Do the Yak

All gone in the Big Apple...

Mimi, one of my favorite bloggers had a recent post that cracked me up more then usual. Every year since 2000 there have been children in my life, which means there's actually a point to Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever, and every year they understand more about the holidays' significance and especially about the PRESENTS I WANT TO OPEN THEM NOW! So why is it that every year I seem to be more and more lame at getting it together vis a vis said holiday(s)? (Disclosure: I just did a Freudian-slip typo and transposed the consonants in "lame" – really.) This year we had the added element of visiting in-laws, which was very wonderful and familial, so between the cooking and house-cleaning (read: removing only life-sized dust bunnies and toothpaste sink-boogers larger than my thumbnail), when the hell do I have time to actually procure and wrap presents? Thank God for Amazon.com even though most of the stuff still arrived too late. Then there was the office holiday party yester

Oh the absurdity... Barbie now has a dog that eats its own shit . How educational! I am not making this up. The Amazon.com product description says in part: "Finally, Barbie has a dog that eats and makes a mess! Tanner the dog eats and ejects waste from his body. At this point, Barbie can pick it up in a scooper, and then Tanner will eat it again -- just like your real dog!" See, it comes with these little "biscuits" that Barbie pops in Tanner's mouth and they magically reappear out the other end as... another kind of biscuit... ready for re-eating. Yummy! And just in case anyone is offended, she comes in an African-American version too. I simply HAD to have it. We just got a generous Amazon gift certificate and you can guess what was the first thing I flung into my virtual shopping cart. And no, it is NOT for the girls. This goes into our cherished up-on-a-high-glass-shelf collection of cultural artifacts, most of which are bobble-head dolls. The most recent i

I meant to comment on this development a while back, but better late than never -- just to state the obvious that the Catholic leadership is STILL full of shit despite their latest doctrinal blah-blah . The highlights: "homosexual acts are immoral" and "the homosexual inclination is objectively disordered." Needless to say, the ban on same-sex marriage, civil unions and adoption are still in full force. "Because homosexual acts cannot fulfill the natural end of human sexuality, they are never morally acceptable," says the chairman of the bishops' doctrine committee. This of course is also a reflection of another "stay the course" sentiment regarding use of contraception, including by married couples. Since sex outside of marriage is verboten and as we know, the only reason to have sex even within marriage is to have so many kids that you financially and emotionally destroy the marriage, not to mention the older kids who get less time and f

Those old family photos can come back and bite you in the ass. What's with the neckties? And was it just too burdensome for Future 43 to put down the cigarette for a minute?

Interesting commentary on NPR yesterday about why everyone is so taken with Barack Obama. The commentator's view ( Steven Barnes ) is that Obama projects hope and positivity across racial divides because he is a black American who does not carry the psychological baggage of being African-America (i.e., descended from slaves). The holidays are coming, which means the domestic-goddess thing ratchets up with holiday cards (arrived via Shutterfly but not yet addressed and sent), planning meals for in-laws (I'll take the 10-pound bag of potatoes for muchas latkes), various end-of-year school functions of a social and/or charitable nature, and mixing a playlist for the office holiday party. Fortunately I keep my sense of humor by playing this little ditty now and then. Batteries not included! FI-I-I-I-VE months of bills!

I few months ago I linked to this compelling bit of nature news (though the photo really says it all). After some careful forensic analysis by National Geographic, it appears that the python did NOT pop from the size of the gator it had swallowed. Seems another alligator bit off the python's head some time after it had chowed down on gator #1. But questions remain on... CSI Everglades. Had another of those (how did I wind up in this movie?" moments the other day when I found a scribbled to-do list I'd made some time ago. The things to do were: buy new calendar [specifically, this family uber-organizer model ] make holiday cards put away laundry cooking sew up stuffed animal Am I a domestic goddess or WHAT? Fortunately the list also included two other items that indicate some slightly wider mental range: do self-evaluation [a masochistic component of our annual performance evaluation process] blog Still, at this time of year, no one can hold a candle to Martha for making

