Not wanting to miss out on all of the iPhone photography fun – I decided to pull out my twice-dropped-badly-cracked original iPhone and use it as my iPhone camera. Problem solved. Here are a couple iPhone clicks from this morning.

Our shy cat Tyler covers his junk (or should I say unjunk) so he doesn’t end up as a centerfold on some kitty porn site.

Our doorbell button broke and when the wind blows it actually rings the doorbell. Go figure. Since I haven’t fixed it yet and the noise drives my son Zak crazy – he took matters into his own hands and silenced doorbell man. Good thinkin’ Zak.

If you’d like to see some good iPhoneography, check out these guys – Chase Jarvis, Sionfullana and fellow photodude Chris Ralston.

To get from the back parking lot to my building – you have to walk down the alley. If you’ve never been down Downtown Lawrence alleys, well, you’re in for an all-senses-stimulation (good and not-so-good). Of course, we have run-of-the-mill taggers defacing brick and stone and stucco – but we also have some art that’s a little more clever. Aimee over at artsyville has been capturing the red hand tagger at several places around Lawrence. I’ve shot several red hands, too, but I can’t find the images. So, I pulled up one of my other faves from several years ago – multiple barneys.

I have an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar on Monday to finally get my iPhone camera fixed. There are so many people doing some really cool iPhone galleries, and I’m excited to join in. My first project will be an iPhone alley art gallery. Let’s hope the Genius Bar guys are really genius.

And, if you enjoy This American Life as much as I do – please consider making a donation so those good folks can continue offering the podcast for free. Donate here.

• Flight of the Conchords / Season 1 (HBO)
The guys are the funniest thing going on TV and their music is all kinds of tasty. The video below is Bret and Jemaine performing one of my faves, Beautiful Girl on the David Letterman Show.

• Burn After Reading / a Coen Brothers film
Awesome cast. Razor sharp humor. And some Coen Brothers twists that will surprise you.

• Keyboard Skins / photojojo
Cool, rubber keyboard skins with shortcuts for photoshop, aperture, final cut, pro tools, after effects and more. And the photojojo store has all kinds of other cool gear for photographers.

• Ultra-cool t-shirts / threadless.com
If you can’t find a cool t-shirt you like on this site – you’re just not very cool.

• Plungerhead Wine
I bought 5 bottles as gifts this year. I don’t know if it’s any good, but how can you resist a wine with a goofball name like that. And it’s closed with a Zork.

I love to cook, and I’ll try anything new and fun, but I normally leave the baking to other family members. This Sunday was the day for me to improve my baking skills. How hard can it be, right? I watch a ton of Food Network. The mixing was easy – butter, Dr. Pepper, cocoa, buttermilk, baking soda, vanilla, eggs, flour and sugar. Pour it all in round cake pans, bake for 20 minutes, check the cakes, and you’re done. Wrong. What I didn’t know (and didn’t bother to ask), is that you’re supposed to take the cakes out of the pans when they’re still warm. Damn, they were stuck badly. I did manage to get the stuck cakes out of the pans – but it wasn’t pretty. I thought frosting and a little powered sugar might cover up the disaster. Wrong. It was still a very ugly cake. The good news – it tasted great, you just had to close your eyes when you ate it. Here’s a photo comparison of how the cake is supposed to look and how my cake turned out. Mmmmmm! I need some more practice.

Ugly cake = good blog entry, right? Well, there’s more. Much more. As I was laughing and shooting a photo of the ugly cake – I was quickly stopped by a scream from my wife Mickey. She was on the floor watering the Christmas tree when the piney monster decided to take a nose dive – bulbs breaking, Santas flying, ornaments rolling, cat scurrying, TV blaring, and wife screaming – you get the picture. If you have never attempted to “re-stand” a fully decorated tree with your wife and two teenage boys – don’t even try. Just run out of the house as fast as you can. We did manage to stay relatively calm – in spite of even more tension caused by me knocking over a huge plant that fell down the carpeted stairwell spreading gallons of dirt and plant debris over the stairs and basement floor. Zak looked down the stairs and said “…that’s a lot of dirt, dad.” Talk about testing family togetherness – we had reached red on the Homeland Security scale. Once we got the tree standing and stable – my oldest son Alec said “I think I’ll go back to my apartment now.” Damn skippy – I’d leave, too, if I could.

Oh well – life is a long list of stories strung together. Our ugly cake and falling tree disaster are just a couple more tasty ones for our fun family history. I hope all you have some fun and frantic holiday stories to add to your family history, too.

More doug stuff:

• hotdoug’s (damn, somebody stole my idea)
• doug (the real funny doug)
• bankrupt doug (who woulda thunk it?)
• doug.org (accronyms suck)
• dougie? (girl, his dougie is fresh)
• dougie ride (huh?)
• the dougie (it’s your style, your swag…)