I was messing around this evening with MyHeritage.com online facial recognition software. Here's the picture I plugged in:


Here are the two hits I got back. Mel Gibson is VERY understandable, but Ravi Shankar????

Other hits included Gerald Ford, Harry Belafonte and Jeff Goldblum.

This is an interesting new service. It's called GotVoice.com and it will communicate with your cell, home and office voice mail system, pull down your voice mail and send it to you via e-mail as an mp3.

Pre-School Christmas PArty

We had Emily's pre-school Christmas party tonight. All three kids have gone to the same pre-school and had the same two teachers, both of whom are awesome. This is Em's last year at this school, and our last event with the co-op preschool. Maddie and Nate are getting to that age where they've just about figured out what's going on with Santa, but we're letting them get through this one more Christmas before letting them know what's going on. Emily asked for a goldfish and Maddie asked for a guinea pig.

Letter to Santa

Emily sat down with Cathie and Emily dictated the following letter to santa:

Dear Santa,
I would like some real puppies for my dog so she can be a mama.
I would also like a farm in our backyard
I would like some baby cows and all kinds of animals
I would like a toy doll for Christmas and some toy trains.
I would like a teddy bear with a bow because we have a playhouse.
Love,
Emily

Movies that are destroying America

Noel turned me on to this hilarious Colbert Report on The Family Stone, Brokeback Mountain, and the Chronicles of Narnia. From the Colbert Report Movie Clips, click on the Movies Destroying America icon.

I've never seen a movie review quite like this on any movie. This one is for Napoleon Dynamite.

Crossroads Podcast

We finally got Crossroads weekly messages online via a podcast. If you're running iTunes, simply click on the PodCast section and drag the following image into iTunes to subscribe:

I started using this great free application called Weather Watcher. It's a no-cost ad-free tray-based weather application. Very nice interface and functionality. You can download it here.

I've been messing with Google and YouTube's video services. Google's takes a while to verify the content, but has a better uploader and fewer restrictions on size and formats. YouTube is quick and painless. Here's Maddie's Cheerleading Video via Google Video.

Crap

Before doing the biopsy today on my Mom, they did another ultrasound on my Mom and it looks like the cancerous mass has come back on my Mom's pancreas. They thought it would be too dangerous to do the biopsy based on where it was at. Chemo starts on Friday. This sucks. Please pray that God does something humongous in all of this.

Sunday

We had a great day today, starting with a head full of curlers. I ended up having to stay home from church with Emily, so she and I amused ourselves by playing competitive Mario Cart and watching some goofy cartoon Christmas special.

Nate spent the night at Austin's last night and Em wasn't feeling great, so Maddie and I decided to go out and play in all of the new snow and work on our snow fort. Last week, we'd gotten the snow fort started, so we thought we should finish it up by building bigger walls and a roof. We put in cross-beam-supports and branches on top to camoflauge it (I know it's still visible, it's a blue tarp for peat's sake)

We spent about an hour working on it, securing the room and cleaning out the inside. We were pretty proud of it, so we got Nate, Cathie and Emily to come out and check it out also.

After checking out the snow fort, it turned into a famlily snow fight. Ever since football, Nate's gotten pretty accurate with his snowballs and got Cathie a few times before she decided to take Nate down hard (I just know that Will and Monaca are going to have our kids taken away by social services):

With the additional snow, we built up our pile at the bottom of the swingset and continued our base-jumping tradition. Here's Maddie getting some air:

The kids took it to the next level, complete with belly flops and falling straight back. You can see all of the pictures here.

Tonight is Ground Zero, our Youth Church deal. Jason's talking tonight about "The Life and Faith of Johnny Cash", which should be cool.

Good column this morning by Mitch Albom about John Lennon and whether or not fame and fortune really fill the void in our lives.

My girl Ingrid

Ever since my gal Ingrid started sending her strange little love notes my way, I've been getting a daily laugh out of her blog. It's basically a place where she takes a fact or two of out context, applies her own hatred to it and then allows readers to post comments that support her world view. Reading through it, I started compiling a list of everyone she hates based on the views she states in her posts. So far:

• Catholics
• Jews
• Non-Whites
• Willow Creek and Saddleback Churches
• Brian McClaren, Rick Warren, etc.
  
