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My sister had her first child yesterday morning. She called at 5:15 AM to say she was leaving her condo, she got to Kaiser at 6:00 AM, and had the baby at 6:10 AM!

His first name is Philip but he will go by his middle name, Cole.

Cole weighs 6.8 pounds and is 19 inches in length.

This Peeps diorama is the winning entry from the Washington Post's contest. Lots of cool entries there.

I'll upload some pics/vids of the kids doing the egg hunt thing later today. Jace will be having his fourth egg hunt in the last five days!

We were invited over for dinner tonight by some "friends" who live in Brentwood who we have hung out with a few times. When we got there we found cold appetizers and a bunch of people we didn't know. After about 15 minutes the host grabbed my arm and told me to sit down at a table with everyone. When I sat down I saw that there was a computer attached to a projector. I figured they were going to make us all watch some home video of a vacation or something. Then a lady in a suit stood up and said "For the rest of this evening I am going to talk to you about..." and I knew I was in trouble. For the next 45 minutes she talked about a juice that can cure cancer, make you lose weight, improve your skin, and... MAKE YOU WEALTHY!

I couldn't believe that I was tricked into a presentation on a pyramid scheme ("MLM", multi-level marketing is the preferred term nowadays). The lady kept talking about how "scientists" have proven that it works and she was always very mystified and impressed by anything "scientific". She kept referring to "friends" of hers that had tumors shrink and wrinkles disappear.

Halfway through Samantha and I were trying to make a graceful exit. Part of me wanted to shout out something rude and leave but I didn't want to reduce myself to their level. I was actually most angry about the fact that I brought over a bottle of wine and some of my homemade beer and I was leaving that behind for those people.

Another thing, out of the audience of 15 or so people I think 80% of them were already part of the scam. They already drink the product and knew the presentation.

They made us all taste it and it was pretty revolting. It was full of shrimp shells which made it gritty and fishy.

Basically, you are supposed to be amazed by how great the wonder tonic is and then you find out it's expensive (they sell it in a wine bottle to make it seem worth the cost). You can't just buy a bottle, you have to get a year's subscription for $130/month. However, if you convince two suckers to sign up for that deal you get your juice for free!

I'm just amazed that people can still be suckered into pyramid schemes and miracle tonics after all these decades (for the former) and centuries (for the latter) of proven frauds.

Oh well, now I know who my true friends are.

UPDATE 4/7: This is great! When I do any google searches for "Monavie Scams" all the websites are owned by people affiliated with selling Monavie so I knew they are actively patrolling the internet to suppress any negative information about the product. So, I had a good feeling that after posting on my blog (which is immediately indexed by google who owns blogger) that I might be contacted by Monavie cronies. I didn't think it would happen within 30 minutes of posting! The guy assumes I won't approve the comment but I definitely will. Please let the freaks come out of the shadows and "endorse" their product! He claims I'm being paid by "Smorty". I would like to imagine that is some sort of villain from an Indiana Jones movie but I think he's talking about an advertising agency. Anyways, everything I said happened did happen, I'm not affiliated with any advertising agencies or juice freaks.

Also, he says I'm lying about the shrimp shells but I had the "Active" version of the drink which has glucosamine which is derived from shrimp shells.

Regarding the pricing, I might be wrong on the details, I left before the presentation was over because it would be insanity to stay any longer. I do know that it costs about $130/case (only 4 bottles to a case). Who cares though, it's a pyramid scheme. Just because Donald Trump (which the commenter seems excited about) is associated with it doesn't mean I think it's legitimate. Donald is also involved in endorsing professional wrestling.



Please, let the crazy comments continue!

UPDATE 4/14: I'd like to thank "Linley" for having the courage to leave a comment after experiencing the dark side of the MLM Mafia. It goes to show how desperate and psychotic people can get when they try to rope victims into these scams.

I'd also like to warn everybody of a growing trend I'm seeing, MLM over the Internet. It makes sense from their perspective, they want to grow their pyramid as fast as possible and the Internet provides them with a way to make virtual "friends" very quickly as opposed to driving around and staging fake dinner parties. I'm seeing this happen a lot on social sites like MySpace. Be careful about people online trying to approach you with any offers (that should go without saying). I've seen MySpace MLMers actually use viruses to take over your MySpace account and make it appear that you are asking your friends to join the MLM program when you actually have no knowledge of it. People are used to seeing spam in their email but have a higher level of trust of MySpace (for some reason).