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People love to guess whether our unborn baby will be a boy or a girl. Here are my theories why people can’t resist:

1. It’s a light conversation about a sensitive subject. Pregnancy is a very complicated subject in society today. For the first two-and-a-half decades of my life, the discussion about pregnancy with my peers has always been laced with qualifiers: teenage pregnancy, unplanned pregnancy, or baby momma drama. Every adult passed through this chapter of life, so there’s some residual anxiety that creeps in when the topic of pregnancy comes up. For people who are all grown up, there’s a whole new angle that’s even more emotionally charged: fertility. If you want to avoid the cloud of complication that surrounds the birds and the bees, just make a pick: boy or girl. And why not…

2. You have a 1 in 2 chance of being correct. These are pretty good odds. You don’t need to do research, there’s no spread to decipher, no overbearing predictions from sports writers or political analysts to influence your opinion.

3. You get a lot of credit for your hunches without having to explain them. I’ve had a dozen people tell me that they “just know” that the baby is going to be a girl or a boy. And none of these all-knowing people have any explanation for why they know what they know. You’ll lose your credibility if you place a bet on a sports game if you can’t explain why you believe your team will win. But in the baby game, not having an explanation adds to your mystique, as if your prediction is divine wisdom that is beyond explanation.

4. If you guess right, you can quit gambling and brag for the next five years. You can’t do this with a sporting event. Nobody cares if you guessed the winner of the 2003 Super Bowl. For you winners out there, know that you really only have five years to boast of your supreme prediction. Because by then the baby is off to Kindergarten and has a personality. If the kid’s a brat, nobody cares if you knew the brat would be a boy or a girl.

I don’t know if I believe what I’ve just written. Honestly, you only have about a year to brag about your pick, because if you gloat any longer people will just think you’re a moron.

5. If you guess wrong, nobody’s going to make fun of you. A new mom is too excited about the new life in her home to point out that you were wrong about the big prediction. Not even the most callous dad is going to give you a hard time. Again, if you bet on the Dallas Mavericks* going into the playoffs last year, people are still making fun of you. Guess a baby wrong, and you’re immediately forgiven.

So I’ve audited dozens of these guessing games over the past month, and I always get hooked in at the end: What do you think? I pause and then sincerely explain what’s on my heart: “I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl. As long as it’s a ninja, that’s all that really matters.”

* The Dallas Mavericks were the most winning team in the NBA last season, yet they were knocked out of the playoffs by the Golden State Warriors, a team that barely made the playoffs.

NBC is releasing a 2-hour TV movie reintroducing the 80′s TV show Knight Rider. Michael Knight will NOT be played by David Hasselhoff, but has been replaced by a unknown soap opera actor Justin Bruening. And the black Pontiac Trans Am will be replaced by a Ford Mustang. If the show takes off, NBC promises a TV series.

The original concept sketch.

A computer rendering

The real deal: KITT 2008.

Now that we’ve looked at the pretty pictures, let’s talk about what this means for the “stock value” of the Ford Mustang.

Why Knight Rider Will Break the Mustang

1. It’s not a Pontiac Trans Am. The switch to a Mustang may not mean much to most people, but to car guys, it might seem like a violation the purity of the original show. Putting a Ford Mustang in the place of the Pontiac Trans Am is like two teams trading quarterbacks on the day of the Super Bowl. The universe is in chaos. But when you take a few minutes to think about it, you’ll remember that the original Knight Rider was an average show that only lasted four seasons. You are giving Pontiac too much credit if you argue that the new show is doomed to fail because they cast a Mustang as a crime fighter.

2. Knight Rider didn’t help the Trans Am. I’m sure that the original Knight Rider boosted sales of the Pontiac Trans Am back in the 1980s, but it hasn’t made the car a legend. Really, it’s been 27 years since Knight Rider debuted, giving America plenty of time to get excited about the Trans Am again. I’ve been to dozens of car shows in the past decade and I rarely see a 3rd Generation Trans Am (1982-1992). You can’t blame it on the fact that they aren’t old enough to be collectibles again, because I regularly see rows of 1994-1996 Impala Super Sports. If you’re not into anecdotal evidence, consider the the fate of the original KITT: the 1982 Knight Rider Trans Am sold for a pitiful $20,000, lot #732.1 at Barrett-Jackson in 2002. That’s less than the cost of a 2002 Chevy mini van. Lets pause to think about how uncool that is.

3. The show will flop and drag the Mustang down with it. This would be a valid fear if the release of this new body of the Mustang was timed with the debut of the show. But the Mustang came out four years ago, and it has a solid fan base amongst all demographics (young and old, male and female, Republican and Democrat.) A TV show can’t destroy that. If this show does flop, nobody will blame it on the Mustang.

My conclusion is that people liked KITT as a crime-fighter, but they didn’t like him enough to like to crown the Trans Am as a car worth collecting. If I could use a sports analogy, they liked KITT as a player, but it wasn’t because of his uniform. It doesn’t matter if Steve Nash plays for the Mavericks, Suns, or Celtics–he’s still the best team mate on earth.

