Tag: TV (Page 14 of 17)

How Geeky Is Too Geeky?

January 23, 2009 / DB

A long-winded attempt to steer you towards a cool television channel and speculate on whether weird hobbies could derail a budding relationship.

I spend a little time each day watching Current TV. If you’ve never seen Current, it is a citizen journalism outlet that lets pretty much anyone submit small videos, which they call pods, of 2-5 minutes about just about any issue. Some pods are about serious matters like the economy, the war on terror, or child labor while others focus on cultural or technology issues. Check your local listings to see if it’s available in your area.

Last week I came across a feature on Geek magazine. The reporter interviewed the magazine’s publisher, some employees, and some people who have been seen in the pages of the magazine. They also followed one of the editors out as she was doing research for a story about a maid cafe. Maid cafes are an Americanized version of Japanese bars where the waitresses dress up as their favorite anime characters.

The young lady the editor interviewed explained that she got connected with the maid cafe from her other hobby: dressing up as Disney princesses. If you watch the clip, you’ll see that they display a photo of the young lady dressed up as Belle from Beauty And The Beast.* While it is a bit shocking to see a 20-something woman dressed up like a cartoon princess, here’s the thing: she’s kind of hot.**

(* I know 800% more about Disney princesses now than I did a year ago. I had no idea who Belle was this time last year.)

The maid get-up didn’t do much for me, but the Belle dress did. What does that say about me?

”What did you think of that Dorothy girl?”
”The whole Judy Garland thing kind of turned me on. That doesn’t make me some kind of fag, does it?”
No, baby, you’re money.”

All this got me thinking. What if, back in my swinging single days of my 20s***, I had met a young lady at a party, a bar, or other social gathering. We talk, we get along, hit it off a little bit, and make arrangements to see each other again. Somewhere along the way, whether during date one or sixteen, she admits that on weekends she likes to dress up as a Disney character and go to parties. I wondered if I would be embarrassed to introduce her or talk about her to my friends.

(Please, friends who knew me in my 20s, keep your comments to yourself.)

“So, tell me about this new girl.”
“Well, she’s smart, she’s funny, she seems to like my jokes. She’s into art and going to interesting places. And she’s kind of hot.”
“Very cool, when do I get to meet her?”
“Well, here’s the thing….”

We’re talking about the early days of a relationship, here. Not someone you’ve fallen in love with and decided to accept, no matter how many warts, odd hobbies, or strange habits they might have.

Dressing up like a Disney princess would be a deal breaker, at least for me.**** I had a hard enough time finding women to date and then trying not to screw it up without having to deal with baggage like that. Of course, the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get over something like a Disney princess dress says a lot about why it took me so long to have a relationship that lasted more than two weeks.

But, come on, dressing like a Disney princess?!?!?

(I tried to think of a corresponding deal-breaking hobby that would be an automatic deal-breaker for women and couldn’t come up with one that seemed to match dressing like Cinderella. Ladies, what would it be? Playing Dungeons & Dragons while dressed like your character, perhaps? Relating every aspect of modern life to The Lord of the Rings? Yelling at the TV during sporting events in the belief that you can affect the action on the court? Help me out here.)

Holiday Perfection

September 1, 2008 / DB

Admit it, you were glued to VH1 Classic’s 80 Hours of the ’80s this weekend (That is if you have VH1 Classic). Lord knows I was. I thought about e-mailing each of you individually to make sure you knew it was on.

In between shows for the kids and doing things outside, I tried to check in on the A-Z run-through of some of the decade’s best videos all weekend. Most nights, while I was reading, I used it as my background music instead of my usual iTunes library. Good stuff.

Five years ago was the great Labor Day flood of 2003, in which we got like 800 inches of rain in about 12 hours (or eight inches, whatever). S. worked a 24 hour shift that weekend. I remember watching a lot of I Love the 80s that weekend. Had it been 80 Hours of the ’80s back then, I might have watched 24 straight hours!

