Amelia got some new umbrellas for her birthday, so she and Brian tried them out.

Screw this guy and his photos that make mine look like total crap.

The first Jeremy video has found its way onto his site: the kid likes to laugh.

I haven't seen my old riding friend Keith McElhinney since he moved to Pennsylvania, but he's clearly been doing a lot of riding at Woodward. At the Dew Tour's 2006 stop in Denver, Keith pulled the world's first ever front flip flair (which he has named the lawn dart) -- check out the video.

Update: Another video at the Dew Action Sports website.

Update #2: Keith's lawn dart won trick of the week on dewtour.com, getting him $5,000 in the process. Congrats, Keith! (And you're welcome for the votes...)

I keep getting asked for them, so here they are: more Jeremy photos!

Pink2o: "Water for women". Sexist, weird marketing, or just a re-branding of the failed "Water for communists" product?

I love that there seems to be a Flickr group for almost any subject. Such as Unintentionally Scary Clowns.

Just for fun, I've started a music podcast called Sinko. You can listen and/or subscribe to it at sinko.kieranchapman.net, and I'll probably be updating it every two weeks from now on. (You can subscribe to it here.)

One thing that drives me nuts about soccer -- I mean other than the fact that I find it incredibly boring to watch (and, to put that in perspective, this is coming from someone who loves to watch baseball) -- is when players fake being tripped ("flopping") in order to try to draw a penalty call.

I didn't watch any of the World Cup, so anything I did see was purely accidental. But I did seem to see too many highlights of "tripping" which seemed to nearly cripple a player, only to see him up and running again in a matter of minutes (if not seconds). So I enjoyed Dave Eggers' piece about soccer in America, which included a pretty funny commentary about flopping:

The True Story of American Soccer

But flopping in soccer is a problem. Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds...

[O]ur flopper will still be on the ground, holding his shin, his head thrown back in mock-agony... Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured -- excelsior! -- and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.

One of my favorite scenes from the (surprisingly good) US version of The Office.