Wow…what a week!

I’m not even sure where to really start, it’s all sort of overwhelming.

Governor Sanford of SC - You, sir, are a douchebag.  And that’s as nicely as I could put it.  First off, to cheat on your wife…that’s grounds for castration.  I’m sorry, I’m lenient on a lot of things, but that is not one of them.  Adultery is one of the commandments that I take literally.  Also, kudos to your wife for not kowtowing like a typical Republican wet noodle and standing by you while you sob about what an awful thing you’ve done.  I’m surprised she didn’t have her own press conference to talk about what a dick you are for leaving her with your four children, who will most certainly grow up now needing therapy to discuss what a useless father you were.  You should’ve been half a man at least and divorced her if you were so in love with this chica from Argentina.  I’ve really had it up to HERE with Republicans lately.

Michael Jackson – As much as I despise the news coverage of this event, I have to say that Michael was truly an icon; a unique harbinger of cool for my generation.  I didn’t really know much about MJ until the “Thriller” album, which I still own, but that was all I needed…and the memories it conjures could fill pages I’m sure.  First, I loved listening to Vincent Price laugh at the end of “Thriller.” Also, I think that was one of the first videos I saw on MTV.  We didn’t have cable when it first came out, but my grandmother did and I first saw “Thriller” on tv with my cousin D. when I was staying over.  My sister and I were also enthralled with MJ to the point that we desired white gloves; lusted after them even.  My grandmother gave us both an old white glove that she had.  They were too small, they were evening gloves, and they weren’t sequined, but we wore them all the time one summer pretending that we were the “King of Pop” himself.  Remarkably goofy considering we were white kids from the suburbs, but, we thought it was cool.  Then came the “Victory Tour” album, which I had to have.  Again, my grandmother saved my existence by purchasing the record for me after I saw it in the record store.  I remember exactly zero songs from that album, but I remember that Tito looked like somebody’s Hawaiian uncle and Jermaine looked like a girl on the photos on the inside.  I still have that album as well.  I think that same day was when my mother bought me a Bart Simpson shirt which she has never let me live down.  It was the one of him in the Bartman costume saying “Watch It, Dude!” because the “Eat My Shorts, Man!” shirt was surely deemed inappropriate.  Ah…the early 80s, what a wonderful time.  Anyway, Michael you were amazing, even through all the weirdness, you really knew how to put on a show.  And the music…we’ll never forget the music.

I’d love to talk about Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett as well, but I didn’t really know them like I did Michael (as if I really knew him!)  I didn’t watch late night television so I think I saw Ed a total a 3 times my whole life, aside from Publisher’s Clearinghouse commercials.  My sister enjoyed the magazine stamps in the envelopes, though.   And, Farrah, I knew guys who had the poster and I only vaguely remember you from your one season of “Charlie’s Angels,” a show I really enjoyed, but rarely saw because it came on after my bedtime.  Still, you energized the libido of a generation of fans and we’ll always be thankful.

See you in the funny papers!

More hell in a handbasket

It seems as though every time I disappear from my blogging duties for a while, the world becomes a little more dim, in every sense of the word.  Dim in its enlightenment, dim in its joy, dim in its desire for human equality.  Last time, I blamed it on you Intertubes, but I know it’s not you.  Honestly, sometimes I feel like we’re the only ones doing the right things, though I know that’s extremely shortsighted.  However, maybe we’re not doing enough.  Still, I’m going to refrain from beating my dead high-horse on this one because my soapbox is crushed from all the standing and I don’t know that anyone can hear me anyway.  But, let’s cover some things that I’ve missed over the past couple…crap, almost 3 weeks.  I didn’t realize I’d been gone that long.

