The Thing Of It Is...

WTF

2009-05-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

Today the Bunster brought home #68 in the series of tiny little pamphlets that his school uses in place of the old Dick-and-Jane books I remember from my childhood. You know the stuff: "See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. See Jane. See Jane run." and so on. Well, compared to these modern little gems, the D & J's were major works of literature.

Here's the latest, in its entirety:

Music
Don likes music.
Don's mom also likes music.
Mom says humans can make nice music.
Mom drops Don off for music class.
Don plays the bugle.
Don makes music with his bugle.
Don is a pupil in music class.
Don likes music class.
Mr. Cupid is starting a new music unit.
It is a unit of new music.
Don is a human who makes music.
He makes music with his bugle.

Yes, it's plotless and written by a robot with a tin ear. Why don't they just have the kids read a random list of words with the "u" sound? It would at least be less of an affront to the sensibilities of anyone who values literature and the English language.

The previous sixty-seven booklets were varying degrees of awful. Meaning that none were actually good, but about a half-dozen of them were passable and at least another dozen were as bad as this or worse.

I know I can do better. Indeed, it would be quite difficult to do worse. So here's my first attempt:

See this pamphlet? It is a unit of words. It is a unit of words with the sound "u." You are a human. You can read the words. You are a human who reads words with your eyes. Mom says humans who read words like this will grow up with no appreciation of the beauty of the English language. Mom despairs for the young humans being taught with this crap.

Facebooked

2009-04-23T21:29:00.001-07:00

Wow, it's been a really, really long time since I've posted anything here! It seems that at the moment I don't have anything coherent and public to say, alas. It's times like this that I wish I'd kept a few inventory blog posts, from back when I was more prolific.

I have laid off of Facebook somewhat, but it's still the best online place to catch up with me. Someday I'll be back here...

Facebookaholic

2008-12-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Sara and I'm a Facebookaholic.

(everyone) "Hi, Sara!"

It started small. I only opened an account because my friend L.M. asked me to, as part of a "project" he was doing for business school. Of course, now I can see he's just a pusher, but I was so naive then. That was it, just one time, plus a quick hit to enter a little minimal profile info. No photo, even. I could have just walked away, but I didn't.

A little while later, a friend request came in from J.B, whom I'd known at Renaissance Faire. So of course I confirmed. I mean, who wouldn't?

And then it slowly snowballed. One friend after another. I kept confirming and confirming. Once, I even went through my husband's friend list, just looking for people I knew so I could add them.

I did manage to ignore the apps. That's good, right? That shows some will power. I didn't accept the title of nobility, you know. And I didn't take my move in Scrabulous. Okay, okay, I admit it...I did try to do Scrabulous, but I had some kind of weird computer glitch with Firefox and it wouldn't work. I'm trying to be honest, here, okay? Cut me a break.

Besides, there's a good side, too! I'm getting back in touch with old friends...people I haven't seen in 18 years, people I've missed and wondered about. And I'm seeing photos of myself and my friends from back in the day. Bringing back to memories. It's great stuff. Really, it is.

So now I have this karma request. And I'm rethinking the no-apps thing. How bad could it be? I can quit anytime. Or at least pull back a bit. I don't have to check the "Friends Of Ol' Marvel - Marvel Comics Alumni" discussion board twice a day. That's totally a choice. And I can stop.

Sure I can...you know, right after I just comment on that great photo S.B. just scanned and posted, that is...

What? Wait, Halloween's OVER already? How?!

2008-11-11T16:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, hey, it's November. Whoops, I completely missed my October post. I'm trying to check in here at least once a month...you can see how well that's working for me.

And I even had a few topics to blog about, too: my first mammogram (not too bad, once I quelled the panic), our yard sale (also not too bad), the Bunster's Halloween costume (another not-too-bad one), and of course the election (which was both fantastic and awful, depending on which part you look at). Hey, I even found a use for this blue to ol. But despite having plenty to say, I didn't find the time to say it.

And I'm not going to be able to say it now, either, because I'm out of time. Ain't that always the way?

So here's the Bunster in his light-up satellite costume.

See you next month!

The Bad Sarah

2008-09-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

Bonnie Fuller has a piece in the Huffington Post about Sarah Palin that I wish I'd written. That woman is scary (Palin, not Fuller....well, actually, Fuller is a little scary, too, but for reasons related to women's fashion magazines, not international politics).

I think my least-favorite story about Palin is how, while she was mayor, Wasilla billed rape victims and their health insurance companies for the cost of the rape kit used to gather evidence. And no, they didn't change burglary victims and their homeowner's insurance companies for fingerprint kits used to investigate those crimes.

My theory about her nomination is that McCain believes that he can attract the independent and undecided votes himself (remember...he's a maverick!...not in Bush W.'s pocket at all! No sir!!), but needs someone to turn out the socially ultra-conservative voters in large numbers. By picking inexperienced Palin, he gets that running mate with far-right credentials, but without a lot of political capital she could use to challenge him. So he can run a more middle-of-the-road Republican administration without a powerful Cheney-type VP meddling in his policies.

No idea whether he's correct, but boy do I hope he's miscalculated. Having Palin one fluttering heartbeat away from the presidency is more terrifying than another four years of Bush Jr. Although you could argue that by voting for McCain, we can get both!

RIP, not so CoolPix

2008-09-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

Last post, I promised something more fun. And then every post topic I thought of after that was some kind of frustrated rant about something or other. My dishwasher, Sarah Palin, political and moral hypocrisy, childhood temper tantrums, same-sex marriage bans...all the really fun stuff in life.

So then I decided to just snap a photo of something cute the Bunster brought home from school. That's heartwarming, right? Good plan, until our little camera died. "No photos for you!" it said, "I'm going to jam my lens cover shut and refuse to open!" Sure, J. opened up the camera and unstuck the cover, no problem. But then the camera decided that if it wasn't the one to open the cover, it didn't count. So no more camera.

Here's a diagram of my camera now:

Same old same old

2008-08-09T20:03:00.000-07:00

So how many times today have you heard some variation of "Holy crap, what if we'd/they'd nominated him? McCain would have the election on a platter!"?

For some reason, I find that I am shocked by this whole thing, despite myself. I thought I was cynical enough that this would be just another idiot politician acting like a complete moron...business as usual. But no, I'm actually feeling a certain degree of betrayal. Not on the level of Elizabeth Edwards, obviously. But I had supported this guy and thought he'd make a good president. Yeah, not so much anymore.

I even feel a little betrayed by Elizabeth, actually, if she really knew about this back in 2006 and that's not just spin. Did she really hit the campaign trail with him, knowing about this huge skeleton in his closet? It pains me to criticize her, obviously. But what was she thinking?!

So John and Elizabeth Edwards campaigned knowing what happened to Gary Hart, to Bill Clinton, to so many idiots before him. He would presumably have accepted the nomination if he'd won it, all with this mess lurking just below the surface to blow the Democrats out of the water completely. How arrogant and stupid must the Edwards have been to think that this wouldn't come to light?

So now what? For Edwards, he becomes an minor footnote in history, one of a growing list. For the rest of us? I guess we all have just that much more reason for cynicism.

My, I'm cheery today, aren't I? Next time, something more fun.

Funny pages

2008-07-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

So it's been another month with no blog posts, but then this morning I realized that I can just piggyback on someone else's brilliance and finally post something. God, why did it take me so long to catch onto this?

Anyway, I just stumbled across the web comic Medium Large, which is written (and drawn?) by Francesco Marciuliano, the writer of Sally Forth. This is the second go-round for the strip, but I didn't see the first ones. So far, I like every single strip he's posted. Not often I say that about any comic strip...most are hit or miss, even the good ones. Check it out. But maybe not in front of any kids who are old enough to read.

Entitlement

2008-06-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

According to the BBC, some parent in Sweden has decided to prove that Americans don't have a monopoly on raising children with an outrageous sense of entitlement. He's complaining to Parliament that his eight-year-old should have the right to publicly snub other children when handing out birthday invitations at school.

I don't think he should stop there. Here are a few other rights that children in Sweden and their helicopter parents should immediately campaign for, perhaps before the UN Commission on Human Rights:

The right to go first on the swings, every time.
The right to eat paste.
The right to stay up as late as they want.
The right to replace vegetables with chocolate at any meal.
The right to an "A" grade regardless of test scores or homework completion.
The right to slap that one girl who's always so mean.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the right to remain frozen in childhood, supported by their parents, until that point in adulthood when their parents finally die, at which point the child's own children can proceed to do the same.

Six months already?

2008-05-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

Writer's block? Procrastination? Ennui? Intimidation? Lack of time?

All that and so much more, I guess.

Some of the things I didn't blog in the last six month: Kindergarten, taking a Japanese class, a trip to the desert, the Bunster's first trip to the emergency room (he's fine now, after three stitches), reconnecting with my sister, and a trip to Ren Faire. Among others. I don't think the problem is a lack of material, anyway.

No promises to get back on track. If I do, then you'll know by reading (all two of you left, that is!). And if I don't, then I shouldn't have promised what I couldn't deliver.

One of the things I've been doing in the past months is trying to dig myself out of years of accumulated clutter and keepsakes. Any idea why I kept these?

Maybe I'm planning to open a museum of defunct comic book production materials? I can't really think of any good reason to keep a couple of rubber cement pick-ups and a burnisher...and yet here they are, fresh out of my desk drawer. At least I'm not putting them back.

