The Weekly Awesome Video. One guy, one duet, a bazillion television theme songs. Check it out.

The Weekly Time Waster. Lateral (Thanks Dawn!)

The Weekly Worst Television Idea Ever. Animal Planet has made the wise decision to give Mike Tyson his own television show. What's it about? Pigeon racing, of course. Yeah, that'll be a hit.

The Weekly Read. I just finished No Survivors by Tom Cain. His first - The Accident Man - was just so damn entertaining, I was really looking forward to reading the second. Cain writes about Samuel Carver, a guy who makes accidents happen to bad people. Of course, while doing all this bad stuff to others, bad stuff happened to him. And No Survivors is all about Carver getting out of trouble. It wasn't as strong as the first but it was still a very well-written, fast paced and terribly addicting thriller.

The Weekly Schadenfreude. Apparently Sandra Bullock's husband is screwing around on her. So she left. Yeah, that sucks. But as I was reading the story on People's site, I skipped down to the comments section and found something that sucked worse - a comment from someone named Rosemary. She wrote: It's the same situation as Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet. The women win the Academy Award then they split from their husbands.Why? I think for 2 reasons: The men feel upstaged by their more successful wives or the men want or need a wife, not an equal partner, primary breadwinner or Super Woman/FemiNazi. We live in the 21st century but when it comes to family, tradition still rules (thank GOD). Women may need or want to work. But if they put work ahead of family - when they choose a golden statue over family, there is a very good chance those families may be torn apart. Call it right or wrong - it's just how it is. When you marry, you must decide what's more important - your career or your spouse and family. And if Jesse was unfaithful to Sandra, then ponder this: Maybe Sandra wasn't home enough. Maybe he's a pig - I don't know; I wasn't there. But he was unfaithful and another family is ripped - because of a woman's career. She's a FOOL.

The Weekly Question From Mia. What color door do you have?*

* On Tuesday night, I sat down and read her all the answers you guys gave last Friday. She loved it.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention undertakes a regular study to pulse-check the health habits of adults in the US. The most recent results pertaining to obesity and the contributing factors to obesity are pretty startling.

- One in five adults smokes.
- 61% of adults report that they're current drinkers. In fact 75% of educated adults - those with bachelor's degrees and higher - indicate they drink.
- Two-thirds of adults are overweight.
- 12% of children between 2-5 are obese.
- The population of children between 6 and 11 finds a 17% obesity rate.
- 17.6% of kids between 7 and 19 are considered obese.
- 80% of kids who were overweight between the ages of 10-15 were obese at age 25.

Over the last three decades the total number of newly diagnosed cases of diabetes in the United States alone tripled to nearly 1.5 million. Of the diagnosed individuals, 83.5% were overweight or obese. Type 2 diabetes occurs rarely in children, however the emerging cases over the last decade are staggering. Most studies attribute this outbreak to two primary factors - exercise (or lack thereof) and diet.

Americans consume about 12 teaspoons of high fructose corn syrup per day; kids and teenagers generally exceed that average by 80%. In fact, of school-age kids, nearly one-third of their caloric intake comes from sugar (while the national average is around 10%).

The average American kid spends three hours a day in front of the TV, and nearly five and a half in front of anything with a screen. And while we can all have arguments over what constitutes excessive TV watching, the simple fact is that these things - entertainment and exercise - don't have to be mutually exclusive. Most recommendations simply call for one to two hours of physical activity a day. Yet that hour or two is being traded for sedentary activities.

The Federal government shells out somewhere around $100 billion per year to pay for or offset obesity-related medical expenses. The individual states add anywhere from $85 million to $7.5 billion to support individuals with obesity-related healthcare expenses or provide related care. For those who are concerned about the government getting involved in health care, I have news for you - they already are. And we're forcing them to.

I threw out a lot of information, a lot of facts. I don't really have any answers nor do I have an argument. I can't complain nor can I judge. But what I want to know is this - what can be done to curb the problem? Or are we just in a downward spiral of cheap food and sedentary lifestyles?

There are pluses and minuses to being an only child. I became very independent at a fairly young age. And though my parents were always around and we had a good relationship, I learned to entertain myself early on. I think I'm a more imaginative and independent adult as a result. I can go for long stretches without speaking a word. I am comfortable being alone. I relish time locked in a room with a book. On the flip side, I can go long stretches without saying a word and that drives Beth crazy. And I never really learned to share. When Beth and I moved in together seventeen years ago (sheesh!), it was the first time I'd really ever shared my living space and my stuff. I am, by the very fact that I was an only child, probably a bit more spoiled and selfish.

