Wordpress, Here I Come!

Well, I think already I'm enjoying Wordpress more than Blogger, so if you're reading this right now, why not read http://silvagami.wordpress.com/ instead?

Sunshine and Happiness and the Apocalypse

I'm a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. I've been reading his books for years now, and damn if the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men wasn't my favorite movie from three years back. As such, when I heard there was a film version of The Road coming, I was all tingly with excitement. Plus it had Viggo Mortensen in it? He's always fun to watch, and who could have guessed that he'd be such a great actor that he'd steal every one of those Lord of the Rings movies. So of course, I was peeing myself over the coming of The Road. I could hardly wait. But I had to, because as far as I can tell, the film was never released anyplace near to me, which completely sucked ass. And so right up on my Netflix it went, so it would pop up in my mailbox as soon as I could get it.

So now here it is, and it's gorgeous to look at, that's for sure. Viggo looks perfectly balanced on the edge of madness and starvation.

You know it's going to be a comedic romp through Happytown when there's a scene of the father showing the son how to commit suicide with a pistol in the mouth in case everything gets to be too much.

These movies, these stories, they're almost too much for me to watch now that I have a child. Used to be, children in jeopardy stories didn't affect me any more than any other sort of plot did, but now, I'm screwed. Not of course for ham-handed "dinosaurs are going to eat my baby" sorts of stories, mind you, but serious stories like this. Stories that want you to think about if it would be a blessing for your child if you put a bullet through his head rather than let things continue as they are.

There's so much loss and hurt and anguish in this film. I'm drained already and it's only halfway through. I already know how the story ends from reading the novel, so I know it's only going to get worse before it... well, it never really gets better. It's absolutely killing me, but it is so, so very good.

I think I'm going to sleep with Sophie tonight.

A Monkey On My Lower Back

The thing I find funny about backs is just how stupidly easy it is to do something to them that really, really, really hurts. Seriously. First time I threw out my back? I was in my late 20s, and I'd just been camping over a holiday weekend. I was packing up my gear, everything had been loaded into the car, and I was bending down to pick up the tarp that the tent had been built on... and I went down, down, down, right onto the tarp.

What the fuck?

Completely out of the blue, that was. I hadn't had any sort of warning pains or soreness, nothing at all. Just bent over, and down I went. Have you ever thrown out your back? Hurts just a little bit. You know, just a little. Like every bone in your spine has been ripped out by evil coked-up Keebler elves and replaced with molten pig iron, and every muscle in your back has been infused with candy corn-sized pieces of broken window glass, which have been pre-coated in a solution of 1/3 parts lemon juice, 1/3 parts corrosive spit from one of those monsters from the Alien movies, and 1/3 parts Sarah Palin bile.

So yeah, just a little uncomfortable.

Seems Simple to Me Anyway

Look, see, I'm not being a bad parent, but here's the deal... two deals, actually.

Deal the First: if you're going to play with your Legos up in the bay window behind the sofa, and I repeatedly tell you to play on the floor instead because you keep losing your Legos piece by piece between the wall and that sofa, do not whine at me when you no longer have enough Legos to build your castle and expect me to leap to Lego rescue on the day I have injured my back and am waiting to see if an urgent care visit is in order. I am even less inclined to be helpful as your whining escalates in volume.

Deal the Second: I don't generally try to give you food issues to deal with later in life, but you know what? When you bring me a piece of pre-wrapped string cheese that you want to eat, make me open the package and then you take one tiny little bite before proclaiming that you want to eat something else instead, you are going to sit right there on the horrible Lego-devouring sofa and eat every last bite of that goddamn cheese, because A) pre-wrapped string cheese ain't cheap; and B) because I am a mean and horrible daddy that obviously doesn't love you.

Sophie's life is worse than being in a Stalinist gulag, I know.

Only An Asshole Gets Killed For a Car

Well, motherfuck. I was planning on going to bed before the sun comes up, but now I've got this wild hair up my ass to watch Repo Man for the millionth time, because that's just how my brain works sometimes. If I were smarter, I'd just leave it alone, go to bed, and watch it on the laptop tomorrow while Sophie is maybe watching Dora the Explorer or taking a nap, but honestly? I'd rather watch it on the big TV, and since I'm off tomorrow, when she takes a nap, I plan to be right there asleep with her.

