5-4-Fri: Cuteness from the Niece & Nephews

Ya know, sometimes kids say the darndest things (TM).

I have recently been proxy parenting and gotten in some hard-core time with the Playskool set. They never, ever stop needing attention; they forget mission-critical instructions, such as "Don't stick a fork into that;" they are capable of a level of self-referential aggrievement at how the behavior of others doesn't bend to their will that rivals Dick Cheney; but, they are smart, cute, and say very funny and endearing things. Hence, this week's list of hee-larious behavior from the kids:

1. After taking the niece and nephews to the book store, getting them each a cookie and hot chocolate, storming around the isles of the Kids' Section, getting everyone their very own book (and some their own bag, please), and taking the scenic route back home with a promise of driving by the kindergarten attended by a favorite cousin, one says to me: "Uncle iClipse, you're a fun guy."

2. Sitting in front of the gas fireplace early in the morning, one turns to me and says, "The fire never runs out of batteries."

3. I was eating lunch on a beach trip vacation this summer when one of the kids clambered up onto the chair next to me and asked, "Whassat?" I replied that I was eating a sandwich with chips and asked if he wanted Frito. "Yes." Do you like Fritos, I asked. "Yes." Fritos are good, I noted. "Yes." Are you having a good time at the beach I asked. "Yes." Do you want to go down to the beach later, I queried. "Yes." Long pause. Then, as he was climbing back down from the table to return to playing with toy cars, he said in parting: "I like talking to you."

4. My next door neighbor was chatting with me across the driveway over the holidays and we were catching up on life when we were treated to the distinct, metallic ping of a piece of gravel winging off the side panel of a car. She spun around on her heel to see her oldest son staring at his grandfather's Subaru with a supremely guilty look on his face. "Did you just throw a rock at Grandpa's car?!," she demanded. "Sorry, Mommy," he said, turning to face us, "My brain and my hand were not talking to each other."

5. A while ago I ran into my old youth group leader walking along the street downtown with her very young daughter in tow. We stopped walking and started talking. After 15 minutes, we heard a loud sigh and both looked down to find her daughter staring into the sky with a long-suffering look on her face, rolling her eyes, and flapping her fingers and thumb together in a "yakety-yak" movement.

PS - My friend just texted to say that over Thanksgiving he is visiting Washington, DC and is on the Metro with his five-year-old who announced to a complete stranger, "Stand back, doors are closing!" Oh, and the slow and morose "I and Love and You" by the Avett Brothers is woefully inappropriate to an upbeat posting about cuteness and kids, but it IS kinda nice; now playing on iTunes.

Funny Thing: Waaah Wahhh

So, I have been spending time recently with a young lady who has a five-year-old kid.

You know how parenting a young kid can woefully warp your sense of appropriate conversational riposte.

My brother tells me of the time, when his first-born was 2 years old, that he visited the auto supply shop looking for a cab light replacement bulb for a late '80s Mazda and they gave him the wrong one but the guy behind the counter didn't believe it so he came out to the car to install it himself. The mechanic couldn't, of course, get the incorrect bulb to actually fit into the housing but he didn't want to be wrong so he kept trying to force it. Suddenly, the bulb snapped out of his hand and rocketed off the windshield and around the front of the car, landing on the passenger floor mat. My brother involuntarily yelped, "Uh oh!" in a sing-song voice.

A colleague of mine recalls the time--when her son was a toddler--that her high-end Congressional reporter husband was at a swanky Hill fete and a US Senator in line in front of him at the buffet dropped a croquette on the floor. As the appetizer plunged off the Senator's plate toward the hallowed marble of the Capitol, the reporter sang out, "Oopsie!"

Which brings me to a funny thing:

This young lady and I were recently, how you say in Amreeka, fooling around. I'm all amped up AND trying to get her to give me her earlobe or something AND she isn't reading me AND then I'm trying harder to get around to her neck AND she's getting confused AND I am OCDing on that earlobe AND there is hair in everyone's face AND hormones are raging AND it's about 90 degrees AND the windows are fogging up AND she still has no idea what I am gunning for ... and she takes my face in her hand and blurts out, "Use your words!"

