Things are about to get applesaucy!

Another book I bought Friday because it made me laugh out loud just paging through it was Jarrett J. Krosoczka's Lunch Lady and the Video Game Villain. ISBN 9780307980793 A middle school "lunch lady" when she's not serving lunch to students is with her coworker Betty a James Bond-type hero with the accompanying gadgets disguised as lunch foods and other items from bendy straw headsets to hover pizzas to taco night vision goggles.

Amazing the preponderance of teachers and students that are containing their criminal tendencies; the villain of the title is the school's technology instructor who's stealing everybody's high-tech stuff to build a giant controlling video game. When the Breakfast Bunch -- middle schoolers Dee, Hector, and Terrence -- turn the Lunch Lady onto some mysterious happenings (apparently they're the only ones who know she fights crime on the side), she gets ... let's say, caught up in it.

And did I mention the Lunch Lady series is comprised (so far) of ten graphic novels for kids that are also kid-friendly? "Video Game Villain" is number nine, and yesterday Sarah checked out the second book (ISBN 9780375846847) in the series, Lunch Lady and the League of Librarians, which she read to Martha for her Reading at Home time and I read after she went to bed. And THAT'S where today's title is from; I'll let you guess who the villains are.

Perhaps we should send Lunch Lady -- unobtrusively -- to North Korea. Monday I was having lunch at work and sat down to watch a DVD I'd bought a few weeks ago, A State of Mind. Filmmaker Daniel Gordon in the early 2000s was given the opportunity and unprecedented access to film in North Korea -- in this case filming the school and training regimen of two pre-teenagers who are practicing to be selected to perform in the Mass Games that their Great Leader's to attend.

The Mass Games are the world's largest choreographed event, and after watching the 93-minute video (from 2003) culminating in the opening ceremony (the Mass Games) of the two-month Arirang Festival. Here in Western civilization we tend to look on the inhabitants of North Korea as deluded, isolationist, and from the video it seems their view of us, to borrow a Nineteen Eighty-Four reference, is that we're all Emmanuel Goldstein.

Parts still live in the 1950s -- incidentally, the Korean War has never ended and a turn-of-the-century Pentagon estimate's that if it flares up again there will be a million casualties in the first twenty-four hours -- and parts you would find indistinguishable from, oh, maybe a third of the country you live in. Particularly in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital that contains one-tenth of the country's population. Not training my children to be Sons and Daughters of the General and Mount Paekdu ...

(the General being then-leader Kim Jong Il and Mount Paekdu being the place all Koreans are encouraged, like all Muslims to Mecca, to make pilgrimage to once in their lifetime) and back in the United States last night after work I headed to a Bible study at Pastor Gerald's house and then got home to a pork roast dinner -- of course, Martha and the kids had already eaten and I was reviewing the kids' practice with them while I was eating! Then the paper route for me, then work,

And the fam is supposed to be picking up something for my birthday tomorrow, David