• Muslims
• Hindus
• Emergents
  
• Charismatics
• Fun
• Me
• Joe
  

That seems like a lot for one woman to carry on her shoulders. She's built up quite a cult following to help her carry the weight. She likens her leadership to and clensing of the church to Hilter's clensing of the world - probably not a healthy way to exist - but hey, that's just my opinion. Ingrid is also tied to a group called Lighthouse Trails Research, which the best I can tell, hates even more things than Ingrid does. It's not a white supremecist group - they seem to hate white people as well. I feel bad for the lady and that one day, she'll have to answer for her devisiveness and hatred. She gets paid to do it, so I guess some people will do a lot in order to keep getting a paycheck. Ultimately, I feel sad for her and the sad state-of-mind she lives in. I'll give 10 to 1 odds that she homeschools.*

*No offense to my friends that homeschool (Mike/Sarah/Noel, etc). You know as well as I how many Christian fringe whack jobs home school. I'd think you'd agree that this is a pretty safe bet.

Look up in the sky!

This picture goes out to my girl Ingrid. How can I be a bad youth leader if I periodically don a Bibleman outfit? The answer: Clearly not the anti-christ (unless i align myself too closely with child star turned bibleman - Willy Ames)

Shabadu's Birthday

After the cheerleading competition, we went over to Dan and Kris's to celebrate Shabadu's (Matthew's) birthday. Everyone was there except Jon, Beth, Libby and my Grandma. Even my Mom was able to make it, which was great.

Allie digs her big cousin Maddie, and vice versa. Maddie let Allie try on her cheerleading outfit as they hung out together and Maddie read to her.

Being a Kurt, Dan likes to save a few cents by keeping it below 60 in the house. Having grown up with my father, I was fine, but Cathie and Susan obviously weren't.


You can see the rest of the birthday pictures in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery here.

Christmas Terrorist?

Not sure what Emily was doing here at Emma's birthday party.

Oh Joy

We spent today at Madeline's cheerleading competition. Luckily we weren't there alone. The three Madeline's are on the same team so we hung with the Kohne's and saw the Wheelocks. I ran into B-Rad Wheelock at the event, who is in high school, but looks a lot older. The funniest part of the whole event was when B-Rad explained to how he needed to hang with his Mom throughout the whole event in order not be confused with a predator at the event (see predator picture below)

There was a lot of hard core positioning at the event for video taping, so Mark Kohne and I accidently went up during the wrong group, so we decided to stay there and pretended to tape the team before in order to optimize our position for taping our team.

This place was huge. I'd figured this was going to be three teams at an elementary school gym. Instead, there were 22 teams and thousands of people, just for our division. The Kohne's had kids in two divisions and had to stay around for 6 hours. Sucks to be them.

The theme for Maddie's team was Fire and Ice, and Cathie had to get creative enough to make the costume herself, which was impressive to me. Maddie's team didn't place and she was pretty bummed out about it. Competition is a great way for kids to learn all sorts of great things, including losing, but it's painful to watch them deal with it on the back end.


You can see more pictures of the event in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery here. I uploaded the video of the competition here.

The epitomy of laziness

My son wants to be a professional video game player when he grows up, but not like this. This New York times article talks about how video game players in the US are outsourcing the early levels of video games to people overseas:

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash. That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

Now if only I could outsource putting my Christmas Tree lights up to someone overseas.

My Space Generation

Interesting Business Week article on The myspace.com Generation. If you've never heard of the company, News Corp bought it recently for $1.3B:

Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

I setup my own myspace account a while back to mess around with it. Most of the kids I'm connected with on it are either from my youth group or other youth pastors who are on it.

After crushing my finger, I was going to post another picture of my finger and give an update on how it's doing, but Cathie was very clear that ABSOLOUTELY NO ONE cares about my hurt finger nor do they want to see another picture of it. My Mom cares. I just know she does.

Oh Christmas Tree....Oh Christmas Tree

We finally got our tree up and the house decorated. The kids had fun decorating all of the ornaments that we've acquired and that they've created over the years. Emily got to hang the star on the tree this year.