All this is a long way of saying that I can't quite relate to the relationship Mia and Owen have. I can't put myself in their shoes. I never had to punch anyone in the head to get a book back. I never had to wait my turn. I never had to put up with being interrupted when I was trying to make myself a sandwich. No one ever tried to steal my pants while I was peeing. And I never had to share my parents' love and affection. So sometimes I feel like I'm operating at a disadvantage as a parent. Unlike Beth - who has a younger brother - I don't have any lessons-learned to work from or wise words to share.

Do you have siblings or are you an only child? And how do you think that impacted the way you turned out as an adult?

#5931 - When your son looks exactly like your dad, it's nice. But strange. Especially when you see your mini-dad picking his nose or peeing on the floor. Most of us don't get to see our dads do that.

#5932 - When you fart really loud in your kids room in the middle of the night, your wife can hear you. Especially when you don't turn off the baby monitors.

#5933 - You will always lose at Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. Always. Even if you cheat. Which you don't because you're not an asshat. Really.

#5934 - Kids are master manipulators. In fact, we should send four year olds to negotiate arms treaties and middle-east peace. They'd get the job done and probably end up with a showing of Cinderella, a new Barbie and a cookie to boot.

#5935 - A single M&M can buy you an unbelievable amount of time.

#5936 - Children find it hilarious when you cluck like a chicken to the tune of Smoke On The Water. We won't talk about how this was discovered.

#5937 - At Target, the average two year old is able to pick up approximately 5.5 items from every 1.4 linear feet of shelf space. These tend to be the most colorful yet inappropriate items such as mouthwash, a six pack of hot pink granny panties, dog biscuits and tampons.

#5938 - Children have no respect for testicles and the fragility thereof.

#5939 - When you watch How It's Made with your four and a half year old daughter, you damn well better know how an engine works or the temperature at which steel melts. Or every possible use for ball-bearings. You will be asked and there will be hell to pay if you don't have an answer.

#5940 - Despite the fact that you installed their buttons, kids know how to push yours more effectively.

You parents got any additions to make?

My tiny dancer isn't so tiny. She's a little person with her own set of likes and dislikes, who colors outside the lines because to color within them would be predictable and boring, who memorizes lyrics to musicals, who makes her own dinners of reverse peanut butter sandwiches in which the peanut butter is on the outside of the sandwich not the inside, who loves her brother and often proves it by trying to teach him to cartwheel or taking him down with a flying tackle, who makes up vast worlds inside her head, and who knows how to spell nearly everything so long as you're not expecting vowels. And who, as of this weekend, took the stage with the confidence of someone three times her age and quite obviously loved every single minute of it, and did it without her parents.

I can't look at the hundreds of pictures I took without seeing how old she is. And how very, very beautiful.

The Weekly Non-Alcoholic Beverage. Vitamin Water Connected

The Weekly Time Waster. Factory Balls 3

The Weekly Read. The Serialist is David Gordon's first novel. It's one of the more unusual, striking books I've read in a very long time. I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is - it's part thriller, part mystery, and part meditation on literature and writing. I know it sounds like an odd combination and it really was. But it was amazingly refreshing and my first two thoughts upon turning the final page were damn, its over and wow. So, while I can't really tell you what The Serialist was, I can certainly tell you it was fantastic and very worthwhile.

The Weekly Music. A few weeks ago, I pointed you to OK Go's This Too Shall Pass marching band video. I can't believe that they managed to top it but they did. Check out OK Go's latest This Too Shall Pass video and prepare to be amazed. I'll admit it - I don't think it's the greatest song in the world but I'd buy the album on the strength of this video and the sense of humor the band shows alone.

The Weekly Opposite of that Last Video. This is stupidly awesome.

The Weekly Most Awesomely Pointless Site. Shatner's Toupee, an exhaustive study of William Shatner's hair.

The Weekly Schadenfreude. Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade over their "milkaholic" baby commercial. See, the baby in question - the one referred to in the ad as a "milkaholic" is named Lindsay. And Lindsay contents that she is on par with Prince, Madonna and Cher in the single-name recognition department and, as a result, demands compensation. And I agree. I say if she's also willing to acknowledge that her name is also synonymous with no-talent hack, hot mess and skank, she should be fairly compensated.