Benefits of the writer's strike

2007-12-01T01:01:00.000-08:00

Apparently, spammers are one of the prime beneficiaries of the writer's strike. I recently cleaned out an e-mail filter and found that the quality of copywriting in spam subject lines has substantially improved recently. In the past, I've noted efforts along the lines of "Make it bigger to please her," which, while reasonably direct, lack a certain poetry.

But now, in one short day, I've received at least a dozen almost literary spam haiku. The following examples are among my favorites of this new genre.

Everett Banks's brief composition "Elongate your short sword to fit her scabbard better!" combines metaphor, medieval imagery, and sexual politics into a compelling piece of blank verse.

On the other hand, Erich Roach's "Grow an anaconda out of your trouser snake!" uses both humor and metaphor mingled with more modern imagery to promote his client's product.

Even those writers who opt for a straightforward approach do so with greater attention to the nuances of language. Ann Rouse's "The advantages of having a big pen!s are innumerable!" is a key example of this school of thought. Not only is the reader encouraged to flights of fancy, rather than crudely assaulted with mere vulgar detail, but Ms. Rouse cleverly uses punctuation to pun on her own professional capabilities.

Naturally, since these are primarily television writers, some stoop to merely capitalizing on another's success. Angelo V. Barrett's "Become a s'e_xual magician in a new year! Increase your stick!" seems fresh and appealing, if you are unaware of Kathy X. Crowe's earlier and more lyrical "Kindle a passion in her heart with your magic stick."

Ms. Crowe herself is unmistakably influenced by other writers as well, although her "Increase your dik and get ready for real s'e_xual fest" is clearly a homage to Marie Javins and not akin to Mr. Barrett's outright plagiarism.

I must confess the most delicious of these literary endeavors to cross my junk folder to date comes from a truly unexpected source. The diamond in the rough "Do you like it when things are easy?" could easily be assumed to be the work of Mr. Banks, Ms. Rouse, or a number of other established spam poets. Instead, this slender masterpiece was provided by none other than Fidelity Investments. Poetry is where you find it.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. -- Robinson Jeffers

Orange you glad?

2007-11-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

After much deliberation, the Bunster decided to be an orange crayon for Halloween. "Fantastic!" I thought, "This will be easy to make." And it was, since I made it out of felt and didn't have to hem anything.

Here's how it came out:

He went trick-or-treating with a group of kids from Kindergarten and they all had a great time. He got so much loot that he still has a bunch of the "good" candy left. So far, I've been very good about not stealing it from him, despite the temptation.

All dressed up

2007-10-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Bunster has started Kindergarten and I have a little free time again. Which I'm using to update the ol' blog constantly with amusing anecdotes from my super busy yet fulfilling life. At least that's the fantasy.

Also, in this same fantasy, the house is beautifully organized and dust-free, my wardrobe is perfectly color-coordinated, I'm running four amazing-looking web sites, our cocktail parties are the delight of all our friends, my hair is always shiny and bouncy, and my nail polish never smudges. Actually, I do have that last one, since I'm not wearing any. I have commando fingers.

Back in reality, I'm currently figuring out how to make a rainbow Halloween costume for a five year old boy that looks both boyish and rainbow-ey. And that he can walk and sit down in. Maybe I'll get lucky and he'll change his mind and be a pirate instead. Or a rainbow pirate.

Halloween is always one of my favorite holidays, even though I'm not really into the whole gory, scary thing. It's a holiday where you can dress up in a cool costume and eat lots of candy. What could be better?

The Bunster, though, only likes the candy part. He's really not interested in dressing up, on Halloween or most other times. Growing up, my sister and I had a large dress-up box full of glittery fun costumes. Before becoming a parent, I assumed my kid would, too. But the Bunster just isn't into it. He does like to play pretend and he has a good imagination, so it's not that he's unable to understand being something else for an evening. It's just that he has no desire to. He says he just wants to be himself.

I have to admire that, even though I don't completely understand it. I've always wanted to be someone else or some other version of myself, even if only temporarily. Whether the transformation is something as simple as evening clothes or as dramatic as an over-the-top Halloween costume, I still enjoy it tremendously, even though my trick-or-treat days have been over for decades.

I've never really examined this before, particularly since so many of my friends feel the same as I do. (That might have something to do with where I met many of my friends...comic book company, renaissance fair, martial arts class...hmm, I kinda see a pattern.) Plus, there are always tons of ads for adult Halloween costumes, so clearly I'm not alone here. But now that I have the Bunster so adamantly himself and nothing but, I have to wonder. Is it really human nature to want to transform yourself? Or is it just a cultural impulse that I might not even have if I hung out with different people? I'm inclined to the former, since so many cultures embrace some form of dressing up. But I am wondering.

Meanwhile, I've explained to the Bunster that you have to have some kind of a costume to go trick-or-treating. It can be Bunster-the-firefighter or Bunster-the-geophysicist (don't ask), I told him, but it has to be something. And he picked a rainbow. Maybe I should have let him go as Bunster-the-Kindergartner instead.

At least he likes the candy. Not liking that would just be weird.

Somewhat mollified

2007-09-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

So I was at least somewhat wrong in my last post...I did get a form letter, as I expected. But it wasn't just pablum about how "the subject of children's safety is extremely important to us." Nope, this form letter apologized for the last one and explained that the information on paying postage was in error.

Hmmm. Apparently, some Mattel staff got the memo about how to handle the recalls, and some didn't.

I do wonder if this second letter went out to everyone who got the first one, or only to those who wrote angry notes back...

Anyway, here's the full form reply I got from Mattel in reply to my e-mailed rant:

Dear Consumer:

Recently you should have received one or more emails and mailing labels from Mattel, for the purpose of returning products affected by the recently announced recall of Barbie® Accessory Sets, GeoTrax™ Engines or It’s a Big Big World™ 6-in-1 Bongo Band Sets.

The email incorrectly stated that you would have to pay for the postage on the included mailing label. We apologize for the erroneous details on the email, but the mailing label you received IS a prepaid mailing label and will not cost you anything to mail.

We apologize for any confusion created by the previous email(s). Please use the mailing label(s) you received to return only the affected part(s) of your product(s). Your return(s) will be carefully assessed and replacement(s) along with bonus piece(s) will be sent to you within 10 - 12 weeks.

To ensure your package is received by us quickly, please take your package to your local post office to receive a round date stamp on your merchandise return mailing acknowledgement or online e-label record (included on bottom half of mailing label). This confirmation stamp is provided by the postal service at no cost to you. [Bold is theirs, not mine. -SK] Packages dropped at a mailbox or collection box are not scanned prior to delivery and may delay the return of your package.

In closing, we would like to apologize to everyone affected by this recall, especially those consumers who bought the affected toys. We realize that parents trust us with what is most precious to them - their children. And we also recognize that trust is earned. Our goal is to correct this problem, improve our systems and maintain the trust of the families that have allowed us to be part of their lives by acting responsibly and quickly to address their concerns.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please call us at 1-800-916-4957, Monday through Friday between the hours of 9 AM and 7 PM Eastern time, and Saturday between the hours of 11 AM and 5 PM Eastern time.

Thank you for contacting Mattel.

So my Cranky Total Mattel Ban is a bit relaxed. On the other hand, I still don't feel great about buying their stuff. Maybe I should, since they're the ones being tested constantly right now. Although I'll bet Hasbro is just as afraid of messing up. I'm sure they can already see the headlines that would make.

I think I'll buy Legos. Although Lord only knows which chemicals they're made of.

I'm back...and singing the lead toy blues

2007-09-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the long hiatus. Blogging doesn't combine well with summer vacation, at least not without camp. The Bunster and I had a good time, but I didn't get a chance to get online very much. Anyway, now I'm back and already ranting. Maybe something on comics next week...

We finally got caught up in the Mattel recalls, after having to run several toys through their online check. The first few turned out okay, but the Bunster's little red Geo Trax engine turns out to be decorated with large quantities of lead. So I sent in the recall info, waited a couple of weeks (so much for 3 to 5 business days...but I guess they're kinda busy at the moment), and today I got an e-mail from them. Turns out the "preprinted mailing label" I've been waiting weeks for isn't postage paid, it's just got tracking numbers for their convenience.

So now I get to pay again for the lead-laced toy, this time to replace it with something safe.

So I just wrote the following extremely snippy e-mail to Mattel:

Excuse me, are you telling me that I have to PAY POSTAGE for the privilege of safely disposing of and replacing the toy that you tried to poison my child with?

You've now put me in a position where I either tell my son that the toy you promised to replace won't be returning after all, or paying even more money to get the toy again. It really doesn't matter to me that the money is going to the post office and not into your coffers...the fact is I have to pay AGAIN to get this toy.

It's bad enough that your quality control is so poor that you have to be caught before you start protecting children from poisons that have been banned for years, but making parents pay to have YOUR NEGLIGENCE corrected? That's adding insult to injury.

I have three birthday parties to shop for this week alone, one of which is my son's. I can assure you that NONE of the presents I purchase will be a Mattel product.

And I'll also be telling any parents who ask what my son wants for his birthday "Legos, cars, trucks, trains, and please, nothing from Mattel."

