Schulz

Album of the Day: "Isolation" by Toto. Yeah, Toto. You remember them, don't you? Had a few hits in the 70s and 80s? Band made up from California studio musicians? Had some ten or so albums over their career, most of them pretty solid? Okay, I'll concede that maybe Toto doesn't have a particularly broad cultural footprint, but they were still a pretty good band, and Steve Lukather, their guitarist -- criminally underrated and overlooked outside of the worlds of guitar and music nerds. Isolation maybe have been one of their more drug-influenced albums and therefore perhaps a bit lacking in consistency, but it was still one of the cassettes I played for months at a time on my Walkman back in high school during our historically long bus ride. I think if my head is ever cut open for any kind of surgery, the faded tattoo of every note and lyric for Isolation will appear on my brain tissue just from the amount of time I played it on the bus.

The Relay for Life is closing in; in fact, I'm set to meet up with my mother in a few hours so we can turn in our team's money at what they call Bank Night. I don't need to go to bank night -- Mom easily could have turned in the checks on her own -- but for some reason I really want to this year. I want to see all the people working to collect the money and organize the event, I want to see what the new t-shirt design looks like for this year, and I suppose I'm just looking forward to building up the event some in my head. It's kind of a depressing time since everything about it highlights my the absence of my sister, but the relay itself can be a lot of fun, too.

A lot of the money that came in this year came from my family, which in this instance means my extended family on my mother's side. This side of our family is unusually close, but that's not what I'm writing about today. We're also a bunch of nerds who put a lot of value in being the one to make everyone else laugh. A perfect example of this is going on right now, as people have developed a minor bidding war through e-mail to see who is going to be able to donate more than one cousin, only to see him come back with this:

So, you wanna get serious? OK, bring it on! Try to top this -- In addition to our earlier contribution, we pledge the following:
-15 Pfennig (West Germany)
-50 Lira (Italy)
-10 Pence (United Kingdom)
-Un Centesimo (Panama)
-1 Ore (Denmark)
-1/2 Franc (France)
-10 Pennies (Ireland)
-10 Shillings (Somalia)
-10 Pennie (Cayman Islands)

I've got more shiny, antique foreign coins in my vault, some of which may actually have verifiable monetary value, so if you want to "dance", you'd better step up to the plate (mixed metaphor or something).

This is also the same side of the family that years ago, when locked into a duel to come up with the most creative point spread tie-breaker in a football pool, saw point spreads in the hundreds, negative numbers, and fractions. I like to think I won out on this little nerd contest with my point spread (π), which if you think about it was arguably a reasonable guess.

And I'd like to proudly highlight here that few people outside of a math teacher would know what the keystroke for pi is. I'm jus' sayin'.

And to get back to that album of the day, I really have to say I'm liking this one. For something that came out in 1984, this is holding up a lot better than some of the other stuff from my younger days....

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