Waaah Wahhh.

PS - Still, we laughed our butts off. Oh, and "Let's Go Surfing" by The Drums is a sassy little number; now playing on iTunes.

5-4-Fri: Son of Horrifying Things

Were you terrified by Halloween’s Five-for-Friday list? Did you cower in fear at its enumeration of horrifying offenses against Man and Nature? Did you shudder and start and look under your bed before you went to sleep to be sure that, say, a tramp stamp was not lurking there?

Well, the thrill is back, baybee. Prepare yourself for “Son of 5 Horrifying Things!” Bwa ha ha ha.

1. Fanny Packs. Dear tourists visiting Your Nation’s Capital: Fanny packs are a no-no. Say it with me. Now, I can understand how you might make the mistake. Things are different on vacation. You make a little more noise in the sack--’cause, hey, who knows the neighbors in a hotel? You sleep in. You start drinking before Noon. Home rules don’t apply. What goes on on vacation stays on vacation, right? Wrong. There are still limits. You wouldn’t kill a man and say to yourself, “Vaycay makes it okay” would you? No. So you still cannot wear a fanny pack. I know that they seem like the best of both worlds: all the ease of a wallet, all the utility of a backpack. But this line of thinking gave us the skort and the El Camino. Not okay. Stop it.

2. Hose with Open-Toe Shoes. Ladies, gather close and listen carefully. Winter is coming. Yet, you still have all those fresh, kicky, open-toe shoes that made summer so much fun. (Maybe they were on SUCH a good sale. Maybe you wore them out to that bar crawl that one night and got your groove back. Whatever.) And it seems like such an easy thing, as the weather cools down, to enjoy all the freedom of your cute, pedi-baring shoes with the practical addition of snuggly pantyhose. The perfect fall pairing, non? Non! Stop dressing like grandma. If a straight man can spot this infraction from 20 yards away, it is a major offense. Trust me. Time to break out the boots.

3. Boogers. I am routinely surprised to pull up to a stop in traffic, glance to the side and see someone sitting at the steering wheel with a finger up their nose going for the gold. This visual train wreck is neck-wrenching reality television cum performance art and, naturally, you can’t look away. The driver roots and rotates. Sometimes a combo thumb-inside/finger-on-the-outside of the nostril method is used to help excavate a particularly big nugget. And the whole time you begin to involuntarily chant beneath your breath, “nononononono, donteatit donteatit donteatit....” Yet, inevitably, the miner next to you pans booger gold out of a rich vein and (a) holds it up to examine it and then (b) eats it. How, how, how is this okay? People, we can SEE you in your car. It is not Harry’s Cloak of Invisibility. It is not Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. And, even if it were, you should not, not, not eat your buggers. It was not alright when you were 3 years old. It is not alright now. Brrrrr.

4. Sideways Baseball Caps. Hey, everyone who is living in a post-gangsta, suburban mall-going, hemmed baggy pants-wearing, studio-managed rap pablum world: quit it with the sideways baseball caps. You don’t even know why you are wearing them like that. And they look stupid. So you look stupid. Not stoopid, mind you, just stupid. And not fresh. Not at all fresh. Here’s a secret: real gangbangers look stupid wearing sideways baseball caps; but no one tells them that because they’ll kill you if you do. And you, son, are not a gangbanger. You are a middle-class poser who is taking his allowance/paycheck from obeying/working for the man down to the movie theater/shopping center/bar to hang out with your friends/co-workers in a totally safe place to chat/meet girls/watch a corporately-packaged sporting event. If you were any less edgy you’d be round. By the way, being black doesn’t get you off the ersatz hook, either. So, straighten the brim, bro. And, no, leaving the “Official Product” holographic price sticker on doesn’t help. It just helps you square the circle on the Snoop-Dogg-to-Minnie-Pearl equation.

