Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 694

Clara behind the camera

My daughter got her hands on Elysha's iPhone and took this photograph of herself, her first self-portrait.

I'm completely obsessed with it.

High-five

My wife has been trying to bring back the high-five ever since I've known her.

She's also been trying to rid the world of bumper stickers, but that's a story for another day.  

In honor of her unwavering support of the high-five, here's a surprisingly amusing video about the etiquette of the high-five.

The devil is in the details

Twenty five years later and there are still Easter eggs to find in Back to the Future.

This one blew my mind.

My little book lover

My daughter, Clara, has an uncommon love for books.  She's sixteen months old and is utterly fascinated by them.

Tonight I watched her remove a book from your toy box and carry it through the kitchen, into the living room, and over to her tiny green chair.  Once there, she climbed into the chair, sat down, placed the book on her lap, and began reading.  Surrounded by toys of every sort, she chose to read.  As usual. 

Later on, she was sitting in my lap, listening to me read before bed. ...

Three biggest mistakes

In speaking with a friend about her son today, she asked me this:

In your twelve years of teaching, what are the three biggest mistakes that you see parents make.

I answered without hesitation:

1. Telling a son or daughter that "it's okay to defend yourself if someone has hit you first."  I inform my students to defend themselves with their feet by running away as fast as possible.  You never know what a person might have in his or her pocket.  As a kid, I can recall running into bullies...

The annoying gadget guy

There are three kinds of guys in this world.

There is the guy who does not care about or own gadgets. 

There is the guy who loves gadgets but does not need to talk about them.  This guy's cellular phone, digital camera, video camera, laptop, and GPS unit remain safely tucked away unless needed.  For this guy, a gadget is the utilitarian device that it was designed to be. 

Then there's the guy who loves his gadgets to inexplicable heights, speaking about them at every chance and taking...

My life

Carol Goldberg wrote a piece in last week's Sunday Hartford Courant about upcoming books by Connecticut authors, and UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO was included on her list.

I'm honored to have my book included on the list and am grateful to Goldberg for her generous comments regarding it, but I am also amused by the aspects of my biography that people choose to highlight when writing pieces like this.  The fact that I was robbed at gunpoint when I was 23 has never seemed as important as it has since I...

The rest of the story

By request, the rest of the highlights of my lip syncing career:

In 1989, Bengi, Coog and I headed to Salisbury Beach in northern Massachusetts to create a lip syncing music video in a studio along the boardwalk.  I pretended to play the drums and sing backup to Skid Row's Youth Gone Wild and Dokken's In My Dreams.  The video was later shown at one of our parties and I didn't hear the end of it for weeks.  I believe that Bengi is still in possession of the video, which frightens me to the...

Memories Id like to forget

While playing Sweet Child o' Mine at last night's wedding, Bengi and I reminisced about a time when we were seventeen years old. We were both in high school, working for a McDonald's in Milford, Massachusetts, and in an effort to build morale, management decided to sponsor a lip-sync contest, complete with a cash prize.

The competition took place in a meeting room inside the Milford Public Library.

A lip-sync contest in a library.

There were four acts competing in the contest. I was in...

Dead

Things that I can't imagine not doing when I'm dead include:

Listening to music… the thought that I will never again hear the music of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Springsteen, The Who, Van Morrison, or the Stones just kills me. 

Sports… I try to imagine the thought of shooting a basketball or hitting a golf ball for the last time. Or watching my last baseball game on a brilliant June afternoon. Someday that will happen to me, and I may never know when that final shot...