This is a video clip of Falon and myself doing the traditional father-daughter dance.

We have some updates on Falon’s Quinceañera.  This is the morning of the Quinceañera, which includes us getting ready and the catholic mass. I should have some videos of the reception in a later post.

Falon, the Damas and the Chambelánes are all getting ready for the big day. This was in the morning before Mass. Falon and company was escorted in a 20 seat H2 Limo. The follow video was everyone getting ready.

At the Jolly Inn, Falon’s name was in lights

Falon and I had our Father-Daughter dance. I’m hoping to get a video of this later to post here. I was told it went well. I had to make adjustments during the dance due to the size of Falon’s dress.

I was able to capture some of the main dance here:

I was also able to get some of the surprise dance:

Hopefully in the coming weeks, months, I will be able to get more videos to post.

We had the final dance practice at the hall. More or less a dry-run. This was a extremely hot day and the hall had no air-conditioning turned on (to save money). It felt close to 98° and very humid. We were able to get through it.

Sorry if these videos are jittery, I was holding my son who was very excited to watch everyone dance.

This is (formal) dance (Spoiler):

Grand finally to the formal dance:

This is the surprise dance again:

We had our last home practice before the final hall practice.  I have these two videos that shows some of our practices.  Notice how the grass is ruin by the constant dancing.  This grass was a lush green only a few months ago.  The stress of the dancing was too much for the greenery.  I wish I had a bigger home with space, but we have to work with what we got.  A typical Chicago bungalow is just not big enough for eight couples dancing.

This is Falon and me dancing the Father-Daughter Dance (Spoiler).

Here is Falon and some of the kids practicing the surprise dance (Spoiler again).

Check out this very nice page of Cartoon Characters done by different artists.
I LOVE CARTOONS!

Growing up on comics in the eighties, the best by far were the Marvel comics. Marvel were just better written and did not suffer from the overall goofiness of DC. Although, I had enjoyed some of the DC World War II Superheroes (Earth Two for us fan boys), such as the Sandman Theater. As it happen, Earth-Two is where the original Superman of WWII lived.

I could never understand the whole popularity of Superman. This guy was near the power of a god, there was no real challenge in reading his stories. No matter how smart Lex Luthor was, Superman was smarter, no matter how strong the villain was, Superman was stronger. By the time the Eighties rolled around, he could move planets! Marvel Superheroes, like Spider-man, were more down to earth, with powers that were limited and had real-world problems.

DC had gone over the top with Superman. It seemed with Superman, no matter how complicated the scheme, he was able to use his super-brain, super-speed, and super-breath to a even more complicated solution (Like shoot a microscopic heat ray from his eyes, bouncing off objects and finding a weak spot in the villain’s force-field, thus penetrating a weak spot to exploit …..blah, blah, blah).

Then I got my hands on a hard-cover book with reprints of the first Action Comics and Superman Comics stories by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Seeing Superman the way people seen him for the first time in 1938 was refreshing. First off, Superman’s only power was that he was from another planet with a higher density. Since his body was adopted to a stronger gravitational pull, this made him stronger and able leap higher. In fact, Superman did NOT have the power of flight, that came later (along with x-ray and heat vision). He had to jump around, much like the Incredible Hulk does today.

When you read these comics you can see that something new was happening. No one has ever seen anything like a superhero before. With a simple science explanation (the more density on his home planet), Siegel and Shuster were able to make it believable that a Superman can exist. This charged every man’s imagination. Who didn’t wish they had the power to fight injustice.

Back then, Superman was no boy scout. Since he didn’t have the power of flight, he had to leap on buildings to get around. His favorite scare tactic was to grab someone by the seat of their pants and start jumping on the top of buildings, telephone poles, and ledges. This just scared the crap out of Superman’s victim.

