It’s been a busy week around here for us Llamas. We’ve all been busy with clients. Hey, our day jobs help keep this content free (as in ad-free) since we pay everything out of our pockets.

Anyhow, we managed to update the long overdue Llama Tails section. It needs tweaked but I was in a rush. You’ll see yours truly in there from a somewhat embarrassing picture my wife snapped of Taranis and I after a few drinks. Hope you enjoy, and if you have an image that you think would be a nice addition to the llama tails, please send em my way.

Llama Tails preview:

What are you waiting on?!? Get over there!

This past week OJ was questioned by LA police… over a dead cat. OJ’s current girl friend decided to take a one month vacation and didn’t ask anyone to tend to her feline. Eventually the cat died of starvation. But that didn’t stop the LA police from questioning our favorite car-pool buddy about the cat and what he knew. How strange it would be if OJ got nailed over the cat thing, yet got away with murdering his ex-wife?

Our other favorite babysitter, Mike Tyson, finds himself in a touch of trouble as well. First, he must explain himself to the Nevada Boxing Commission for his behavior when he tried to attack Lennox Lewis at a press conference. He reportedly bit Lewis’s foot during the melee, then he shouted derogatory remarks to many reporters while groping his own crotch.

How could it get worse? Tyson learned on Tuesday that Las Vegas police believe the report that he raped a women there is credible. The case has been forwarded to the District Attorney for possible prosecution.

Something tells me that if these two characters were locked up in a room together, either one would end up dead, or they’d get along perfectly.

The Woz, Stephen Wozniak is in the market to make another zillion dollars. As if he doesn’t have enough already. Woz is the co-founder of Apple who retired from there over 10 years ago. It must be nice to retire at age 40.

Woz has founded a new start-up called Wheels of Zeus (link to NYTimes article - free registration required), a play on his nickname Woz.

The Zuesians plan on bringing GPS technology to us little people by, as a company spokesperson said in nice simple advertising language, allowing “everyday people track everyday things.” I guess stalkers can rejoice. More information on their product offering won’t be available until Spring.

As expected, Woz located the company amongst friends in Silicon Valley, which has gone through a steep decline over the past decade. The Woz said the rent was less than half of what it would have been at the peak of the Internet bubble that ended about a year ago.

“I’m trying to conserve money,” he said. Let that go down in history next to Bill Gates’s, “64k of RAM is all anyone should ever need.”

99 bottles of beer! OHHHH… take one down pass it around… Ninty eight bottles of beer on the wall! If your like me, college has filled your head with little more than bong resin and beer hops. Now it’s time for you to take your final exam. It’s time to put those dollars to work and see if your education really taught you anything.

YES, I’m ready to take the test!

or

NO, I need more schooling.

I’m all out of witty commentary. Some would say that’s nothing new. So, for a taste of the ridiculous, I point you to this story about a brothel for man-whores that, surprise, went out of business. It seems to me that 99.9% of the women in the world should be able to get someone to have sex with them at the drop of a hat. Right next to this absurdity, I give you a story about 50 people getting blown up when lava flowed by a gas station in the Congo.

You may have read my previous writings on the Congo. Imagine a country as war-torn as that and then throw an active volcano on top of it. Surely, the people of the Congo must feel as though hell has taken up residence in their country. Their only concern is survival, while at the same time, women in Switzerland are paying for sex.

There has been a new bout of violence in the Middle East, with a Palestinian gunman opening fire at a Bat Mitzvah and Israel’s retaliation with attacks from the air.

See if you can follow me…

Remember when you were a kid and you were fighting with your older brother or sister, and your mom comes into the room and yells at you to stop? So you both point at each other and say the other one did it and you hit them because they hit you first. But mom didn’t care who did what first, she just wanted you to go to your rooms to stop the fighting.

Yo, Israel and Palestine, the world doesn’t care anymore. We’re like mom, just stop it. We don’t care who did what first and who is retaliating for what. Just go to your rooms. You can come back out when you grow up.

Sometimes, life offers up a nice little tidbit of funny for us to chew on. We just tear into it gleefully and our belly hurts from the uproarious tumult. Well, I doubt Ronald Huff was laughing when he looked down from heaven and saw his very own pet monitor lizards eating him.