Sincerely and not at all happily,
Sara Kocher

It's actually four parties now, but it's not likely they're going to actually read it anyway. I get to vent, get a minimum wage customer service clerk to send me another form letter, and then either pay the postage or toss the toy and live with the guilt of dumping lead into the environment.

You know, the post office could really make a fortune on these recalls if they just got a few more Chinese factories to play fast and loose with the lead paint...

Filler, aka update 'n' rant

2007-06-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

So the graduations both went well. The Bunster's surprised me by being quite age-appropriate and kind of cool. They all wore tee-shirts, black pants/skirts/shorts, Hawaiian-style floral leis, and little "grass skirts" made of what looked like sturdy construction paper. A few songs were sung ("Each of us is a flower, growing in life's garden," in case you weren't aware), the director made a quick speech, and each child received a fake diploma tied with a ribbon. And then were were done and it was time for the bounce-house, the hot dogs, some snow cones, and a bit of cake. Not simultaneously, of course.

The Bunster's older brother G.'s graduation also went well. Although the senior class was pretty large, J. was able to spot G. from the bleachers and got some pretty good photos and video, considering the distance. They had a party afterward (which the Bunster and I also missed, alas), which was low key yet fun. So that was good.

On a completely unrelated note, I read Luann (I know, shoot me now. I also read For Better or For Worse, and Cathy, so clearly my comic strip taste is suspect to say the least.) and something really bothered me today. Which, to be honest, I should say about this strip everyday, but anyway....

Luann's brother Brad is talking about his complete ignorance in the kitchen and appears to believe that antipasti, minestrone, risotto, and "a nice chianti" are French food. Leaving aside the Silence of the Lambs reference (what, he's going to eat his girlfriend's liver?), how has he managed to get to age 20-something and not know this? Did his parents just keep taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese even when they hit their late teens? Did they simply never take them to a restaurant at all? Who gets to early adulthood without at least one trip to an Italian restaurant? I grew up in the midwest and we all knew this stuff (admittedly I have foodie parents, but still!).

And now I'm off to Chuck E. Cheese with the Bunster for a 5 year old's birthday party. I know...setting a great example for his future. At least his favorite foods include goat cheese and sushi.

Moments such as these

2007-05-23T11:13:00.001-07:00

On my way out of the Bunster's preschool, there was a big sign "Graduation and Make-up Photos are Here!" I vaguely remembered there being a picture day a few weeks back, so I stopped to check if we had a packet to pick up. Sure enough, there was a thick envelope with a horrendous photo of the Bunster peeking out.

At the Bunster's old school, school pictures were done just as I remember them from my elementary school years. There was one picture day per year. A few weeks later, you got a proof sheet and an order form that featured a variety of options, none of which were exactly the combination of photo sizes and numbers that you wanted. You bought the assortment you compromised on and it arrived not long afterward, along with a copy of the class photo. If your eyes were closed, you got one chance to retake the photo. And that was it.

Not at the Bunster's current school, though.

We've now completed the fourth "picture day" of this school year and I'm not sure we're done yet. We had the Fall photos, the Spring photos, the Graduation photos, and also a Natural Poses photo day, which we skipped (I think Natural Poses means positioning the child awkwardly with his hand curled under his chin in front of a cutesy backdrop, then photoshopping the image to make it look as much as possible like those fake vintage greeting cards. At least, as far as I could tell from the samples.).

With all this practice, we've gotten to know the drill. Each photo shoot involves several poses, some with accessories like wicker chairs or baskets of fake apples. A few weeks later, we receive a large packet with multiple photos of each pose. We select the ones we want to keep and return the rest along with payment for the prints we kept. The Spring photos also include the option to buy a class photo. And of course, each time we are also solicited to buy additional prints and miscellaneous photo-related keepsakes from their handy web site.

The Graduation photos, however, turn out to be a little different. There is only one pose, which they printed in various sizes. It shows the Bunster grimacing in a white gown and mortarboard, while clutching a white diploma tied with a gold bow. If you swapped out the mortarboard for a halo and the diploma for a cardboard harp, he'd look like a little boy who really doesn't want to play the angel in the Christmas pageant but is putting up with it, having failed in his struggles to break free. The photo is certainly a keeper, but not in quite the way they intended.

In addition to this, they included a handy ready-to-fill-out "Graduation Certificate" and photo holder, with gilt lettering (presented to ______ for successful completion of study and active attendance), and a pre-scrapbooked photo, with little mortarboard-and-diploma graphics and the slogan "Moments such as these only happen once."

Mmm-hmmm.

"Moments such as these" aren't going to only happen once. The photos seem to happen at a pretty steady pace. And as for the graduation, if this early start is any indication, moments like this will happen five more times. Maybe more, if he heads for grad school.

Why is there is such a thing as pre-school graduation at all? Sure, leaving preschool and heading off for Kindergarten is a milestone. But it's one that should be celebrated with cupcakes and juice. Perhaps a Spring Concert for parents to admire their kids as they sing and do a little play. Maybe even a bounce-house if you're going all out.

Instead, the Bunster's graduation involves the following:

Six weeks of almost-daily rehearsal.
Photo in cap-and-gown, with diploma and little blue "Class of 2007" tassel.
A $25 "graduation fee" to the school.
A requirement that we send the kids to school on graduation day in black pants (which is, of course, about the only color the Bunster does not already own).
A special graduation tee shirt (nice, except that he has about 47 tee shirts already).
The presentation of a fake diploma, so that the real one can be handed directly to the parents afterward, to preserve it in pristine condition.
And worst of all, missing his brother's high school graduation, because the ceremonies are, by awful coincidence, on the same day, one hour and 56 miles apart.

I thought, briefly, about skipping the fake graduation in favor of the real one. And then I remembered the six weeks of preparation, the new songs, the constant hype the kids have all received. I thought about how I'd have felt, missing a party all my school friends were going to. And so the Bunster and I will be there, fakely graduating, while big brother G, J, and the grandparents will be doing the real thing.

At least we're sure to have plenty of photos.

Unclear on the concept

2007-05-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Am I the one who's missing something here, or are the guys over at B&H really showing what century they're stuck in?
Because it seems like you'd have to be really unclear on the concept of digital to spend all the money to print a 720-page full-color catalog, call it The Digital Photography SourceBook, and pay to mail it all the way from New York to California.

So I can't figure out why this thudded onto our porch this afternoon. Well, the thud I understand. And when I went to fetch the mail, I quickly understood the slightly peeved expression on the mailman's face, which seemed so inexplicable when I glimpsed him briefly though our front window.

What I can't figure out is why the guys over at B&H are sending this out.

You'd think they'd never heard of a little thing called the internet before. Except that that's where we found them in the first place.

If it were a catalog for film photo buffs, I could see catering to a customer base that includes people who really prefer the giant catalog. But anyone interested in 720 pages of digital photography equipment is probably going to be pretty comfortable with the overall concept of digital. Which would almost certainly include computers and web browsers.

If they're hoping we'll keep it until we need something...well, hoping that your inventory is sized better than the yellow pages for placement under a preschooler's bottom at Gramma's holiday table doesn't strike me as a particularly successful marketing strategy. Or are printing and mailing costs so low now that it's cheaper than e-commerce?

All we've ever bought from them was a pair of inexpensive computer speakers, so we're not exactly their bestest customers ever, either. At least I hope not, for their sakes.

And I really hope the mail carrier forgives us and we don't spend the next few weeks retrieving our mail from the shrubbery as payback for having to haul that useless catalog.

Why I don't blog much

2007-05-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

As all three of you know, I don't post very often. And there's a very good reason why. I'll spend a few days coming up with something pithy, maybe a bit funny, and start writing in my head in spare moments before sitting down to pull together a few paragraphs for the blog. And then I'll stumble across something like this and spend all my blog time reading and laughing instead.

And when I finally hop up from the computer to run out and get the Bunster from school, I'll be thinking something along the lines of "Oh my god that was so funny. I'll never write like that. What was I going to blog about anyway?"

Then whatever I was going to say has completely flown out of my head and I have to start the process all over again.

As the Bunster said in his very first swear: Darnut!

p.s. If you didn't click the link above, go back and do it now. You should read Quinn Cummings's blog...she's amazingly funny.

This is just to say...

2007-05-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Well, that was a nice, although unintentional, hiatus. I'd been doing so well, too, posting about once a week, generally on a Monday. And then all of a sudden, I just sort of lost interest. I was still reading other people's blogs, but found myself without much to say on my own.

I was going to write "it's probably better to stop than to post meaningless content," but unfortunately if I went with that philosophy I'd probably never post again. I'm pretty confident that none of what I write here is particularly meaningful, really. It's not like I'm traveling the world or fighting cancer or creating art. I don't have a lot of insights into the human condition or anything.

Every now and then, I start to think that a blog should have some kind of purpose or focus or main topic. Which mine really doesn't. It's pretty much just short notes to people I already know, to let them know how I'm doing or what I'm thinking about. Which I then post to the internet, just in case some random person somewhere is also interested.

Not exactly a purpose, per se, but it'll have to do.

Snarky

2007-04-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

Marc Siry called on bloggers to post our opinions on what he calls "name mockery." You know, changing the name of something, especially a brand, in order to mock it. Like Star-yucks, WinDoze, MicroSloth, etc.

And he's right, it is asinine. And childish. I vividly recall the "chicken a la barf" served at my elementary school's hot lunch. I've never even tried chicken a la king because I always flashback to that name and I just can't bring myself to order it.