• North Korea – Has there ever been a more egomaniacal lunatic with paranoid delusions running such a large cult with access to nuclear materiel?  Not that I’m aware of.  So this Kim Jong-Il, who has his country frightened into calling him “Esteemed God” or some such nonsense is prancing around in his mechanic’s jumpsuit trying to scare the rest of the world with his nuclear activity because he thinks the bogeyman is after him.  Why in the world would the United States be trying to subvert his leadership and destroy his regime?  Maybe because he’s a crackpot who is threatening nuclear warfare.  Even so, up to this point, we’ve pretty much left him to his own devices because we’ve been busy elsewhere (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), so it’s hard to point a finger at the U.S.  Besides, that sort of colonialization went out of fashion in the 1950s (or 1960s …I mean 80s, dammit, we need need to stop doing that shit!)
• Iran – I think we, meaning the United States, have enough problems with our own election counts that we have no business meddling in the affairs of other elections in other countries, even if those elections reek of vote-rigging and have set off waves of violence in a country known for its oppressive regimes.  That said, there is something a bit off with a theocratic government and there is a slight odor when the Supreme Leader comes out and says that the President, who is like-minded in his conservative values, bears no fault in the election process because he won by such a large margin.  Yes, of course, it would be impossible to rig 11 million votes.  Well, not entirely impossible…I mean, if you can rig just one vote, how hard can it be to do 10,999,999 more?  My thoughts go out to the thousands of individuals who have taken to the streets to express their desire to live in a free society without the pain and indignity of being considered as mere sheep for the slaughter.
• Republicans - Speaking of conservative moral values, why is it every month or so, some “upstanding Republican who is fighting for this country’s moral and family values” gets caught with his pants down?  I’m speaking, of course, about Senator Ensign (or Senator Craig or Representative Curtis or Representative Foley or Rev. Haggard…the list goes on and on folks!)  Now, I’m not saying that Democrats are innocent by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m certain that there is more than just a top ten list of Democrat Dirty-Birds.  But what I am certain of is the seeming lack of hypocrisy.  Republicans are always spouting there core values of family and tradition and moral uprightness, when they’re really no better than the gay-loving, baby-killing heathens that we are.  They just tend to go about it in a different, i.e. dark and secretive, manner.
• Kate and Jon Gosselin – Who gives a damn? NOBODY! This also goes for Carrie Prejean, former Miss California and Spencer and Heidi, or Speidi, or Dumbasses, whatever they’re calling you these days.  And, probably a thousand other F-list celebrities with WAAAY more than their 15 minutes in the spotlight.  I’m sure that I could wander over to TMZ and make a list, but honestly, who wants that?  I’m ashamed that I even know there is such a thing as TMZ.

Even with all of that, can I tell you that I fear for my daughter’s future in this crazy world, but I know that if I’m capable of instilling in her the power of self-determination and critical thinking that maybe one day, instead of just sitting on the couch on Sunday morning and writing into the ether about the powerlessness to effect change, maybe she’ll be an instrument of change and I can sit around and write about how well the Red Sox are doing and how the Yankees got beat by the lowly Nationals, AGAIN!  And, something else I know for sure, that smile of hers will most certainly be the catalyst for benevolence, because even without teeth, it shines like the twin suns of Tatooine on a hot August day!

See you in the funny papers!

Memorial

Today would’ve been Melisa Augustson’s birthday.  She would’ve been 32.  She was a bright spot in the universe and we are all less fortunate by not having her in this world.  She was taken from this life way before her time in a most violent way and it was a sad day for all.

We miss you Melisa, but we know you’re in a wonderful place.

For more information on violence against women, please visit womenshealth.gov

Fear of flying

Let me begin this post by saying I feel the deepest of sympathies with families of the people lost on Air France 447.  I can think of very few things that would be more terrifying than to have someone on the other end of the phone tell me that a person I love has disappeared.  However, one thing I think would have been to be on that flight.  How terrifying must it have been to have flown into a thunderstorm and then plummet several miles into the ocean never to be seen again?  And this is exactly the sort of event that gives me great anxiety whenever we contemplate taking a trip involving flight.

Today, I read this article about the irrationality regarding the fear of flying from Live Science and I have this to say.  While I appreciate the science behind this article and I completely understand the statistical realities of flying versus other types of transportation and even illness, I want to express my sincere thought that this does not make a lick of difference to those of us who fear the reality of events like Air France 447.  It may very well be anticipatory anxiety, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening.

I do not like flight.  I will most likely never like flight and I promise you that no amount of statistical analysis is likely to change my mind regarding this phenomenon.  I’ll take my chances on the highway.

See you in the funny papers!

Love/Hate

Things I’m currently in love with:

• Romola Garai
• MLB Network (Thanks Dad!)
• The fussy face my daughter makes when she’s sleepy and doesn’t want a pacifier
• My weight and blood pressure

Things I currently despise:

• The term “clean coal,” as there is no such thing
• Big Papi’s unfortunate hitting slump
• Lack of exercise
• The amount of diapers my daughter goes through, not their messiness, just the sheer number

Oh, and due to my current baby-induced vacation, please check out the terrific number of movies I’ve seen lately on the updated (practically daily!) Spoiler-Free Movie Reviews page.  See you in the funny papers!

