The latest entertainment news that is sure to excite my daughter is that the band KISS is planning a tv show for children. My daugther loves KISS. And Bon Jovi. And Guns N Roses. And Elvis. All of these artists and many more make up her ipod listening.

MSN Entertainment

Ready for your kids to "Rock and Roll All Nite"?

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, co-founders of KISS, are developing a children's show based on the band with Canadian production company E1 Television, the company announced Tuesday.

In a press release, the currently untitled program is said to "create a comedic half-hour kids television series that galvanizes the band's iconic personas for its young fans." Both Simmons and Stanley will serve as executive producers, along with E1's senior vice president of kids and animation, Frank Saperstein.

"KISS continues to be the juggernaut of licensing and merchandising, from KISS M&M's to KISS Dr Pepper," Simmons said in a statement. "KISS is a band, but also the only music BRAND. Continuing in our 35-year history of going where no band has gone before, we are proud to partner with E1. Like all things KISS, we intend to make this a very special show for our fans."

No other details about the show have been released.

Someone toilet papered the tree in our front yard sometime Saturday night. The contractors who are tearing up and rebuilding the outside of our house left at around 5 on Saturday and they tell me there was no toilet paper on the tree when they left. My friend Susanne drove by to check on our house Sunday morning after church and there was the toilet papered tree.

I arrived back home from my trip Sunday night and had to chuckle at the clearly amateur toilet papering job. They even left a couple of full rolls of tp on the ground under the tree. I cannot for the life of me imagine who would tp our yard. Seems like our friends are too old for that sort of thing and Toot's friends are far too young for unsupervisied toilet papering.

I suppose it was probably just some passing teens who were bored and decided the extra rolls of tp in their backpacks could be put to a better use than the original intended purpose.

I was not chuckling the next day when I went out to check our mailbox and found birth control devices on the mailbox handle and handcream squirted on the mailbox to look like you-know-what. Obviously someone is into really juvenile tricks. But I'm going to shrug it off. No sense getting all mad about it because who should I get mad at? Instead I installed extra security cameras around the perimeter of the property, put dobermans to guard the backyard, set up laser guns to zap intruders in the front yard, and hired my own ninjas to patrol the yard every five minutes. Everything should be just fine now ;)

Today it seems that I am adjusting to the time zone change and the fact that I went from a city of millions yesterday to a town of 20,000 today. It is a bit of a culture change. My mother went home to her town of 3,000 and I can imagine that she is now adjusting to country life again.

Some friends asked how it was to drive in LA. It is actually just like driving in Houston. The freeways are massive and crowded.

The best meal I had in LA was at Bar Pintxo in Santa Monica. We went to visit the 3rd Street Promenade. Unfortunately it rained while we were promenading so we cut that visit short. But the Bar Pintxo was excellent even though I still have not figured out how to pronounce their name. Their food is Spanish tapas and we loved it. All those cute little trays of delicacies arriving at our table every few minutes cheered us up despite the rain.

The best person we met in a service capacity was the front desk clerk at our hotel. He was gracious and kind in a city that can often be overwhelming. I recommend staying at the Culver Hotel so you can experience their great hospitality.

We discovered another restaurant that bears mentioning here: the S & W Country Diner at 9748 Washington Blvd in Culver City. It was a gem of a place that harkens back to the diners of yore. And not in a fake way. This was the real McCoy. Vinyl booths. Good, hearty breakfasts. One of those bars with bar stools that face the area where the waitstaff works.

We took one of those tours of Hollywood. We were busy snapping pictures of the stars on sidewalks and trying to avoid the people dressed up as movie characters. At one point we saw Spiderman, Darth Vader, and that Super Mario character talking to each other on the sidewalk and giving each other tips about the best way to pose for pictures with tourists. While we were strolling along, one of those tour operators offered us a limo ride tour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills and before you could say Paris Hilton, we were off on a tour.

First we passed Bob Barker's house, then we went to a scenic overlook of the Hollywood sign, then we got in a fuss with some dude (it turned out to be a shared limo tour :( ). The dude was sitting at the back where the air-conditioning controls were located and he kept turning the air off. We were sweltering hot! His girlfriend fell asleep or passed out. The three ladies from Wisconsin were strangely quiet. I got carsick and had to ride in the front with the driver. And Toot fell asleep and sleep with her head on my mom's lap and missed the majority of the tour which included Elvis's old house and the Playboy mansion. All in all, that was mostly a waste of money.

Oh, and we visited the La Brea tarpits. That was really cool. But stinky. Toot found some erasers for her collection in the gift shop there.

And that was the trip to LA. Quick.

This is the view from our hotel room in Culver City, California. We had a whirlwind trip out here to San Diego and Los Angeles. Now we are headed back to Texas this morning.

This hotel is located in the western part of Los Angeles and is our usual place to stay when we visit here. I like the neighborhood around the hotel very much. There are great restaurants within easy walking distance of the hotel. This visit we tried Fords Filling Station. It was quite good but really, really loud inside. I will write more about that on my food blog later. Once I get home!

This is a fountain at the Mission of San Juan Capistrano in the town named after it. The mission is located somewhat south of Los Angeles. This is the glorious riot of succulents planted in the pot of the fountain. The mission is beautiful and very old. I was fascinated with the plants that are everywhere. There was a huge variety of trees, succulents, and cacti throughout the grounds of the mission.