Adults who use name mockery in lieu of actual criticism are just showing their level of immaturity. Same for acronym mockery, like Fix It Again, Tony for Fiat.

And yet, nearly all of us do this. Come on, haven't you ever used one of these? Maybe ironically, maybe rarely. But never?

Keep reading...

It's all part of snarking instead of offering cogent criticism. Or maybe the snark is intended to be the criticism, funny and a little mean-spirited, but certainly getting the point across. If I worked in the affected industries, I'd be checking sites like Television Without Pity and Go Fug Yourself to see what people were saying about my work. Since I don't, I read 'em for entertainment. If either site dropped the snark in favor of relevant critiques complete with ideas for improvement, I doubt they'd have a tenth of the readership.

The other reason for name mockery in place of real commentary is that the victim brand can't defend itself, as it could against real criticism. Starbucks could reply to a comment about the burnt flavor of their beans with information on how they're processed and what "true" coffee connoisseurs "should" be looking for. But what are they going to say to "Star-yucks?"

-- We are not yucky!
-- Are too!
-- Are not!
-- Are too!
-- Mom! He's calling us yucky!

Guess this just means we're all immature. Nyah nyah na nyah nyah...

The Eternal Lunch Question

2007-04-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Where to go to lunch? I dunno, what do you want to eat?

Spin the Wheel of Lunch and end yet another of the great inane debates. But be forewarned, it seems to pick Sizzler pretty often.

Preschool blues

2007-03-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a friend gave me a collection of articles about preschool and kindergarten. One of them was How Much is Too Much? The Influence of Preschool Centers on Children's Development Nationwide, which discussed the effects of preschool on later behavior in kindergarten. The authors analyzed data from the National Center for Educational Statistics and came to the conclusion that preschool has positive benefits for developing cognitive skills, but detrimental effects on learning appropriate social behavior.

After controlling for a number of factors, including family income, ethnicity, and "32 different features of the child's home and family," they found that attending preschool will typically increase a child's pre-reading and math skills, but at the cost of hindering social development in several areas, including levels of aggression, bullying, acting up, sharing, cooperation, and self-control.

Keep reading...

And then today I read this article from the NY Times, in which different researchers not only came to pretty much the same conclusion, but also say that the effects last at least into middle school.

But in each case, since I haven't read the actual studies, I have to wonder, is this negative social behavior that they describing actually undesirable for the child's future development, or just behavior that's inconvenient for the rigid style of instruction used in some elementary schools?

A docile child who does what he's told at all times is certainly easy to handle in a classroom. But does such a child turn into an adult with critical thinking skills?

A child who can sit quietly through a dull lecture and reliably regurgitate the answers to the weekly quiz will probably get good grades and do decently on multiple-choice standardized tests. But will that child actually be educated? Will she know how to learn new information on her own?

I am not arguing for letting bullies run free in the classroom, nor for children to run wild and not have age-appropriate discipline at home and at school. But I do wonder...do we need to tolerate a certain level of disruption and minor misbehavior in order let children be children? And to produce adults who can think for themselves?

One of the other articles my friend gave me seems to say yes. It describes Japanese preschool/kindergartens as places where teachers try to nurture a "childlike child" and allow high levels of noise and activity. The teachers in the article expect the children to be kind to one another and cooperative, but also highly energetic. When discipline problems arise in the classroom, the teachers encourage the children to work out solutions with the teacher gently guiding them.

I wish the abstract and news article said more about what kinds of negative behavior the teachers were reporting. I guess I have some more reading to do.

Service call

2007-03-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here waiting for a repair guy for the Blue Star range. It's only been seven weeks since the grill exploded...they sure aren't in any hurry here. Ahem.

I'm feeling a little cranky in part because of one of those frustrating facts of life. Any time a repair or service person gives you a window of time ("I'll be there between 3 and 5 pm"), they're going to arrive at the very, very, very end of it.

Unless, of course, you're not there on time and then the repair guy'll arrive at the very first second of the time window and be gone by the time you come panting up to the house three minutes late.

Keep reading...

Since I wasn't late today, that means that I've just spent the afternoon sitting at home waiting for the Blue Star service guy, who's still not here. He's got twenty-four more minutes before the window expires. And then another 15 because I'm sometimes late, too (yeah, I know, Steve, I know. Pot, kettle, etc...I got it.). And then I'll be ticked off. And still grill-less.

UPDATE 5:57 PM
Well, he didn't show up at all. I left him a voice-mail back at 5 pm and hopefully he'll have a good reason for standing me up. Maybe he had a flat tire on a wilderness road and a mountain lion ate his cell phone before he could call me to say he's running late. Something reasonable like that.

So much for grilling something when J's cousins come by tomorrow. Oh well.

UPDATE 6:20 PM
The service guy finally called...he's feeling sick and couldn't make it. No mention of how his cell phone is feeling. I sympathize, but only up to a point. He coulda called. Guess we'll reschedule when he's better. Unless Signature Marketing, the Blue Star distributor we're working with, can come up with a service guy who'll actually, you know, show up and do the service.

UPDATE ONE WEEK LATER
The repair guy showed up when he promised and fixed the stove. Nice guy, too. More on this in the comments, if you're interested.

Random thought

2007-03-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

Way back before my Marvel days, when the world was young and no one had any fashion sense, I once attended a party at Antioch College while wearing a dress made out of two (clean) black plastic garbage bags.

Although I didn't look as pretty as this actress does, I'm pretty certain that I had the sense not to wear bright orange shoes with huge bows on them.

Apparently, that late-80's trashy fashion sense would stand me in good stead if I was now a happening young starlet dating the actor of the moment.

Wonder if her casual wardrobe includes those neon-bright fishnet slouchy ankle socks I used to wear. Or maybe some striped leg warmers.

Ah, this takes me back to the bad ole days.

It's not your father's Marvel Comics anymore...

2007-03-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

What?!! The??!

Marcus blogged recently about what Marvel's been doing to their stable of heroes, but I had no idea how bad it's gotten. Now I do.

Either they're doing a retread on the old Superman death (yeah, he's alive again, what a surprise, sure didn't see that coming a mile away, yawn) or they're actually gutting the character of Captain America and putting someone else in the tights.

Either way, what the hell are they thinking?

I know what I'm thinking. To quote Marcus, "last resort of the hack."

Good bye, Steve Rodgers. We thought we knew you.

Must...resist...stats...

2007-03-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

I almost titled this entry "Why I Hate Marie." Except I don't, but you'll see what I mean in a minute.

It's been only a couple of days since I put Sitemeter on here after she mentioned it in a post and I'm already obsessed with it, too. I can see that someone in Pennsylvania searched for old prizer-painter on MSN and found my entry about the stove blowing up. That I'm being read in Egypt, Hawaii, and Michigan (no surprise, but now it's graphed, even). That someone looking for "stan drake"" juliet jones" on Google found this post and then left to see Stan Drake's site.

So much information! Why do I even need to know? And yet I check it. And check it. "Was the visit from Germany my cousin?" I wonder, "And do I know anyone in Missouri?" Ahhhhhh! Must! Stop! Now!

But I can't look away, now that it's here.

Thanks, Marie.

Bloodthirsty?

2007-02-23T16:53:00.000-08:00

I'm the webmaster for a small synagogue and today I was posting some Purim songs onto their site. One song in particular really bothered me. In it, the Jewish people are exulting over Haman's failure to annihilate them, but they're also exulting over Haman's hanging and taunting him on the scaffold. It has lines like "Get up in the tree" and "I hear you almost see your house from there." My first reaction was horror.

It's one thing to rejoice that you are saved, but another to rejoice over anyone's death, even your deadliest enemy's. Civilized people don't behave that way.

But then I thought about my reaction to the US soldiers who raped and murdered a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered her whole family. Would I rejoice at seeing those men tortured for what they did to Abeer Qassim al-Janabi? Part of me, being brutally honest, says, "Yes. Yes, I would."

Keep reading...

I feel sick when I think of what they did. And so angry. And ashamed that they are my countrymen and that they believed (at least at that time) that they were acting in my name and yours. I wish not mere death on them, but the level of pain and anguish that they inflicted.

And then another part of me reminds myself that any death, even of someone as vile as they, or as vile as the 9/11 hijackers for that matter, is still a cause for sorrow, not rejoicing. Reveling in someone's death is taking the first steps into the kind of thinking that creates monsters like them. At a bare minimum, one can be sorrowful that the evil person traveled the road they did, and wish that they'd led a better, more worthwhile life.

I don't know where that leaves me. Would I jeer at the impending deaths of former Pfc. Steven D. Green, former Sgt. Paul Cortez, Spc. James Barker, and Pfc. Jesse Spielman? I hope not. But I can see where it would be sorely tempting.

Sooooo tired

2007-02-22T23:27:00.000-08:00

I'm so tired I forgot what I was going to blog about...

Might have been something about my friends E and M who just had a baby girl on Wednesday (well, E did...M's part was way earlier). Or maybe about that news article I read about three boys saved from an icy canal. Or it was something cute that the Bunster did. But I can't remember now.

I DO remember reading an e-mail about a woman who's giving up staying up late for Lent. Sounds like a great idea...not easy to do, but definitely good for you. And I'm sitting here at 11:38 pm saying "great plan, I should do that!" Like someone eating donuts in front of the TV and saying "yeah, I should get to the gym!"