Before Nate was born, someone (my Mom?) got him this pink girly precious moments ornament that he wants nothing to do with. I chased him around the house, trying to get a picture with him and the ornament at the same time, but this is the best I could do:

Update on my Mom

Quick Update on my Mom's Pancreatic Cancer:
My Mom has her first session of chemotherapy tomorrow. The whole thing takes about six hours. On Monday, she's back down in the morning and they're doing a biopsy to test something they found during a recent MRI . She's been feeling better and better, not sure if it's the medication or if her body's just adjusting to the surgery. Please pray for her. Thanks.

Brief summary of events

I nuked a couple of today's post off my blog today. Here's why:
Another site posted some things that were mean about me and my church. I found them funny and posted those things, along with some equally mean e-mails that some of their followers had sent. By not getting angry and laughing at what was said, I think I pour gasoline on their fire and they continued to rant. I was embaressed to let people see some of the infighting that goes in the Christian body, so out of embaressement, I've removed all posts and links from my my blog.

Name Dropping

I was at Triad this morning working out with Kirk. It's always competitive, and Kirk cut me no slack even with a busted finger. Being a fellow Spartan, Damon Dowdell (MSU's 2003 QB) jumped in and helped me keep Kirk in his place, because that's just the way us Spartan's roll. Damon is at Triad training, getting ready for a couple of pro gigs. He joined in our workout and between the two of us, Kirk didn't have a chance.

Name that tune..

Every few weeks Nate and I sit down in front of iTunes and we make him a CD. Each CD has about 20 songs and consists of a pretty broad musical spectrum, but mostly stuff from 1970 through the 1990s. When we lay down at night during bed time, we'll sometimes go through the songs on the latest CD he's listening to and talk about the stories behind the songs, the stories that the songs are telling, or about the music group and why they were influential. He'll often get stuck on a given song and listen to it over and over as he falls asleep. It's funny to see what he's listening to when I go check on him before I go to bed. I'd love to see him learn to listen to music with discernment, really asking questions and have a broad understanding of music to draw from as he figures out what he likes and doesn't like.

The current CD I made for Nate has the following artists:
Jethro Tull
Black Sabbath
Billy Joel
Dan Fogelberg
Procol Harum
Lenny Kravitz
Bob Segar
Alice Cooper
The Ramones
Lynrd Skynard
Jennifer Knapp
Pedro the Lion
Queen
Rich Mullins
Willie Nelson
The Who

Angel Tree

Cathie and the kids and I went out tonight to pick up our angel tree gifts. Angel Tree is a cool thing we've participated in through our church over the last 4 years. The Prison Fellowship group goes into prisons and find out what prisoners want to get their kids for Christmas. Each of our kids picks a kid and we go shopping with them for the kid and buy them presents on behalf of the prisoner, which will be delivered to the children this Saturday. Each year, we talk to the kids about what we're doing, and that this means that they'll receive one less gift but will be helping someone out. They're into it, and have fun doing it and give a ton of thought into what to get the kid their sponsoring. (When Cathie's not around, I explain to the kids that when their Mom ends up in jail, wouldn't they want someone to do the same for them?)

Camera Mail

This Camera Mail is an interesting idea. The people doing this have too much time on their hands, but the results are pretty funny. The guy has basically mailed cameras attached to post cards to various places and then developed the pictures of all of the postal workers that have used it to take pictures around the country. As I get to be my Dad's age with plenty of spare time, this might be something I'll do.

Got this from Rich:
1- Go to www.google.com
2- Type in, french military victories.
3- Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky"

I'm torn between laughing and crying for my friend Will, whose life has come to the point that he's posted the following as part of his blog:

And yes, I am a 32 year-old man who lives with his mother and owns a cat to whom I just devoted a whole blog entry.

Best lines from tonight episode of The Office on the office Christmas Party:

Michael Scott (Boss): "Presents are the best way to show someone you care. It's like this tangible thing you can point to and say 'Hey man, I love you this many dollars worth.'"
Michael Scott (Boss), after receiving a hand-made oven-mitt: "Phyllis is basically saing 'Hey Michael, I know you did a lot for the office this year, but I only care about you a homemade oven-mitt's worth.' I gave Ryan an iPod."
Michael Scott (Boss): "Reverse psychology is an awesome tool. I don't know if you know about this, but basically, you make someone think the opposite of what you believe and that tricks them into doing something stupid. Works like a charm."

