Jack Is Back

The teaser for Season 5 of 24 is available here.

I Wonder If I Can Get An Advance On That?

Via Kris, I find that I am rolling in it

My blog is worth $14,678.04.
How much is your blog worth?

Son Be A Dentist!

Notes from an afternoon trip to the dentist.

* There is a touch of dominatrix in every good dental hygienist. There is more than a touch in the great ones.

* My hygienist today was a great one.

* Her name, in all seriousness, was Veronica Mars. But she didn't look like this person. And no, I didn't make a comment about her name. I used to hate it when people asked me if I were David Hyde-Pierce, so I don't ask others.

* Is there a more useless command in the English language than "Relax your lip"? What does that mean exactly? Whatever it means, it would be a hell of a lot easier to relax if I didn't have that metal thing jabbing me in the gum.

* I always get nitrous oxide when I go to the dentist. I build up stuff on my teeth so quickly that it requires some real heavy duty scraping to get them clean. And that's with going four times a year. Yep, nitrous and headphones to listen to the radio. Nothing like getting lost in a song while on laughing gas.

Happy brushing!

Today's Funny eBay Posting

The leather pants are gone but the memories remain. (Link via The Poor Man.)

My favorite bits are these:

I have not worn these leather pants for the following reasons:

I am not a member of Queen.
I do not like motorcycles.
I am not Rod Stewart.
I am not French.
I do not cruise for transvestites in an expensive sports car.

These were not cheap leather pants. They are Donna Karan leather pants. They’re for men. Brave men, I would think. Perhaps tattooed, pierced men. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say you either have to be very tough, very gay, or very famous to wear these pants and get away with it.

and

They are size 34x34. I am no longer size 34x34, so even were I to suddenly decide I was a famous gay biker I would not be able to wear these pants. These pants are destined for someone else. For reasons unknown - perhaps to keep my options open, in case I wanted to become a pirate - I have shuffled these unworn pants from house to house, closet to closet. Alas, it is now time to part ways so that I may use the extra room for any rhinestone-studded jeans I may purchase in the future.

But the whole thing, including the questions and the seller's payment instructions, is filled with gems.

Happy Birthday Ethan

Thirty eight and a half inches tall. Thirty five pounds. Those are the vital stats of my baby boy on this, the day before his third birthday.

That’s the 75th percentile on both height and weight. And while the inches and pounds have grown, the percentile has remained the same from last year, which the doctor says is a sign of good, healthy eating.

Three years old. Three years. What an amazing thing. Three years ago I was sitting at Mercy Hospital, nervous, edgy. Lesa’s water had broken and she had gone into labor. She called me at work – I called my mother, who was in Spirit Lake where my little sister had given birth to my nephew Max two days earlier. (Max was a week late, Ethan almost four weeks early. I guess they wanted to show up around the same time.)

Because of the fates, she was never going to dilate enough to give birth vaginally. But we didn’t know that at the time. In fact, it wouldn’t be until many, many hours later – the next morning, as a matter of fact – that her obstetrician would decide a c-section was in order. Although we didn’t know it at the time, we were in for a very, very long night.

At least I got away from the hospital for a bit. Once my mom got there, I called Matt (insert plug for Dreamwell show Eve-olution here), and he and the truck met me at Target, where I frantically bought the baby items we needed, which, considering both Lesa and I are procrastinators, was just about everything. We loaded up the truck, took things to our place, and I went back to Mercy, where some fifteen hours later, Ethan was finally brought into this world.

Ethan. What a great name, huh? Lesa picked it. I got to choose the middle name. Wesley. Ethan Wesley.

He throws everything. His favorite thing to do with his toys, when he isn’t trying to play with them exactly like his brother plays with his toys, is to toss them in the air. The sound is unmistakable, and you can hear it everywhere in the house. Thomp. Thomp. Thomp. Poor Woody. He survived the Toy Story movies only to find himself constantly being thrown in the air by a toddler.

Ethan talks constantly too. Constantly. Lots and lots of words, more of them everyday. He’ll be chattering at you and say something and you think “When did he start to say quarter? When did he pick up story book?” It’s an amazing thing, a humbling thing, a life-changing thing.

It’s the best thing.

And now, almost, he’s three. He looks so much like a little man right now that I can’t wait to see what he looks like in another year’s time. And while it saddens me to think that these days of his life will never come again, it excites me to watch him grow and change and develop.

Happy Birthday Ethan. Daddy loves you more than you’ll ever know.

Good News/Bad News

The good news is that comedian Dave Attell will be performing at Hancher on December 7th. The bad news is that he will be sharing the stage with Pauly Shore.

Oh well. Gonna miss that one.

Why Are There So Many Crappy Flavors In The Bag Of Starburts I Bought?

Actually, that's pretty much the whole post.*




*I promise to use this joke only once a year.

Linkage Tweakage

Two new links for the geeks and baseball fans in all of us. The first is a comics news site, Fanboy Rampage. The second is a baseball gossip site, On The DL. This is basically blind items about groupie encounters with baseball players, though they also feature a lot of pictures of ballplayers and groupies.

Fresh Readin'!

My Amazing Race summary is up. You can read it here.

