Remember that old saying your mother always said – wait thirty minutes after eating before you go in the water? This rule works in other situations, too.
One of the games that I like to play with Gav is something I call “Attack of the 50-Foot Baby!” This involves putting Gavin up on my shoulders in a sitting position and holding him steady with one hand behind his back while I stomp through the house like a I’m a T-Rex rampaging through downtown Tokyo. He likes to be up high and look at the world from a different perspective. The only thing I get out of this is a bit of exercise and the chance to act like a fool, since I sing the Attack song to the theme from the movie “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”. This also allows him the opportunity to grab my ears as hard as he can and use them for steering.
So the other day I had just finished feeding Gav and started in on the “Attack of the 50-Foot Baby” routine with him squealing with delight all the way. I went through the house and stopped in front of a mirror to see how the little guy was doing. He met my eyes in the mirror, gave me an immense toothless grin, and spit up all over the top of my head.
So yeah – lesson learned.
I’m not a foodie by any means, but I don’t mind experimenting and I’m fairly good at following directions, so if I find an interesting recipe I have no problem in giving it a go. However, I still have to consider myself an amateur, as the following story might indicate.
Sunday evening I’m working on a chicken slow-cooker recipe out of an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook (love their stuff). My wife’s in the other room playing with the kiddo and I’m preparing the meal. It’s a spicy one with curry and jalapeño peppers, neither of which I’d ever cooked with before. I add the curry powder and then stem, seed, and mince the peppers. Immediately afterward, I notice that my lips are tingling. I know I’m cooking with some hot stuff, so I proceed to rinse my hands under the faucet and rub my face, hoping to get the spices off.
You’ll notice that at no point did I use any soap – I thought water would do the trick. No such luck; now my entire face feels like I dunked it in a volcano, and I realize that the oil or juice from the jalapeños that was on my hands is now spread all over my face, nose, and eyes. I furiously scrub my face with soap, so much so that my eyes started burning from the soap as well as the jalapeño juice. At this point I’m a complete burning, weeping mess, and I had to dash upstairs and jump in the shower and forcibly hold my hands at my sides to keep from clawing my face off.
I seriously doubt Julia Child ever had to deal with this sort of thing.
In case you were wondering, the chicken dish turned out great.
The most views and the most responses I’ve ever got on this blog was about a year or so ago when I took a swipe at the television show Jericho when it was renewed after a viewer protest involving peanuts when so many other far, far more worthy shows never got a second chance.
Today I read it was finally, officially, canceled after a failed comeback. My prediction in the blog post – that it was never going to have any more viewers that it already had – was, in the end, correct.
And yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about it. It’s petty, sure, but sometimes petty’s what you got to go with.
I’ll not be holding my breath waiting for apologies from all those Jericho fans who bombed my blog, though.
After years of phone calls, internet postings, and filing restraining orders, my lifelong crusade has finally come to fruition: ABC has officially ordered episodes of Rob Thomas’ Cupid remake.
But this news comes with a catch: turns out that the CW network also wants Thomas to helm a Beverly Hills, 90210 remake.
I’m torn. Which to root for? The return of a Cupid in a different city and without the chemistry of Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall or a 90210 remake, with all the glorious cheesiness that implies?
I have an authorcrush on Charlie Huston.
A hardboiled thriller noir writer with a love for genre, the man can pretty much do it all. He writes comic books (currently writing Moon Knight for Marvel Comics,) vampires (his Joe Pitt casebooks are about as far away as Anne Rice as you can get and yet offers a fresh and unexpected take on the folks with fangs,) and even coming-of-age novels. (His recent award-winning novel, The Shotgun Rule, is freaking brilliant, a story of four teens in the 1980s who toy around with small-time crime and find that their choices blossom quickly into serious consequences. Think Stand By Me with guns and methamphetamine and you’ll get the picture.)
His writing style is a bit hard to digest at first – the man apparently hates quotation marks and has his characters talk in dashes with no “he exclaimed” or “she shouted” helpers, so sometimes you have to puzzle out who’s talking, but you get the hang of it after a few pages, and, really, we’re all adults here and don’t need to be spoon-fed this sort of thing. His dialogue is razor-sharp and his novels have the power of a hard slug of cheap whiskey. Start with Shotgun Rule to get a taste and go from there.
Oh: he has a pretty good blog going, too. Check it.
Almost two full weeks into the staying-at-home gig and I’m enjoying it a bunch. I’m still adjusting – I’m learning new things about Gav on a day-to-day basis. However, I owe emails to about half the internet. You see, I thought I would have extra time to do homework and update my blog. I’m behind on school and haven’t posted here in almost two weeks – welcome to parenthood.
I would like to thank my TiVo for saving my sanity. Also included in that thanks is the Discovery Channel, as I often watch Cash Cab and Mythbusters every morning during feedings. It Takes a Thief is good stuff too, and worth watching.
Admission: I’m a huge Michael Chabon fan. His Pulitzer-prize winning Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of my top-ten desert island books, and one I endlessly push on unsuspecting patrons. His other novels, like the Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union are all wonderful and brilliant and worth your time.
That said, I didn’t much cotton to his latest, Gentlemen of the Road. The thing is that Chabon loves genre and has written several novels in different styles and forms – he wrote an homage of Sherlock Holmes in the novel The Final Solution. Last year’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union was a tale that owed much to noir pioneer Raymond Chandler. I didn’t like the first, but loved the second, probably because I’m a crazy huge Chandler freak. (Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, incidentally, is one of my other desert island books.)
Gentlemen of the Road is a historical adventure tale that takes place in a Jewish kingdom along the Silk Road in Central Asia around the 10th Century. Chabon here pays homage to fantasy author Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fantasy stories: the problem here is that I’ve never read any of Fritz Leiber’s work, and I’m betting that the vast, vast majority of readers out there haven’t either. Chabon might be doing a fabulous job of imitating that style, but I’m not in on the joke. It’s like watching the World Series of Cricket – I might be watching world-class athletes at the top of their game, but without knowing the rules of the game and how to play, much of what I’m watching is completely lost on me. So what I’m left with is a overly mannered, baroque writing style and no reason whatsoever to care about the characters. I gave up about a third of the way through.