Memorial Day

I’ll never be accused of being the most patriotic of citizens, but I do have a sentimental streak that’s wider than the nearest river.  I tend to wax ooey-gooey over the slightest of events anymore…wedding toasts, home makeover shows, song lyrics, etc.  Memorial Day for me is just the right mix of patriotism and nostalgia.  We take the time to remember those who have fought, ostensibly, for our freedom.   And, then we go and have beer and bratwurst to honor their memory.  My sister A. and I, until recently, had a fairly significant role in a local memorial service.  It was a very low budget affair put on by an American Legion post at a local cemetery.  It started back in 1995 when a church friend, himself a veteran of WWII, asked us to sing at this service.  And, for 13 years, we marched out among rarely visited graves to belt out the National Anthem and a couple of other hastily chosen hymns that hinted at patriotic fare.  I’ll admit that we disliked it.  It broke up our day off and there was very little recognition in it.  Still, it was a good deed for a friend and how do you say no to someone whose war wounds leave him crippled when your only good excuse is that you’d rather stay in bed?

None of this is to say, however, that I don’t believe fervently that every man and woman killed in combat, be they military or civilian, doesn’t deserve to be recognized, lauded, and memorialized for their efforts.  These individuals made a terrible sacrifice for a common cause, in most cases, and it’s the very least that I can do to show some amount of appreciation.  To that end, I’d like to close this post with part of a poem by Walt Whitman that bears a little witness to what I can do to honor those who’ve gone before on this Memorial Day.

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

Vigil strange, I kept on the field one night;

When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day.

Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,

Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade — not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,

I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,

And buried him where he fell.

Resurfacing

B-dang!  I was on an absolute tear to start this month.  5 posts in 5 days…and then, zip!  Nothing!  I mean, it was like I’d gone into the witness protection program.

Now, I’ll go ahead and admit that part of that was due to IvyCat Aside: My own personal nickname for my new daughter and her subsequent needs and desires.  Babies are no joke.  They need feeding, changing, bathing, attention and, most of all, love!  C. and I have been tag teaming like Superfly Snuka and Junkyard Dog with the daily activities of our new little one and it has been an absolute rush.  I gotta be honest…I’m better at this than I thought I would be.  I was a little nervous because, y’know, babies don’t come with manuals.  Heck, they don’t even come with fortunes wrapped in a cookie with some sage advice.  But, I was born to rock babies in this rocking chair y’all!  I’m basically at one with the Force on this one, rocking her to sleep and listening to her soft, but insistent, grunts and snorts that substitute for communication.

As well, it didn’t help that we had to go back to the hospital on Monday of this week when IvyCat turned up hypothermic with no weight gain and light eating patterns at the pediatrician’s office.  So, what started out as a one-hour trip to the doctor ended up being a 48-hour stay at the hospital.  Kids…you can’t live with ‘em!  So, after the urinalysis (which required a catheter), blood tests and antibiotics (which required an IV Aside: ooh, good one.  Get it, IV, Ivy…oh, shuddup!) and the ever popular LP (pronounced lumbar puncture, which she totally slept through)…turns out, she just needed to learn to eat better.  On top of all this, C. got sick while we were at the hospital.  She was shivering violently through Jeopardy…and not because I was beating her to all the answers…and she still has a wicked cough that they can’t give her anything for since she’s nursing Ivy.  So, if you’ve managed to follow along, on Tuesday night, I was watching two sick girls, one on a monitor and one on a pull out couch and I covered both admirably if I do say so myself.  C. called me a superhero, which you know does wonders for my self-esteem.

Anyway, what I came to talk about is why’n the hell did you, yes you Intertubes, let all this crazy shenanigans go down while I was otherwise engaged.  Let me recap:

• Some blonde girl and Douche Trump were kissing each other’s rears on CNN because she answered a dumb question, from a dumb judge, during a dumb pageant and the whole world went dumb about it because they can’t decide what they hate more: gay marriage or nude pictures.  Seriously, why was this news?  Who gives a flying crapola what she thinks?  Is she some sort of enlightened guru who merely poses as a beauty queen?  Doubtful.
• A U.S. soldier goes ape shit because his mind literally can’t handle the strain of being in combat for so many tours in a row and he kills 5 other soldiers.  Tell me this…would it not have been more mathematically convenient for the Army to agree that this guy needed serious counseling and therapy and just send him home, replacing him with one person, rather than having to replace five men/women and have to admit to their families that they should’ve known better?  Because, they should’ve known better.  We’ve known about PTSD since, I don’t know…the Battle of Marathon in 490BCE Aside: it’s true, look it up.  Documented by Herodotus apparently!  We’ve got treatment for it, but hey…let’s just go ahead and kill each other while we’re trying to kill the insurgents.  Um, that is why we’re there, right?
• Nancy Pelosi stuck her foot in her mouth and has it wedged in there so tight that she’s having a hard time getting it out.  But, I think the problem is, she’s trying to use the other foot to push the first one out.  We all know politicians are dishonest.  Sometimes that’s how they get to be where they are.  If they weren’t dishonest, they’d never make it off the PTA.  I don’t know what she knew when she knew it, but she does and it would help if she’d get her story straight before talking about it in public.
• Dear students of Notre Dame, let it go!  Barack Obama is president and deserves an honorary degree no less than any other high muckity-muck you’ve had speak at your hallowed institution.  Just because you have a huge mural of Jesus in the endzone doesn’t make you greater than the rest of us.  Trust me, I’m betting that any number of your previous speakers have had similar views on abortion and a host of other things you disagree with…but they all came and went without fanfare.  But, if you really don’t want to participate in your own college graduation because some guy, whose speech you won’t remember because you got absolutely lit the night before, disagrees with you on unborn babies, then I think you’re going to find that your close-minded view of the world is going to really cut down on your career choices.