OK, so maybe it was a bit unrealistic to expect myself to post every day during Thanksgiving break. Which was a lot of fun, by the way, but we basically spent every waking moment at my dad's, which was a tightly scheduled sessions of eating, talking and drinking (usually all three at once), so I just fell off the NaBloPoMo wagon big-time. Better luck next year -- though would it kill these people to make it some month other than November? Or December. And probably August. I'll have my people call your people. So... Thanksgiving. The Texas clan seems happy and remarkably calm, all things considered (three boys under 6 and two very full-time jobs). Nothing much happened, aside from the above activities plus a rousing game of Pictionary. I was so inspired that subsequently volunteered to help plan the office holiday party. Yes, there will be Charades, and yes, and I'm quite sure I will embarrass myself while playing even though I will be completely sober. In other news, I'

Geese Aplenty has validated my feelings about bicyclists in the city . Tomorrow is Demolition Derby Day in the Leafy Suburb. Not with cars, more's the pity, but with large pieces of equipment that eat buildings, which is the fate that's about to befall the existing ranch house on the site of our future Forever House. Yes, after months of dealing with town bureaucrats and attitudinous architects, the house project is finally getting underway. So I get to wake up at 5 a.m. on a Monday on which I'm on vacation to go shiver in a driveway while Ben and the kids dance around and watch the fun. If it were up to me I'd wait until the news highlights on TV, but apparently to men and small children, watching a house get torn down is a Big Deal. So I'll cheerfully go along with it and then excuse myself after a decent interval to go back home and go back to sleep. I have to store up strength for this week's fun -- my brother and his family fly in for a visit highlighted by

In yesterday's post about the delightful CowParade Boston, I neglected to do something vitally important: aggressively plug Sacred Cows , the superb debut novel by my friend Karen Olson , because it actually features a Cow Parade in New Haven, the setting for her debut mystery novel about hard-boiled police reporter Annie Seymour. Probably the reason I forgot to make the connection is because of my shameful secret: I haven't actually read the book yet, though Karen was kind enough to give me a copy a while back. Why, you ask? Well, early on, I guess I was subconsciously afraid that I wouldn't like it and then would have to think up something nice to say about it, and of course I didn't want to hurt any feelings. Not that I'm any great judge of literature with ultra-high standards; as anyone who knows me can attest, I have never shied away from books that some ivory-tower aesthetes might view as, well, trash. In fact I was the despair of my favorite high school teac

A while back, the whole family plus Ben's mom went for a walk in the Back Bay to observe members of a herd of colorful ruminants. I refer to CowParade Boston, a terrific public-art display that's appeared in several places around the country. Basically the organizers solicit artists' designs for painting white fiberglass cows, then they select the winning srtists and give them each a cow to decorate. Then the cows are installed here and there throughout the city, though naturally most of them are in places that get a lot of foot traffic. Finally after a period of time they remove the cows and auction thenm off for charity. I meant to write about this before, but I didn't because I didn't realize until now that there are lovely cow photos on the web so you can see what the heck I'm talking about. We have private documentation as well -- took a photo of each cow we encountered, with the kids and others draped around the under the creature, which is probably one

It gets pretty boring when you're waiting on the podium for those dumbass reporters to frame their nitwit questions.

Yesterday was the last day of a three-day weekend. It was overcast when the two urchins clambered into bed around 7 a.m. Eventually we all got up and Ben made pancakes and I settled down to read the paper while Ben immersed himself in revising architectural drawings for the Forever House. The kids were blissfully quiet, enraptured by Noggin. And I just couldn't get motivated. There wasn't anything pressing to do, anyway. And the kitchen was kind of cold. So... I tiptoed back upstairs, climbed back into the toasty bed and took a post-breakfast nap. The icing on the cake was hearing rain spatter against the window as I huddled under the comforter. The best part was that I don't think anyone even noticed. Children didn't come whining, husbands were not standing by the bed clearing their throats ostentatiously... I swear on days like that (rainy fall/winter Sundays) there really is no reason to get out of bed in the first place. And it's a good thing I have a job becaus

Boy I love the Internet! And the people who use their copious free time to make it even more fun. (Don't forget to click on "more.") adopt your own virtual pet!

