Cheeky's Hideaway

It's Not Waterboarding, But....

Barack Obama made several memos public recently outlining CIA techniques which could be construed as torture.  The detail in the documents is eye-opening, as it performs some impressive legal acrobatics to justify certain methods of interrogation, many of which would get a thumbs up from Pol Pot.

There is a little noticed tactic highlighted in the report which has not received as much press as some of the other more memorable methods.  As the report reads:

"This technique is used to cause psychological discomfort.  When the technique is employed, the detainees spouse is required to spend the entire day, every day at home.  During and between interrogations, the detainee will be required to share a cramped kitchen with the spouse, get used to the spouses lack of knowledge of the daily routine, and generally put up with his/her annoying habits and attitude for the entire day.  This technique may be used on an ongoing basis so long as the health and sanity of the detainee is not in danger."

I'm tellin' ya, I did NOT expect being home all day to be this rough.  Any fantasies I had about sitting around, drinking beer and playing video games for a couple weeks were never seriously entertained, but the oppressive boredom and repetitiveness can get to you quickly.  After all, Cheeky is at that age where everything is super important and requires my immediate undivided attention, particularly if it involves something an inanimate object is supposedly saying.  Oodgie and I are discovering all kinds of new ways to miscommunicate.  And the fact that we're sandbagging our money for necessities like groceries and barbiturates limits our options to anything within walking distance and can be foraged. 

If I weren't the only person around here who knows how to operate our stereo Oodgie would have stabbed me with a spork by now.

OK, maybe that's a bit extreme (sporks are, after all, a tool of satan), but it ain't easy.  I'm probably spending way too much time hunched over our computer, hitting refresh every two minutes in case some recruiter has written back.  My internet celebrity career hasn't really taken off, probably because posting Blip.FM Tweets and ranting about COBRA doesn't exactly draw a Kutscheresque following.  What can I say?  It's a little grim...who wants to hear about that?

I'm keeping my head up, though.  Or at least I'm keeping it from dragging on the floor, which, if you try to picture it, would look pretty awkward and uncomfortable. I'm convinced that this glorious opportunity to get to know my apartment is a temporary thing, and that massive success is just around the corner, albeit completely hidden behind a very large middle finger.  And I still have the last few unwatched episodes of Freaks & Geeks and Firefly to get through, so it's not like I don't have things to do.

And in the meantime I'm taking on an ongoing quest I've titled the "Tour de Starbucks."  (Today's destination:  Court St., Cobble Hill) This generally involves carrying my ridiculously heavy laptop from Starbucks to Starbucks, glaring at sweatshirted layabouts napping in the comfy chairs and trying my best not to fit in too much with the bespectacled latte-sippers surfing dating sites working on their novels.  Brooklyn is stinky with both, and the way I've been shaving lately it would be easy it would be hard to pick me out of a lineup of them. Worse, I'm becoming uncomfortably familiar with Diana Krall's musical output; I need my headphones and some Silversun Pickups to cleanse the pallet.

Maybe you'll see me in your local Starbucks, too!  The first person to find me wins a laser pointer I stole from work and a coupon for a free back rub.  Just don't approach to quickly...I'll probably be so hopped up on Pike Place Blend that I might tear a limb off before you can say "getajobyoubum!"

Next Thing You Know You're Livin' in a Van Down by the River

Getting laid off feels a little like vacation at first.  You sleep in late, eat crap, and wear clothes that you probably should have thrown out in 1994. 

You also find yourself constantly stressing out about why a recruiter you talked to 18 minutes ago hasn't called you back and offered you a job yet, or whether renewing your subscription to Cat Fancy magazine is going to be the final straw that sends your family reeling into abject poverty. 

It's a weird dichotomy, whipsawing back and forth between being an International Man of Leisure and Kevin Costner in the last hour of No Way Out.  I angrily stew over not having enough time to network or dig up freelance work, then when given a few minutes I stare blearily at the screen and eventually end up browsing through Digg looking for emberassing prom pictures.

