December 19, 2004
I had a great birthday today. My family got me the boxed DVD set of Seinfeld and we watched the making of the show, a one hour documentary. Really insightful and inspiring. The network really didn't want this show to work, they didn't "get it" the test audiences said it was "too jewish," and they basically wanted to "fix it" but when some producer tried to give Jerry and Larry David a sheaf of changes, Larry said, "I'm not going to do any of these. Good luck with the show." Man, that takes guts.

Last night was the True West Christmas party up at the Brink's beautiful home. Really had fun. Trish made a great lasagna, we all brought gag gifts and a trick chicken brought by Brittany was the prized, fought over gift. Lots of laughs.

Grandma Betty came out for breakfast and I made birthday pancakes. Went down at nine to witness a quail release over off Saguaro Road. It was fun. As we pulled up and let Grandma Betty off, I was turning the car around and I heard the host say to a woman in a lawn chair, "Bob Boze Bell is here." The woman in the chair said something and the host replied, "Is that a good, or a bad thing?" Not sure what that means, but I assume it wasn't a high complement. Ha.

Learned a lot about Quail. They have 47 different sounds they make. When the quail rehabber opened the door, they huddled in the back of the aviary and nervously twittered and bounced around, afraid to go through the door to freedom. Finally one or two did, and then clusters of them launched themselves outward into the unknown, until there was one nervous little guy left. There he remained, stuck on his perch, looking scared, sending off the message, "Hey, it's not so bad in here. Come back. We can make this work! I’m serious! Check it out! I’m groovin' in here!"

So much like human behavior, isn't it? How many times do we see the open door and are too scared to walk through it?

Fun talking to my kids. Ursula is back from Iraq and Deena had hairy stories to tell about that. Tomcat told us his theories on human behavior: "A mouse has 99% of the same genes as we do. Almost every species are more alike than disimiliar."

"It never occurs to a boy of eighteen that he will some day be as dumb as his father."
—Old Norwegian saying