It's so much easier to think about what you should be doing than to actually go and do it.

Completion, explosion, coughing, and vamping

2007-02-20T15:44:00.000-08:00

Apparently, I don't post often enough. So, quick update time:

1. The kitchen is done, pretty much. We have one additional shelf to install inside a cabinet, but that's about a half-hour of work for J. next weekend. No big deal, he says. Here's how it looks now:
2. The brand new Blue Star stove exploded. During a dinner party, even. We're the most gracious hosts...we made the guests bring the main dish and then we blew it up.*

3. The Bunster has a slight cold. Enough to stay home from school yesterday and today, but just barely. So he's going stir-crazy in the house and we're both getting royally sick of playing Chutes-and-Ladders. It helps that he likes to play it backwards once someone wins (counting down from 100 to 1, so chutes are now good and ladders are bad news), but not by much. Does anyone make a strategy-based game for preschoolers? I'd pay good money for one. Probably willing to fork over way too much good money, if you catch me on a day like today.

4. I have no actual subject to blog about today, except maybe the kitchen. I'm just vamping desperately so I can post anyway. Can you tell?

5. Hey, here's a Meez!

----------------------
* Okay, actually, only the grill exploded, the rest of the stove still works great. And it's under warranty, of course, since it was just installed in December. And we finished the meat under the broiler (appropriate, since it was London broil). But the story is better without those pesky details. Can't grill with it looking like this:

Nice hole in the gas line, hunh? At least no one was hurt.

We just got the replacement parts from Prizer-Painter (who make the Blue Star range) and are waiting for a repair to be scheduled. Since simply getting the parts into the mail took 'em three weeks, we're just hoping to be grilling again before the weather gets too warm to do it indoors.

At least they didn't call it an iPod

2007-02-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

We got a Macy's lingerie catalog the other day and I found this while flipping through it:

Because everything can be marketed better if you steal whatever's trendy and reapply it meaninglessly to your product...

What on earth is an iBra? I don't even want to hear about interactivity. J. wanted to know if it has a USB port or Bluetooth (ouch!). And, of course, I can't pass up wondering whether it becomes SCSI after too many washes.

p.s. no Meeze today, maybe soon, though.

Monkey see, monkey do

2007-01-20T21:33:00.000-08:00

Steve has some Meez on his blog, so I had to make one, too. All the cool kids are doing it.

Want more? Just click...

Except J says my Meez is kinda boring. So how about this?

Or maybe this one?

Okay. I'm going to stop now.

Fa La La la...

2006-12-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

Note: I wrote this post on December 12, but didn't have internet access to put it onto the blog (thanks to a goof by my service provider...they forgot to update the build on a server). By the time I got DSL up and running again, I'd forgotten about this and didn't post it. So here's my last curmudgeonly post of 2006, backdated to avoid confusion (mine).

Today I received the following in a mass e-mail from the "room mom" for the Bunster's Pre-K class:

[About] Friday's concert/potluck: Thanks to all of you who have signed to bring something and those who will. The children will be singing "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer", however, the songs will be changed so that the word "Christmas" doesn't appear. Ms. Tonya wanted me to make sure that you all knew that.

What. The. Hell???

How does removing the word "Christmas" make "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" into anything other than screwed up Christmas songs?

I'm Jewish and I'm offended by this.

Why? So glad you asked...

For one thing, since taking out one word doesn't actually make these into anything other than Christmas songs, they're still completely ignoring the holiday I (and quite a number of the children) celebrate. So much for multi-cultural educational experiences.

For another thing, I'm bothered by the attempt to disembowel songs and strip them of their meaning. While these particular tunes aren't evocative of much in the way of religion, they are still symbolic of the holiday they belong to. And I'm generally against stripping the meaning from the various symbols and icons of a culture. Changing and evolving the meaning, sure, either as the culture changes or in an attempt to change it. But not stripping away all meaning until they're just hollow shells to hang crass commercialism on.

Maybe I shouldn't be. Perhaps the answer is to pervert every holiday and meaningful icon into complete unrecognisability, so that absolutely everyone can spend each holiday being offended and excluded. It would be very egalitarian.

So we can sing "I had a little top, I made it out of clay, and when it's dry and ready, oh top I will play" on Lighting Candles Holiday, salute the Lady of the Flowing Dress as we enter New York City Harbor, and of course fly our Strawberry/Blueberry/Vanilla Flag high on National Relax With a Picnic Day.

Nope. I'd rather keep Christmas, Santa, Chanukah, dreidels, the Statue of Liberty, American flags, and Memorial Day. We can just add more holidays and icons to our cultural pantheon until everyone is represented, instead of no one.

Update, 12/15: Turns out the lyrics in question have been rewritten as follows:

Then one foggy winter's eve,
He-ee came to say,
"Rudolph with your nose so bright,
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

As my next door neighbor said, "He-Eee? Who the hell is He-ee supposed to be, Baby Jesus?"

And people wonder why younger generations sometimes seem so ignorant. We've taught them to be.

December Post

2006-12-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

We got our first Christmas card the day before Thanksgiving this year. I was happy to hear from the friends (Hi Mary!), and began to wonder where in the garage we packed up the cards. When we were preparing for the remodel back in late August, the holidays seemed a million years away.

The next card didn't arrive until today (Hi Don!), so I'd kind of put the whole thing out of my mind. Not the wisest course of action if we're planning on Christmas/Channukah greetings instead of MLK birthday notes to everyone.

So here's fair warning to those of you on the card list who read my blog: I am thinking of you, quite fondly, actually, while frantically searching for those cards. Hopefully, we can find 'em in time to get them into the mail. You know, before January 1st.

If you can't stand the heat....

2006-11-22T00:41:00.000-08:00

You can tell it's late at night when I'm trying to come up with funny kitchen puns and this is all that comes to mind.

And you can tell it's way past my bedtime when I decide to just use it even though it's lame.

So here's the latest update on our kitchen. As you can see, we have a floor now, plus a granite countertop and a nice tile backspash. The sinks are installed and we're no longer washing dishes in the bathroom (which, while practical, was not fun).

Still to come: cabinet handles, installing the dishwasher and stove hood, bringing in and hooking up the stove and fridge, etc. Still, pretty amazing that we're so far along in only two months and three weeks!

By the way, sorry about the weird spots in the photo. We don't actually have poltergiests. If you know any good ways to clean a pocket digital camera's lens, let me know.

Conspiracy theory

2006-11-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

For a couple of weeks now, Bob McCormick, host of KNX's "Money 101" radio talk show, has been going on and on about conspiracy theories that gas prices were being artificially lowered by the oil companies in order to influence the election. He said that the claim was the companies were forgoing profits in hopes that they'd get more $$$ later with Republicans still in power. Although he didn't exactly endorse the idea, he left me with the strong impression that he agreed with this theory. But I kind of laughed and blew it off as more wishful thinking than reality.

And then I was pumping gas at Costco this morning and overheard someone at the next pump asking the attendant, "Do you know why gas prices are suddenly going up again." And the guy on the other side of my pump and I simultaneously replied "The election's over!" Apparently, I am a nutcase conspiracy theorist after all.

Put on your tinfoil hat and read on...

So I emptied my purse and found my three latest Costco gas receipts. On October 26, I paid $2.26 a gallon there. By the day before the election, November 6, it was down to $2.18 a gallon. And today? Only three days post-election, it was all the way back up to $2.28 per gallon. Hmmm....

Maybe there is something to this. Wish someone would do a real audit instead of just compiling anecdotal experiences. Also, is price manipulation in order to influence elections just good old fashioned capitalism? Or is it illegal? With major commodities like oil, I'm thinking that laissez-faire capitalism is not the right answer. So if this is legal, it shouldn't be. And if there really was an attempt to influence the election this way, I'd like to find out.

Plumb fine cabinet

2006-10-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, J opened a drawer in one of our new cabinets and discovered some unusual plumbing. We were about to have cold running water inside a pot drawer. Handy for washing them, I guess, but kind of messy.

Apparently, the plumber forgot to raise the pipe above cabinet level, and the cabinet installers just worked around it.

It's fixed now, although the drawer and cabinet back will keep the little round hole as a permanent momento.

The kitchen and family room are now painted green. It was a somewhat hasty decision, so I hope we'll continue to like the color. If not, at least paint is the easiest thing to change.

R Toys Us?

2006-10-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

I was doing some birthday party shopping at Toys R Us the other day, since the Bunster is now totally on the pre-school party circuit (he has a better social life than I do). And I'm standing in the massively pink-saturated doll section debating the merits of Glitter Princess Sleeping Beauty versus the Rapunzel's Wedding Flower Girl 4-pack, when it suddenly hits me...there are no black Disney Princesses.

Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Snow White, Pocahontas, Jasmine, Mulan...they've had blonde, brunette, redheaded, Asian, Native American, and Arab princesses. Unless I've forgotten something obvious (please let me know) only one major ethnic group is missing.

Disney does have an animated movie set in Africa, but The Lion King has animal characters, not people.

I guess you could argue that Pacific Islanders aren't really represented, since Mulan is Chinese and Lilo isn't a Princess. And there hasn't been an Indian princess, nor a Hispanic one. But while this is true, to a four-year-old, Mulan, Jasmine or Pocahontas dolls make fine stand-ins for those ethnicities. But there's no doll that looks like you if you're an African-American four-year-old.