I've managed kept myself pretty busy, though. I get to spend a lot more time with Cheeky, and we still have our morning fist-fight over which clothes she wants to wear (I suggest a pair of pants or a dress, and she insists on wearing and outfit that doesn't exist in our dimension).  Oodgie is psyched to have a co-schlepper.  I'm making a tiny but concerted effort to write more.  And I've been working on a new look to correspond with the lifestyle. 

I am a little disappointed, however, that my emergency backup plan of becoming an internet celebrity hasn't gotten off the ground yet. By this time I had expected to be co-hosting a show with Alex Albrecht or exchanging Tweets with Jimmy Fallon.  My social profile has yet to catch up with my self-image of being interesting and awesome, proving definitively that high school wasn't a fluke. 

So I need your help. I need to become famous so I can get paid just for being my handsome, witty self.  I may not have the skills or the sponsors, but I'm certainly more deserving than some.  And then you can tell everyone you knew me "way back when." 

Sure beats workin'....

Damages

They say bad things come in threes.  If so, I'm in trouble.

It's no secret that I'm a little clumsy but I'm hardly accident prone.  In fact, I consider myself a relatively well-oiled specimen of unalloyed manhood, due largely to intense cowardice my keen sense of self-preservation and a healthy diet.  These last few weeks, however, I've discovered the limitations of that body...quite violently.

It turns out, for example, that the nose is actually a relatively delicate thing.  The shockingly handsome nasal slope with which I was graced at birth was once given a jolt when a knee collided with it at high speed (the fact that it was my own knee is of little consequence physically, but rather difficult to explain rationally).  My nose made a near flawless recovery, maintaining the majestic symmetry of my face, but gave me due warning that it would brook no further abuse. 

And it was quite cross with me when, a couple weeks ago, it collided with a racquet.  Hard.

I have to give my racquetball opponent credit for  excellent follow-through on his backhand.  From the looks of things, he'd apparently found a way to puncture my aorta via the bridge of my nose, since the court looked like it had been used to film an early Peter Jackson movie.  Band-aids proved utterly useless, and although I tried to play through I was eventually forced to leave.  Apparently the gym has some pretty strict rules about this since the previous caretaker left.

I spent the rest of the day with an ice-bag on my face, contemplating what I'd tell people when they inevitably asked me why I'd been sketched and inked by Frank Miller.  Most of my excuses came from the school of "you should see the other guy," and I thought I could enhance my already impressive manliness with a good story.  I kept overshooting the mark, though, and usually went with:

1. I took a puck to the nose during our game against the Ukrainian national team
2. That's the last time a that bouncer will tell me I can't get into the Copa
3. If loyalties must be broken, if the lines must be crossed, do it fast...do it furious
4. Ninjas.  Always the damn ninjas

Sadly, no one ever bought these, so I ended up confessing that I injured myself playing a sport most gyms discontinued during the Reagan administration.  But it did make me feel badass...at least for a few minutes.

Time passes, and injuries heal.  My nose once again returned to its original form, and I could pick it with inpunity.  The shiner which came as an added bonus faded from deep violet to gangrene, and eventually disappeared entirely.   Oodgie could once again stare lovingly into my puppy-dog eyes, perceiving a gateway into a world of which she desparately wants to be a part.

Until....

We were in Florida last week, compensating for a spectacular vacation we'd planned and cancelled due to unforseen circumstances.  All seemed to be going well:  Cheeky had amassed an impressive sandcastle real estate empire, Oodgie was working on her tennis serves, and I had two cold six packs in the fridge.  Movement was largely optional.  The hardest thing I needed to do was maneuver around hotel furniture.

FAIL!

Let me pause to ask this rhetorical question:  how is it that something as small and insignificant as a little toe be the source of such an inordinate, excruciating amount of pain?  I have sympathy for Ty Lawson.

The frequency and variety of my stubs is the stuff of legend.  My one-legged flailing paroxysm of pain is an art form.  The creativity and sheer vulgarity of the corresponding profanity would strip paint from a Chevy.  I'm a professional toe-stubber, the kind employed by secret government agencies when only the most discreet and deadly toe-stubber can be used.