...of the election results. No more from me on this topic (unless something juicy happens like a senator switching parties), except to point out this clever campaign-sign contest .

I thought we were past this phase... We were all driving home last night around 9:00 from dinner at a friend's house when Becky suddenly started crying in the back seat. The reason? "I have a bead up my nose!" she wailed. We were about five minutes from home and she wasn't having any trouble breathing, so I tried to convince her not to sniff (no dice). Once we got home I took her upstairs while Bern got the flashlight and I got the Tweezers of Futility. I had a look and I could see something sparkling WA-A-A-AY up there. No way were metal instruments going that far. We called the doctor, who told us to try a home remedy that usually works -- holding the unobstructed nostril closed and giving her a strong puff of air mouth-to-mouth. Also no dice. So off we went to our health plan's Urgent Care clinic, thankfully (I say that because the alternative would have been the hospital ER, and since she wasn't spouting arterial blood, we would have been seen after five h

1. I admit it -- I now read politicalwire.com a lot. We love Charles Rangel . Which reminds me of something I forgot to mention about Election Day. I'm signed up for news alerts from CNN.com, so I sometimes get e-mails with the subject line "CNN Breaking News" and the body text has a one-line summary of the story. Obviously this is intended for news stories so big that you want to know about them ASAP rather than wait until you get around to checking the web site on your own. So on election day, I saw "CNN Breaking News" in my Inbox and sprang to attention, since I assumed it was something major to do with the election like maybe Cheney having a heart attack at his polling station or Bush conceding. Imagine my burst of relief and warm feelings when I opened the e-mail and read: "Britney Spears files for divorce from her husband Kevin Federline, citing irreconcilable differences." Thank God CNN.com has its priorities straight. 2. Dan Savage had a grea

That's me, doing my daily NaBloPoMo post before midnight tonight so you don't forget, and the Dems, who have managed to gain control of the Senate as well as the House, as they just announced (this is Wednesday night) that Democrat James Webb beat incumbent Republican George "Macaca" Allen by a hair in Virginia. This beats even my rosiest expectations (winning back the House but not the Senate), and it's a sweet counterpoint to how I felt two years ago when it seemed Kerry had a good shot but Shitforbrains won by taking Ohio. Boy was that disappointing, especially since I was mired in the Deep South at the time. Now all I can say is... YESSSSSSS! I can't believe how caught up I got. Toward the end i was devouring politicalwire.com and electoral-vote.com , and last night I even printed out some score sheets for tracking the hot races like on Oscar night -- though CNN had a terrific personal tracking page as well. I certainly didn't get this worked up abou

I got new glasses for the first time since the turn of the century (I would guess the early 1990s). When selecting frames, you're always at the mercy of whatever style happens to be hip at the moment, but I think we're in a good period. They're neither outlandish nor nerdy; they're subtle yet quietly cool. Of course I may laugh my ass off at pictures of myself in these glasses 'round about 2025. Though I can't imagine they could be worse than others that people thought were nice-looking at the time, like this . Those of us who are unusually nearsighted also had to cope with thick distorting eyeglass lenses, but they seem to have largely solved that problem. Otherwise I might still look like this . By the way, did you recognize that last person? This photo will surely be trotted out for ridicule when she runs for president. It's not surprising that she's always had a rotten hairstyle, which she frequently tries to overwhelm away with scarves. Though this