The Weekly Question From Mia*. What color is your best tiara and how long is your hair?

* Seriously, I've been asking her what questions she'd like to ask you guys and this is what she's coming up with.

I wrote at least once last week about the hours - or lack thereof - available to me in the day. I think we all came to the collective conclusion that more hours wouldn't necessarily be a goo thing since we're all busy enough and those additional hours would only get filled up with the boring and tedious crap we need a break from.

The one thing I really didn't address in that list of stuff I talked about was blogging.

I make time to write my posts and respond to the comments that I get. Both are really important to me and things that I feel like I have to do daily. There's no gun to my head except the gun in my head that I mentally point at my head. That didn't make sense but I think you probably know what I'm trying to say. But the piece of the great blogging trifecta that's missing is reading all the awesome stuff many of you write each and every day. The simple and awful truth is that that I haven't commented on your sites in at least a month and I haven't cracked open my newsreader in just about that long. I fear this makes me a horrible person and an even worse blogger.

Reciprocation is important to me. You all take time out of your days to drop by and read and even comment on whatever I've managed to cobble together that day. And I'm concerned that you don't know what that means to me. Because it means a lot and I am extremely grateful for it.

There. That's my confession. You all hate me now, right?

I'm pretty well convinced that people who may eventually become parents should be injected with some innate knowledge upon birth. Like, how to change a diaper, what to do for fever and how that differs from treating a puking kid, and what kids should be reading and at what age. I was born without that knowledge so I need you. Seriously. Help. Or else I'm going to be reading her the latest Harlan Coben or John Sanford thrillers that are sitting on my nightstand. And nothing good would come of that.

What books did you love growing up? And, if you're a parent, what books do your kids love now?

I'm not even going to point fingers here. There's more than enough blame to go around. Republicans are falling all over themselves to block anything from being changed at all, even if it somehow benefits the people of the United States, while the Democrats can't seem to get organized enough to take their collective thumbs out of their collective asses and make a persuasive enough argument to the American people about why things should change. And instead of trying to sort out what's best for the people who put them in office, all any of them seem to be able to do is argue like a bunch of five year olds on a playground. Though they have a very large playground and their arguments are featured on the 6:00 news.

I'm sick of the bitching. I'm sick of the fighting. I'm sick of the ego-centrism. And, most of all, I'm sick of the fact that these people - the people we have elected to go to Washington and do a good job on our behalf because all of us wouldn't fit in Washington and if we all tried my commute would be a bitch - lose sight of the fact that they're elected public servants on, like, day two they're in the District.

I'm not at all a reactionary but when they're up for re-election I say we fire them all. And let's reopen the conversation about term limits. Except we can't leave it up to Congress. That's kind of like trusting Tiger Woods to keep his putter to himself when he walks by a cocktail waitress. Instead of electing people with flashy campaigns, Aaron Sorkin-like speeches and buzzwords aplenty (I'm not necessarily talking about Obama - I voted for him and would do it again), lets find some people who value the country over themselves, our paychecks over their own, our jobs more than theirs.

I ask you - is the country and the world better off than it was last year? How about your personally?

On Thursday, I surprised The Bean by picking her up from school and taking her on a lunch date. When I pulled up and she saw that it was just me in the car she screamed daddy!. She was thrilled. It was awesome. My heart did giant somersaults. We went to Chipotle (or, as Mia says the chip restaurant) - her favorite restaurant on the face of the earth since we haven't yet found a place that serves exclusively chips, fries, milkshakes and noodles. We mingled with the lunch-hour crowd, had some burritos, quesadillas and chips (all of which Mia ordered by herself) then went on a requested trip to the bookstore and a cookie-acquiring mission at the next-door Starbucks. The whole day was a big hit.

