Found this in the NY Daily News under the byline of Neil Steinberg:
NO DOUBT it is a thrill to ride a chartered bus all night from Cleveland with your fellow peace activists. No doubt it feels great when you wake up after a few hours sleep to shouts that you are rolling into New York City, where the big workers’ rights protest, or anti-fur rally, or whatever, is being held.
You stand around all day, sing songs, make new friends, shout for the TV cameras, listen to Martin Sheen speak. A memory to last a lifetime.
But that is not the point. Of course activists of every stripe want to come to Central Park to protest. The point is whether the average New Yorker wants to have a pleasant, well-tended park, or one that looks like a vacant lot the hour after the circus left. Most would prefer a pleasant park.
The said, there is a certain the-whole-world-is-watching thrill to go for a walk in the park and stumble across some giant rally of 100,000 people fooling themselves they are accomplishing something. So I have an idea: Allow, if not lots of big gatherings, then more than the paltry pair of nonopera, nonsymphony gatherings that are allowed now. But charge them. If it costs $250,000 to restore the lawn after each big hoo-ha, then require that groups pony up beforehand. That seems only fair - you make a mess, you clean it up. An extra buck or two a head won’t break most organizations - well, except maybe the peaceniks. They never seem to have jobs.
Getting Mighty last week (two years ago) led Sara to tell me about her first car, a little Honda Civic named, “Manamana”. Lucky or fate sent this 
One of the better pranks I’ve heard about let alone seen video of.
Less than a week until the election ends and the post election season starts. To bide the time, I found a web site that counts the electoral votes based on state to state polls. 
This was a great childhood game because it was competive, skill based and quicker than monopoly.
I was never good at the punch a mole game. My excuse was that I was six and the wacking stick was too heavy. That same year I found out that you could pull out all the tickets from the skee-ball machine if you pull them slowly with constant pressure. That is really neither here nor there and I don’t remember any of the cool prizes I won, so there’s your brief glipse of me as a 6 year old.
Feeling a bit like Ryan Seacrest, I have the results to last weeks American Idol. You may have already seen the results, where the beautiful and talented La Toya London lost when everyone expected Jasmine “Flower In Her Hair” Trias, wasn’t even in the bottom two, to go home instead. I know why, and it’s not because of sympathy votes.
My name is Thad, and I’m a reality TV junkie.
All of my music is stored on my computer now, and before that the CDs were in big wallets, so it’s been a while since I’ve looked through the album covers. Some covers I remember were the baby on the first Nirvana album, and Michael Jackson with the white tiger on Thriller…although that may have been on the inside…