Much better today. Houston, we have a brain. Last weekend Ben spent just about every waking moment working on the architectural plans for the new house while I imitated June Cleaver by doing laundry, grocery shopping and -- I cannot believe this -- baking cookies for the Election Day school bake sale. Apparently the wild yak has been fully domesticated. Anyway, we were inside the whole time so late Sunday afternoon we all went for a walk in the woods to have QUALITY FAMILY TIME, dammit, and we had a cool nature experience. As we approached our house at dusk, I heard “whoo hoo, whoo hoo” nearby. No, it was not Homer Simpson or some uncouth teen wolf-whistling at my hott bod. It was a great horned owl, I figured, though of course you couldn’t see it. But -- wrong! I looked up in the general direction of the hooting and there it was, a blob on the highest branch of a dead tree, moving now and then. Of course it took off as I was telling the others where it was, but I kept my eye on it, fi

O-kaaaaay... so the daily blogging thing didn't even get up to speed before I fell off the horse. But in the spirit of American stick-to-it-iveness, I will get right back on that horse. Oh dear, now I sound just like my mother. I have some ideas for semi-interesting posts. Unfortunately I can't pursue any of them today because I have a cold that is turning my brain into mush. It's extra annoying because I'm over the constant sneezing and honking phase, so I don't appear to be sick, but beneath this composed exterior is a yak teetering on the verge of delirium, so I'm going to rest now. And if you're wondering about the title of this post, it's the sound of snoring by one of several animals in Snoozers by Sanda Boynton, the best writer of little kids' books I've found.

I'm deliberately stealing the subject line of a post by Dooce because I'm so glad she alerted the world to this excellent article by a reporter in New Orleans who realized he was suffering from serious depression and needed medication, but only after his life had almost completely fallen apart. He was one of many people, including me earlier on, and my mother-in-law now, who didn't quite believe in depression as a serious illness that can and was skeptical of antidepressants, perhaps feeling that taking medicine was a copout and was simply bypassing "real issues" that could be sorted out only by talk therapy. I myself always figured that depression was a natural result of temporarily difficult circumstances in your life, that you should buck up and keep plodding and you'd eventually feel better, etc., etc. I too was an on-and-off sufferer starting at age 15; that episode I attributed to RHI (Raging Hormonal Imbalance, i.e., being smack in the middle of pube

Not to turn on the religion-rant button again, but The New York Times had an interesting review of a book that argues that a basic sense of right and wrong are hard-wired into humans, much as Noam Chomsky argues that the the capacity for language is also part of our innate neural machinery. To quote the Times article: This "moral grammar... is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie. But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations." The book then "suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior." Told ya so! you can be a good person (in fact, you're so

Here we go -- 30 straight days of posting, so I foresee some mighty inconsequential things being said, both here and elsewhere. As an editor of mine once said about an extremely light and fluffy feature that one of us had written, "Better put a rock on it or it'll float away." So last night was Halloween. As usual, we waited until the night before to purchase and carve pumpkins. Then as it turned out, we weren't even around last night, so the poor things have yet to be set on the stoop and lit up. The reason for our absence was that one of our future neighbors in Leafy Suburb had tracked me down and kindly invited the whole family over to her annual Halloween party and trick-or treat-en masse. So all the neighborhood parents and kids were there. The hostess provided pizza for all, lovely hors d'oeuvres and beer for the grownups, which immediately warmed me to her -- no foofy martinis, and not even fancy Pilsner glasses -- right out of the bottle, though only micro

I'm so inspired by the fact that someone I've never even met posted a comment on my last entry that I'm going to have top pursue this rich topic further. I refer, of course, to "water closets," and no I will not be sharing any more personal adventures therewith, but seriously, indoor plumbing is something we have to deal with soon in earnest, picking out fixtures and whatnot for the new house. So work with me here. In the interest of fairness, we should briefly look at sinks, which aren't nearly as interesting as toilets except for the occasional unintentionally amusing ones. In a fancy plumbing store a few years back, a salesperson showed us one like this , and before I knew it, I had blurted out, "It looks just like a tampon!" Well, it DID. She couldn't HANDLE the truth, is all. As we can imagine, the call of nature was something to be dreaded in the days before the invention of the toilet. You had your Roman group privies without stall walls