This show is damn funny. Not working in an office, I can live vicariously through these guys.

Murderball

I watched the movie Murderball tonight. It's a documentary about quadrapalegic rugby, following the US Wheelchair Rugby team. They changed the name from Murderball, because it was tough to get corporate sponsors with that name. These guys are amazing. They are as tough as any non-wheelchair rugby team and they beat the hell out of each other. They've got thier chairs decked out mad max style and hit each other full force, throwing themselves all over the place. It really gave me a new understanding of what goes on in the brain of someone in a wheelchair for life, along with some of the paralympic activites which I'd learned about from my work with the USOC. The movie tracks one of the guys (shown in the poster above) named Mark Zupan. This guy is a bad-ass, tough as nails who you just love to watch in this thing and would love to hang with over a beer. In the beginning of the movie, they interview some of his friends who explain (like any good friends would) "Mark was a prick before the accident — don't point to the wheelchair. He's just as much of a prick as he always was."

Ow

Ouch. I was at Triad today working out with Kirk (who incidently was selected for the 2nd year in a row as one of the top 100 trainers in the US by Men's Journal Magazine) when I crushed my finger. We were working out on doing bench presses on a stability ball when the thing slipped out from under me, I rolled and crushed my finger between two dumbells, instead of just letting go, like a dumbell. My finger swelled up to the size of a toe and hurt like I'd broken it until I finally poked it through the nail with a needle to let off some of the pressure. I've got ice on it, but it keeps seeping blood out the nail, which is kinda gross. On a more interesting and less gory note, while Kirk and I were warming up, I got to talking with a couple guys who'd just gotten done working out there with Kirk. Both used to play for MSU in the past two years, one being a quarterback and the other a wide receiver. It was interesting to hear their take on John L. Smith vs. Bobby Williams. Both are working to go pro, either with a canadian or european league.

The first rule of fight club...

Last year Nate and I went to one of the big geeked-out computer shows at a near by expo center, where, of course, they sold boxing gloves. We bought two pair which Nate and I used to have our own boxing matches. Soon, he and his buddy Austin started having boxing matches, which look pretty ferocious on video. Amazingly, no one ends up hurt (too badly) or crying out of these. You can see the Nate and Austin boxing video here .

Dooohh

As you probably know, Conan used to be one of the writers on the Simpsons. This is an excellent clip of Hank Azaria and Dan Castelleneta doing a bunch of their Simpson's Voices.

I've been noticing lately how badly my memory seems to stink. I read this article on how Mental awareness requires better filters
and realized that my "filters" stink. I can't figure out for the life of me how I can remember some of what i do remember, and be oblivious to other stuff out there. I suck at keeping irrelevent things out of my awareness. On the contrary, I seem to be drawn to the irrelevent, which doesn't do much for my memory.

Maybe this makes me a nerd, but this is cool video of an Exploding over-clocked CPU after the heat sink is pulled off.

Perfect Day

After church today, the kids and I headed outside to play. It was a perfect winter day - fresh snow mixed with enough sun to having good packing snow.

We piled as much snow as we could underneath our swingset and the kids proceeded to launch off of it while I took pictures. My camera's got some great features for taking high speed pictures, so I messed around with those and got some cool action shots.

We were having a fun snowball fight until Maddie got Nate at close range....

And Nate turned around and pelted her in the side of the face from 2 feet away.

We then headed out to the woods and spent about a half hour building a pretty cool fort, we called Fort Kurt (okay, it was cool for us).

Maddie had a found a big crevice in the woods behind our house and Nate, Emily and I piled branches around it to wall it off. Nate wanted to try and set up some kind of booby trap to catch a deer which was a great idea, in theory. The plans were big, but we couldn't make it happen like it does in the cartoons.


We played some more as Emily came up with a game to see who could slide the farthest off the slide, and then headed in where Cathie had hot choclate waiting for all of us. I posted the pictures in our family photo gallery here.