Granted, it was just his body. An empty vessel at that point as his death had been several days ago. But there is still something sacred about the body of a deceased person. At least, sacred enough not to want to be eaten by lizards after you die.

It appears that old Ronald just keeled over. His lizards got a little lunchy and ate his face off. Karma is a bitch. I guess there is at least one lesson to be learned here: A Hungry Lizard is Your Enemy, Not Your Friend.

• No Lego-designed toys are allowed to portray weapons from the 20th century.
• Every lego must be backwards compatible. Bricks produced in 2002 work seamlessly with bricks from 1956.
• They believe every lego leaves the factory unfinished. To come to life, each one needs the touch and the imagination of a child.
• Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the CEO of Lego, is the grandson of Kirk Christiansen, the carpenter who founded Lego. The house where his father, Godtfred, grew up is nestled amid Lego’s corporate buildings. When the CEO visits the group that develops toys for preschoolers, he climbs the stairs to his father’s childhood bedroom.
• Lego believes childhood play should be open-ended, self-guided play. Not directed play concurrent with video games.
• Almost every office and conference room at Lego contains a bowl of loose Lego bricks so that people can play during meetings.
• The original Legoland theme park in Billund sits adjacent to company headquarters. Everything there is scaled to children. There are even child-sized toilets.
• The founder of Lego, Kirk Christiansen, used to keep a red square lego in his pocket everywhere he went, lest he forget the Lego values.

The sad part: Lego is loosing money quickly. They are nearly fighting for survival. Why? Kids and parents don’t express these types of values anymore.

Parents are overly career oriented, kids are assaulted by media and mass commercialism. Simply, Lego is having trouble competing with Pokeman, Playstation, and Gameboy. Not because they can’t compete, but because the values held by toys are just different now, and they lack creativity.

I wonder, if we could get our kids playing with Lego’s, and enjoying self-guided, open-ended play, would they be better people when they grow up? I’m thinking yes. Everything kids play with these days are directed. Games have outcomes and paths.

How many of you are old enough, like me, to remember having a tub of Lego’s in your room? I’m sure you remember, they were engaging. More so than a good book, they could hold your attention for hours. Much like the Sandboxes our parents played in, Legos encouraged us to create worlds - any world we could come up with. Those little interlocking pieces beckoned us to create, to think, to make. But they did not direct us, they simply gave our little minds a place to run free no matter where we were. A child in the thick of New York City could be off in his own lands and discovering new places. And all because of those little bricks.

And whenever we wanted, we could invite others on our journey. A friend from school, a neighbor, a cousin could easily create along side, adding their own twists and personality to the universe.

How does this happen now? Kids zone out staring at their Gameboys, neither interacting with anyone, nor wanting too. Anxiety comes along with games like that. Did I play it right? Did I beat the high-score? Did I get to the end? With Lego’s, kids always win.

In order to compete, Lego has been introducing themed sets, the most famous of them being the Star Wars Legos. But they are running into a problem, kids want to build it exactly as is shown on the box. This introduces a dilemma for Lego, wherein the themed sets seem to go against some of the Lego values. But they’ve had to do this to compete for market share.

Their solution: storytelling. Each themed set now comes with a story - a story that has a begining, but no ending. Literally, just chapter one. Just enough to set up the theme, to tell the kids a little about it and give them a push into the creative world. From there, the kids can play out the theme in any way they choose, as much as they choose. Still not true Lego values, but it’s something.

I love Legos. I built a Lego table for my son as his first birthday gift. Hopefully my son will grow up a Lego kid.

Because I think Legos can save our children.

Twenty-five years ago today, the nation met a young man named Kunta Kinte. For eight nights in 1977, Kunta and his descendants showed mainstream America something it had never seen. “Roots” was the story of a West African enslaved in the United States. Based on Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, this ground-breaking miniseries cast a primetime eye on the castigation of slavery and its confederated beatings, rapes, and forced separation. It was thought-provoking, emotional, controversial, and a ratings bonanza. All of which leaves one wondering why television can’t be that way more often.