Famille Du Pentium

Ah, the dog days of summer.  Now summer is over, and it’s time to think about school and soccer and ice skating and going to curriculum nights, parent-teacher conferences, etc etc.

All our pictures from this summer are HERE.  You can see everything from Disney in June to the last pictures I just posted, from the first day of AYSO Soccer for Ethan and Aaron. 

Speaking of those AYSO pictures, I’m having a little server-side trouble uploading, and was only able to upload a few.  More will come later this week, so if you want to see them keep an eye open HERE.

The next big picture & blog event will be Hannukah 2007, although I’ll post here (and at the family Picture Gallery) whenever something interesting comes up. 

First of, before we get to business… what’s with all the Llamas around here?  🙂

OK I knew someday this day would come.  My son, Aaron, is now in fifth grade and must be able to recite the Preamble of the US Constitution in order to move on to sixth grade.  When I was a kid, this was a requirement of 8th grade.  But in my day, we weren’t learning algebra in fourth grade.  Whatever.

Anyway, so I knew this day would come.  My son wants to know how *I* memorized the constitution, or at least the preamble.  And what is the response of everyone who passed through Junior High School in the 1970’s?  School House Rock, of course! To this day, I can recite the Preamble from memory, thanks to that famous video.  I’m sure thousands of people my age are the same boat. 

But what to do? the problem is, School House Rock is no longer on T.V. every Saturday morning between every cartoon, anymore.  So what’s an over forty victim of fate to do?   Sing the song to my kids?  HAH!  Fat chance.  Now, it’s YOUTUBE to the rescue!

In the next post, (one article up from this) you will find the actual youtube video of the School House Rock video that teaches the preamble.  I can’t post it inline here because of a quirk with moveable type weblogs.  Those of you who remember, can sing along.  It brought a tear to my eye. 

During my last visit to Zurich, I took a day excursion to Jungfraujoch, the highest point in the Swiss Alps, also called "Top of Europe".  From roughly 11,700 feet you can see … well, more Alps.  But it is a beautiful trip up the mountain by cogwheel train, with picturesque views of the Swiss countryside and mountains.  On the way, we stopped over in Lucerne and Interlaken.  The pictures are HERE; unfortunately I don’t have time right now to explain them all but it’s basically – pictures of Interlaken on the way up (that’s where you’ll find Hooters), and then pictures of the mountain itself. 

Enjoy! 

During my recent travels to Zurich, I took a walking tour and during the tour I saw this:

For those of you who can’t read it, the full-size picture is here. 

For those of you who can’t read German, it basically says that Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, lived in this apartment.

Interesting, huh?  So what does that have with Swiss Banking Law?

Well, see,when Lenin left exile in Switzerland at this apartment to go back to Russia and overthrow the Tzar, he took all his money out of his Swiss bank account… all except CHF8 (eight Swiss Francs).  

And there it remains, to this day, in his name, until a decendant of Lenin claims it.