Repo Man is fucking awesome. It's easily the best movie produced by a Monkee, directed by the guy that did Sid & Nancy, starring the King of Cool, Harry Dean Stanton, and the Not-So-Cool, Emilio Estevez, and a 1964 Chevy Malibu hauling radioactive alien bodies in the trunk that I've ever seen, and God knows I've seen every Monkee-produced, Alex Cox-directed, H.D.S. and E.E.-acted, alien-hauling Chevy Malibu movie ever made.

It's the Citizen Kane of repo movies. Also, the soundtrack kicks all sorts of ass: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies... I remember that my gang of friends back in high school passed around cassette dubs of the album like they were crack, and holy shit did I ever want to join the Circle Jerks after listening to it over and over and over and over... Many years later, when I saw that the soundtrack had finally been released on CD, I nearly pooped myself in excitement over it.

I should have lost my virginity watching this movie, dammit! That's how awesome it is.

Fuck and Run

Look, I’m not saying that I still don’t like Liz Phair. I’m just saying that I liked her better when she sang about blowjobs and doing it doggie style so that everyone could watch TV while they were fucking.

Liz Phair now, dear reader, is sort of like fucking your mom.

Liz Phair then was… well, okay, it was still sort of like fucking your mom too, actually. If you know what I mean.

Hah!

P.S. Your mom is hot.

Anyway, on a nearly related note, my iTunes is absolutely convinced that what I'm lacking in my life is more Willie Nelson.  I've got 12,000 songs shuffling around on there, and what keeps coming up but this seemingly endless parade of the red headed stranger. Don't get me wrong, I like Willie Nelson. I just like him better when he's singing about blowjobs and fucking while watching television.

No, wait. That's still Liz Phair.

Seriously though, I'm used to odd mixes coming up once the shuffle button is hit, but... well here, have a look at my recently played artists, in the order that they've been (of course) recently played: Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Willie Nelson with Norah Jones, Rage Against the Machine, The White Stripes, Willie Nelson, Barenaked Ladies, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard, Liz Phair, The Decemberists, Ween, Lou Reed and Willie Nelson.

Is it a sign? Do I owe the government taxes? Should I start smoking prodigious amounts of weed? What does it mean, oh Magic 8-Ball?

More unrelated but still... weird. Sophie is in the bay window. Completely naked. With the top of her head shoved up between the dog's legs so that she is wearing his junk as a hat.

I don't mind if the kid is naked while she's at home, but maybe I should draw the line at rubbing the dog's unit with her head up in the window where any passing CPS representative can see them.

Obviously summer is off to a good start.

Straight From the Horse's Vagina

Sophie and Molly went to the bookstore today, because the library was closed and Molly needed a book right this minute. Molly came back with a copy of Twilight, which I’m not even going to comment on, since I prefer my vampires of the Salem’s Lot variety rather than the sparkly hairless-chested Jonas Brothers type. Sophie, however, definitely scored in the book department. She came back with a visible horse, which is just totally, totally awesome. Remember the Visible Man models from when we were kids? A plastic statue of a human man, with breakaway organs and bones, designed to show kids the anatomy of a person? Well, this is the same thing, only it’s a book with a plastic toy transparent horse in the center of it, and every page you turn reveals more and more of the underlying tissue and matter under the horse’s skin (and since it’s a three-dimensional model, as you reveal more of the horse on one page as you go, the pieces that come away on one page start to build up on the other, so that you’re constantly getting a breaking down-building up dynamic going).

Sophie is absolutely in love with this book. Her grasp of equine anatomy is shady at best, but she is all too eager to point out the various organs to you. She made me read it with her five times alone this afternoon, jabbing her finger at the bits and pieces as we went.

“That his brain, Daddy,” she said, pointing at the horse’s stomach with certainty. I could see where she would have trouble with this, because for a large animal, a horse’s brain sure is awfully small (at least in this plastic model it was; I’ve never seen a real horse’s brain, nor do I feel a deep-seated need to), and her stomach is right there, huge and obvious and  just waiting to be pointed at by a sticky little finger. Oddly, the only organ she nailed correctly each time we went through the book was the horse’s uterus, which Molly had explained to her was where baby horses came from. Sophie has been on a “babies come from mommy’s tummy” kick the past couple of weeks, so maybe this explains why she’s Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden when it comes to a horse’s reproductive organs.