One story had Superman fighting the slumlords.  First he had the tenants leaving their homes and then begins to destroy the dwellings. The National guard were called out, where they begin shooting at Superman from airplanes. He didn’t give a cat’s ass. Superman just went ahead and continued to destroy the homes, forcing the slumlords to rebuild them. In another story, Superman is beating up a gangster, when some other gangsters come in and started shooting at him. Well, being Superman, all he had to do was stand there an let the bullets bounce off, but instead, he flings the gangster he was beating up into the line of fire (thus killing him). This is just bad-ass. As time went on with the beginning of World War II and the following patriotic mood in the country, Superman began to morphed into the American boy-scout we recognized today. Soon, the X-ray and flying were added and then the heat vision. This pretty much marked the end of original Superman.

During the early days of Superman, the Fleischer/Famous studios created some very nice cartoon series for the theaters using rotoscope technology. These cartoons should give you an idea of the original Superman. When watching these episodes, remember the limitation of Superman’s powers (such as the lack of flight, etc). As a matter of fact, I believe it was this series that introduced the power of X-Ray vision. If you would like to watch these episodes, go to the Toonami Digital Arsenal site. Keep in mind, that some of these episodes are not politically correct due to Wold War II, Pearl Harbor attack or just plain ignorance.

The dresses have all come in and the tuxes are ready. Thanks to all the Damas (Ladies) and the Chambelánes (Gentlemen) who have already signed up. We have already had a change of the line up, but we were able to get a replacement.

Russell Snook-Whitfield has stepped forward as a last minute replacement. We appreciate it.

The next step is for the dance lessons. If you didn’t know, the birthday girl, her Chambelan and the accompanying seven couples all have to do a special waltz. It has been a recent tradition to start with a waltz and then do a more modern dance (maybe even a change of clothes for the dancers).

The father (myself), the godfather, and the grandfathers all have to dance with my daughter who is turning 15. I guess this mean we will need to do some dance lessons ourselves? Nevertheless, it will give us an excuse to rent a tux and look good for the party.

We hope this will be a special event that everyone will remember.

The dresses were ordered and the tuxedos have been picked out for Falon’s upcoming Quinceanera party.

It turns out that After Hours were brought out by the Men’s Warehouse and is now MW Tux.

Please check out the Quinceanera web page for more information.

We are getting more and more sponsors for the party, for which we are grateful. As anybody who has gone through with a Quinceanera party before, this can be quite costly. But in the end, it will be a great event and everyone will have a grand time. I’m a little bummed out that it will take place on a Sunday, but that is when everything fell together. (Besides the fact that Falon’s 15th birthday falls on that Sunday). It seems that Sunday was meant to be.

I’m really digging the Last.fm service, where you can get streaming music to your PC and iPod (albeit a jailbroken iTouch). The service uses data mining to figure out what music that you enjoy, by using a rating system and a technology called scrobbing.

Scrobbing tracks song you have played in various applications, such as iTunes, and uploads the information to their server. This list can be shared among your friends on social networks like facebook as well as last.fm.

The fancy algorithms from Last.fm have figured out that I really enjoy female vocalists, especially in the indie pop genre. Fiona Apple frequently shows up. The problem I have with this is that I remember when Fiona Apple had her big hit back in the nineties called “criminal“. I had brought the album and expected the rest of the songs to be the same. What I got was something very different. Fiona comes across as very mature and talented! This was not what I was expecting. I was expecting something more like “criminal” and at the time it bummed me out. I will acknowledge that the album was good, probably excellent, but since I was expecting something totally different, it has tainted me.

To this day, I can’t hear a Fiona Apple song and think, it “sucks”. The truth is that I don’t even give it a far chance. If you look at my CD collections (I have over 500 CDs in my basement), I dig much worst music than Fiona’s. Like I said, Fiona is very talented, but since my expectation was skewed, I can’t bring myself to listen to her.

In the end, I know the loss is mine. Perhaps one day I can break out of my mindset and listen to Fiona with an open mind. Until that day, I will enjoy Quiero Club’s music.