So, to sum up, Intertubes, try not to let the world go to hell the next time I need a couple days off.  Fer cryin’ out loud, it was only 10 days and I was busy.  Keep an eye on things next time.

See you in the funny papers!

Ivy Catherine

You’ve all been so patient…waiting for the new baby, waiting to hear the name, waiting for me to post some pictures.  Well, here she is…Ivy Catherine was born at 8:18 p.m. on 5/4/09 Aside: Yes, I had her born on Star Wars Day on purpose. She weighed 7lbs. and 3 oz. and was 19.5 inches long.

…and that is what has made my life even better!

See you in the funny papers!

May the Fourth be with you!

I wait an entire year to use that pun.  It’s almost the perfect pun: wordplay, Star Wars, makes my wife’s eyes roll, normal people get it right away, etc.

Speaking of Star Wars, don’t you sometimes wish you could wave your hand like Obi-Wan and get people to do/not do the things that you don’t want them to do.  Now, I realize that this falls into a category that sounds suspiciously like the dark side.  And, I get it, really, I mean, I’d be using it all the time for minor stuff because I don’t have the discipline to be a Jedi.  I’d be too easily swayed by getting my own way.  <hand wave>You want to make me chocolate chip cookies for no reason</hand wave> Plus, how big of a nerd am I that I just used HTML code to signify a Jedi mind trick?  You be the judge.

Take yesterday for instance, I can think of no less than 3 things where I would’ve used the Jedi mind trick.  

1. You do not want to give that rambling sermon.
2. You do want to be born today. Aside: Seriously, when is this baby coming? Is it wrong to use Jedi mind tricks on babies?
3. You do not want to steal a base against the Red Sox. Carl Crawford…aka THE FLASH!

Plus, that whole using the Force to levitate things would make laundry so much easier.  And, with a lightsaber to mow the lawn!?  Seriously, just call me the domestic Jedi!

See you in the funny papers!

I believe I can fly…

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves. ~ Marcel Proust from “Remembrance of Things Past“

Sometimes there are moment in our lives where, in the face of rationality, we cling to the irrational.  This is why people who are down on their luck financially buy lottery tickets.  It’s the very reason that superstitions arise from seemingly nowhere.  It’s the reason that I imagine that the new Star Wars films (not including that animated Clone Wars nightmare) were not as bad as critics maintained they were and that somehow my viewing of Red Sox games figures directly into the outcome.  We need the hopes of folly to make reality a little less devastating.

So, yesterday, I started a new hobby for myself which doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s a little folly that delays reality for moments at a time.  I settled into a comfortable area of my yard and began my bird-watching career.  Over the course of the morning, five different species were identified and I was able to get three more on a drive to a Derby party.  I still haven’t pinpointed one particular species that I know is nesting in the neighborhood…but I believe it’s more than likely a Black-crowned Night Heron.  I’m fairly sure that they’re in a migratory pattern and will not be around for long, so I’d like to make certain before they disappear.  So far though, I’ve really enjoyed my time watching birds.  I’m able to identify now by sight several birds and I can pick out the melody of the Song Sparrow just by leaning an ear toward the window.  I’m using WhatBird to assist my identification and it has been very, very useful.

I realize that with the impending birth of my daughter Aside: Still nothing…really, I promise, I’ll let you know. that this new hobby is more than likely folly, but it does take my mind off of the reality that I will soon be a father.  It also staves off the reality of work, yard maintenance, and other necessities.  So, I guess you’d say that my life, at least since yesterday, is for the birds!

See you in the funny papers!