When I got home from work this evening, after Sophie had gone to bed, I went up to check on her like I always do. She'd pulled her baby's crib upstairs and into her room, and there was a doll propped up in it, looking disturbingly like one of those old Victorian photos of a baby, dead from small pox or cholera, that you could use to show your relatives what the child looked like before the funeral, some five or six months before the arrival of said relatives by train from the other coast. Sophie was asleep in her bed with her visible horse book cradled under her arm, where I assume she'd fallen asleep while pointing out its uterus again and again to her terminally ill, pox-ridden baby.

I'm guessing the baby's autopsy begins in the morning.

Haikus For Old Lovers #3

Sleeping on my couch
in black panties and sports bra,
platonic my ass

Multiplicity

Oh yes, I almost forgot: yesterday, Sophie and I were picking up some Chinese food for lunch, because I was feeling like a lazy fuck and she, being only three years old, is lacking in any mad cooking skillz at this point--perhaps after her first Easy Bake Oven we can reassess her abilities. I was having the Kung Pao chicken, while she is more of a chicken and broccoli sort of girl. She also loves chopsticks, although she is terrible with them so far. I'm going to order her some practice sticks for her birthday, so there's always the chance that she'll be grabbing flies out of the air before she's five. From there it's only a short hop until she kicks the ass of the bad girl in her school during a karate tournament, and her future awesomeness will be cemented.

Actually, none of that is what I meant to tell you.

On our way out of the restaurant and back to the car, we passed a man who looked exactly like me, in some weird David Cronenbergian Dead Ringers kind of way (okay, not that weird--because what could be more weird than identical twin gynecologists? Yep: identical twin cross-dressing Sarah Palin impersonators. Or actually just Sarah Palin herself. Again, I digress.)

As he walked past us, Sophie pointed at him and said, "He is also my daddy, Daddy!"

I don't know why I brought this up, other than it was pretty cute, and also it's good to know that I would be so easily replaceable if I fell into the ocean while crab fishing and drowned.

Sophie Creeps Me Out #1

We were at the library today, because Sophie loves books and I am trying to instill within her the knowledge that libraries are awesome AWESOME AWESOME. Generally our approach is to swing quickly through the "New Releases" section, where I grab one or two books whose covers look interesting (since she is impatient and won't let me stand in the aisle for more than fifteen seconds), and then we are off to the children's wing, where she plays with puppets and puzzles and looks out the glass wall at the garden outside and grabs random books off the shelf for me to read to her. Last week, her favorite was a kid's biography of Malcolm X. Today it was an English to Hebrew picture dictionary. Sophie's tastes are wide and varied.

So today we are laying on the alphabet carpet and she is opening flaps on a Bob the Builder book, minding our own business, when this weird little boy comes over and sits next to us. Now, believe me when I tell you that I don't use the word "weird" to describe many children, other than my own, of course. Children are by their very nature just a little bit off, and more power to them there. This kid, though: dude. It wasn't just the combination of his Hitler youth cheekbones and doll's eyes, Tom Cullen haircut (M-O-O-N spells "home schooled") and Village of the Damned thousand yard stare that raised the hairs up on the back of my neck. No, what really did it was his opening statement to the two of us:

"Casey's dead," he said, in a flat, monotone, Ediphone wax cylinder-sounding sort of way. "She's up in heaven, protected by angels."

Creepy number one.

Sophie doesn't even look up from her book at him. "She's buried under the window," she says.

Creepy number two.

She's going to end up being that kid nobody wants to sit next to in home room, right? Or the next David Blaine, which really is just as bad.

Haikus For Old Lovers #2

Did the class see us
coming out of the darkroom,
your shirt on backwards?

Haikus For Old Lovers #1

You loved Dick Van Dyke
a lot more than you loved me.
Nick at Nite sucks ass.

I Am a Whiny Plague Monkey

It started out pretty simple, this illness that has currently got me wanting to curl up under a blanket and not come out for a week. I assumed it was something that Sophie gave me, since generally when she gets ill, I get it too. And she was, in point of fact, ill on Saturday. Not terribly, just a little snotty and with a tiny bit of a fever, which is how my symptoms manifested, and so I wasn’t worried about it. Sunday however, about halfway through the day, I was very hot, very snotty, and very unhappy. Yesterday, that was absolutely fucking brutal. I knew I was doomed when I woke up in the morning and felt as though I had a flaming pineapple stuck in the middle of my throat. On top of that was the alternating freezing chills and sweat-drenched fever spells. The wracking cough was a good touch too, in a very “Victorian dying of tuberculosis” sort of way.

Lost: Spoiler Alert!

So it turns out the island was really just inside the snow globe of an autistic kid.

Well, at least that explains the polar bears.

