I'm watching E-Ring, that Dennis Hopper/Benjamin Bratt cheeseball fest on NBC. And with Dennis and Benjamin on the case, it's cheesecake and beefcake for dinner every Wednesday, baby!
Hey now--don't judge me. It's on and I'm too tired to go surfing the channels. Which has happened every Wednesday for the past 5 weeks, which means I've now seen 6 episodes. But only by accident. I swear.
One of the key features of E-Ring is the moment on each episode where one of the old military guys who is now a desk jockey at the Pentagon gets so upset at the civilian command a-wipes that he "back door authorizes" a covert operation to do whatever it is the "suits" can't muster the cojones to authorize.
It's genius in its simplicity. Every episode. Very entertaining. Until you think about its real-world parallels, and then it is HIGH-LARIOUS. Think John McCain (not Pentagon, but since I don't know of any military people running the Pentagon right now, we'll have to go to the Senate). Now think about spry-but-still-senior-citizen McCain getting so riled up about something that he says, "Dammit Janet! I'm goin' in!" and heading off at "oh-three-hundred" to do special ops in Kosovo.
Now THAT would be some awesome telly.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Annual Thanksgiving Post
After reading Christopher Hitchens' piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the ecumenical and universal national joy that is Thanksgiving, I figured I'd do a quickie post on Why I Love Thanksgiving. Please add your own to this non-exhaustive list:
1. Three words: Crispy Turkey Skin. I loves me my turkey cracklin'.
2. No need to awkwardly say anything like, "Um, I don't mean to be difficult but I'm Jewish, so I don't feel comfortable participating in the christmas tree ornament exchange..."
3. Even immigrants do it.
4. Food, folks and football!
5. It's the only time when you can legitimately walk around in front of grandma with your pants unbuttoned
6. Only holiday where it is acceptable to feed your kids marshmallow-covered food for dinner.
7. "Taking a break" from eating and then coming back when you've made extra room is entirely acceptable behavior.
I'm sure there are more but I've gotta do some work. Add some of your own and help me out!
1. Three words: Crispy Turkey Skin. I loves me my turkey cracklin'.
2. No need to awkwardly say anything like, "Um, I don't mean to be difficult but I'm Jewish, so I don't feel comfortable participating in the christmas tree ornament exchange..."
3. Even immigrants do it.
4. Food, folks and football!
5. It's the only time when you can legitimately walk around in front of grandma with your pants unbuttoned
6. Only holiday where it is acceptable to feed your kids marshmallow-covered food for dinner.
7. "Taking a break" from eating and then coming back when you've made extra room is entirely acceptable behavior.
I'm sure there are more but I've gotta do some work. Add some of your own and help me out!
Saturday, November 19, 2005
An Anvil Fell On Me
Okay. So when was the last time you heard of someone getting hit in the face with a rake?
Doesn't it just have the ring of "retro" to it? Like, you can imagine Dagwood Bumstead or Foghorn Leghorn or even perhaps someone on the Sgt. Bilko show getting smashed in the face with a rake. You generally don't equate someone as trendy and happenin' as my good self with Getting Smashed In The Face With a Rake. It's so very Looney Tunes, and so very NOT Haggis harmony.
Yeah.
So, you'll never guess what happened to me today! Guess! Go on! Guess! Need a clue?! I will say only that it involved my face and a rake.
No kidding. I was in my Mama Bear mode, storing provisions for winter to avoid being out of rock salt or whatever when the first blizzard hits (and here in DC, by blizzard I mean "the first three inches of snow"), weatherproofing the house to reduce the insane energy costs that await around the corner, cruelly cutting back the rose bushes so that they'll grow fantastically next season, and finally and at long last putting into action my Martha Stewart-inspired laundry/mud room action plan.
That's right folks. The laundry room is now a bona-fide, Martha-approved "Home Haberdashery Center" where you can hang shirts, sew buttons, and find castile soap and spray starch easily. It's so fantastic that those of you who know me know that I will now thoroughly enjoy the 16.3 minutes I spend in it annually. And that I am, as we speak, googling "castile soap" to figure out what the hell it's for...
Regardless, the room's previous incarnation was as Catch-All Dumping Ground for Anything That Doesn't Go Anywhere Else. Among those items, which included a bike, Super Lawn Weed and Seed, a green watering can, and one year's worth of that fuzzy stuff that comes out of the dryer...was one old-school (wooden with really heavy metal tines) rake. A rake which I moved out of the way so I could bound energetically out the door into the yard where I could cruelly prune the roses in the name of loving roses, a rake which, once out of the way, suddenly found itself IN the way as I, seemingly in slow motion, stepped on the perpendicular row of tines and...
WHAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Got a face full of old-school rake.