Why Knight Rider Will Make the Mustang

I think there’s more reason to believe that a Mustang as Knight Rider will be a good thing for everyone…

1. Hollywood was good to the Delorean. Anyone from the 1980s can pick a Back to the Future DeLorean out of a parking lot at a car show, even if they don’t know what the name it is. The DeLorean may not be a quintessential “classic” like a ’57 Chevy, but it’s one of the few cars from the 1980s to be lionized by the American public. Keep in mind that it was a car was a piece of junk and it ruined GM’s golden child John DeLorean.

2. Hollywood was good to the Shelby Mustang GT-500. Consider what consider the 2000 release of the movie Gone in 60 Seconds did for the Shelby Mustang GT500 Eleanor. That car has an absolute rock star in the movie. At the Barrett-Jackson Car Auction in Scottsdale, the “original” Eleanor sold for $675,000. There were probably 20 Eleanors on the set used for different stunts, but the Eleanor that sold at the auction was the most functional, least beat up car. Did I mention that Eleanor wasn’t not even a real Shelby? It’s an ordinary ’67 Mustang fastback scooped out of a junkyard and dressed up to look like a customized Shelby. Recreating that car has become a cottage industry. These replicas have sold for six figures at Barrett-Jackson every year since then movie came out in 2000.

3. If OJ’s Bronco was good for Ford, Knight Rider will be good for Ford. You would think that Ford would’ve canceled their archaic full-sized Bronco by the time OJ used it as his getaway wagon on national TV. At the time, it was only driven by employees of the Forestry Service and the Department of Transportation. It had zero sex appeal. I read several articles after the murder trial that claimed that sales of the Bronco shot through the roof.

4. TV saves careers. Just for fun, I’ll use an analogy that car guys won’t care about: Jessica Simpson and Nick Lache. People wondered if these young lovers were smart when they chose to broadcast their first year of marriage on an MTV reality show called “The Newlyweds” back in 2003. The show wasn’t good for their marriage (divorced in 2006), but the show gave Jessica’s brief singing career a jolt of Hollywood that has aloud her to stick around for the last five years and she’ll probably around for another five. Not bad for someone with no tangible talent. (Don’t ask me to explain why Nick’s career didn’t do the same, I’d have to talk about the complex relationship between famous girls and the non-famous girls who love to hate them, thereby making her more famous.)

Conclusion: Ford Wins

Rumor has it that Pontiac will release a rear-wheel drive muscle car sometime in 2010 or 2011, but as of today, nobody knows if it will be branded as a GTO or a Firebird Trans Am. Regardless, it’s not worth it to GM to speed up the concept model if there isn’t a lot of commitment from NBC behind Knight Rider. GM doesn’t have time to mess around with a show that might end as soon as it begins, they’re in the fight of their life with Japanese heavyweight Toyota.

When it came time to turn on the cameras and start filming, NBC needed a star. Ford was ready with lots of hype and a badass Mustang with a tank of gas. Good luck happens to people who are prepared when opportunity arrives.

This morning a few of us went on a sleigh ride. Here are some photos…

Me and Candyce riding in the back of the sleigh.

This horse was huge. It could kick over a house if it felt like it.

L to R: Candyce, Cowhand, Lauryn Oertle, Megan Madigan, Dani Weimen, Kevin Day, the horse

This afternoon Danny  and I found snowshoes in the closet, so we strapped them on and ventured out of the cabin. After about 20 minutes, we had worked up a sweat and the sun was warming up. I lifted my hoody off back and stood there shirtless for about 10 seconds. It felt so good that I tied it around my waist. Danny did the same. We spent the next 45 minutes scooting across the snow-covered valley like a bunch of bareback freaks.

Kevin spotted us from the cabin’s front porch, and he decided he wanted to get in on the fun. Danny went inside and Kevin joined me for a second trip. We explored the building sites for new cabins near the base of the mountain. We rounded the frozen lake and jumped over frozen creeks. We discovered tracks and crap from elk and deer. It was quite an afternoon of adventure.

Last night I had a dream that all adults were required to take the SAT again. The problem was that none of the test questions were visible on the page. The pages kept changing colors and sizes, so every time I looked back to the sheet of questions, it looked nothing like it did before. Plus, there were random items that ended up on my desk, objects that apparently related to this new exciting version of the SAT. There were 3 black socks, an avocado, and a photo of Ralph Machio from The Karate Kid.

There was a professor in the room who paced back and forth with excitement as I sat there trying to figure out what to do with my avocado. Some grownups started chatting away in the corner about how ridiculous this whole ordeal was, and they were violently yanked from their desks and dragged out of the testing room by police officers.

I was so happy when I woke up to realize I’m actually here in the White Mountains of Eastern Arizona. I’m a grown man who’s married and spending a weekend with his homies. I peeked through the blinds to see that the sun was getting ready to rise, so I scrambled downstairs to see if I could see some wildlife in the early morning. I got hooked on looking for wildlife in the early morning last summer at Yosemite when I was rewarded with bobcat, a coyote, and a bunch of deer. I never knew it was so much to be the star in my own Discovery Channel TV show.