Had that been the case, you would have expected about 5000 words out of me. So it makes sense that I scribbled down a few notes this weekend.
Worst video of the weekend? The Jackson’s “Torture.” Neither Jermaine or Michael bothered to show up. One of the other Jackson brothers had a single dance move he repeated over-and-over. And then there was some strange witch, demon, spider, skeleton thing going on. Apparently there wasn’t a lot of collaboration on the actual album. I know I have a few readers who saw the first show of the Victory Tour at Arrowhead in KC.

Also shitty was the video for REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Lovin’ You.” Just go watch. It’s a short song. As if the beginning and end aren’t bad enough, note the 10″ TV they “invested” in for the vid.

Long time readers will recall that I loved that song back in the day. I never really noticed until this weekend, though, how they totally copped out. There’s no second verse! Some songs truncate the second verse, cutting it to only two lines. But REO went straight to the guitar solo then back into the chorus. I wonder if Kevin Cronin tried and tried to put something decent together for the second verse, kept getting crap, but realizing he had pure FM radio gold in the first verse and chorus, decided to cut to the chase. It hit #1 for a week and kept me up for hours one night in 1981 to try to record it, so I guess it worked.

Continuing the shitty theme, pretty much all hip-hop videos. Most of them had the feel of, “Well, the label says we have to put a video together, so let’s call up all our boys, get some ladies to come on down, and we’ll figure something out. Oh, and our budget is $500.” I still love the music, but it was hard to justify how excited I was when Yo! MTV Raps started.

Another bad one was a Black Sabbath video from the Dio years. Filmed before a live audience, there is all kinds of bad camera work and audio through the entire piece. But, at the end, the music abruptly fades out, there’s a split second of silence, then the fake crowd noise fades in. Did they even try?

Eurythmics songs have aged very well. Annie Lennox is awesome.

On the positive side, I’ve decided Jane’s Addiction is one of the most underrated bands ever. I had no idea that Nothing’s Shocking came out in 1988. That’s a year before Nirvana’s Bleach came out. (And then Ritual De Lo Habitual came out a year before Nevermind.) I always thought <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgF7yxIjY8E”>”Mountain Song”</a> was brilliant, but knowing it came out when hair metal still ruled makes it even more amazing. And “Jane Says” was from ’88, too. Those guys were geniuses and deserve more credit for changing music. Nothing’s Shocking is the perfect mix of showing us exactly where rock music was in 1988 and where it was going from there. Weird that the video for “Jane Says” was actually from the mid-90s reunion.

And could Mark Goodman have taken his sunglasses off for his little between songs moments?

I hope they do this again over Thanksgiving are around the end of the year.

NY77

March 5, 2008 / DB

Every now and then, I write something and forget to post it. What lies below is an example of that. I only thought of this while reading a book this week that revolved around the same subject. I’m glad I found it.

I finally caught VH1’s documentary <a href=”http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/vh1_rock_docs/122259/episode.jhtml”>NY 77: The Coolest Year in Hell</a> this week. If you’re a fan of music, pop culture, or just American history, you owe it yourself to track it down. It’s an amazing piece of work documenting on of the most fascinating years ever, when three different kinds of new music were emerging just a few blocks from each other.

Other than Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in 1776, I don’t know that I’d rather travel back in time to live through a single year anyplace other than New York in 1977. It was a time when all the promise of the 1960s was coming completely unhinged as the city sunk into bancruptcy, crime was taking over the city, sex and drugs were losing their value because they were so easily obtained, and the city was generally becoming a cesspool. I think there are a lot of people my age who have never really cared to visit New York because we remember all the stories about how bad it was when we were kids. I remember seeing footage of the blackout while watching The Price is Right, hearing my parents and their friends talking about all the crime in New York, and generally equating New York with evil things (This was before I knew about the Yankees, no less!).