But never before have these stubs been accompanied by an audible *crack*

Surprisingly, there was little of the usual flying debris or pathetic sobbing I inject into such situations.  I was relatively zen about it.  After a couple deep breaths and some tearful muttering, I touched my toe to see if I could feel anything.  Nope.  Nothing.  As numb and bereft of feeling as Dick Cheney's soul.  

An hour later it looked something like this.

There's not much you can do about a broken toe.  You can lash it to its neighbor, like a deck chair before a storm, but that's about it.  Days later, I have to swagger like an early-90s rapper just to hide cover up my limp. 

Now I'm worried, though.  If bad things come in threes, as I've always heard they do, then my misery isn't over yet.  I keep wondering what's next.  Will it be a nail gun injury?  Elephantitis?  Cymothoa Exigua?  Worse?

I'm being extra careful around the house, just in case.  

UPDATE:  In a delicious piece of irony, just as I was rereading this this morning before posting it, I found out EXACTLY what #3 would be.  How's that for timing?  Guess I can relax now.  Literally.

The World is Flat: Exposing the Dangers of a Hand-Drawn Economy

I occasionally wonder how globalization would impact the Smurfs.

To their credit, they organized their society around an enlightened despot who encouraged diversification within the proletariat and judiciously diffused internal strife by encouraging everyone to smurf unto others as you would have them smurf unto you.  In addition, the presence of a powerful external threat to unite them contributed to their stability, as did their obvious shared genetics ancestry.  This model can lead to powerful economic dynamism were they to choose to export their good and services to other nations, such as the Snorks or Biskitts.

Of course, we can only speculate.  Smurf society collapsed into obscurity, crippled by FCC regulations mandating "educational" programming, driving local affiliates to cut back on their Smurf-related correspondents and in favor of the Bayside High School journalism class.  It's entirely possible that the Smurfs could have overcome the obvious gender inequalities to dominate the mushroom region of the forest and be a world leader in "blue" technologies.

Which brings me, belatedly, to my point.  I cannot see how today's aspirants to animated economic leadership have the resources, organization, or focus to survive.  I've done a preliminary analysis of some of the more prominent ones described in my child's literature or in the helpful documentaries found on Noggin, and my findings are not promising:

Ponyville:  Ponyville has been perplexing me since I first discovered it during one of Serendipity's butterfly hunts.  A verdant land, it has all the obvious hallmarks of a pre-industrial society.  It's easy to romanticize such halcyon places, with their babbling brooks and rainbow berry bushes.  But in reality such places are rarely as magical as they seem.

The economy of Ponyville appears to lack any form of formal currency.  Pony's are often seen at the Cotton Candy Cafe or Twist 'n Style Petal Parlour gossiping and sharing mutual admiration at how great their friendships are, yet the services provided are never paid for.  In fact, emotional support seems to be the only form of currency accepted by these Pony's.  This begs the question of how these goods and services are manufactured and maintained, as to my knowledge emotional support is less effective than comprehensive health care and competitive wages to an organized labor force.

My suspicion is that this is actually a feudal society in which serfs are kept conveniently out of site while the matriarchal aristocracy spends its days attending extravagant pony parties at Celebration Castle.  This is further upheld by recent news reports that Wysteria named every pony in Ponyville a princess, further strengthening their control of the nations major institutions, presumably at the expense of the masses.  One can only hope that such bald abuse of power does not lead to future civilian unrest...or worse.

Dora's Forest:  The forest where Dora's parent let her play--unsupervised, with a monkey--seems to have some surprising advantages.  Thanks to a healthy investment in infrastructure, roads are well laid-out and easy to read on a map, although they have a reputation for poor signage at forks in the road or when approaching hazards such as Crocodile Lake or King Crab's sandcastle.  The economy is stable enough to permit specialization of it's multilingual workforce in anything from transportation to gardening.  Natural resources are plentiful, and the recent unveiling of a "robot house" has showcased it's adoption of new technologies.  But things are not always what they seem.

