Much of this website is devoted to ranting and raving about stupid things like old men writing checks or the horrid gastronomical experience that is "California Cuisine". I often feel that the site has a dark cloud hanging over it, as if there's nothing but bad juju here. And so, to make amends for that, I decided to create The Happy Page - a page filled with nothing but good thoughts and positive karma. Bookmark this page - if you're ever having a really bad day, come here and take a gander at some of the things below... maybe they'll cheer you up!

On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Army cut off all access to West Berlin, leaving the Allies no way to re-supply the people of West Berlin except via air. The result of this was the Berlin Airlift, which brought millions of tons of food and supplies to the people of West Berlin until the blockade was ended in May 1949. One of the American pilots participating in the airlift was a man named Gail Halvorsen. Halvorsen began to notice groups of German children near the base watching the planes take off and land. After giving some of the kids sticks of gum one day, he promised to drop more candy from his plane the following day. Of course, with planes landing every 90 seconds during the airlift, the kids wouldn't know which plane was Halvorsen's, so he promised to wiggle his C-47's wings as he approached Templehof airport... thus earning himself the nickname "Uncle Wiggly Wings". During the airlift, "Uncle Wiggly Wings" made thousands of small parachutes by hand, to which he attached to candy bars and gum. He then dropped the goodies to the kids out of his window on approach to Templehof. Halvorsen and his crew personally dropped a total of 850 pounds of candy to German children, but as news of "Operation Little Vittles" spread, the program was expanded among aircrews so that in the end 23 tons of candy was dropped to hungry children in a ruined city.

If that story doesn't make you go "awwwwww!" then I don't think anything will.

In today's world of huge corporations, it's easy to feel that companies don't care about what "we" think. Anyone that's been trapped in a customer service nightmare with the phone or cable company can attest to feeling like they're stuck in a Brazil-like bureaucratic netherworld. So that makes it all the more refreshing that New Line Cinema actually listened to the public when it came to the movie Snakes On A Plane. The film stars Samuel L. Jackson as an FBI agent who has to fight a planeload of snakes unleashed by an assassin bent on killing a witness in protective custody... although you didn't really need to know that, given the film's fantastically straightforward title. It's a movie... about snakes... on a plane!

News about the film leaked out last fall, and geeks fell in love the idea of a movie having such a simple and descriptive title. When word leaked out that New Line was going to change the title to Pacific Air Flight 121, a mini-revolt happened. Dozens of Snakes On A Plane fansites and blogs decried the move... and New Line actually listened! But then, the almost unbelievable happened: a guy named Chris Rohan of Bethesda, Maryland created his own "spoof trailer" of the film. The faux-trailer contained one line of dialog in particular: a Samuel L. Jackson sound-alike (in a nod to Jackson's role in the cult classic Pulp Fiction), saying "I want these motherfuckin' snakes off the motherfuckin' plane!" As word of the spoof spread, more and more Snakes fansites demanded that the line be added to the film. It became so popular that word of it reached the upper management folks at New Line... who decided to not only add many of the fan's ideas into the film, but also added the line from the spoof trailer to the actual film! And, in my book, that's awesome!

I was watching some March Madness on the ol' TV when a commercial for Coke came on. It began by focusing on the bottom of an empty glass. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream then plopped into the glass, which was then was filled with delicious Coke that (when combined with the vanilla ice cream) looked more like a Guinness than your basic Coke. The float looked so good that I just had to have one!

So Miss Lisa and I went to the grocery store a couple of days later. We were almost done, so she asked if there was anything else I needed. A light went off in my head and I remembered the Coke commercial. I ran across the store and picked up a container of vanilla ice cream and a 20 ounce Coke at the checkout. Once we had gotten all our groceries put up at home, I made the float... and man, was it delicious!

The cynical amongst us might read my story and think that Coke's marketing worked on me. Perhaps that's true. But what I thought about when I wrote it was how often we overlook the simple pleasures in life. The Coke float means nothing in the greater scheme of my life, but you know what? For a good 20 minutes or so, I enjoyed a simple pleasure... and loved it!

Lisa and I were once in Sam's Club when her blood sugar started to drop. It wasn't a crash, but rather one of those slow drops, so she opted to fix it by getting a slice of cheese pizza from the café at the front of the store. She ended up raving about the pizza, calling it some of the best she'd ever had. On our next trip we tried the "take and bake" pizzas, but it wasn't the same. Come to find out, the pizza sold at the café uses a different (fresh) crust, whilst the "take and bake" pizzas sold in the regular store use a frozen crust. Taking that into account, we called ahead and ordered a whole hot pie from the café on a subsequent evening of running errands.

So we got home and ate it. And it's pretty good. But what I liked best about the pizza is that, with my first bite, I was transported back to my childhood. You see, when I was a little kid, my dad watched a lot of professional basketball. He had season tickets to Atlanta Hawks games, so that meant that I went to a lot of games with him. Back then the Hawks played in the Omni Arena, next to which was the "Omni Center" (now known as CNN Center), which contained the Omni Hotel and several shops, offices and restaurants. One of those restaurants was an old-school pizza place owned by a couple of guys from Brooklyn. It was probably because the place was next to the door (and thus only steps away from the arena) that my dad first took me there, but man, was that place ever good! To this day I remember how the pizza tasted... the sauce was spicy, not sweet, the crust was thin but chewy and the pepperoni were almost burnt... much like the Sam's Club pizza! Biting into that Sam's Club pizza was almost like hopping into a time machine and going back to the 1970s, when I was in awe of being a little kid in "the big city", when my dad held my hand was we walked through the Omni, and my poor little legs had to take four steps for every one of his.

I know, I know... computers can be a huge source of frustration. But then again, they've sure come a long way. Just the other day I was encoding a video, transferring files to a portable hard drive and some other files to an SD card, and testing out some updates in a virtual machine... all at once! Granted, the video encoding and virtual machine were competing for as much of my CPU as possible, but still... everything was running smoothly. I also had Outlook open and synching to my Smartphone on the fly, as well as several Notepad++ documents and about 30 Firefox tabs open. On the hardware side, I had 5 USB devices connected as well as a PS/2 keyboard and monitor.

Compare this to the early days of Windows 95. My folks bought me the "next to top of the line" computer available at the time - a Pentium 133 with 8MB of RAM and a massive 1.6GB hard drive. And boy, did I tear up the phone lines with my brand spankin' new 56k modem and Internet Explorer 2.0 when I got that machine home! USB wasn't even thought of yet, so most devices connected using a serial port or a parallel port "pass-through". There were no CD burners, and the then-revolutionary idea of a portable drive - and a 100MB Zip drive, at that - was just on the horizon. There weren't DVD drives either, but even if they did exist, hard drives weren't big enough to rip a DVD and processors weren't fast enough to encode a movie in less than a week. Oh, and speaking of encoding, DivX and XviD didn't exist yet either, so your only ripping choice was MPEG1 (shudder). But boy was it fascinating to download a cutting-edge program called "RealPlayer" and watch jerky 10fps music videos the size of a postage stamp on my computer!

Ohmygosh! I just love that song! It's such a breezy and happy little tune, but the best part about hearing that song it is that you know that they're bringing the funny! The theme should be adopted as some kind of international sign of the funny: imagine US troops in a fierce gun battle with some Iraqi insurgents. Now imagine the sound of "The Office" theme rising above the gunfire. Now imagine everyone putting down their arms to enjoy watching The Office together. Makes you smile, doesn't it?