Perhaps fueled by the state of the city, or perhaps just through dumb luck and coincidence, the future of music was being forged in three spots in the city in 1977. On the lower west side, disco was developing first in a few homes and small clubs, and eventually spreading to larger clubs like Studio 54. On the lower east side, punk rock and new wave were gaining an audience at CBGB’s. And in the south Bronx, hip hop and rap were developing independently but soon joined forces. Disco was like a supernova, taking over the charts (thanks largely to Saturday Night Fever), and quickly burning away (although to be honest, disco never really died. It just became dance music and never really went away but changed with the times). Punk and new wave created the dominant pop sounds of the early and mid-80s and laid the seeds for the alt-rock revolution of the 1990s. And hip-hop obviously has become the dominant force in music.

What an amazing moment in time! I can’t imagine I would have fit in, but I would have loved to go back and see what Studio 54 was really like. Did it seem outrageous at the time, or was that just what New Yorkers saw as their reality? Did people understand that the music they heard at CBGB’s or Disco Fever (where hip-hop went public) was revolutionary or did they just like it because it was new and fun and helped them to forget about all the problems they faced during the day? What was it like to walk the streets back then, knowing the Son of Sam was prowling around, pretty much everyone was a target for muggers, and the few cops who were around were generally powerless to stop those who wanted to do you harm? It’s easy to overgeneralize when analyzing history, but 1977 seems like a pivital point in our nation’s history, when things really began to change and we started moving towards the more afluent, consumer-oriented, homogenous culture we live in today.

Columnist Jimmy Breslin has a great line at the end of the show, when asked about what New York has become. He says that it is Indianapolis, all the fun and danger have been sucked out and what is left is a city created by Madison Avenue to be family friendly. “I want to see whores on 47th street!” he says. The woman next to him (his wife?) says, “You wouldn’t know a whore if you saw one!” Two crusty, old New Yorkers who remember what it used to be like. The perfect summation.

Ed

July 4, 2007 / DB

I tend to get stuck on specific memories occasionally. I’ll call up some image from the past and it becomes a dominant thought for a couple days. I’m never sure if this is a sign, and if it is a sign what it means, or just how my brain works. For example, last fall I went through an extended phase where I kept thinking of the fall of 1994, when my roommate got a Mac and we were discovering the strange world of AOL. (I was so proud the day I learned how to talk trash on Michigan fans in the College Football chat room after Kordell Stewart went all Doug Flutie on them!) This spring, I kept thinking of watching Royals’ games with my grandfather in 1988. For like a week, that was the constant background noise I dealt with.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my favorite shows ever, Ed. The whole Stuckeyville gang – Ed, Carol, Mike, Nancy, etc. – keep popping up. That’s not unusual; every 4-5 months I check in to see if there are any updates on Ed coming to DVD (All reports say to the producers, or whoever is responsible, are working very hard, but they are having issues clearing the rights for all the music they used. They hope to get there, but are not there yet). I think this latest, extended stretch comes from a recent profile I read about Justin “I’m a Mac” Long, who is in the new Die Hard movie. I was a little bummed no one comes up to him and talks about his days as Warren P. Cheswick. As much as I love Macs, I still think of him as Warren first.

As I thought about it more, I decided Ed was definitely one of my five favorite shows ever. Probably #3, behind Cheers and Seinfeld. Part of that is because it was a great, if under-appreciated show. Part is because it was kind of my show – lots of friends watched it, too, but I was one of the first in our circle of friends to start watching and spread the world. S. used Ed as the theme for my 30th birthday party, which solidified that bond. And I’m sure part had to do with the point in my life when Ed came along, when I was advancing out of the entry-level part of my career into actually doing meaningful work, starting a relationship of depth and importance, and taking the final jump to adulthood and benefiting from the boost of confidence that came along with it. I remember a good friend gushed about Friends during its first season, saying the show was “exactly about my life!” Ed felt like that for me. Ironically, in the show’s final year, I didn’t watch much, partially because I was traveling so much, partially because NBC was yanking it around the schedule. But perhaps part of that was also because of how my life had changed with marriage, home ownership, etc. I thought the show ended well, hitting just the right notes in its final episode, if too soon. Sadly, TBS gave up way too quickly on airing reruns in 2004.