Sometimes My Brain Doesn't Work

Sophie and I popped out to grab a take-and-bake pizza this afternoon not far from the house, maybe a fifteen minute drive. She likes it there, although she's not really a giant fan of pizza just yet. What she really likes is the pink lemonade they carry there, Tropicana in a plastic bottle (which means, I think, that's there isn't any actual lemon in the lemonade, but what sort of father would I be if I didn't start her on the road to poor eating choices this early in life?), which to me tastes like a bit of a combination of antifreeze, lost childhood and rodeo clown urine mixed in a lovely high fructose corn syrup base. Not my thing, but to each his or her own.

The wind was blowing like a motherfuck while we were heading back to the car, gusting to over 45 mph (I know, because I checked when we got home--go, go, Gadget Internet!), which meant that it was all I could do to prevent our pizza from turning into a flying saucer and taking off in an uncontrolled spin up, up and away. Getting it, the lemonade, the salad, the cookie dough ("Which only costs you an extra $.01 with the family-sized pizza and salad that you are already buying," upsold the woman behind the counter), Sophie and the stuffed red plush T-rex that she insisted be brought with us all into the car without disaster took talent, luck and a prayer to Cthulhu, but we pulled it off pretty smoothly. Or so I thought, until we were doing 70mph on the freeway and heading home.

"Daddy," Sophie said from her car seat in the back. "You forgot to buckle me in."

I thought a moment. Shit, she was right. "Well, can you buckle the top one for me, honey?" She's got a pair of buckles, one that goes over her chest and shoulders, one that goes over her waist. She's learned to put the top one on and off by herself, but she can't manage the lower one yet on her own. She needs to start working out, squeezing racquetballs an hour a day or something. She'll never get to that "Connie Chung cracking walnuts with her bare hands" thing if she doesn't get started on it now.

"Sometimes little kids can do the top one," she said.* "Sometimes grownups have to do the bottom one."

We made it home in one piece, but it made me remember how my mother and grandfather drove me across the country as a baby, back before child seats, before seat belt laws, hell, almost even before cars were required to have seat belts. I rode from east to west coasts in a wicker basket, wrapped in a blanket, all Moses-ed up, and nothing bad happened to me because of it.

Okay, we did hit a patch of ice in Kentucky or Tennessee or some Hazzard County place like that, and my grandfather did manage to roll us upside-down in a ditch, and it was only sheer luck that none of us was killed or severely injured in the accident, but c'mon! Whoever hasn't been in a near-fatal car accident, raise your hand.

That's what I thought.

But I do hope that the next time I forget to strap her in, Sophie tells me before we actually hit the freeway. I do sorta kinda like her and shit, so I'd like to keep her in one piece.

*Sophie's new thing is what I call the "sometimes little kids" observation, which goes a little something like this: "Sometimes little kids get books at the library." "Sometimes little kids eat candy for dinner." "Sometimes little kids flush toilet." "Sometimes little kids fall out of bed."

Sometimes Daddy thinks it's really cute.

Yes, I Am a Geek. Suck it, Trebek!

From the Get the Hell Out of Here Department: it was thirty years ago today that The Empire Strikes Back was released. I was ten years old at the time, and I remember being absolutely pissed beyond belief at the cliffhanger ending, and also trying to figure out at what point exactly I had stopped wanting to be Luke Skywalker and instead wanted to be Han Solo. I was pretty sure it wasn't when he was getting busy with Princess Leia, but instead when he was flying the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid field. Now that was some badass shit when you were a kid. Of course, I still wanted a lightsaber, but only if I could have Han's spaceship too.

And yeah, okay: he got to make out with the princess too. Sue me.

Bonus: I think it's sort of funny the Firefox's spell check recognizes "Leia" and "Darth Vader" but doesn't recognize "lightsaber" or "Chewbacca." What's this world coming to?

Edit: Today is also the thirtieth anniversary of Pac-Man. Ain't that a kick in the head?

Hot Dog Fever

So we're lounging around the house today, Sophie and I, and by "lounging" I mean that I am laying on the sofa and reading and she is running in a loop, completely bare-ass nekkid through the kitchen, the living room and the hallway, shrieking at the top of her lungs "I pee on floor! I pee on couch! I pee in pants!" (none of which she has actually done), while the dog chases after her, absolutely manic from feeding on her insane energy.

Welcome to our post-bath household.

