Two video posts in one week! If you’re thinking this is a blogger’s cop-out because he wants to focus his time on NaNoWriMo, you’re absolutely right. But even if that weren’t the case I would feel compelled to share this with you anyway.

If you’re a true geek and don’t exactly consider yourself a spring chicken, then this just might be right up your alley. The concept? Take clips of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, run the audio through Auto-Tune, add a bit of creative video editing, and you’ve got this:

I can’t put my finger on it, but I found this extraordinarily moving. And the more I listened to it, the more I wanted to listen to it. It’s both haunting and hypnotic. And my inner artist/writer/musician is utterly fascinated how seemingly random prose can instantly be turned into poetry.

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise.
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns:
The rising of the milky way

Check out the creator of this ingenious little project here.

Okay, now back to NaNoWriMo!

While there’s plenty of bad food out there I enjoy eating, most of it is just that: bad. This would include everything from pepperonly pizza to Late Night Taco Doritos to Cheez-Its. These foods all have two things in common: 1) I really, really like them; and 2) if I eat too much of them, I get that awful, stuffed feeling, followed by deep regret, followed then by a long winter’s nap.

This is bad food. This is not dangerous food.

Dangerous food, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame. True, dangerous foods also have two common traits. And, true, the first trait is the same as above: I really, really like it. But the second is quite different, and also what makes a food go from bad to dangerous: I can eat it on and on without end forever and ever.

Oh, granted, I’m sure that technically there’s some upper limit. All I’m saying is that I haven’t reached it yet. These are the types of foods I could turn professional with. I must tread around these foods with great care.

It’s not a very long list, fortunately. Here goes:

• Long John Silver’s Chicken Planks
• McDonald’s Hash Browns
• Cashews

This is the point where I’d normally say something rather witty and humorous about each of these things, but I’ve got to make some NaNoWriMo progress. So while I go write another couple thousand words over there, tell me what your dangerous foods are.

When my oldest daughter Sarah was eight, she read about Kraft’s annual “Blue Box Kid” contest on the back of a mac and cheese box. The basics of the contest went something like this: write a story, create an image, or produce a video proclaiming your undying love for this mass-produced macaroni and cheese food product and win something in return. As an added bonus, you got to keep most of your soul.

At any rate, it sounded like a great daddy-daughter project and we gave it a shot. But rather than listen to me ramble on for another three hundred words, let’s just get to the final result(s):

We submitted our entry, heard nothing for months, and figured that was that. But lo and behold we eventually got a letter in the mail telling us that we’d been awarded a coveted “honorable mention” spot. (My guess is one of the stipulations of the contest was the child had to do all the work and it’s a bit obvious dad helped out a bit on this one. Otherwise we totally would have pwned everyone else.) Some time after the letter showed up we got a free T-shirt and a year’s supply of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which, in their terms was a case of fifty boxes. In return, eight years later, Kraft got this free advertising. How ’bout that.