Anyway, because of those memories, I’ve been reading through a few Ed forums (They’re still out there, believe it or not), both to get DVD news and remember some of my favorite episodes. That got my brain working and I thought, in honor of my the show and the holiday week, I would put together a mix of some of the great music that was featured during the show’s 3 1/2 year run. It was like Grey’s Anatomy, only not all the songs were for chicks.

So, if you follow the link below, you’ll be able to download a quick and dirty mix of some songs I discovered via the good people at Ed. Hopefully the DVDs will be out before too long.

1 – “I’ll Be Coming Home” – Foo Fighters. The excellent theme song (For seasons 1, 3, and 4. We’ll pretend season two’s intro never happened).
2 – “Someday, Someway” – Marshall Crenshaw. This has become one of my all-time favorite songs thanks to both Ed and a friend who introduced me to Marshall at about the same time.
3 – “Bohemian Like You” – Dandy Warhols. This was in the same episode as “Someday, Someway.” The producers were on a roll that week.
4 – “Dressed Up Like Nebraska” – Josh Rouse. My introduction to an artist who has become one of my favorites, even if he’s left the Midwest behind.
5 – “What A Fool Believes” – The Doobie Brothers. As the show went on, it leaned more towards classic songs like this, but it was still a nice flash-back.
6 – “Dope Nose” – Weezer. When radio was sucking and you couldn’t hear songs like this anywhere, Ed occasionally came through for us.
7 – “I’m Always In Love” – Wilco. Again, ignored by radio, pumped up by Ed.
8 – “Fight Test” – The Flaming Lips. I always thought executive producer David Letterman set the tone for playing music like this, stuff out of the mainstream but worthy of a listen.
9 – “Yellow” – Coldplay. Ubiquitous for awhile, this might have been the first show to feature this song.

Twenty Years

November 24, 2006 / DB

After a lovely Thanksgiving Day, I got the girls to bed (S. is working tonight), did some dishes, made some formula for the night, watched some random TV, and finally, around 11:30, got around to pouring myself a glass of Jameson and sitting down to watch the greatest episode of Cheers ever produced, The Thanksgiving Orphans. I got about ten minutes into it when I had a shocking revelation: this year marks the 20th anniversary of the episode. There should have been a commemorative edition on Nick at Night or TV Land. Instead, Cheers is no where to be found on their schedules these days. Although the local channel that airs Cheers slotted this episode in at 9:30 this morning, they usually run episodes at 2:30 AM or in random slots on the weekends. When Cheers starts disappearing from TV, you know you’re getting old. There ought to be a law that Cheers is aired at least once a day on at least one station in every market in the country.

I had another revelation while watching the show (Jameson is a fine Irish whisky, so it isn’t uncommon to have revelations when enjoying it): one day my girls will make fun of me for my little Thanksgiving tradition. Ten years, maybe more, from now, I’m always going to have a tape or DVD or whatever the medium is then of The Thanksgiving Orphans stocked away somewhere. On Thanksgiving night, after dinner and clean-up or traveling back to our house, depending on if we host or head to relatives’ for the day, I’ll pour myself a glass of something nice, nothing blended of course, grab the tape or DVD or whatever, and pop it in. As I laugh until the tears come, my girls will shake their heads and say, “There’s dad, watching his olde time TV programme.” (They won’t actually say that, but I like the way that looks on the screen.) Then they’ll run out to meet friends or go shopping or whatever it is they’ll want to do while their old man sits on the couch, watching a show that will then be over 30 years old, but be no less funny than the first time I taped it in 1986. (I had that tape for a long, long time, which had the added bonus of live coverage of the Plaza Lights in Kansas City being turned on.)

One funny side note, I caught a few minutes of the episode as it aired this morning. When Diane comes to Carla’s door in her pilgrim costume, M. said, “Trick or treat!” Poor girl is fixated on trick or treating now. When the UPS man rang the doorbell Tuesday, she said the same thing.

I hope all had happy and safe Thanksgivings. A little Thanksgiving music post is still to come, as I didn’t complete it before the holiday.