Bonus bare-ass nekkid info: I stopped taking baths with her when she started referring to my junk as a "hot dog." I figured that was probably a good time to just let the past go, man. On the hot dog front, however, today while we were at home I was wearing this flannel jammy pants thing that had a small hole torn about two inches down from my inseam. Not a big deal until I squatted down to pick up her socks off the floor and ripped the hole to about the size of a kiwi fruit. I cursed the goddamn jammies under my breath and promptly forgot about the entire thing until about an hour later, when we were both laying on opposite ends of the couch.

Sophie looked over at me and said, "Daddy?"

"Yes, honey?"

"I can see your hot dog butt."

"What?"

Oh. Testicles. She can see my testicles.

Aren't you glad to be reading this blog?

24 Hours With Red Dead Redemption and Sophie

Things Sophie has seen in our new video game, Red Dead Redemption (which is a western Grand Theft Auto, for those of you that have lives): horsies, rabbits, puppies, a herd of cows eating flowers in a field, a thunderstorm at night, and a train.

Things Daddy has seen after Sophie has gone to bed: gunshots to the face, prostitutes being knifed in alleys, rabbits getting their heads blown off and skinned, a murder/suicide, men on fire, and a woman getting run over by a train.

Fun for the whole family!

Shitty Haiku for the Man In the Park With the Metal Detector

Beep beep under foot,
kneeling with spoon in his hand,
alas! Bottle cap.

See that photo? See the bandage wrapped tightly around Sophie’s little hand, the only thing protecting her delicate being from a horrible, flesh-eating bacteria?

She’s got a splinter. In her thumb. About a quarter of an inch long.

My daughter is a combination of the world’s youngest hypochondriac and a pre-school Ferris Bueller. If she has the slightest cough, she wants “grape medicine,” which is Children’s Liquid Tylenol. If she has to pick up her toys, she complains of the sudden onset of exquisite back pain, or else she collapses on the floor and attempts to crawl toward you, dragging her legs behind her like a paraplegic motorcycle crash victim. Her performances are Oscar-worthy and give me hope for my ultimate financial security, when I can manage her child star career and gleefully milk her overflowing bank account of all it contains. Hey, don’t give me that look: I brought her in to this world, so I figure she owes me a living, one to which I’ve never had the opportunity to grow accustomed to living.

My only real concern isn’t that one day she will be suffering from an honest, God-given disease and I won’t believe that she is ill, but rather that as she gets older she’ll realize that the only way to garner sympathy or to excuse herself from household chores is to up the ante and aim to imitate truly epic viruses or (belatedly-appearing) congenital defects. I can’t even begin to image how she’ll fake the symptoms of a club foot, or the dissolving organs of a good old fashioned ebola infection. She’s a smart kid though. I’m sure she’ll figure something out.

Say Hello To My Little Friend

I like to think that I'm a pretty good father. Sophie gets a bath every day, she's got clean clothes and her hair brushed. I don't let her have too much candy and she always gets at least one book read to her at night before bedtime. Right now though, we're playing a little game. It's called How Many Pickles Can Sophie Eat Before She Barfs Like a Drunken Sorority Girl at a Frat Party During Dead Week?

My kid has a love of pickles that rivals Tony Montana's lust for cocaine in its sheer obsessive power. She would subsist on nothing but pickles if only she could open the jars herself, but alas, her little girl hands are too delicate and weak to unscrew the lids, and so she has adapted herself to the situation thus: "Daddy, I want pickle. Daddy, can I have pickle? Pickle! Now pickle for me! Pickle pickle pickle pickle PICKLE!"

Which brings me to our game. I've told her before that she can't eat nothing but pickles or she will get a tummy ache and be sick. She insists that I am wrong, that pickles won't make her belly hurt, and that I am in point of fact a poopyhead. So now we get to find out who is correct, the poopyhead or the three year old, as I give her the opened jar of Milwaukee's Baby Dills and let her go to town.

It's just like Thunderdome, only with pickled fruit instead of a midget on another dude's back (and yes, pickle=cucumber=fruit, not vegetable. Look it up!).

****Edit: nine baby dills. That was when she complained that her belly hurt, laid down on the floor and passed into a pickle coma. I am teh winnar!

Zombie Child, Smack Smack On Your Face!

Once upon a time, Sophie woke in the middle of the night, looked directly at me and said calmly, "Zombies gonna eat me." She then immediately fell back asleep.

Another time, she was playing on the living room floor when she suddenly said, apropos of nothing, "Zombies are coming."