I'm hoping this is just because the Disney marketing machine is still generating new Princesses.

On the one hand, the whole pink-glitter-fluffy-princess thing sets my teeth on edge and I can't wait for this craze to die down. But on the other hand, I'd hate to be that little left-out girl.

More kitchen

2006-10-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

More kitchen progress:

Next up are windows and a countertop. The plywood is nice, but maybe something a little more solid would be good.

Guess what this is...

2006-10-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hey, which room in our house is this?

Here's an earlier view:

And this is what it looked like a month ago:

We're more or less halfway through a kitchen remodel. I'm using it as my excuse for not blogging more often lately (although if you've visited before you already know that's not exactly accurate). We've been living in about half our house, cooking on a hot plate and fighting the good fight against construction dust for a month now.

If all goes well, we'll have cabinets in within a couple of days. I'll post a few more photos once they're in place. For now, one final image:

Buy this now.

2006-08-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

Trader Joe's Belgian Chocolate Pudding.

The best pudding I've ever had.

If you like chocolate and live anywhere near a Trader Joe's, you must get some now. Maybe bring a spoon to the store, it's that good.

If you love chocolate, buy two or three.

Don't believe me? Keep reading...

Don't believe me? You should, given the amount of chocolate I eat. But just in case, here's a (slightly edited) review from J.:

So this afternoon I escape my office and go to a nearby park to have a picnic lunch with Sara and [the Bunster]. Sara had stopped by Trader Joe's to get some yummies. The bread, cheese, spreads, etc. were all good and tasty. Then she pulled out dessert -- premade, prepackaged Trader Joe's Belgian Chocolate Pudding. Okay, I thought -- I'll give it a try. It should be at least ok.

O!!

My!!!

GAWD!!!!!

I could not believe the taste explosion of deep, rich, perfectly balanced chocolate. Smooth, creamy, sweet with just a bit of bittersweet from a fine dark chocolate. Not too heavy, not too rich, but soft, velvety, and delicious.

If you like chocolate, and if there is a Trader Joe's near you, RUN -- do not walk -- to get your hands on this. You will thank me. Your wife will thank me. Your husband will thank me. Your
girlfriend/boyfriend/children/future children will thank me.

Go now. Bring a spoon. Buy two. Share with a friend. Smear it all over someone you love.

Yes, it's worth the drive from Castle Rock to Denver.

So there you go. Don't say I didn't tell you.

Revenge would be sweeter if I'd taken more photos

2006-08-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

So Steve posted a bunch of old photos, responding to Marie's old Marvel holiday party shots. And he posted one of my favorite photos of myself ever. So flattering!

I should have checked my ammunition before I fired back with "I'll be digging through my old photo boxes now for a little sweet revenge." Because these just aren't all that embarrassing, unless you count my fabulous jacket:

Sure, Steve does look about 12 in that first one, although I'm guessing he was maybe 19 at the time. But twenty-some years ago, we all looked like babies, more or less.

Wish I'd taken some photos at some of Marc Siry's parties, or maybe at the early Marvel holiday parties. I remember some amazingly bad outfits worn to the Friar's Club parties by various Marvel-ites, including me, but I have no proof. Alas.

Stan Drake

2006-08-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Don Hudson recently posted some old Power Pack stuff and mentioned that Stan Drake, an old-school strip artist, worked on PP also. I was an assistant editor on the book then and once got to visit Stan in his studio in Connecticut.

Stan did a strip for years called "The Heart of Juliet Jones" and when I visited and admired his work, he gave me a few old JJ strips. I still have 'em tucked safely away, keep meaning to frame them. Now Don's inspired me to scan one and post it:

Somewhere in my garage I have some reprint volumes of JJ, too. Such gorgeous art!

A Little Manga Love

2006-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Steve loaned me a weird little semi-manga called Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, by Brian Lee O'Malley, and I promised a review of it almost a month ago. Lazy much?

So here we go:

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life starts out as a teen-rocker comic full of music and angst and lots of hanging around talking. And then suddenly, halfway through the book, a character says, "No, no, it's...its just, like, this really convenient subspace highway happens to go through your head."

And then it slowly heads into truly weird territory.

Keep reading...

Don't want to spoil the story, so no plot-wrecking details. Despite this slow slide into weirdness, I still didn't see the final "concert" section of the book coming at all and sat there thinking "did I pick up some other comic and not notice?" But in a good way.

Who wouldn't love a comic where a cute slacker rock 'n' roll boy has to figure out what to do about his seventeen-year-old pseudo-girlfriend ("we haven't even held hands") so he can pursue a space-warping Amazon.ca delivery girl on rollerblades? Um, the delivery girl is on rollerblades, not the pursuit. Although that would be cool, and definitely in the spirit of this comic.

Or where finally defeating a villain lets you pick up coins, although not enough for bus fare?

And I have to love this exchange:

Scott: "You dated seven evil dudes?"
Ramona: "Not all at once!"

The artwork fits the story well, although I found the manga style took some getting used to, since I don't read a lot of manga. I don't know all the conventions, but it seems like classic manga-style to me, only with easier-to-follow storytelling. Or maybe I'm just getting better at following a fight sequence.

But the writing is the reason I enjoyed this book so much. Brian Lee O'Malley can and does suddenly switch from high-manga all-out psi-fight to goofy and sardonic and back. At one point, the characters poke fun at the conventions of a manga fight without breaking the fourth wall or acknowledging that they're in a comic book. Throughout, it manages to be tongue-in-cheek in a way that's not at all self-conscious or pretentious.

By the way, I called Scott Pilgrim a "semi-manga" because it didn't seem to follow the conventions of manga as I understand them. But then I realize that this is like calling Gunpowder Girl and the Outlaw Squaw a "semi-comic" because it doesn't have any caped superheros. And also that I might have written this so I can still say "Well, I don't really read manga." Deny everything! But read Scott Pilgrim.

Filler

2006-06-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, Steve, yesterday WAS a long time ago. This from the man who left Velma Dinkley in her (almost) altogether for a whole month...

I do have a few more-up-to-date entries coming up, and two or three of them are even comic-book-related. I'm currently in love with the Fables series of trade paperbacks by Bill Willingham et al. (okay, so that's not terribly up-to-date, but bear with me); Steve loaned me a weird little semi-manga called Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, which I liked very much; and I just read the most godawful comic I've seen in years and want to warn you away from it.

Keep reading...

My mini-review of The Five Fists of Science is: "Fun basic concept, damaged by mediocre writing and utterly destroyed by some of the poorest-quality sequential art I've seen since my days as the Marvel submissions editor."

Given that my job then was to review unsolicited artwork, mostly from kids, and send nice form letters to 99% of the applicants, that's not saying much. Or maybe it's saying a lot.

Most of the names at the top of the Image comics masthead on this book are people whose work I liked and/or respected back in the day when I read a lot more comics. I have no idea how much Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders must have bribed them to publish TFFoS. Maybe they're family. Or perhaps Family.

Can't resist one little item that should go in my proper review instead of this filler blog entry:

The "heroic" fight scene on pages four, five, six, and seven took me and J about 5 minutes to piece together, since the artwork was so muddy we couldn't tell what the hell was going on. Once we did work it out, we wished we hadn't bothered. My favorite part was when the one-armed guy manages to remove his prosthetic arm from within the mutton-sleeved blouse he was wearing and bludgeon a pistol-carrying thug with it before the guy was able to run away or shoot. And the thug had a head start. That's one FAST one-armed guy. Richard Kimble wouldn't stand a chance.

I do hope Fraction and Sanders are nice guys who move past this little debacle and end up doing interesting work. Interesting in the enjoyable sense, that is, not interesting like this project. But no matter how great they may be personally, I don't have much to say about their book that isn't criticism. Sorry, guys.

-------------
UPDATE:
Okay, still don't like TFFoS, but I'm a dork to write that Matt Fraction should "end up doing interesting work" when I loved Last Of The Independents. So maybe I'd have liked this one as well, if it had a good artist and a bit of editing. But it didn't and I don't.

Quote of Yesterday

2006-04-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

"I'm just not speechacle at the moment," I said yesterday. Which might be why this entry is so short.

And, yeah, I do invent words. Or at least I think I do, anyway.

Quiz

2006-04-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

What's worse than a pre-schooler who won't sleep until midnight and then pops awake at 7:45 am? One that falls asleep at 9:15 pm, wakes at 1 am and doesn't fall asleep again until past 4 am. How much past 4 am I don't know yet. I'm hoping not much longer now...

Poor Taste in Television

2006-04-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I admit it. I watch brain-candy TV. Not the "reality" stuff that always makes me squirmingly uncomfortable...those shows make me feel like I'm invading the participants privacy. Never mind that they've invited me and a whole camera crew in to do so. I just feel creepy watching.

Nope, I like the fluff, like Clueless, Grosse Pointe, Friends, and Sex in the City. One of my favorites was a show call Leap of Faith which was one of the million or so failed shows NBC scheduled for the 8:30 slot after Friends. It featured an adorable advertising copywriter and her graphic-artist best friend and was sort of Sex In the City for network TV, with fewer lead characters and no onscreen sex. It only lasted about 5 episodes, but I loved every one of them.

I'm a sucker for the kinds of shows where everyone lives in housing way beyond what their characters can afford, they all dress super trendily, and no one dies or investigates anything.