Now Playing: Out Of Touch by <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Hall%20&%20Oates%22″>Hall & Oates</a>

Typical Night

February 28, 2006 / DB

Tuesdays at 9:00 are channel flipping time in our house. I generally run the remote, so we spend most of the following hour watching Scrubs on NBC. Is it just me, or since they started airing the new episodes in back-to-back fashion, isn’t the first episode always much funnier than the second? Anyway, during commercials on Scrubs, we flip over to TBS and watch Sex and the City reruns. Or, as I tell my wife, “Now you can laugh for awhile.” Not that I don’t find S&C funny, it’s more that like most of the TV and movie humor I’m into, my wife just doesn’t get Scrubs. She’s finally admitted that My Name is Earl is “kind of funny,” but can’t connect with the wacky docs at Sacred Heart or with the hilarity that is The Office.

Tonight I think we entered the phase of pregnancy where we sit and stare at S.’s stomach a lot. Little Fetisina was flopping around, sticking parts out, and jumping around all evening. Perhaps it was the etoufee we dined on to celebrate Mardi Gras. Most of the night S. sat on the couch with her belly sticking out so we could watch the show and try to guess what body parts were in each position. Do you think those are her feet, or is that her head? Could that lump be arms or her butt? Terrific fun when it’s not working your innards over; S. seemed a little more weirded out and uncomfortable.

I think we’re both going through odd phases right now. S.’s job is much different than it was during her pregnancy with M.. Now she’s dealing with lots of very sick premies; a routine week involves the deaths of several newborns where at her old job it was rare to have any deaths. I can’t imagine dealing with that under normal conditions, let alone when you’re carrying your own child. To make matters worse, in the past week to ten days, she’s started seeing kids whose due dates were after Fetisina’s due date. She had a kid last night who was due on June 1. Poor kid had no steroids over the last couple weeks of gestation, so on top of some other serious issues, its lungs are woefully underdeveloped and it doesn’t have much chance to survive the week. I know each time she deals with one of these kids, she’s thinking, “What if this happened to me?”

I, on the other hand, have started to have the crisis of confidence I assume most dads have when #2 is approaching birth. I’m finding it hard to imagine how I can possibly love another child as much as I love M.. Like all the other aspects of fatherhood; changing diapers, cleaning up puke, staying up all night with a screaming infant, dealing with mood swings, etc.; it seems an impossible task when it’s just a concept. When I finally have to deal with it, as with the diapers and the puke and the crying and the mood swings, I’m sure it will come without effort or thought. But sitting here at 28 weeks, I wonder how on earth will I be able to love Fetisina in the same amount that I love M.. What’s the old cliche of parenthood? You don’t love any of your kids any more than another, but you do find ways of loving them differently? Chances are good that Baby of the Blogger #2 will act quite different from her big sister. Where M. is full-speed-ahead exuberant, equally easy to entertain and frustrate, her sister might be cautious and calculating, sizing up things before she rushes in. Where M. fills the house with her screams and laughter and talking, Lil’ Sis might sit in corners reading books quietly. Or perhaps she’ll be a brute and force her will upon M.. We have friends whose youngest (4) shoves her 8-year-old brother and 7-year-old sister around without any objections from them. It’s those differences that will make me love her in a way that is different, but equal, to how I love M.. It’s just difficult to come to terms with that until I know what those differences are and can start connecting with them.