Toilets and I, we have issues. Not that I don't like using them -- I was only kidding about outhouses, really -- but sometimes they plot against me, and now they're after my daughter as well. Last weekend we went to some people's house for brunch. I'd met them briefly once or twice -- Ben knew them from elsewhere and they were super nice. Which is why it was a tad embarrassing to report to the man of the house that my four-year-old daughter had managed to clog their toilet. Yes, folks, she has talent, as we have documented . It gets worse; this family does not own a plumber's helper. I'm not even going to discuss what I did to try (unsuccessfully) to solve the problem. I offered to go back to our house and fetch one, but the Man tut-tutted and headed into the bathroom. Silence, followed by some disturbingly vigorous sounds, and then a triumphant flush and gurgle. Turns out he had employed the toilet brush in ways not recommended by the manufacturer. Exactly how

The month of November has been designated National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo , by Fussy . Participants commit to posting a blog entry every single day during that month, even if it's just a picture or an inarticulate squawk. I'm up for it. At least it's less masochistic than its progenitor, NaNoPoMo , where you commit to writing a total of 50,000 words in one month, or about 175 pages of a novel -- from scratch. This is a great way to overcome writer's block, as the organizers cheerfully note, "Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality... Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap." That is, of course, assuming you actually have the time to type that many words in one month that make any sort of sense at all. What the jargon on "ER" used to sound like Yes, we have HIV, cancer and plenty of other unsavory ailments, but there us

Just got back from Seattle late (really late) Sunday night. We were supposed to return by dinnertime, but Someone (ahem) didn't leave enough time to get to the airport and they wouldn't let us on the plane even though it wasn't scheduled to depart for another 30 minutes. Fortunately Sea-Tac airport has a fully padded play space for hyperkinetic youths. Then we were selected (randomly, I think) for the Whole-Ball-of-Wax search, involving full-body pat-downs and swabbing our stuff for explosives residue. Fortunately we had answered the kids' questions about security with deliberate vagueness ("Oh, just to be sure you're not bringing anything... that's, you know, not allowed") since I could clearly envision one of them piping up "Mommy, are they looking for bombs? Do you have a bomb? I have one! In my stuffed kitty! Hee hee hee!" I can happily say that I am still walking free even though I had inadvertently left a small bottle of Purell hand-sa

But first, sports. Click on the icons for details; they automatically go to the latest data so you can come back again and again. Like any sporting event, it's always satisfying when your team is ahead but it's most exciting when the contest is close – especially when the stakes are this high. Of course the House race got a little more interesting since the Foley scandal broke. Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe compares the GOP leadership to the Catholic hierarchy in light of sexual molestation in the ranks: ignore the wrongdoer and conceal everything. Saturday was Museum Day sponsored by the Smithsonian – you could get two free passes to pretty much any museum of your choice on that day only. So all four of us went to the MFA (kids get in free). I wasn't expecting too much and Becky did indeed get noisily bored after a while, but Sarah was really into it, to the point of bringing a sketchpad and copying in pencil some painting and a mummy case, complete with one-letter c

I know I'm obsessed with these people and I thought I'd sampled most of the media droppings about them, but I wasn't aware until I read The Sarcastic Journalist yesterday that they have a web site . It includes links to fun facts (Hey! Did you knoiw she's been pregnant fot a total of ten and a half YEARS?) and some insight into their apparently highly satisfactory relationship with God . I just can't get over these people – I have this horrified fascination, like when you see photos for the first time of gigantic slimy sea worms living miles deep in the ocean in boiling water from volcanic vents, or watching a graphic movie about nuclear war. You're awed, you're amazed, you're disgusted but you can't tear your eyes away. On the bright side, I had a better-than-usual ride into work today. I was playing my iPod through the nifty device Ben got me for my birthday, and the music turned out to be really interesting stuff I blindly downloaded from strea