I've never had a concussion before, but I think I know what it is. I literally saw stars. Couldn't momentarily answer the question, "oh my god are you okay?!" with anything but "I don't know." Looked in the mirror (a lovely and necessary feature of any classy haberdashery center, don't you think?), saw that it had hit my left temple and thankfully not my eye orbitals or my prodigious proboscis, and then FREAKED OUT. My latest blood counts were good enough for government work. Except my platelets. The things that clot your blood and ensure you don't bleed to death. Yeah, mine were low enough to elicit that Furrowed Doctor Brow that NOBODY wants to see on an otherwise sunshiney day. So the Baby Daddy says, "Don't worry; you're not bleeding" to which I barked, "Yeah! Not out of my skin! What if my skull bleeds out?!" To which he, characteristically, mellowly said, "You'll be fine." Which I know was meant to tell me that I'll be fine but in reality just pissed me off.
As I stormed up the stairs to get an ice pack to stem the certain brain stem bleeding that was absolutely, positively going on in my skull, I was so mad at him for so minimizing my fear by daring to be so calm when I have just been SMASHED IN THE FACE WITH A F****NG RAKE!! With only 15,000 platelets on the freakin' job no less!! How could he still be down there and not be up here performing life-saving brain surgery on me!?? What a total jerk!!
And then I realized as I finally got a few moments of a frozen package of edamame on the wound, that I wasn't really scared to be bleeding out through the ears, wasn't really mad because he had the temerity to reassure me of my well-being in a moment of crisis, wasn't really mad that some stupid f'ing moron had left a rake where a well-meaning, cute and otherwise jolly girl could step on it. Nope. I was mad because I had just crossed that line between tragedy and comedy where I could never tell the story about The Day I Thought I'd Bleed to Death (oh you poor dear!) without having to also admit that I, oh cool and collected and hipster I, had joined the ranks of Wile E. Coyote, Gomer Pyle and dare I say the trifecta of Larry, Curly and Moe as the self-inflicter of Garden Tool Injury.
Yep, the story had all the makings of a real Katherine Hepburn drama in which I would star, but alas I would instead have to settle for being an extra on I Love Lucy. Or, worse, a blog post on StarSpangledHaggis.
Doesn't it just have the ring of "retro" to it? Like, you can imagine Dagwood Bumstead or Foghorn Leghorn or even perhaps someone on the Sgt. Bilko show getting smashed in the face with a rake. You generally don't equate someone as trendy and happenin' as my good self with Getting Smashed In The Face With a Rake. It's so very Looney Tunes, and so very NOT Haggis harmony.
Yeah.
So, you'll never guess what happened to me today! Guess! Go on! Guess! Need a clue?! I will say only that it involved my face and a rake.
No kidding. I was in my Mama Bear mode, storing provisions for winter to avoid being out of rock salt or whatever when the first blizzard hits (and here in DC, by blizzard I mean "the first three inches of snow"), weatherproofing the house to reduce the insane energy costs that await around the corner, cruelly cutting back the rose bushes so that they'll grow fantastically next season, and finally and at long last putting into action my Martha Stewart-inspired laundry/mud room action plan.
That's right folks. The laundry room is now a bona-fide, Martha-approved "Home Haberdashery Center" where you can hang shirts, sew buttons, and find castile soap and spray starch easily. It's so fantastic that those of you who know me know that I will now thoroughly enjoy the 16.3 minutes I spend in it annually. And that I am, as we speak, googling "castile soap" to figure out what the hell it's for...
Regardless, the room's previous incarnation was as Catch-All Dumping Ground for Anything That Doesn't Go Anywhere Else. Among those items, which included a bike, Super Lawn Weed and Seed, a green watering can, and one year's worth of that fuzzy stuff that comes out of the dryer...was one old-school (wooden with really heavy metal tines) rake. A rake which I moved out of the way so I could bound energetically out the door into the yard where I could cruelly prune the roses in the name of loving roses, a rake which, once out of the way, suddenly found itself IN the way as I, seemingly in slow motion, stepped on the perpendicular row of tines and...
WHAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Got a face full of old-school rake.
I've never had a concussion before, but I think I know what it is. I literally saw stars. Couldn't momentarily answer the question, "oh my god are you okay?!" with anything but "I don't know." Looked in the mirror (a lovely and necessary feature of any classy haberdashery center, don't you think?), saw that it had hit my left temple and thankfully not my eye orbitals or my prodigious proboscis, and then FREAKED OUT. My latest blood counts were good enough for government work. Except my platelets. The things that clot your blood and ensure you don't bleed to death. Yeah, mine were low enough to elicit that Furrowed Doctor Brow that NOBODY wants to see on an otherwise sunshiney day. So the Baby Daddy says, "Don't worry; you're not bleeding" to which I barked, "Yeah! Not out of my skin! What if my skull bleeds out?!" To which he, characteristically, mellowly said, "You'll be fine." Which I know was meant to tell me that I'll be fine but in reality just pissed me off.
As I stormed up the stairs to get an ice pack to stem the certain brain stem bleeding that was absolutely, positively going on in my skull, I was so mad at him for so minimizing my fear by daring to be so calm when I have just been SMASHED IN THE FACE WITH A F****NG RAKE!! With only 15,000 platelets on the freakin' job no less!! How could he still be down there and not be up here performing life-saving brain surgery on me!?? What a total jerk!!