Winter Olympics

February 19, 2006 / DB

I’ve decided the Winter Olympics kind of suck. Not the events themselves, but the coverage we’re getting here in the States. I realize by making that statement I’m offering the most obvious and repeated opinion possible, but it’s true. The fundamental problem with the Winter Olympics are that there are so many fewer events than in the Summer Olympics it is difficult to fill all the TV hours. Thus, as NBC tries to save all the marquee events for prime time, we’re left with watching all kinds of crap during the day. I’ve actually watched about 10 hours of curling just because it was on. There’s no good reason for me to watch that “event.” In the summer, we can watch the preliminary rounds of events or pool play sports like volleyball, basketball, etc. during the day and convince ourselves that the finals we watch at night are kinda-sorta live. Other than hockey, there’s little in the Winter Games to make the daytimes pass.
Worse, when NBC holds an event for the evening they edit the crap out of it and ruin the drama. Example: Sunday night they were showing the men’s cross country pursuit event, which was fun to watch. Halfway through, though, Bob Costas says “We’ll get back to the cross country action in a little while, but first, we go to to the ice dancing competition.” I believe the proper internet term of the day is WTF?!?! We’re dealing with sports that the average American has minimal interest in, and you really want us to hang around for an hour to see how it turns out? No thanks.

NBC’s problem is doubly complicated because in the summer there’s really not a lot of reason to check sports web sites during the day. Most baseball games are played at night, and even then you can go directly to mlb.com if you want to avoid Olympic results. In the winter, though, I’m following college basketball and the NBA, so I’m checking scores throughout the day. Need to see that Texas-Oklahoma State score? What’s this? Bode fell down again? No reason to watch tonight I guess. It’s really a no-win situation for NBC, but I’m all-too-willing to pile on. Their job is to lure me in, and they’re failing.

I thought the buzz that was developing last week about how new sports like snowboarding are “saving” the Winter Olympics was interesting. The sports picked from the X-Games world are in many ways the opposite of the traditional sports. No further proof is needed than the reaction to Lindsey Jacobellis’ gaffe in the snowboard cross final. If you missed it, she grabbed her board to showboat on her final jump, bit it, and ended up staggering to a silver. Immediately the press attacked her, saying she was the ugly American, she demonstrated what’s wrong with sports today, or just playing up her failure. I think they miss the point. From my limited understanding of the sport, that seems like part of it. A little extra flair here and there. In regular sports, it’s seen as showing up the competition. In extreme sports, it’s seen as part of the event, done out of the excitement inherent to the sport rather than an attempt to denegrate opponents. In traditional sports, rivals are supposed to be fierce but good-natured, a balance that is often lost. The extreme sport athletes do seem to care about each other, focus on enjoyment of the competition rather than the competition itself, and, for lack of a better term, keep it real. Funny that they were being hailed at winter sport’s saviors and as soon as they act like themselves, get hammered.

Why did CBS have snowboarding on Sunday as well? Were these competitors not good enough to make the Olympics? Did CBS think it was smart to counter-program with the same events? Did they think NBC throwing the Daytona 500 in the middle of its coverage might lead legions of winter sports fans to search for their sports on a different channel?

Best thing about the Olympics is listening to the hockey announcers. There are no better announcers in the world of team sports. These guys talk 1000 miles an hour, have to track rapid changes in lineups, and react to plays that are difficult to see with the naked eye. They do all of this and make it all perfectly comprehensible and entertaining. A counter to listening to a certain pair of basketball announcers from the midwest on Saturday who managed to miss play-after-play because they were too busy talking about things that had nothing to do with the action in front of them. I don’t think they could ever handle hockey.

BTW, hockey should use my recommendation for Olympic basketball. Go with under-22 teams. I’m sorry, Chris Chelios isn’t playing solely for the honor of his country. He’s playing to fill a spot on his resume. That’s true for all the NHL veterans. Let’s give the game back to the kids. Even if they’re playing in the NHL or European pro leagues, at least they’ve not been jaded by the professional game. There are plenty of opportunities for the veterans to play for their country: the World Cup and Canada Cup being two examples.

Being Bobby

August 5, 2005 / DB

I’ve been watching afternoon episodes of Being Bobby Brown the last couple of weeks. We assumed it for the last decade, but Bobby and Whitney are officially insane, aren’t they? You don’t act like that on national TV if that’s not who you really are, right? When the cameras turn off, they don’t magically transform into the black Cleavers, do they?
There’s a part of me that feels dirty about watching it, since you’re seeing the basis for years and years of therapy for their kids in each episode. But that is what reality TV is all about, right? Trainwrecks? Seeing other people in completely ridiculous, demeaning situations that are generally the result of their own actions and choices so we feel better about our own lives? But the fact that the Browns/Houstons agreed to share their lives with the world removes some of that reluctance to watch. They want us to know they’re crazy. They’re proud of the fact that they’re nutso. They want us to see them fuck their kids up for life. If nothing else, it’s a good primer on how not to act as a parent and proof that just because you have some money, you’re kids still have even odds of having messed up childhoods. It bums me out, yet I can’t stop watching. The producers have me right where they want me.