A more thorough analysis of Dora's forest quickly exposes the sort of instability which plagued Tarzan and led to the eventual economic decline of Bedrock once the Great Gazoo arrived.  The lack of an effective security force has resulted into a number of unique magical objects routinely falling into the wrong hands.  The resulting collateral damage--including the environmental cleanup of the mermaid kingdom and the re-population of the Snowy Forest--cost several million golden coins, severely curtailing the Coney Island ice cream budget.  The titular head of the government's opposition party has been accused of theft and corruption, yet remains a powerful voice in daily life.  And the proximity to an environmentally-protected rain forest is a bureaucratic headache for construction companies and pharmaceutical firms wishing to capitalize on the abundant resources within.

It remains to be seen whether Dora's Forest can overcome these obstacles, let alone maintain the high standard of living enjoyed by its citizens.  A government spokesman, reached at his office under a bridge, admitted that he needs help to "solve my riddle."

Disneyworld:  In a recent coup, a cabal of princesses took control of government offices and local media outlets and promptly instituted a jewelry- and fairy-based economy.  This experiment has many of the characteristics of Lenin's GOELRO plan, but as was the case in 1920 it is likely that a more totalitarian regime would be necessary to ensure it's execution.  As history has taught us, it is far more likely that political dissidents will either flee to the neighboring, more independent Pixar-dominated territories or find themselves in gulags. 

Maisy's Town:  Several economists have suggested that Maisy Mouse and her elbowless cohorts are on the cusp of the same sort of economic revolution experienced in South Korea during the 1990's.  However, I see tremendous flaws in such arguments.  Numerous examples of incompetence abound, including frequent job-swapping between unskilled workers (e.g. traffic problems caused by Charlie's misuse of a crane, medical malpractice caused when Maisy and Tallulah bumped into each other while treating Panda).  The complete absence of perspective or hard lines in any of their products or services gives them limited value, as does their over-dependence on primary colors.  Even Cyril, the cabinet minister who has shown to be talented in both plate-spinning and maraca-shaking, has shown a proclivity to scare himself in the mirror when wearing his lion mask.  Without a new regime, there is little chance that anything more than the occasional batch of cookies will ever be exported.

Of course, any analysis and prediction will be limited by the data available, and future developments may have an unexpected positive impact on the nations described above.  Few economists foresaw the rise of the Looney Tunes empire, driven largely by the willingness of its population to take any job available, from bull-fighter to opera conductor to astronaut, to propel forward their aggressive economic agenda. 

Such examples are more often the exception than the rule, however.  For every economic success story, there are five more which ended tragically.

The British Think I'm Stupid. Or Do They...?

There's a meme rolling around Facebook in which the BBC is accused of thinking that the average person has only read six of the one hundred books listed below.  People are responding to it with the self-righteous indignation of Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, which is a little unfair as I can't find a single reference to the BBC's original indictment of our intelligence (if it exists at all).

However, it does get me thinking.  I feel a little smug about my intelligence at times, despite having no chess champion trophies or honorary seats at Oxford to show for it.  And I like to think I'm reasonably well-read.  But in the last few years, as I spend more and more time either finger-twitching in front of the TV or cramming my thoughts into 140 characters, I've noticed my reading habits have withered as much as my stock portfolio.  I still love to read, but never seem to make time to do it.

So I decided to take the test anyway, to see if I'd officially atrophied to the point of being an amorphous blob and let my brain fall into disuse.

Here are the instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' (and bold) after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star/asterisk/Bonds (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Put a # (and italics) by those you've started but not finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible #
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare #
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen  (but I did like the movie)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (isn't this a repeat?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne #
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (I thought this would only include good books...)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *  (been trying to read this for years...)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X+
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X+
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt * (See: Atonement, above)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X+
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (barf)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle #
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams *
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total read = 37
Total started but not finished = 4
Total I still want to read = 7

A flawed list, no doubt.  There's some obvious stuff that isn't listed, and a few that have no right being on the list.  But the numbers don't lie, and it looks like there's hope for me yet.  Either that or I my pace out of the starting gate was brisk and I'm just coasting now.

And in the meantime, all you haters out there should lay off of the BBC.  They did bring us Monty Python, Dr. Who, and The Office, you know...