Wondering where the Trans World Expedition is now? Why, they have just left Lake Titicaca. (I recall as a child that we thought that name was hilariously funny for some reason.)

This is their picture of Pisac, agricultural terraces. Now the expedition is on to Bolivia. Reading the ongoing adventures of this expedition has opened my eyes to the beautiful cities and towns of South America that I never realized even existed.

You can donate money to help them buy gas as they make their trip around the world this year.

Saturday found us in the mood to eat German food. There is a place in Houston that we have been meaning to try for some time now but we never seemed to find the time. So on Saturday we went to Rudi Lechner's on Gessner.

The ambiance was nice. The decor was typical German-restaurant decor: pictures of the motherland, lots of  beer steins on display, and a great European beer selection. We had to walk through the bar area to get to the restrooms and I liked the looks of their comfortable-looking old-world bar. I would defintely go back to have a German beer at their bar.

Danny got his usual dish: Jaeger Schnitzel. But he proclaimed that it was not as good as our local Lake Jackson German restaurant, the Wurst Haus. I had the cabbage rolls which were fairly good. The mashed potatoes they served alongside were outstanding.

But my favorite item at the restaurant was the bread plate they brought as soon as we were seated. They included some apple-spice bread that I simply couldn't get enough of and some homemade white bread that was excellent also.

On Wednesday evenings they have live music and a full buffet. Perhaps we will go there again on a Wednesday and give that a try.

A few years ago I was in Los Angeles for work. A group of us coworkers and some spouses went to the Japanese area of Los Angeles for dinner. Just let me say right now that I cannot use chopsticks. Cannot. I have tried many times over the years. I have been coached on the proper technique by actual Japanese people. I have honestly given it my best effort but to no avail. I simply can't get it.

So of course, everyone wanted to eat sushi and drink all sorts of saki. I was nervous. The people in my group were so cosmopolitan (as opposed to us country bumpkins from Houston.) They knew proper chopstick usage and were quite knowledgeable about saki brands.

We ordered our food. I made an effort to use the chopsticks. I drank the saki. Finally someone rescued me from my dilemma. They announced to the entire table that the traditional way to eat sushi was with your fingers. So that is exactly what I did. And to this day, I hope they were right because that is how I continue to eat my sushi.

But the really good part of this story is that I discovered a wonderful store in the Japanese shopping center that sold the most amazing erasers. I kid you not. Erasers. I bought my daughter a few packs. And so her eraser collection was born. And here is what her Japanese eraser collection looks like today (with a few other eraser thrown in from other parts of the globe):

Yes, that is her manual typewriter in the background. She found that at a garage sale several years ago for $3 and I ordered some ribbons for it that cost considerably more than $3. She loves to use that typewriter!

My friend and I used to go to the Dallas Trade Mart/World Trade Center to go shopping a couple of times a year. This place is not open to the public (or wasn't back then). You have to be registered as a business to get in and shop on floor after marvelous floor of everything from housewares to furniture to clothing. The first of each month is called Market Days and the vendors there have fantastic deals that are mostly cash and carry rock-bottom prices.

So here's my story: one day we were at the Trade Mart. I was about 6 months pregnant. We were pulling our little cart around behind us and loading up on good deals. In one part of the market there are escalators. There is a small sign that says no carts on escalators. But we were in a hurry to get to a particular vendor's place on the second floor. So we ignored the sign.

My friend gets on the escalator first pulling the cart. I am behind the cart. We ride up without incident. But at the top, the cart suddenly becomes wedged in and can't get loose. I started to step back down the escalator because I obviously couldn't go up. There were people behind me and they started stepping back down too. But I wasn't fast enough and the moving steps kept bashing me into the stuck cart.

Meanwhile my friend was frantically pulling the cart and I was pushing from my end. It was getting to be a bad situation with people piling up behind me on the escalator. Genteel southern ladies were starting to raise their voices behind me because the steps were bringing them up but they couldn't see what was going on to stop them from getting off.

Finally my friend hauls off and kicks the crap out of that cart. It dislodges and goes flying up in the air but luckily, she still had hold of the handle. She hauls it out of the way and me and all those ladies came tumbling off the escalator. My friend takes off running and pulling the cart behind her. I'm waddling along as fast as I can with my enormous pregnant belly and swollen ankles.

We end up hiding in a shop down the hallway where we collapse onto the floor. We were actually crying and laughing at the same time. I think we had some sort of hysterical laughing fit going on. We were hiding because we broke one of the sacred rules of the Trade Mart about carts on escalators and we almost got caught. Under no circumstances did we want to get kicked out of there and miss out on a whole day of good shopping deals.

I wonder why discussions of bodily functions can be so darn hilarious. A blog that I read frequently ran a contest recently about embarassing farts. Yes, you read that right. And the entries for the contest are in the comments section. Go there and prepare to do some laughing: ShaunaGlenn

My family seems to revel in the awesomeness of their gas-passing. I, on the other hand, am the prude of the family. The kill-joy, if you please. I frown upon their gross public displays of gassiness. But, I do understand there are times when a person has to do what a person has to do. And as you will find when you go to Shauna Glenn's Letterrip contest, people have emitted some amazing sounds and fluids from their hind ends in some pretty embarassing locales.