Plastics. I have found plastics Nirvana . I can now fully indulge my bizarre fascination with Things for Holding Other Things. I have found little squeeze bottles in all sorts of sizes for shampoo when traveling. And big plastic jars for flour and sugar. Not to mention all manner of buckets, pails, bins, barrels and drums. AND! Did you know that we ordinary mortals can also satisfy all our pump , valve , and pipe/duct/blower needs from the privacy of our own computer? Take a deep cleansing breath... OK. The rest of life pales in comparison, but for the record, it's been the usual whirlwind of grocery shopping, taking the kids to the dentist, a family outing to go apple-picking (SO New Englandy), and visiting my dad, which was really nice last night because my brother from Texas was in town, so we stayed and talked until the kids sent a latter to the dining room via registered mail that said WE ARE DAMN TIRED AND CRANKY – WOULD YOU PLEASE BE RESPONSIBLE PARENTS AND TAKE US HOME AND

All this global jihad, all this conservative Christianity... so bogus. These days the media's focus is on Islamic extremism because of Iraq and the 9/11 anniversary. As a side note, ABC recently aired a docudrama about 9/11 that raised hackles over some right-leaning inaccruacies, as noted by Defective Yeti . But the show apparently sucked in other ways and no one watched it. American Christian fundamentalism is no longer big news (remember Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and "God hates fags"?). In the eyes of today’s Islamic hard-liners, all Americans, Jews, etc. are infidels, of course, but The War for Islam in the Boston Globe discusses the intra-Muslim struggle that’s also happening. The article notes that the "Islamic Reformation" is fueled by growing literacy and ease of access to the Koran, and varying interpretations thereof -- including the old-style puritanical views by bin Laden et al. Thanks partly to the Internet and widespread translation of the Kora

So we just shampoo the child and she's cured and we go on our merry way, right? WRONG. We shampooed, we combed afterwards per instructions, we found nothing alarming, we relaxed, and then we decided to do the same for Sarah just as a precaution. And we painstakingly combed out her hair with the special ultra-fine comb (after first using a regular comb and incinerating it). "Painstaking" is just the right word, because Sarah has longer and much finer hair than Sarah, so the comb caught all the time no matter how gentle I tried to be. So this precautionary task involved about 45 minutes of intermittent shrieking and sobbing, which was no fun for anyone but would have been easy to put behind us had the exercise not revealed a LOT of tiny brown... things, some moving and some not. All I can say is... ICK ICK ICK. It appears Becky may actually have caught lice from Sarah, who had commented in preceding days or even weeks that her head itched, but of course it never occurred to

I was in the car on the way to work. It was a Tuesday and therefore a very hectic production deadline day for the weekly newspaper I edited. Just as I got to my desk, Ben called to say he'd heard on NPR that a plan had crashed into the World Trade Center. I hung up thinking that was pretty stupid of the pilot, since the weather was perfectly clear; I assumed it was a small plane whose pilot had a seizure or something. Then I heard that a second plane had hit the other tower. I immediately logged onto CNN.com but of course got nothing due to the totally overloaded bandwidth. I was the only one in the office with a radio, so people crammed into my cubicle listening to the local public radio station. The plane hit the Pentagon; there was a report of a car bomb at the State Dept. All flights were cancelled indefinitely. A colleague burst into tears. I kept putting the paper together because no one told me to stop, and I figured that someone might just send me a new story in the afterno