Today she crawled on top of me while I was laying on the couch, put her face directly in mine and said, "Gonna eat your brains, Daddy."

She's three. We don't watch zombie movies while she's around, play zombie video games or even use the word zombie in her presence.

My daughter creeps me the fuck out sometimes.

What's In the Fucking Ice Chest?

Now, you have to understand that even though my daughter threatens to kill me and bury me in a deep, deep hole in the backyard, she does love me. She doesn't generally say it in so many words, preferring to show her love by headbutting me in the groin or by jumping on me when I'm laying on the couch and kneeing me in the groin or, when she's feeling especially affectionate, just letting loose with an Ivan Drago cockpunch right in my groin. Her methods of demonstrating her love are many and varied, so when she told me a few weeks back that "Daddy, I don't want to lose you," and didn't punctuate this statement with a shoe thrown to the groin, I figured it was time to start taking my health a little more seriously.

Nuclear Detergent

Not having enough liquid detergent in any of the bottles to separately wash the load of jeans in the washer, I have just combined the cleaning powers of one quarter Tide 2X Ultra with one quarter All 2X Ultra and one half Purex Ultra Concentrate.

I am either going to end up with jeans as holy, angelic and perfect as Miley Cyrus's hymen or I'm going to drop a subatomic deuce through the earth's core that will make the Cern Large Hadron Collider look like a marshmallow cannon.

Tell your children that you love them, just in case.

Why I Miss Gilmore Girls

Because the excellent characters and brilliant, snappy dialogue made me think of a time on television when solid writing made for compelling viewing. Also because it made me think of Lauren Graham in Bad Santa yelling “Fuck me, Santa! Fuck me, Santa! Fuck me, Santa!” while getting banged in the front seat of a car.

But also, you know, that thing about the writing.

I Know Why the Caged Zombie Sings

Sophie and I found a bird's nest in the eaves above our front porch.

"See that?" I said. "That's a bird's nest. Birds built that so they would have someplace to put their eggs. One day the eggs will hatch and little baby birds will come out."

"Like eggs in the kitchen," Sophie said.

"Well, just like that, only birds come out of these, and birds don't come out of the ones in the refrigerator. You were in an egg once, in your mommy's tummy."

She gasped and put her hands up to either side of her face. "Don't eat me! I am a kid! Zombies don't eat me!"

It's always about the zombies with the little squirt.

Taken Together, I Sleep With One Eye Open

Kids love hula hoops. I think we can all agree on that. I know mine does. She's got a pink one that lights up at various points around the circle while she spins it, although the spinning is rather limited at this point, what with her only being three years old and not very coordinated yet.

The other day, I'm napping on the couch and wake to find her with the hoop, standing next to me. She's naked from the waist down, having taken off her pants and panties, and she's spinning the hoop over her head and between her legs, repeatedly saying, "I kill you, I kill you, I kill you."

I haven't yet decided if this is oddly endearing, in a sort of pornographic Wednesday Addams sort of way, or just more than a little bit disturbing.

Now, keep that story in mind while I tell you this one: a couple of days ago, I'm out in the backyard with the daughter unit, who begins idly kicking at the edges of one of the holes that the demon spawn of a dog we have has been digging.

"Please don't kick that, honey," I say. "You'll get your new shoes dirty."

She looks at me and then puts her head down and says under her breath, "I gonna dig it so deep you never get out."

I think I'll be safe until she can reach the knives in the kitchen. Then all bets are off.

Career Direction

You know, if every serial killer could dress up like a clown and entertain at children's parties, then I'd have myself a second source of income.

You're My Inspiration

That last Dora the Explorer post was inspired by my daughter, Miss Sophie. She had been watching a particularly dramatic episode of Dora, in which Swiper the kleptomaniacal fox had stolen several items from our heroine and her monkey companion, Boots. Let's listen in to the conversation between my three year old and the television, shall we?

Dora: "Oh no! Swiper swiped Boot's boots! Can you see what else Swiper swiped?"

Sophie, icy derision in her voice: "Your backpack, you idiot. Jesus."

Daddy's so proud.

Dora the Explorer in Realityworld (tm)

"Oh no!" Dora cried. "How are we going to get across Piranha River and away from the hungry crocodiles chasing us?"

Boots the monkey scampered up into a nearby tree and began to idly masturbate, chattering loudly.

"We can use those vines to swing across!" Dora turned to address the camera. "But we're going to need your help. Raise your arms up high andAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUGHGHHIEIEIIEI!"

The crocodiles had arrived.