Author: Jonathan Blundell

I'm a husband, father of three, blogger, podcaster, author and media geek who is hoping to live a simple life and follow The Way.

Baby Jessica, 20 years later

Baby Jessica, aka Jessica McClure, is now 21 years old and raising her son with husband Daniel Morales in Midland.
From the DMN:

There was no fanfare here Tuesday to mark the day in 1987 when 18-month-old Jessica McClure was lifted to safety after falling into the open backyard well.
The young wife and mother is living quietly in this West Texas oil patch city.
“Jessica’s just been a wonderful, wonderful mother,” said her father, Chip McClure. “That’s always been Jessica’s dream, to be a stay-at-home mom.”
In 3 1/2 years, however, her quiet existence might change when all the tributes that were sent to her while the nation waited anxiously for her rescue matures into a payment of $1 million or more.
Many of the sympathetic strangers worldwide who remained glued to television coverage until Jessica was freed from 22 feet below the ground showered the family with teddy bears, homemade gifts, cards and cash.
The cash sits in a trust fund waiting for the 21-year-old to turn 25.

20 years doesn’t seem like that long of a time – but it does make me feel old.

Cheney ‘the black sheep of family’

From the AP/NPR:

Though they may spar across the political aisle, Vice President Dick Cheney is close enough to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him “cousin.” Eighth cousin, that is.
Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, revealed this tantalizing bit of political trivia during a television interview Tuesday.

Apparently Cheney’s wife discovered the link while researching her memoirs.
A spokesman for the Obama Presidential Campaign said, “obviously Cheney is the black sheep of the family.”
Gotta love family history. I’ve had a lot of fun tracing our family history back using Geni and other online services. I’m interesting in finding out more about the Pendleton pedigree, which is on my mom’s side of the family.

According to her spokeswoman, Sen. Obama, D-Ill., is a descendent of Mareen Duvall. This French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650’s from England, said Ginny Justice, a spokeswoman for Lynne Cheney.

Got any interesting history in your family tree?

Chicago says, “We’ll keep your change”

From WiseBread:

Chicago is testing a coinless parking meter system, The Tribune reported yesterday. You might think that would be great for consumers, eliminating annoyances like the hunt for coins and the need to pay for more time than you actually use.
It’s true, drivers would no longer have to plug the meter with change. But apparently the City of Chicago considers parkers’ tendancy to overpay more of a feature than a bug. In fact, the city is apparently so consumer-hostile that it plans to keep parkers’ overpayments and charge the next customer for the very same time.

The city claims their losing thousands of dollars from people “piggy backing” off time that’s unused from previous cars.
In other words, if you pay for 30 minutes in the parking meter and leave after 20, the city claims that anyone who parks there and uses/takes advantage of those remaining minutes left on the meter is costing the city money. They think they should be able to charge two people for that same parking spot during those left over 10 minutes. With the new meters, the time on the meter will be wiped clean every time a car leaves with minutes remaining on the clock.
Just another example of a governmental authority taking all they can from Joe Citizen.
Seems like many politicians would believe that the salary you get is actually their money and anything you get to take home is simply, “the cost of doing business” and of course, like any good business man, they’ll do all they can to lesson the cost of doing business.

… it’s sounding better and better.

FREE: Moby mix

Moby re-did a mix of his song Porcelain for a gig he had over the weekend and (for a limited time I’m sure) you can download the new mix on his myspace page. Just don’t tell the suits. They might get a little angry.
From Moby’s blog:

oh, before ‘degenerates’ on thursday i realized that i didn’t have any remixes of ‘porcelain’ that i wanted to play(although the extant remixes of ‘porcelain’ are good, they’re just not energetic enough for a big room set), so i quickly made a remix of ‘porcelain’ that worked well at ‘degenerates’.
i’ve posted it on myspace if you want to download it and play it when you dj.
hopefully the man won’t get upset with me for giving away music, but it’s
just a simple little remix.

In related news, I’ve been working on a new show/podcast for OrangeNoiseRadio. I’d love to have a mix of all sorts of stuff but it will probably start out with a mix of house/drum&bass/ambient music. The only downside is that for it to be a legal podcast, the music needs to be copywrite free or under a creative commons license. So it’s taking a little longer to find the music.
If you’ve got any great creative commons music you want to suggest – feel free to drop me a note or a link.
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