And then I realized as I finally got a few moments of a frozen package of edamame on the wound, that I wasn't really scared to be bleeding out through the ears, wasn't really mad because he had the temerity to reassure me of my well-being in a moment of crisis, wasn't really mad that some stupid f'ing moron had left a rake where a well-meaning, cute and otherwise jolly girl could step on it. Nope. I was mad because I had just crossed that line between tragedy and comedy where I could never tell the story about The Day I Thought I'd Bleed to Death (oh you poor dear!) without having to also admit that I, oh cool and collected and hipster I, had joined the ranks of Wile E. Coyote, Gomer Pyle and dare I say the trifecta of Larry, Curly and Moe as the self-inflicter of Garden Tool Injury.
Yep, the story had all the makings of a real Katherine Hepburn drama in which I would star, but alas I would instead have to settle for being an extra on I Love Lucy. Or, worse, a blog post on StarSpangledHaggis.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Bad Stedman!
One of the cool things about having a kid is the fact that they (thank you, Art Linkletter) say the darndest things. It's also cool because, while they are pre-verbal (or in The Bambina's case, incredibly verbal but mostly incomprehensible), they find the darndest things funny.
The latest funny things in our house include both the words, "belly button" and The Bambina's immediate search for same as soon as a person walks in the door. The social worker dropped by for a half hour to do the 6 month at home visit and all I could do was pray that she wouldn't point at his crotchy/belly area, yell, "Beh' Buh!" and start trying to lift his shirt to poke her finger in his navel. I seriously was sitting there making nice-nice with the social worker while telepathically commanding her to forget about belly buttons for the next 20-40 minutes. Luckily my Jedi Mind Tricks were in top form and we emerged without precipitating any uncomfortable questions about shirt-lifting in the home.
One of the other things that makes her laugh is the word "Stedman," as in Oprah's life partner, Stedman Graham. The baby daddy and I were discussing Stedman (don't ask why...) and every time we said "Stedman" she'd laugh hysterically. Her laughter was causing her to get distracted from eating her dinner so I said in a mock serious tone, "Bad Stedman! Bad Stedman!" which apparently was Sid Caesar-bring-down-the-house funny to this toddler, and so now we can't go a full day without at some point just gratuitously saying, "Bad Stedman!" to elicit the wonderful belly laugh that makes my day every time I hear it.
It's kind of embarrassing on one level and kind of magical on another, how you feel like your day isn't complete until you hear your child laugh. And how you will resort to saying "boogers," "SillyBilly!" and, yes, even "Stedman Graham" to make it happen.
The latest funny things in our house include both the words, "belly button" and The Bambina's immediate search for same as soon as a person walks in the door. The social worker dropped by for a half hour to do the 6 month at home visit and all I could do was pray that she wouldn't point at his crotchy/belly area, yell, "Beh' Buh!" and start trying to lift his shirt to poke her finger in his navel. I seriously was sitting there making nice-nice with the social worker while telepathically commanding her to forget about belly buttons for the next 20-40 minutes. Luckily my Jedi Mind Tricks were in top form and we emerged without precipitating any uncomfortable questions about shirt-lifting in the home.
One of the other things that makes her laugh is the word "Stedman," as in Oprah's life partner, Stedman Graham. The baby daddy and I were discussing Stedman (don't ask why...) and every time we said "Stedman" she'd laugh hysterically. Her laughter was causing her to get distracted from eating her dinner so I said in a mock serious tone, "Bad Stedman! Bad Stedman!" which apparently was Sid Caesar-bring-down-the-house funny to this toddler, and so now we can't go a full day without at some point just gratuitously saying, "Bad Stedman!" to elicit the wonderful belly laugh that makes my day every time I hear it.
It's kind of embarrassing on one level and kind of magical on another, how you feel like your day isn't complete until you hear your child laugh. And how you will resort to saying "boogers," "SillyBilly!" and, yes, even "Stedman Graham" to make it happen.
Today's Good Karma
Writer's block has descended. And, as anyone would in a similar situation, I am heading straight to the Chasids for Today's Good Karma! ;)
"Doing good is not about being nice. You can do nice things all day long for many people, but it could be all just more service of your own self. When you help those who show gratitude, when you lend a hand to those who are on your side, you are still within the realm of your own ego and self. Help someone you don't want to help. Help him and learn to want to help him--only because this is the right thing to do. At first it may not feel so rewarding. Now you have sprung free."
"Doing good is not about being nice. You can do nice things all day long for many people, but it could be all just more service of your own self. When you help those who show gratitude, when you lend a hand to those who are on your side, you are still within the realm of your own ego and self. Help someone you don't want to help. Help him and learn to want to help him--only because this is the right thing to do. At first it may not feel so rewarding. Now you have sprung free."
Monday, November 14, 2005
Saturday, November 12, 2005
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