Keep reading...

Occasionally, I like one with good writing, like Sports Night or the British version of Coupling (not the American version...I do have some standards). But I'll take mediocre writing if it's not cringe-inducing and the actors are cute enough.

This week, I discovered a new one, So NoTORIous on VH1, starring (lord help me) Tori Spelling as herself. A fictionalized, tongue-in-cheek version of herself. She's quite good, with good comic timing and an amazing willingness to make fun of herself. And since it's scripted and fictionalized, it's more like the fake behind-the-scenes Grosse Pointe than a reality show. The two episodes I've seen are very funny. My favorite line so far is Tori telling her best friend "This is LA, we all look like hookers." Gotta love that.

If you like most of the fluff I've listed above, you'll probably love So NoTORIous right along with me. Pull on your jammies, make some chocolate chip brownies, flop down in front of the TV and have fun trashing your brain. VH1 has it on like a million times a week, so check your listings.

Any Info on Blogger E-mails?

2006-04-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

I just got a request from a client for a combo blog/e-mail list, to be available via subscription. Blogger does allow you to enter one e-mail address to be notified whenever you post. Since he's already got a mailing list to send to, this should work well for him. I think.

Anyone have any experience with receiving Blogger's auto-notices of updates? Are they just a link? Generic text? The full body of the new post? Does the system send updates each time you make a small edit, or only when you create a new post?

So I've just set my blog to notify me and I'll be testing to answer those questions. If you've used this on your blog or receive these updates from one you read, please let me know if you find them useful, annoying, or both. Thanks!

Update
1) When you create a new post, it sends the body of the post to your list, with a small footer which contains a link to the specific post: "Posted by Sara Kocher to The Thing Of It Is... at 4/02/2006 02:24:00 PM"
2) Updating an existing post, even with significant additional text, does not trigger a new notification e-mail.
3) Any images in a post are simply missing from the e-mail. Seems like this could make things a bit confusing, depending on the post.

Testing 123...

2006-04-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

So what happens with the notification system when you include a photo in your post? Gotta check that out, too, of course!

So here's one hosted elsewhere:

I wanted to try a photo that's imported into Blogger also, but it won't take one. Even a little 9k image just times out before loading.

p.s this image is courtesy of the morguefile

Learning Curve

2006-03-30T16:46:00.000-08:00

The Bunster is doing much better. Turns out that what he had was a short-lived stomach flu. His fever broke Monday night, after an experience not too different from last time. Only this time it was in the evening rather than the middle of the night, a slight improvement.

I keep guiltily thinking that it might have been even shorter-lived if we'd brought in the Pedialyte right away. Instead, we foolishly gave him milk (why? what were we thinking?), which prompted a second round of throwing up. And then we tried 33% apple juice/67% water and then just plain water. Not all at once, of course.

Keep reading...

Now I know, thanks to a super nurse at our pediatrician's office, that we should offer 1 tsp. of Pedialyte or Gatoraide every 15 minutes at first. Once things settle down and he has an appetite, move on to plain toast, bananas, and apples. This could also include rice, except that he won't eat it unless it's in sushi. Which I'm thinking isn't the best food choice when you have the flu.

Anyway, he's currently alternating between cooking in his play kitchen and racing cars, so everything's great now. Except for my work-load, after missing two of my three available days. Ah well.

Sick Daze

2006-03-27T14:36:00.000-08:00

We're sick again, or at least the Bunster is. He's got a fever and is a lot less energetic than usual, but no symptoms other than that yet. He was fine this morning, feisty and full of energy. He refused to eat any breakfast and went to school with six ounces of milk and four dried cranberries in his tummy, but this is not unusual for him. His appetite veers from small to non-existent pretty regularly. So I'm not even considering possible illness, since he seems just fine.

Two hour later, I get The Call from the Assistant Director.

I scoot over there and the poor little Bunster is huddled forlornly in an office chair with his head draped over the arm, too listless to lift his head. If he were 12, it could have been a stellar performance, but with pre-schoolers, it's always the real thing, alas.

Keep reading...

So we come home, he drinks a little more milk and refuses all offers of food. I take his temperature, which is 101, and give him some tylenol. And then he goes right to bed, without complaint. He's been asleep for about two hours now.

With so little to go on, I'm warring between optimism and despair. "Maybe it's just a bug and he'll be fine by tomorrow!" Or "Maybe he's really sick and will miss the Girl Next Door's party next weekend and I won't be able to do any work all week."

I pay some bills, go online to kill my pointless thinking and immediately find a blog talking about whether to send sick kids to school anyway and how hard it is to be a working parent. Which is true, but not what I want to be reading right now.

Good News!

2006-02-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

Last week, J got a call from his mechanic at the Mazda dealership. "Good news!" the guy said, "Your brakes are shot and various fluids need flushing. It'll be only a thousand dollars, on top of the $300+ for your 30K service."

No kidding, he started this with "Good news!"

Apparently, everything can be good. It just needs the right spin.

Keep reading...

So:

"Good news! People are dying and threatening death over a few stupid cartoons they haven't even seen."

"Good news! We're in an unwinnable war in the wrong country, while leaving our main enemy free to wreck further destruction for years."

"Good news! Our president has spawned a whole cottage industry of tee shirts and refrigerator magnets with cute phases along the lines of "Like a rock...only dumber."

Yeah, it didn't work with the car either. J took the car over to our regular mechanic, who did a great job for a lot less. He'd only taken it to the dealership in the first place because he thought the brake problem might be warranty work. If only the other problems were so easy to resolve when spinning doesn't work.

I'd originally intended to write something lighthearted about comics, or maybe agree with Marie that the correct response to an offensive cartoon is to return fire with your own cartoon. But I made the mistake of reading the news before writing.

String Theory

2005-12-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

Someone recently mentioned to me that my Blogger photo looks like I'm being tortured in a cage of string and suggested I choose something else.

If you're a parent in the L.A. area, you might recognize the location in my photo. It's the small "ladybug" climber at Kidspace, and I was crawling around up there in a sort of nest of string trying to keep the Bunster from 1) falling and 2) stepping on other climbing kids.

You could argue that the commentor was correct about string torture, but actually Kidspace is a lot of fun for adults as well as the age 2 to 9 crowd it's designed to attract. Highly recommended.

So, what do you think? Keep the photo? Or go for one of these two instead:

Age

2005-12-07T22:26:00.000-08:00

Marie Javins is trying to determine whether to go to Kuwait for a short-term job or settle down and stop cavorting all over the world while entertaining her friends and assorted strangers with her travel journals. Among other things, she wrote this:

But it feels like I missed something. Like I went to sleep one day at age 34 and when I opened my eyes, everyone else had moved forward by five years while to me it was January 5, 2001, the day after I got on the Amtrak to head west. Others had saved while I had spent. Advanced while I’d ignored. I’d let a lot of friendships slide and constantly have to start over. It’s like everyone else has aged gracefully but I’m still casting about trying to work out what to do next.

I expressed this to Sean, a friend in Sydney. He told me I was flat-out wrong. That I’d been living while others were chained to the desk. Maybe he’s right, but I still feel like I missed some vital personal-growth part of life, or at least realized too late that I’d been ignoring it.

I have no useful advice about world travel or whether or not to go to Kuwait, but finding-yourself personal-growth type angst? I think everyone's been there, unless they're one of the rare few who've known exactly what they wanted to do in life from very early on. Or maybe one of the not-so-rare ones who's too stupid to think about it.

Growing up, I always thought that this kind of worry and angst was a feature of your teens and early 20's and that once you settled into your "real" life (whether marriage-kids-white-picket-fence or world travel), it would go away.

But no.

Keep reading...

I feel as though my old self simply ceased to exist in 2002 when the Bunster was born. One minute I was me and the next I was someone else entirely. The part that feels like me has been slowly coming back, plus I've been getting used to the new me, so it's not bad. It's just kind of surreal. And I'm still figuring out what kind of person I'd like to be.

It's not that I'm discontented with my life...I love nearly all of it and the parts I don't love are pretty typical (want more sleep, cuter shoes, more time with my husband, and so forth). It's just that I can't keep being a work-at-home mom of a preschooler forever and so I feel the need to have some kind of direction to guide my future choices. And I don't really know what that direction should be. Like Marie, I'm still casting about trying to work out what to do next.

And then it strikes me that this is normal. Average. Typical. Basically, all the things it doesn't feel like when you're in the middle of it.

Of course, there's the classic mid-life-crisis cliche of the middle aged man with the convertible sports car and the trophy girlfriend half his age. It's certainly one answer to the question of what to do next, although kind of a sad one. Robert Cilley, writing about keeping mementos of the past, says, "It is the smudgy ink stamp on the wrist that says he can get back into the nightclub of youth." And I think he'd agree that the red Miata and the 23-year-old fall into that category.

But this questioning and searching isn't about recapturing youth. It's just about which path to take next.

How many people really know what to do next?

Would Marie's "aging gracefully" friends recognize themselves in that description? Or are they also trying to figure out what comes next, wondering whether to reinvent themselves or continue on their current paths?

The urge to recreate yourself, the feeling that perhaps whatever it is that you're doing isn't taking you in the right direction and you should be exploring another, is something that comes and goes for most people.