Another academic year begins. Sarah started first grade today, which is the Thursday after Labor Day. Tuesday and Wednesday we had no options except to bring her to work, which I did for most of the day Tuesday and then Wednesday afternoon. I must admit I had mighty low expectations of getting any actual work done, but she surprised me. She spent most of her time being coy and mute with my office mates, killing a whole forest's worth of paper with my three-hole punch, coloring, cutting, and playing with my desk animals, complete with intricate and dialogue under her breath. At one point, though I was actually concentrating on something and she kept interrupting... Sarah: "Mom? Mom?" Me: (only a tiny bit impatiently) "Just a sec, sweetie, I'm working on something." Sarah: "I told you it would be annoying having a kid at work." Actually she told me no such thing, nor did I tell her any such thing, so I have to conclude she's already adept at pick

Remember my rant about kiddie spas that sexualize little girls? That's nothing compared to kiddie beauty contests. The movie we saw last night, “Little Miss Sunshine," does a hilarious send-up of this fine American institution that's also surprisingly touching. Great dialogue, great acting throughout, but the pageant finale will go down as a classic. Nine-year-old Olive: "I'd like to dedicate this performance to my Grandpa." Emcee: "Aw, how sweet. And where is your grandpa now, honey?" Olive, with equanimity: "In the trunk of our car." I won't spoil the whole thing for you, but this emcee has to be seen to be believed. Think American actor wildly impersonating Eric Idle impersonating a 1970s American game-show emcee. Ben and I laughed a lot during the movie, but it wasn’t entirely carefree humor — it was complicated because it was also poignant in places, and because it revolved around something I find truly horrifying. The kiddie-pa

Just pondering some words that are inherently funny. I don't mean words whose meanings evoke humor, but words that just sound funny all by themselves. As a group, I think the funniest are words that mean surprised or puzzled, like "kerfuffled," "bamboozled," "flummoxed" and "gobsmacked." The derivation of only the last one is clear, as in "being so surprised you slap your hand to your open mouth," or "gob" in British parlance, as in "Shut yer festering gob!" There are lots of other useful British words and phrases you should know... where was I? Oh yes... lots of animals have funny names even though the animal itself it not particularly amusing. I have to admit my views in this area are somewhat colored by Monty Python. I mean, how can you not suppress a chuckle at the mere mention, even in the most serious context, of "halibut," "wombat," "stoat," "vole" or "hedgehog

...from Sarah's birthday party last Saturday. God, whatever happened to plain old Pin the Tail on the Donkey? We woke up in what we thought was plenty of time to get ready before the kiddies arrived at 11:00. We had actually gotten all the fixin's (ice cream cake, matching paper Spongebob Squarepants tableware, gifts, wrapping paper and a puppet lady) in the days before. So all we had to do was tidy up a bit and get ready for fun. But first we had a leisurely bearkfast, coffee and newspaper-reading session before getting to work. T-minus 90 minutes: Ben helps Sarah assemble goodie bags for her guests, which takes quite a bit of time due to her insistence that items be distributed in exactly the correct order and combination. I start to worry about time and start mopping the kitchen/dining area at high speed like one of those people in the sport of curling, then stabbing at the toilet bowl with the brush once or twice. T-minus 60 minutes: Ben and I are setting a new decibel reco

OK, actually femininity in general, but "tits" will probably get more hits from Google wankers. I refer to the two extremes of Puritanical modesty vs. titty exhibitionism and the high-volume, self-righteous, straitlaced moral outrage that invariably follows. On one end of the spectrum, you have people who are offended by images of breast-feeding . Note that the partly visible nursing boob in question was on the cover of BabyTalk magazine, not Penthouse. "There's a huge Puritanical streak in Americans, and there's a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part... It's not like women are whipping them out with tassels on them! Mostly, they are trying to be discreet," says the editor. You go, girl. Then we have my old favorite Michelle Duggar, she of the nuclear-powered uterus, who just doesn't have enough to do with taking care of more than a dozen kids but she has to MAKE HER DAUGHTERS' DRESSES HERSELF so as to ensure sufficie