Exile In Fanville

Liz Phair, or, as I like to call her, the Earth-2 Mrs. Dweeze, just released a new album. I like it a lot, though of course she can do no wrong musically as far as I am concerned. I mean, how can you not love a woman who works the line

I’ll fuck you and your minions too

into a song?

Go to her site, find the videos section, and watch the video for her first release from the CD, Everything to Me. Good stuff. Strong stuff.

It's Another Big Ten Football Weekend

It was Homecoming Weekend here in America's Heartland. For me, that means digging out my saxophone and making with the marching. And no, that's not code.

As most of my Iowa readers know, I was in the marching band in college. Part of the University of Iowa Homecoming tradition is the Iowa Alumni Band, made up of former marching band members willing to shell out $45 for the privilege of killing themselves in the Homecoming parade on Friday night and at the game on Saturday. Trust me. Marching in a parade sucks when you are in college. It's hell when you are in your 40s. But I've done in almost every year since I graduated, missing only three years in that time.

Three years ago, a new tradition within a tradition was started. Previously, the Alumni Band only took the field to play one song, the Iowa Fight Song, with the (what we affectionately refer to as) Junior Band. That changed, and now the Alumni Band do the entire pre-game show. Needless to say, this really sucks a group ranging in age from recent college graduates to people in their 60s and 70s. We get off the field and we need a quarter to recover.

But it's worth it. There's no feeling like having some 65,000-70,000 people screaming for you. We get to relive the glory days, see a decent football game, and generally behave in a manner long forgotten for most of us. Here are some thoughts on the day:

• When the college girls were 10 years younger than me, it was really cool to lust after them. When they were 20 years younger than me, it was way cool to lust after them. Now that they are almost 30 years younger than me, it was really, uhm, creepy to see some that were lustworthy. I'll turn my dirty old man card in now.



• There's no sarcasm like large group sarcasm. The Illini kicker missed three field goals in the first half. Two blocked, a third that was only two yards longer than an extra point attempt, went wide right by about five feet. As part of the halftime warmups, new Illini head coach and all around dick Ron Zook (Alice, he told me to tell you hi) sent the kicker out to take practice kicks INSIDE THE END ZONE. Because, you know, if they got in the end zone, they would turn down the 6 points for the opportunity to kick the field goal. (Yes, I know the point was to get him to get the ball up higher faster so it couldn't be blocked. But if you really want to nit pick about that, get your own damn blog.) Unfortunately for the kicker, the end zone he was practicing in was right in front of the Alumni Band. So he puts the ball in the kicking tee, takes his steps back, and boots it through the uprights.
  
  At which point the Alumni Band goes nuts. Cheering, high fives, etc. He gets the ball back, puts it in the tee again, and we start chanting "Two in a row! Two in a row!" He nails it again, more celebration, and then a third attempt. He nails it a third time, then takes the tee back to about the five-yard line. This is greeted with shouts of "No!" and "Come back!" and "It's a trap!" But he puts that kick through the uprights, and the end zone celebration from the Alumni Band is probably louder than what you would have heard if the Iowa kicker had nailed a field goal to win the national title.
  
  Yep. No sarcasm like large group sarcasm.



• Adding to that, my best personal line came in the third quarter. Illinois had driven to our two yard line, and were threatening to score. On third down we sacked the quarterback for an eight yard loss. I turned to my friends and said "At least we moved them out of field goal range."



• There's a post in the archives about a guy from band, a guy we can't stand. It's back in the Englert posts someplace, and it talks about how annoying this guy is to be around. Well, it wasn't any different this weekend. And as usual, a funny thing was said about him, though not by him. See, everytime we would make a joke, he would make the exact same joke about 30 seconds later. One of my friends turned to me and said "Is he on a tape delay?" I said "Yeah, it's in case he says something stupid" which caused my friend to reply "It isn't working."



• We formed up at 7:00 on Saturday morning, which meant leaving the house around 6:30. Which meant leaving the house before I could find my Alumni Band baseball cap. This was unfortunate on a day with temps in the mid-80s and a high, hot sun. It was particularly unfortunate for a guy who got his head shaved two days previous. Fortunately, I was wise enough to wear shorts. It would have been damn near unbearable without that.



• I didn't wear pink though. Someone had the bright idea that Hawk fans should wear pink to, you know, support the locker room. (See post below. Although techinically, the locker room is currently painted Dusty Rose, not pink. As one of my alumni friends pointed out, Dusty Rose sounds more like a stripper or a convict, or best of all, a convict stripper, than a color. But I digress.)
  
  There weren't many who did so. You could see a smattering of pink shirts here and there, but there wasn't more than 4-5% of the crowd that did. I saw some of them close up - they said things like "Get a Grip!" and "Don't Get Stuck On Stupid!" Real well thought out stuff.
  
  Here's the thing. If the most cogent argument you can muster about something is "Don't get stuck on stupid" or "Get a grip" or "Ram it up your cunt" (see comments to previous thread) then maybe, just maybe, your opponent is right. (Here's a further hint: "Ram it up your cunt" is not a good counter argument to the claim that something is hostile to women. Hard to believe, I know. But true.) If the person you're arguing against is truly wrong, you should be able to muster an argument using facts or informed opinion to counter them.
  
  Radical stuff, that.

Anyway, that was my Homecoming weekend. On Iowa!