Friday was similar. While Mia was at school, Owen and I went shopping at Target. I'm pretty sure he picked up one of nearly everything they had and put it in the basket. We almost left with dog food (we don't have a dog), five pairs of headphones (we only have three iPods in the house), year's supply of mouthwash (I think he liked the colors) and there was a cute little two year old girl that Owen has his eye on though I'm sure she wouldn't have fit in the basket with all that mouthwash. He did managed to find a copy of Wall-e which he had to own. I was game so we paid for our stuff and headed home to watch the movie together, just the two of us. He loved it, spent the entire time asking about Wall-e, discussing the relative merits of robots and inquiring what dat? After the movie, I picked Mia up from school again for a repeat lunch date. We hit a different place, had fries and milkshakes and she insisted on going to another book store. Which we did. Then we went home and chilled out for the rest of the afternoon.

We went to the circus on Saturday. It was Mia's third year in a row, Owen's very first. I can't tell you how absolutely, consistently perfect the Big Apple Circus is. It's low-key, lots of fun, and wonderfully old-school. It's fantastic for kids in the single-digits. By the end of the day, both kids were exhausted (so were their parents) so we picked up take-out Indian (at a new place, it was meh), got the kids to bed and crapped out ourselves after finally catching up on our Olympic backlog of shows - Grey's Anatomy (dude, this show has gotten sucky), Survivor (rocks, as always) and Lost (WTF?).

And on Sunday we rested. If resting is constituted by trips to Costco, the beer store, cleaning out the garage, going on a long bike ride and walk through the neighborhood and watching a repeat showing of Wall-e. Mia was happy on her bike, Owen was thrilled to follow her, and we were all happy to feel the taste of spring Sunday offered.

The Weekly Time Waster. Contrapunctus

The Weekly Read. This week - in between working and working and working - I took on David Ignatius' The Increment. The verdict? Not half bad. I was expecting a hard-boiled international spy novel. But what I got was kind of International Intrigue Lite. It wasn't bad - I saw all the twists and turns coming from miles away - but it was well-written and it presented a very well-illustrated portrait of Iran.

The Weekly Television Show I Want To Simultaneously Last Forever And Come To A Hurried Conclusion. Lost. It's driving me nuts. I want answers, people.

The Weekly Week. In case you didn't know, it's National Procrastination Week. I would have told you earlier but, well, I didn't get around to it.

The Weekly Schadenfreude. I'm going with the fine people of New York state who cannot for the life of them seem to find a governor who isn't sleeping with a high-priced hooker or surrounding himself with criminals. Bet Schwarzenegger doesn't look so bad now, does he?

The Weekly Question from My Daughter. What's your middle name?

The massive earthquake that struck Chile on Saturday may have shifted the Earth's axis and created shorter days, scientists at NASA say. The change is negligible, but permanent: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second. A large quake shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet. When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.

Over the past two weeks I've juggled more than I ever thought I could. I conducted assessments on the staff who work for me, I completed a major project, I led a team developing a proposal for new work, I was a dad, I finished one book and started another, I wrote ten entries, answered somewhere around 1,000 emails and somehow managed to sleep. And I wished for more hours in the day.

On Wednesday afternoon the whole gigantic work project was complete. I worked the rest of the day from home. And promptly fell down half a flight of stairs. As I was lying there, the kids asking if I was okay, I started to think do I really want a longer day? The answer was no. Because I'd just manage to fill it up with things to do, more balls to juggle, more plates to keep in the air. Eventually, I answered the children, I was okay (though really I was pretty banged up). And I hugged them both.

Do you need more hours in a day? Do you want more hours?

I'm a reader. Duh. I love to read. It's an escape for me, a little window through which I can crawl each and every day and enter a new universe. And I have shelves and shelves of read and unread universes scattered throughout our house. I might be able to build and actual universe out of the books I own. Long way of saying that I'm more than a little invested in books - physical, paper books. Which is why I haven't jumped on-board the whole e-book bandwagon yet. You know, the Nook, the Kindle, the soon-to-be-released iPad bandwagon.

It's sort of strange given how I've sacrificed physical CDs for music downloads. It's been months since I bought an actual CD. I've even gone so far as to rip my entire CD collection to a virtual format (man, that was a pain in the ass). I do miss the art. I miss being able to pull the CD cover out, read the lyrics, see who did the cover design, check out who played on the album. But I've realized that, most of all, I really care about the music. And I can get that more inexpensively and conveniently online. (I realize this also makes me lazy and cheap.)

I think I'd miss physical books more than I miss physical CDs. I'd miss the feel in my hands, turning the pages, dog-earing a page to mark my place.

What about you? Have you jumped on the e-book bandwagon? And do you think books are fading into obscurity?