5. “W” Car Stickers. Mein freunds, it is safe to take the “W: The President” sticker off your entry-level German import and/or SUV. By now, you have gone well beyond stubborn “rogue” statement-making into a place that just says, “Attention, citizens, I am a feeble-minded contrarian who doesn’t want to acknowledge the existence global warming or minorities.” It’s not hard. Just slip into the garage under cover of darkness and peel that bad boy off the window. (Look, if you’d really meant it you’d have put it on the paintjob anyway, right? You think Dick Cheney is buying magnetic political stickers!? He’s stapling that @#$* right onto the bumper.) Time to face it that your guy destroyed a perfectly good first world economy, cashed out the WWII global gratitude bond grandpa gave us for our first communion and spent it on a flashy Baghdad trial for Saddam to show Dad who’s who, turned the US education system into a multiple choice exam, and basically had his Cabinet stand outside and empty aerosol hairspray cans into the environment for 8 years. You made a mistake. We are as sorry as you are. Take. The. Sticker. Off. (Or I’m going to have to pee on your car tonight.)

PS - Scary stuff. And that’s not mentioning people who inexplicably still play the air guitar, sniff their fingers, or, woefully, wear Tommy Hilfiger clothing. I’ll save all that for next year’s Fright Night Spooktackular. Oh, and “You're the Ocean” by Teitur is the opposite of uncool; now playing on iTunes.

Do It: Watch Kutiman Mashup

Legion are the false promises of the InterWebs. Remember how there would be no digital divide? How ads would be a thing of the past? How there would still be newspapers?

But few Nettified functionalities have been more of a woefully sputtering fizzle than the vaunted mash up. "Yo, dawg, I herd you like watching online content and contributing some user generated content. So, we put content in your content so that you can watch while you watch." But now a dude goin' by the handle of Kutiman ("Wait a second, son, "handle" in the post Y2K world? That's a 10-4 good buddy.) has Made. It. Happen.

Behold, the mother of all funk chords!

Ohhhh, the goodness. The cleverness. The sampl-i-ness of it all. Uncle iClipse is recommending it to those of you who have not already been bombarded by it on FaceBook or had it reTweeted to death.

Do it! Watch Kutiman.

PS - Funk is the bomb. Funkiness lurks all around us. Sometimes it is clear to me that jazz is secretly just a bunch of funky music nerds who are tired of how easy it is for them to be funk-i and making it harder for their own enjoyment by (a) doing it live and (b) only making the funk obvious to the insiders. Oh, and "Cantaloop" by US 3 is fu-hun-kee; now playing on iTunes.

Phonetic Alphabet

A friend of mine challenged me to learn the Phonetic Alphabet. You know the one--it's what soldiers are busy saying in all the old war movies: "Roger Home Base, this is Echo One. Our location is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Awaiting instructions. Over." I was initially unconvinced of its value to a civilian in the 21st century except as an engagingly eccentric interest/ability; of which some would say that I perhaps already have an overflowing cupful.

Yet, I was recently doing that thing where some business has established a convenient voice recognition system to aide you in your inquiry, but, woefully, it only speaks a sub-dialect of Russian, so when it inquires, "What movie would you like to see?" and you respond, "Zombieland" it says, "You have selected 'Maid in Manhattan;' is this correct?" Except I was actually using United's phone booking system and the automated woman and I were facing some early relationship jitters as she consistently misheard my boarding code, which was something intuitive like XGFCHLMT. After the third failed attempt she says, "We appear to be having difficulty understanding each other." I reflexively brace myself for the "It's not you it's me" speech, but then she says, "Let's try something else. Say the name of something that begins with each letter. For example 'Alice' for 'A' or 'Bob' for 'B.' Please repeat your boarding code this way now." Too late I realize the utility of the Phonetic Alphabet, which would have gotten me quickly to my flight departure information and made me look impossibly cool at the same time. Instead, I made up wild silent letter and other fantastical associations for my own amusement--"X as in Xylophone, G as in Gila Monster, F as in Fenestrate." She was less than amused. I gave up on our burgeoning love (hey, a sense of humor matters) and pressed "O" for a live human being.

