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My mom has gotten word that the tissue received from my dad has helped a total of 115 people.
Most notably, there are two women who are now able to see thanks to my dad’s eyes.
So that’s all pretty cool, and my dad would have been glad to know that he managed to help so many people.
I’m glad that so many people could be helped, and it’s good to know that in this way my dad lives on, but I’m selfish enough to wish that my dad were just alive instead.
Ah well.
As was mentioned, I didn’t do much yesterday. Mostly I waited for A&E to finish with the back-to-back episodes of 24 and their airing of Philadelphia and get on with airing episodes of Sell This House so that I could get my Tanya Memme fix.
Once it finally got started, though, I found myself torn between watching Tanya, watching this cheesy but still kind of cool mockumentary on Animal Planet called Prehistoric Park in which the basic idea was that time-travel technology was being used to capture live specimens of extinct animals using Walking With Dinosaurs style CGI, and an episode of Iron Chef America on Food Network that featured Iron Chefs Bobby Flay and Mario Batali squaring off with help from special guests Rachael Ray and Giada De Laurentis.
For the Iron Chef thing I wasn’t paying much attention to Flay vs. Batali, as I was most interested in seeing Giada vs. Rachael Ray.
Giada was paired with Flay, Rachael was with Batali.
Of course, because I was flipping back and forth between three shows I missed out on seeing who actually won.
Still, the most interesting moment came when the Flay/De Laurentis team was being judged.
Among the judges was former Daily Show correspondent Mo Rocca, who made some amusing comments, most notably when he warned one of the other judges who was being especially critical of one of her dishes about the fact that Giada is Italian, at which point Giada agreed, made a crazy face and began making a stabbing motion.
It was a Crazy Hot Italian Moment!
Mo also earned himself some love by making a joke about whether or not Italian cops eat the Italian donuts that Giada had made. This got her to laugh – which made her look just as crazy as she did when “pretending” to be psycho – and to give him a hug.
Anyway, the show was noteworthy inasmuch as it’s about as close as I’m likely to get to seeing Giada and Rachael clad in bikinis and locked in combat in a kid’s pool full of oil (EVOO, of course).
And for the record, my money would be on Giada, as you can never underestimate the power of crazy.
Once that was over I turned my full attention back on Tanya and the house staging. I like the home improvement related shows, but I really don’t think Sell This House would be as interesting if it weren’t for Tanya and her various outfits.
Still, I am amazed at the wide-range of asking prices for hones across the country. Some seem amazingly low compared to NoVA, while others just make you wonder how anyone can possibly afford them.
I mean, there was this townhouse in Brooklyn that was selling for $825,000. It was a house that would probably sell for half as much around here. It wasn’t in a “ritzy” neighborhood, and apart from just being relatively spacious it didn’t have much going for it to justify a price like that.
It was basically just a standard house in the suburbs, a nice middle-class house.
So given that it wasn’t like it would appeal to the upper-class, who is the homebuyer that can afford to buy a place like that? Is the average income in that area really high enough to support a mortgage like that?
I don’t get it. I mean, there has to come a point when prices are just too high for even upper middle class people to afford, yet are not nice enough for the truly wealthy to bother with.
But whatever.
Somewhere along the line yesterday I realized that I wasn’t going to cook anything and that I didn’t want pizza, so I was going to have to venture out into the world.
This meant venturing only so far as my car and then taking that through a McDonald’s drive-through, but it’s a lot more venturing that I was in the mood for.
It made me kind of miss living in Ashburn where everything was a lot closer than it is where I’m living now. I mean, I had a grocery store and several restaurants just across the street, and the McDonald’s was a much closer drive.
Oh well.
This morning I ventured out again and did some grocery shopping. That was about as exciting as it always is.
Afterwards I watched the movie Jesus Camp, which I had downloaded the other night.
It was pretty disturbing to watch these kids being subjected to standard brainwashing techniques employed by groups that would be classified as cults by Christians – and to see the people doing the brainwashing be totally unapologetic for that fact. That they’re using the same tactics as “the enemy” doesn’t concern them in the slightest. They’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals.
(Like Jack T. Chick, who by his own admission was inspired to create comic tracts based on the success that the Communist party had in China by using tracts. Some Chick tracts actually had cameo appearances in the movie.)
Of course, despite being genuinely terrifying, the movie did have some moments of pure comedy, such as the assembly in Christian Rap was being performed. There was just something so funny about hearing some white kids who would make Pat Boone look like Tupac engaging in some hardcore rapping.
After all, JC is the OG.
We all kickin’ it for Christ, indeed.
(Jack wouldn’t have approved of the use of Christian Rock and Rap music, by the way. Christian popular music is just one of the Devil’s tricks.)
And that was pretty much my day.