So I fumbled down the stairs to catch the show. I built a fire in the fireplace and made some coffee so my homies will l have something fun to wake up to. Now I’m here typing because I think it’s too damn cold out there even for the animals. They still lounging in their animal houses up in the woods. There’s about ten inches of snow on the ground outside, and the snow drifts on the front porch are two feet deep. It’s fun looking at the snow, but it’s like staring at the same painting for an hour. You just get bored.

:::

High Mountain Rangers

1988 was a good year for me. I was nine years old and my family took a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to hang out at the beach while staying in a free weekend at a “timeshare”. (Dad described it to me like this: We get to stay here for free as long as me and Mom sit in a three hour meeting where they try to get us to buy this place.) I remember thinking those people were dumb because they obviously didn’t know we were broke. We couldn’t even buy pop tarts, much less a “combo” by the beach.

I was thrilled because we were at the beach and there would be skateboarders there like me, but I was strung out with joy because our condo was on the 10th floor of the building. I’d never stayed in a place that high off the ground before.

The adventures just kept coming. That night Katie, Kristie, and I got to explore all of the TV channels that beach people got to watch, and we came across a show called The High Mountain Rangers. The plot was pretty simple: a dad and his two sons are part of a rescue crew that saves the lives of dumb tourists lost in the snowy mountains. Check out the Show intro High Mountain Rangers on YouTube.

This show made me feel pretty cool because I lived in the mountains too and I was always in the woods. And although I was only 9 and wasn’t officially dating anyone, I liked the idea that I was a rough mountain man that was misunderstood by the pretty city girls. This was my kind of show.We got back to the mountains, I looked for the show for about a month with no luck. In college, I poked around the Internet hoping I’d find something, and didn’t come up with anything.

I just checkout out Wikipedia and found out the show was canceled after its first season of 12 episodes. No wonder I couldn’t find it on TV! It’s a shame too… You know, I might be the biggest fan that show ever had. If I had more time on my hands, I’d start an ironic High Mountain Rangers fan club online.

Over the course of writing this, it’s gone from “kinda dark” outside to a bright bright morning. The snow is a big mirror to reflect the rays of the sun, and this cabin is so bright inside I can barely see the computer monitor because of the reflections. I should point out that although it’s cold outside, my bare toes are warm right now. Radiant floor heating is the best thing in the world. By the way, I still haven’t seen a wild animal outside.

This was first published on my blog on Suns.com:

For those of you who missed the game last night, you missed a lot:

1. Leandro is getting traded. The fan favorite Leandro Barbosa was called in his Los Angeles hotel room yesterday afternoon and was told that Steve Kerr needed to speak to him in the lobby. Apparently, Leandro had been traded to the New York Knicks. A stunned and emotional LB went to his mentor Dan Dantoni’s room and asked, “Do you not like me? I thought you liked me?” Dan barked back at him, “You’re not getting traded!”
Lesson Learned: Famous people shouldn’t use their real names when they check in at a hotel.

2. Mike D’Antoni and Kobe Bryant are great friends. I knew that young Kobe grew up in Italy admiring the explosive play of the superstar Mike D’Antoni. It’s rumored that Kobe adopted D’Antoni’s #8 as his own for several years before he changed to #24 in 2006. Last night we saw Mike and Kobe laughing together on the sidelines. This his hardly evidence of a life-long friendship, but it’s news to most Phoenicians.

Lesson Learned: Sports commentators need to learn to use the word “frenemy.”

3. Boris Diaw can still shoot. If you’ve been a Suns fan over the past few years, you’ll remember that Boris Diaw can hit critical shots in big games. Last night against the Lakers, Boris sunk 9 of 13. It feels good to see confidence in Boris again.

Lesson Learned: Boris needs to get in touch with his inner tiger.

4. Lamar Odom wears girl’s tights. I don’t want to be the fashion police, but some things need to said. Dwayne Wade debuted his black leotard bottoms to the world a couple seasons ago when his Miami Heat stormed the NBA playoffs and brought Miami home its first championship trophy. His training staff justified Dwayne Wade’s pantie hose as “leg warmers” that kept his muscles limber. Since then, Kobe and Lebron have been seen rockin’ the tights. (At least Lebron has the common sense to grow a burly beard to keep his manliness.) This trend is growing and is causing great trepidation in my life. Last night I suffered through almost 3 hours of watching big and bad Lamar Odom wear purple tights under his gold shorts.

Lesson learned: That ain’t right.

5. Steve Nash is funny. Some of you missed this because you were already in bed for the night. TNT’s courtside clown Craig Sager asked Steve Nash after the game why the Suns seem to be struggling in the first part of the year. Nash listened patiently as Sager stretched a question out over 30 seconds before he finally blurted back: “It’s because we suck!” Steve continued with a straight forward appraisal of the team’s struggles, but it was clear that Steve was in a funny mood after the big game. Sager’s second question was why we haven’t seen more aggression out of Boris Diaw. Nash yelled into the microphone “It’s because he sucks too!” Sager ended the interview before Steve Nash could tell him that he sucks as well.

Lesson Learned: Craig Sager needs new clothes.