I was going to write something pithy about how nice it would be to be able to buy a compass to provide this direction. But then I remembered the bookstore's worth of shelves of self-help books, the thousands of "career counselors" and all the various videos, songs, poems, etc. intended to instill or inspire exactly this kind of direction. Perhaps I should try composing something about how nice it would be to buy an accurate life-compass.

Midnight hurl

2005-10-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

I went to bed kind of late last night and was awoken after perhaps an hour of sleep by a little voice calling, "Mommy, my tummy hurts."

I think you can guess what's coming next. But at 2:15 in the morning, I didn't have a clue. Even though the Bunster has been recovering from the flu.

So I staggered down the hall, scooped him out of bed, and initiated soothing Mommy conversation #12: "Tell Mommy Where It Hurts." And some little lizard brain thing started propelling me away from the bed and slowly toward the door as he said "Right here" while pointing at his abdomen. "Do you think you're going to throw up?" I asked. "No," he said, snuggling closer and burrowing his head against my shoulder. And then he vomited in my hair and down my back. Plus a little on the rug and a miniscule amount on the hall floor, which is wood and easy to clean.

God, I love parenting!

I have so much more sympathy now for all the hurled-upon teens that Steve draws.

Keep reading...

So...J got a towel and I stood on it to strip off all the barfy pajamas. I wrapped up my hair in a beyond-gross barf-bun, and then washed up the Bunster and strategic bits of myself while J cleaned the hall. J took the Bunster and got him into dry pjs and snuggled him in our bed while I scrubbed the rug. Then we tucked the Bunster back into his own bed, where he slept peacefully. I rinsed off everything that needed it and J tossed the load of wash into the machine. Then I took a shower and scrubbed my hair. A lot.

After this flurry of activity, we finally got back to sleep at 4 am.

This morning, the Bunster was fresh as a daisy and none the worse for wear and every other cliché along those lines. And J and I looked like we'd had the flu for a week and might not get over it anytime soon. We brewed a giant pot of coffee. It helped a little.

Marvelous

2005-10-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

If you came to this blog through the Comiculture site, you may be wondering, "Who is Sara Kocher, anyway? And what is she doing on the Comiculture web site?"

First, a bit of background...back in the mid '80s, the president of Marvel Comics was an Antioch College grad. As the story goes (and since I got this from college gossip, not from him, insert grain of salt here), he wanted to do something for the old Alma Mater. So he established an internship program for Antioch students only -- a 3-month internship which included a small stipend. There was already a Marvel internship program offered for high school and college students, but those jobs were generally unpaid. After the first Antioch intern completed his 3-month stint, the internship shifted into the Epic Comics department, then headed by Archie Goodwin. I don't recall how many interns came and went before I got the job, but I'm guessing two or three at most.

And how did I get the coveted Antioch internship at Marvel? Well, I really wanted to live in New York City. So I checked the list of jobs for any in NYC that paid enough to live on (frugally), and chose my favorite. "I read comic strips," I thought, "And this sounds like fun."

Keep reading...

I spent a few weeks reading all the comics I could get my hands on (mostly from dorm-mates) and the local comics shop loaned me a box of "returns." I was so well qualified!

FYI
(if you're not a comics fan or pro):

When a newsstand comic isn't sold, it can be returned to the distributor for a credit. Rather than shipping back all those comics (paper weighs a lot), retailers just send the cover. The rest of the comic is supposed to be thrown away. But instead, these "returns" can be kept in a big ole box and loaned to college students prepping for internships who are too poor to buy a ton of comics.

So I went to New York, fell in love with comics, and dropped out of college (nearly giving my parents a heart attack). After the internship, I spent a couple of months working in a local comic shop until I found a position at Marvel, as a receptionist (my parents were just thrilled). A few months later, I was hired as an assistant editor, first for a Marvel editor and then in the Epic Department. And things were great. But after about two years at Marvel, Archie Goodwin left Epic (or, more accurately, was pushed), Epic was reorganized, and I was out of a job. I quickly discovered that comic books are pretty much the only branch of publishing where lack of a degree is no hindrance.

I went back to school, finished my degree (my parents breathed a sigh of relief), worked for years doing non-comics-related things, got married, and had kids. I still read comics, including lots of newspaper strips, but I was out of the industry. Then the guys founded Comiculture. I offered to become a proofreader and general web-monkey and they took me up on it. And here I am. My parents are so proud.

M&M's Forever

2005-10-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Bunster, my three-year-old son, can easily can take a solid half-hour to eat a small bag of M&Ms. Not only is he a slow eater anyway, but there's also the M&M ritual on top of that. Here's how he eats an M&M:

Bunster: What is this? (holding out his hand)

Me: I don't know, Bunster, what is that?

Bunster: A red M&M!

Me: How nice! And what does it have on it?

Bunster: A "M"! (He'll learn about "a" and "an" at some point. Kid's only three, so right now it's up in the air which he'll use.)

Me: An "M"? Wow! And why does it have an "M" on it?

Bunster: Because it's an M&M!

Then he eats that single M&M, fishes another out of the bag, and begins the ritual again.

It doesn't speed things up if I don't participate...he'll just prompt me for my lines and then wait patiently for me to deliver them. Takes even longer.

Oh, and that thing about "melts in your mouth, not in your hand?" Yeah, not so much if you're in preschool. And those dyes don't wash off easily. He always has smudgy rainbow hands for an hour or two, until I can sneak in a second hand washing to get the last of it.

Beaming Up

2005-09-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, one of my friends or family reminds me of my "greatest claim to fame" in the comics industry. Did I write something really groundbreaking? Not unless you consider a never-published inventory story "groundbreaking" in some way (ground fertilizing, perhaps). Do a fantastic job coloring? Um, no. I figured out after one job that coloring isn't the best career path for someone overwhelmed by the color options in a 24-pack of Crayola. Draw? Or letter? Well, if you knew me, you wouldn't ask about those. Let's just say "stick figure" and "chicken scratch" and leave it at that.

No, no, my claim to fame is that I was "cast" as a transporter room crewmember in a few issues of DC's Star Trek comic.

That's right, I really did beam them up. Or at least my alter ego did. In a mini skirt, too.

Keep reading...

And how did I become so famous? Because the writer knew me and decided to use my name, which at the time was Sara Tuchinsky. He often borrowed the names of family and friends when creating new characters and I guess my last name caught his eye as interesting. What he hadn't realized is that that the artist knew me as well. So when he saw my name in the script, he naturally drew me.

I had no idea until the bundle of comics came out (Marvel editors and their assistants at that time got a bundle of comics each week with everything published by Marvel and DC). People started coming down the hall saying "Hey, you're in Star Trek." And so I was, for several issues. I even got hypnotized once so that a weird alien-guy could try to use the transporter without being caught.

Years later, while vanity-googling, I discovered that some Star Trek fan had created a web site listing every single spaceship by serial number. He'd gathered the info from the show, books, and various other Trekkie media, but whenever he couldn't find a ship's name for a particular serial number, he'd make one up from "authentic" names he'd seen in Star Trek material. And there I was, the USS Sara Tuchinsky. I'd include a link, but the page disappeared a couple of years ago. Fame is fleeting.

Procrastination

2005-09-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's 8:30 pm and I'm unpacking and doing laundry after a weekend trip out of town. Or at least, I was unpacking etc.

Now I'm sitting at the computer instead. I just read a few online comic strips and then came here. Because I want to be folding laundry at 10:30 pm? Or because someone is paying me to waste time and write this fascinating blog entry? Or is it that I hope the laundry will magically go away if I run out of time to do it?

And then I wonder...how many blogs have an entry with the title "procrastination." So I use Blogger's Blog Search and find that there are 78,625 posts matching procrastination. At least I didn't start reading them.

Keep reading...a little more procrastination won't hurt...

In my ongoing fight against procrastination, I've begun to realize an uncomfortable truth. It's like weight loss - I already know what I have to do, how to do it, when, where, why, etc. I'm just not doing it. (Obviously, I'm not talking about people who have hormonal/illness/drug-interaction issues. Bear with me, this is just an analogy.) So here I am, ignoring my laundry/exercycle and eating twinkies made of time instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Guilt-ridden as any yo-yo dieter after a mallomar binge, I begin convincing myself to hop out of this chair and get moving with the Spray 'N' Wash and the tedious hanging up of shirts. And then I have a revelation.

A few days ago, I watched the first ten or fifteen minutes of Martha Stewart's new show. Martha was trying to teach Marcia Cross (of Desperate Housewives) how to fold a shirt. Martha laid two impossibly flat, perfectly ironed tee shirts down, did something complicated with her hands for about a quarter second and held up a perfectly folded shirt. It was like watching a good close-up magician. Marcia was standing right next to her trying to follow along with the other shirt and ended up as baffled by the sleight-of-hand as I was.

And now I see it: Laundry should be left to the professionals. This is not something to do casually at home. It's an art, dammit.

Procrastination solved.

How I Got My Blog...

2005-09-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

I was on the phone with Steve and invented a new word: inertial.

"Is inertial even a word?"

"No, I invented it," I bragged, "and it's great. I should get a blog so I can publicize it."

"Do you want one on Comiculture?" he asked. "I can set it up in about 5 minutes."

"Sure!" I said.

But then, while he set up this blog, I went to Dictionary.com and discovered that inertial is actually a real word. It's the adjective form of inertia, as in "The inertial response to the problem prolonged it."

So I'm not nearly as original as I'd thought. But I have a blog now.