(P.S.  I think we should come up with an alternative list that better reflects reality.  Something that includes Middlesex, The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay and As I Lay Dying but leave out everything Mitch Albom over wrote.  Leave me something in the comments and we'll try to correct the meme.  WOLVERINES!!!)

Cute or Annoying?

I've got an idea for a new game show.  I haven't quite finalized how to execute it (although who cares as long as I find the right washed-up comedian to host) but it goes something like this:

Contestants get to witness some of Cheeky's behavior and have to guess whether it's "cute" or "annoying."  This may seem pretty straightforward, but I assure you it's not.  It's completely contextual, which is where the challenge is.  Let me give you some examples.

Listening to Cheeky sing at the top of her lungs after putting her to bed = CUTE

Listening to Cheeky sing at the top of her lungs TWO HOURS after putting her to bed = ANNOYING

Getting a big hug and kiss from Cheeky because she doesn't want you to leave for work = CUTE

Getting a big hug and kiss from Cheeky WHILE SHE REFUSES TO LET GO OF YOUR LEG because she doesn't want you to go to work = ANNOYING

Cheeky giggling after a fart = CUTE

Cheeky giggling after a fart THAT SMELLS LIKE THE DECAYING INTESTINES OF A DEAD GOAT THAT HAD FEASTED ON THE DIARRHEA OF A 40 YEAR-OLD ALCOHOLIC FOR A WEEK = ANNOYING

Cheeky running naked in the house announcing she's "Makid Girl!" = CUTE

Cheeky running naked in the house WHEN SHE'S SUPPOSED TO BE GETTING IN THE F*CKING TUB announcing she's "Makid Girl!" = ANNOYING

Complex, convoluted explanations of life's little idiosyncrasies as explained by a three year-old = CUTE

Complex, convoluted explanations of life's little idiosyncrasies as explained by a three year-old AD NAUSEUM FOR HOURS ON END WITHOUT A BREAK OF ANY KIND = ANNOYING

Cheeky climbing into our bed in the morning to snuggle - CUTE

Cheeky climbing into our bed in the morning to snuggle WHICH IS BULLSHIT BECAUSE ALL SHE REALLY WANTS IS FOR YOU TO WAKE YOUR ASS UP AND SCRATCH HER BACK UNTIL EVERY ITCH SHE WILL EVER HAVE IN HER ENTIRE LIFE IS GONE = ANNOYING

You get the basic idea. It's the type of game parents would probably be REALLY good at, and the payoff wouldn't have to be that big.  Personally, you don't need to offer $1 million to get me on the show...I'd take a weekend night of babysitting.

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

As the hundreds of underpaid interns who e-mail me trying to get me to plug products know by now, I don't really like schilling for The Man.  I have a reputation to uphold, you see.  You don't wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner. A rebel. 

But every once in a while I feel compelled to pimp.  Sometimes it's unsolicited.  Sometimes it's flat-out bought.  Other times I just respect the people behind it.  Regardless, I wouldn't mention it if I didn't think it was something worth checking out.

So if you have a chance to detach yourself from the latest economic news and check out IttyBits.com.  Compared to the overwhelming majority of "parenting sites" out there--which generally range somewhere from useless to annoying--I think it's great.  Simple, valuable, and in no way affiliated with a major multinational corporation dabbling in arms-trading.

Give it a look...tell 'em CroutonBoy sent you.  It's one of the few places where saying that won't get you defenestrated.

Pigskin Paradise

Remember when the Super Bowls were boring?  For like a decade it seemed like Buffalo or Denver would impersonate the Washington Generals while an NFC team armed with chainsaws and mini-guns would obliterate them.  But DAMN have we had some good ones lately, and 2009 was no exception.

Last year's game was epic, but this year?  RIDICULOUS!  Harrison's interception?  The safety?  Larry Fitzgerald?  Santonio Holmes' toes????  Incredible.  Kudos to the Cardinals, who apparently do not suck after all, and congrats to the Steelers who now have a ring for...well, let's just hope they put it on their other hand.