Jesus must be coming soon, because you can now buy a $120 toothbrush with toothpaste built in. Why does a toothbrush need a CD? How lazy do you have to be to not want to apply your own toothpaste?

Another Saturday Night, Live.

Cathie and I went out wtih our friends Justin and Lori tonight for dinner and a movie. I introduced Justin and Lori to the comedic genius music of Stephen Lynch and we laughed pretty hard the whole way there. After dinner, we saw the movie Just Friends. Good flick but I could've waited to see it on video. It was snowing hard by the time we got home, and everything was covered in beautiful freshly fallen snow. Cathie and I went for a walk about midnight and it was so peaceful and quiet as the snow fell (yes, we left our children alone, sleeping in the house like bad parents). We watched Dane Cook on Saturday Night Live and laughed hard. One of the best SNL's I've seen in a while.

Tonight i watched the documentary, or should I say rockumentary, Rock School. The movie starts off with this group of young kids playing Santana's Black Magic Woman, perfectly, note for note. It's about the Paul Green School of Rock Music. The guy is tough and can be a tool, the guy you love to hate. Great flick about music, about kids. It finishes up with an amazing version of Frank Zappa's Inca Roads.

Emily, tonight:

For Will's birthday, I want another pet catapillar like the on I had before. He did tricks for me. When I said roll-over, he'd roll-over. When I said flip, he'd flip. It did the tricks in the grass, so I couldn't really see it.

Rudy has brought clarity to my life. I had no clue until I read his blog (Jon will probably be angry that I referenced another blog. Tough.). If you watch family guy, you saw this crazy peanut butter jelly guy skit that made no sense at all. According to Rudy:

I finally understand this skit from The Family Guy. Dave was wondering what it meant too, because it was too random, even for the Family Guy. Apparently it all started with this internet skit of a banana dancing to this song. It all makes sense now.

Even if you hate the Family Guy, watch this part of it. It'll stick with you.

While my Mom was at U of M for some of her chemotherapy prep, they did a cat scan and found something they didn't like. She's going in next Monday for an outpatient biopsy. They hope it's scar tissue and not more malignant tissue. Please pray for her.

I never go to the gym without my iPod. I'll bring written workouts and magazine articles with pictures of new exercises with me, but I saw this and thought it a cool idea. Pumppod.com is an awesome use for a video iPod. It lets you store the specifics of an exercise on your Video iPod and have it with you during workouts. Genius. (It works on my Treo phone also, but I already have one of those, and that wouldn't help me justify a new Video iPod)

FireFox Extensions I'm using

Here's what I'm using with the latest version of FireFox Browser (v1.5)
LinkPreview - When you hover over a url, it shows you a thumbnail of the page.
Google Toolbar -Obvious
Adblock -Additional pop-up blocking functionality
Tab Preview -When you hover over a tab, it shows you an image of your current page.
IE Tab -Allows you to open an IE page within Firefox. Helpful for yahoo mail that doesn't support rich text in Firefox.
Yahoo Toolbar -Obvious

I found this definition of You might be emergent if... to be pretty funny.

Thanks to MarkO for these beauties - Christian Sunglasses. They also get the award for: Most out-of-context use of scripture to sell a product by quoting this verse:

"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light." Matthew 6:22

So basically, if I wear these glasses, I'm all set. Excellent. The upside is, they give 30% of their profits to the needy.

Erik's full of this stuff this week. He passed on this tool for more intelligent e-mail reading, called SNARF from Microsoft:

The Social Relationship and Network Finder, or SNARF, is an application that uses the same database as a user's e-mail client to count the number of times users send and receive e-mails from people, said AJ Brush, a researcher in the community technologies group at Microsoft Research, who developed the tool. alling this kind of e-mail triage process "social sorting," researchers worked with graduate students to come up with the tool so it will help users prioritise e-mails based on how often they send and receive mails from contacts, she said.

"One of the core SNARF notions is that it’s about people," Brush said. "We’re really trying to remember information about the people in my e-mail rather than on a per-message basis. Then SNARF will know it’s that message from [for example] Julie, I talk to her all the time, so it will put that higher in order of importance."

Here's a more indepth article on the technology.