Don't get caught out this way. Immediately, as I now have, memorize the following alliterative alphabetic mantra:

ALPHA
BRAVO
CHARLIE
DELTA
ECHO
FOXTROT
GOLF
HOTEL
INDIA
JULIET
KILO
LIMA
MIKE
NOVEMBER
OSCAR
PAPA
QUEBEC
ROMEO
SIERRA
TANGO
UNIFORM
VICTOR
WHISKEY
X-RAY
YANKEE
ZULU

PS - Have you noticed that Joss Whedon is using the Phonetic Alphabet to name the "actives" in his underwhelming new tee-vee show, "Dollhouse"? Oh, and "I am Trying to Break Your Heart" by Wilco is Golf Oscar Oscar Delta; now playing on iTunes.

5-4-Fri: Horrifying Things

Tomorrow is Halloween, so this week you get a list of five woefully ghoulish, terrible, horrifying things:

1. Blue Jeans Shorts. There is never, repeat after me, never any excuse for wearing blue jeans shorts. Hemming them only adds several centuries in purgatory. One exception: short cutoffs on hot girls in the 1980s; if this does not apply to you gender-wise or temporally then don't even think about it.

2. Tramp Stamp. As Chris Rock noted, any girl working the pole is a living symbol of parental failure. Don't extend the discussion to include shaming your parents with a lower back billboard. What one might refer to as the buttal philtrum should be bare--not covered with a butterfly that will just metamorphose into a bat as you age.

3. Barbed Wire Tattoo. For guys with no sense of shame, there is the barbed wire tattoo around the biceps. Dudes, see supra. Don't do it. You don't look like a super hero. You don't look like a football player. You don't look cool. You look like a dork. You look like someone who doesn't realize that your tattoo will be an ironic Abu Ghraib-like fence around your arm waddle when you're 70. Also, ladies, if Pam can't pull this one off, neither can you.

4. Mullet. This hairstyle has been much ridiculed elsewhere, so I'll leave it at simply shivering with repulsion and warning you off it; but beware its modern iterations. WHAT are the producers of the otherwise charming "Castle" thinking by giving the easy-on-the-eyes Stana Katic a girl mullet this season?!

5. The White Hemp Choker with Sea Shell Accents. Ever meet some tool who has been to a surfing lesson once on Spring Break and now obsessively wears brown leather flip flops and board shorts topped by a white rope surf choker? Me, too. Sporting these brotastic necklaces is a fashion nightmare for the turtle-shell-ribbed belly-baring boy toys of Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and it ain't gonna work any better for you. Please--and I am begging America here--please stop it.

PS - I am not a close follower of Billy Ray Cyrus' career, but I think it is possible that he has been a combo-platter offender on all fronts here. And he's busy plowing new ground. I stumbled across the Disney juggernaut "Hannah Montana" on cable television the other day and daymn if Billy didn't show up playing Miley's fake-life dad and sporting blond highlights, a soul patch, a spin art Bonnaroo tee, some kind of dominatrix-like leather watch band the width of a WWE trophy belt. Maybe I'll go as him for Halloween this year. Spooky! (Sorry, Bill, but you put it out there.) Oh, and "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Del Tones is scary good; now playing on iTunes.

Crisis of Credit

Annnnnnd, we're back. Thank you caller. We were talking about the messed up US economy and how such a thing happens and who is to blame. Well, as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Oh, and also the enemy is the sickening and woefully insatiable gluttony of Wall Street...Pogo forgot to mention that part.

To date, the best explanation of what the heck is going on with the Great Recession that I have seen is "Crisis of Credit Visualized"--an animated primer on how the American economy went belly up based on credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, sub-prime mortgages, credit crunches, and other highly jargonable phrases uttered on NPR that you might not have fully grasped when they first smooched your ear with their authoritative yet somehow incomprehensible syllabic combinations.

Enjoy. (For a while I had this thing parked on my Bookmarks toolbar; that's how good it is.)

PS - I am loving the idea that Greenspan seems to be saying, "Uh, about that whole self-regulation thing, I might, uh, have been wrong." Well, maybe the economy can rise like a phoenix from the ashes of boneheaded, unregulated greed. Oh, and "1901" by Phoenix is on fire; now playing on iTunes.