But no Super Bowl is complete without a healthy dose of friends, libations, and foods that virtually guarantee a triple bypass.  And my irregular heartbeat this morning tells me that we were successful on all counts.  In fact, I'd say we outdid ourselves on the last of those three.

My love-affair with bacon is well-publicized.  So when I came across this recipe last week our Super Bowl menu was a foregone comclusion.  Oodgie, to her credit, overcame her revulsion and, having confirmed that our life insurance is still in force, agreed to make it.  Behold...BACON EXPLOSION!

I suspect some of you may be rushing to the restroom or slouched over a garbage pail right now, but for those of you who describe bacon, sausage, and barbecue sauce as "yum", "yummy", and "yummolicous" then you know what I'm talkin' about.  And you know who you are ...

There's still one left, if anyone's hungry. 

If You Must Fear Anything In This World, Fear Disney

We interrupt the laziness that has defined this blog of late for an urgent message regarding an insidious evil which threatens the very fabric of Western civilization.

I'm not talking about cyberterrorism or the apparently unkillable Tony Almeida.  I'm talking about Disney.

Yes that Disney.  The one with the mouse ears, cuddly woodland creatures and the majority ownership in ESPN.

I'm compelled as a parent to protect my child from the swirling winds of crappiness and loserfication which buffet her every day.  I valiantly and successfully kept the purple dinosaur at bay, and I've saved her from the cuddly suckiness of Boobah and Teletubbies until the day I pass her a joint for the first time.  But I was blind to that old friend, who every Sunday night of my childhood dished out healthy, wholesome doses of Chip 'n' Dale, the Apple Dumpling Gang, and Escape to Witch Mountain. 

Unbeknownst to me, Disney's marketing team was not content to roll back and forth on their private islands made of Krugerrands and fairy tears.  Sensing a vulnerability in the o-ring of the young female psyche, they stole a page from George Lucas, wrapped their hands firmly around the withered, chapped teats of their glorious past, and squeezed out a dastardly plot to desecrate their legacy for spectacular profits.  

Thus was spawned the bane of my existence -- Disney Princesses

Don't ask me how this malevolent force swept past my defenses.  I've rocked back and forth late into the night, my knees clutched close to my chest, trying to comprehend how it gnawed through our floorboards, crawled into my daughter's ear, and wrapped itself around her cerebral cortex.

I've tried to gently steer Cheeky towards the finer, cooler things in life but once Disney had her in their clutches, resistance became futile.

Every morning is a debate over not whether to wear a princess dress, but which one (thanks a lot, ECG!)  I'm constantly corrected over the difference between Cinderella and Aurora (Cinderella, apparently wears her hair up).  And for the love of god what sadistic fuck invented the Pretty Pretty Princess game?  You've already taken my daughter, Disney...must you also take my dignity?

And what sort of lessons are these Princesses teaching?  You'll never be happy with out a big, strong handsome prince?  Living in the woods with seven vertically challenged miners is a good idea?  And let's not forget that if life kicks you in the teeth you should just suck it up, cause eventually a fairy godmother will materialize and fix it all?  You know, just like in real life. *

I'm all for introducing my child to strong female role-models. I think Disney even dabbled in some of their own for a day or two.  But from what I can tell these cel-animated bitches have done nothing but reinforce the importance of coordinating jewelry with your gown, which might cut it in fairy-tale land but not in my house.  Much more of this and I'm shipping her off to Dagobah to "unlearn what she has learned."

And one last thing...don't even get me started on the impending whoring of my beloved Muppets, whose de-coolification began with their last Christmas special and will probably continue until Fraggle Rock is revealed to be behind the auto shop at East High School.

* By the way, have you ever gone back and read the original fairy tales these princesses are based upon?  Holy crap, there's some seriously messed up shit going on!  At the end of Snow White the wicked Queen has to wear heated iron shoes until she's dead!  I read one version of Cinderella in which her step-sisters were struck blind!  And there's a lot of huntsman with axes roaming around doing things that would get you a part in the Cannibal Holocaust sequel.  Grimm times, indeed...

Reason #621 Why I Love--and Sometimes Fear--YouTube

The question of today is...."Why?"