Father's Day

I love my father ...

Alec Baldwin

When they were filming It's Complicated at St. John's University, where my father teaches philosophy, Alec Baldwin crossed paths with my father. My father gave him a big broad smile, and said, "You know, Adam is my favorite Baldwin brother."

Adam Baldwin on

the left... for once.

Alec Baldwin sighed and said "Yeah, I get that alot."

Adam Baldwin has nothing to do with the tribe of the Baldwin brothers, and is actually on the opposite end of the political spectrum from said family of left-wingers.

My father can be just a bit of a troublemaker.


Once, at the Great Irish Fair, in Coney Island, New York, my father came across NORAID -- a "charity group" for Northern Ireland, dedicated to helping the widows and orphans of the violence in Northern Ireland.

In reality, they took the money and dedicated it to creating more widows and orphans.

When Noraid hit my father up for money, he told them, in his clear, second tenor voice, "I don't support cop killers."

My father did catch the attention of every police officer within earshot.

.... Okay, more than a bit of a troublemaker.

My father is about as responsible for my writing career as J. Michael Straczynski.  When I told him I had an idea for what basically turned out to be Fanfiction from Hell, he told me to write it down ...

A million words later, and it turned into something so completely different, I had to rewrite it from the bottom up. Now that it's a five book series (and outlined to thirteen) I'm thinking of submitting it to Baen books.

My father is responsible for my Catholic education, more than any of those ignorant morons in Catholic school.  As a student of Thomas Aquinas, my father has applied reason and rationality to religion, and has taught me to do much the same .... which is usually why atheists like Matt confuse me when he says that "no one uses their brain about religion and believes in it", and why Protestant friends of mine say that Catholics don't even read the Bible. All I can think is: Where do they find these people? Answer: everywhere, probably.

There was this one time, back in college, my father worked with a hydrogen generator ... remember those? If you don't, there's a wiki entry for that somewhere, I'm sure... anyway, my father once, by accident, added the wrong acid. His professor took his generator and tossed it out the window, destroying part of a construction site outside. The professor then informed the lab that using the wrong acid results in the more unstable cousin of TNT....

It's going into a novel somehow.

Another story he told me was of ether ... apparently, ether tends to give off a lot of vapor. It is also very flammable, so to heat it, people in a lab use a water bath, heated by a hot plate beneath the water. So, of course, someone used a Bunsen burner, the ether vapors caught fire and ...

As my father told it, "When you see the air catch on fire above your head, you hit the ground fast."

Anyway. Here's to my father. I have no idea what I would do without him.