***SPOILER ALERT: If you, my mom, Donna Murphy, are reading this, and it’s not yet Mother’s Day, stop reading this now. Please. I mean it.***

So, yeah, this year I made another “card” for my mom, Donna. I lifted the inspiration (and parts of the oh-so-complicated CSS) from www.barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com . I wrote the script.

And now, I give it to you. All you need is your mom’s name, some inspiration, and a place on the web to upload a couple files (that place must support php). It’s a last minute online mother’s-day card. For you. I call it MomBike.

Download it here.

To use MomBike:

1. Change your mom’s name on line 15 of index.php .
2. Write the phrases you want displayed, one per line, in the words.txt file.
3. FTP both this file and words.txt to somewhere on the web.

And, if you’re not my mom, you can preview MomBike in action here.

I didn’t pick up Springsteen again until 2004, when I put Nebraska on repeat for two or three months. Last Christmas my sister gave me Born in the USA on vinyl. JJ got me the BitheUSA book. It’s been a Bruce kind of year. And, this week, the keyboarder for the E Street Band, Danny Federici died. I never knew the guy. But — and this is what I came here to tell you about — I do want to share a little about what I learned about Federici and the Born in the USA song.

Springsteen had written a bunch of songs as demos — lots of those songs went on (in the “demo” version) to be an album (Nebraska). Born in the USA was one of those songs, but it didn’t make the cut. The demo version sounded different, a lot more desolate. When Springsteen still thought the demos he recorded were just demos, and when he got his band together to turn them into something more, he pulled out the Born in the USA song. The band played it through once, they played it through twice, and the second take of that song is the version you hear on the album.

Pudding Cake

Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees.
Serves 8.

• 1 cup flour
• 1 1/2 cup sugar (divided)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa (divided)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 2 tbs melted butter
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup cold water

Instructions

Combine flour and 3/4 cups of sugar baking powder and 2 tbs of cocoa, add nuts and butter, stir in the milk and vanilla. The batter will be quite thick. Pour the mixture into a greased 8″ round by 3″ deep baking dish. Mix together the brown sugar, the remaining 1/2 cup of white sugar, and the remaining cocoa and sprinkle it over the batter. Pour on the cold water and bake for 1 hour.

• “He’s an artist, and Tetris is his canvas.”
• (Near the end of a match, from the Tetris play-by-play announcer) “This isn’t a question of who wins — it’s a question of who loses.”

The tournament was double-elimination, and I lost in the first round. Then I won the next five matches. In the semi-final round I faced the guy that beat me in the first round… my fingers were crossed for one of those “at first I was the student, but now I am the master”-type moments. Nope. Dude beat me, then won the tournament… but third place (out of 12) ain’t bad…

The tournament goes on the final Wednesday of each month, which is cool because my mom and dad will be in town for the next one, and my mom loves Tetris…

In the past 16 days I travelled 6880 miles (more than half done in my hardy Honda Civic hatchback). This incuded a wedding, a visit with my dad’s side of the family (four separate visits), two stops in New York City to visit friends, and one long drive across more than half of the country (it’s a good story, I’m going to tell it in its own entry soon).

The view from my new cubicle’s pretty sweet — we’ve got these panoramic windows in the newsroom, and I’m watching the sun go down on the Rocky Mountains right now. It’s my second day of work.

-Joe

I got 13 rolls of photos back from the photo lab today, there’s one roll from my grandmother’s 80th birthday party last month that has so many shots of people laughing. I love it when small themes like that emerge. I have an eight-month backlog of photos I need to post online, it’s part of a massive catching-up project that starts soon.

Tomorrow my subscription to the Greensboro News and Record begins. Getting subscribed was a bit rough on the communication frontier, and the paper is actually mailed to my place (the cool part about that is it will arrive in my mailbox the same day it comes out. How that happens I don’t know). I’ve been doing some analysis at my job (at the Winston-Salem Journal) of the stories we produce vs. the stories that we pull from the Associated Press … looking at another paper, in a similar, close-by market will shine some perspective on the newspaper product. I think. It may be tricky for me to write about the results, since 1. It concerns my employer and 2. That implies I’m a biased source. But hey, I’m a journalist, I know how to handle bias.

And, finally, the motorcycle’s running again, and John French taught me a new way to kickstart the bike last night. I had been using just my leg — he showed me how to use my whole body. I love it when the tool you need was in you the whole time … it’s like finding your sunglasses on top of your head …

Oh, and one last part: Water balloons. Water balloons are awesome. Same goes for pillow fights.

In all seriousness, I don’t believe evil exists and I do believe love does. This frame of mind makes the world a much more manageable place to live, and my parents are responsible in a large part for setting me on the way to this outlook. Thanks, guys!