Front Row

I figured out a way to get Front Row to work on my Mac Mini and use the AirClick Remote I have on my Mac to control it all. All that being said, I'm not sure it's all that great. It uses iPhoto, which is a horrible app for picture display, especially when it's compared with a free application like Picasa. The video piece ties in nicely to iTunes, and it has some cool movie preview technology that's very slick, along with the ability to view music videos and tv shows you've downloaded. It looks sweet on my 52" HDTV - I'm just not sure the capability is all that special. It's really just packaged existing mac functionality into a nice interface - nothing real new that I can see. After dinking around in the core of the Mac OS, I continue to be blown away by how powerful it is and how it just crushes the Windows Operating system in terms of functionality, capability and architecture. The interface for application installation is so simple, but the unix core gives you the ability to customize at least at the same level as can be down in XP or a server environment.

Conversation with Nate

When your son starts a conversation out with "Dad, did you know that a nutcracker doesn't really crack nuts?", you know what's coming next. A broken nutcracker. Nate took Madeline's nutcracker and tried to crack a nut with it, cracking the nutcracker in half. I can't really blame him for doing something that I might have tried first if he hadn't.

New iMac Review

Check out Mossberg's latest WSJ review on the new iMac G5. This thing looks fantastic, especially the entertainment center functionality. The Front Row software looks great. Doesn't seem to be offered for my Mac Mini.

My son Nate now has someone other than me to aspire to. There's now this video game freak.

Erik turned me on to this cool new music site called Pandora. You pick an artist or song and it will play songs by that artist, as well as songs related musically, thematically and by related by others. It's free and pretty interesting.

Met with a friend of mine, John, for breakfast this morning. John Hedapohl has agreed to be a spiritual mentor for me, something I really haven't taken advantage of since we agreed to start doing this six months ago. We met today and I remember why I need this in my life. John has an amazing balance of knowledge, reflection and practicality of life, people and faith that I need. When I imagine a conversation with Jesus, I think it would be a lot like my conversations with John. Lots of listening, openess, acceptance, truth and love.

Technology I'm loving:

• Mac Mini
• Treo 650
• Plantronics 510 Headset
• Firefox 1.5
• Konfabulator
• Gallery2
• Plantronics CS50 Desktop Wireless Headset
• iPod (40GB)
  

Technology I'm lusting after:

• Video iPod - 60GB
• Indiana Jones Pinball Machine
• TomTom Bluetooth Navigator
• Treo 700w
  

What sucks is that i'm on a budget and trying NOT just to go out and buy what I want. novel idea, huh? With that being said, is there anything I'm missing on my lists?

Quick observation: As I look at my list of technology I'm currently digging, three of the items on that list (iPod, CS50 and 650) came from a friend of mine, Mack, having them before anyone I knew and nudging me towards them. He's currently got the 60GB video iPod and the TomTom system, which I want badly, but I'm having a tough time saving up for.

At least i don't still have a phone like Bill Belanger.

Today is Will's Birthday

Today is my friend Will's birthday. I laughed so hard when Susan posted this picture of him. Will is (in the words of the immortal Bob Rays) my brotha-from-anotha-motha. Statistically speaking, the chances of him dying are much higher now than they were last year due to his age. I have many pictures of myself with both bad hair and flannel that I hope never make it into the public like this.

Will's holding my now-eight year old son Nate in the piture above. Here's a fun birthday story to tell you what kind of friend Will is:
Cathie was out of town on a women's retreat and I was at home with an 18 month old and a new born baby trying to survive. Will had come over to watch a movie with me. We were enjoying the movie when all of the sudden I heard a scream, only to find Nate in his bed, covered in Puke. I grabbed Nate, threw him in the bathtub while Will grabbed the puke-covered sheets and washed them. Greater love has no man.....

Will is also the only non-blood-or-married family member included in the Kurt birthday-phone-call tradition. It goes like this. Every Kurt (including Kevin and Susan) member must talk to another family member on their birthday. Doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing. You must call them. Some secretly hope that other's don't call so this can be used against them in the future. The calls have begun today to Will, with Dan/Kris and kids waking Will up at 7AM with a phone call. Funny thing, Will is typically the first person to call people and typically will remind me about my own family's birthdays.