Certainly not the best picture ever taken of me. But considering that it was taken at about 4 in the morning, it's not so bad. I'm the guy in the dark suit standing in the back. To my right is my preternaturally young friend Dorian. In front of him is Miss E. To her left is my wife, youngest daughter, eldest daughter, and my eldest daughter's friend. I think the evidence in incontrovertible. I need a hair cut. I had to badger Dorian and Miss E into coming into the picture. While I've got other friends at Church, I'm closer to those two than most of my extended family. When they aren't around, things just seem emptier than they ought to be.

Last night we all ventured out for some Thai food. Well, not all of us as in all of the folks in that picture. Not everyone in the picture lives in our house, or even close enough to call at a moment's notice to head out to grab some Thai food. For a late April evening in southern Ohio, it was surprisingly chilly.

After dinner we sallied forth and bought a new television. I was shopping for either a Panasonic or a Sony model. The local big box electronics store didn't have any Panasonic models smaller than what would expect in Godzilla's living room if Godzilla ever married Gamera and they build a very large cottage to hold their mutant renegade lizard/amphibian family. as I'm a tightwad, I turned to Sony. The store had Sony model that came highly recommended by Consumer Reports for about $200 less than CR priced them at. I bought the display model at an additional $150 discount.

We took it home and were pleasantly surprised to find that our local cable company broadcasts all sorts of channels in high def that they don't advertise as being part of their basic package. Most are HD versions of local channels. And it's possible that the internal antenna may simply be picking up OTA channels rather than bringing them in from the cable. (Were we live we actually get pretty good broadcast reception.) Aside from making me dizzy while channel surfing because the screen aspect keeps changing, it's pretty fun. And the sound rocks out, quite a few of the channels are broadcast in 5.1 surround sound. Another big advantage is that closed captioning chip does a much better job than our old 10 year old set we replaced.

My only complaint is that there is no video out. When we went shopping for new VCRs so that our daughter's could watch the library of VHS tapes that they've amassed over the years, I couldn't find one with a tuner. Or rather I couldn't find one cheap enough that I was willing to buy it with a tuner. This means no time shifting in the living room. A video out from the new TV would have solved that.

Now my lovely wife gets to go out to heck Ikea and pick out a new entertainment center. Fortunately, I do not need to be involved for the picking out. Unfortunately, I'm going to be stuck doing the assembling.

Facebook has me sucked into a dumb little game called Mob Wars. I need 15 more unsavory individuals to join my mob so that pull off a casino heist. But aside from dumb little games, Facebook is kind of interesting in searching for friends I've lost touch with across the decades. The most surprising thing about it, to me, is how many people I don't know from different groups that I've belonged to. For example, out the people in my high school class at the high school I graduated from, I don't think I know any of those who have joined Facebook.

That is all.