Now Playing: I Like from the album “Guy” by <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Guy%22″>Guy</a>

My Morning With M

July 17, 2005 / DB

A rare weekend post. Tomorrow is the day the plumbers/electrical people come to hopefully repair our sewer problems for good. It’s only supposed to be 90, so going with out A/C won’t suck at all. Thankfully, I found a sitter so I can stay here and monitor the work while M. chills in climate-controlled nirvana.

Here’s a running diary of my morning with M. Friday.

4:45: M. cries. Wake up and check her. She’s rolling around, grinding her binky against her gums. Damn teething! I pick her up and let her rest against my chest for about ten minutes. She’s out, but I know if I put her back to bed, she’ll just wake up again in 15 minutes.
4:55: Grab a blanket and lay down on the couch. M. takes a few minutes to get comfortable, but eventually falls into an uneasy sleep. I say uneasy because as soon as I fall asleep, she moves around and wakes me up. She also manages to get her hair right against my chin or nose, so it constantly tickles me. Make mental note to shave it all off later in the day.
5:30: She’s slumbering peacefully, but my back hurts from my awkward position so I can’t sleep.
5:55: She starts to wake up, staring at the ceiling and jabbering.
6:00: British Open comes on. Finally, something to watch! Get M.’s milk and sit back to watch some golf. She loves her milk, you know.
6:30: Check OLN. No Tour de France until 7:30 today?
6:31: Curse the French.
6:45: Someone has poopies. It’s not daddy.
6:50: Change diaper. As soon as I get her cleaned, M. flips over, laughs, and crawls away from me bare-assed. I grab her and put her on her clean diaper. Someone in the Open makes a putt and the crowd applauds. M. claps along with them. Funniest moment of the morning.
7:10: The Today Show really sucks these days.
7:15: Freaking <a href=”http://empyrealenvirons.blogs.com/empyreal_environs/2005/07/falter.html”>A-Rod</a>.
7:20: M. seems uninterested in my monologue about how the <a href=”http://sports.espn.go.com/golf/britishopen05/news/story?id=2109938″ id=”2109938″>greatest golfer of all-time and his heir apparent</a> are dominating coverage on TNT this morning. Apparently, sucking your own toes is more interesting than this golf history lesson.
7:40: Is that mommy I hear upstairs? Crying from M..
7:45: S. gets up and relieves me.

Still no walking. Unless S. holds her hands, that is, then she struts around like a champ. I predict she’ll walk one week from Monday, which of course is her birthday.

Although her recognizable vocabulary is still pretty much “mama” and “dada,” she does have some other “words” that she reuses in similar situations. Example, when she’s babbling about something, she often uses the term “Bop-mmm.” I don’t know if she’s dyslexic and means “mmm-bop” or what, but we hear that a lot. Anytime she sees a duck, she said “Bah-bah-bah” which is about as close to “quack-quack-quack” as she can come. “M., what does a duck say?” “Bah-bah-bah.” Always three times. She even points at the <a href=”http://duckgear.aflac.com/ccduckgear/”>Aflac duck</a> and says “bah-bah-bah.” Very cute.

I think kids enjoy repeating things because parents force them to. You know how little kids want to be swung around over-and-over, or go down a slide 50 times, etc.? I used to think that was because repetition is a learning tool or their complete lack of cyncism and total devotion to the pleasure of the moment was what caused it. Now I believe it’s because the typical kid has to put up with this from their parents:
“M., how big are you? Where’s the fan? What does the duck say? Where is your tongue? Where’s your mommy?” Repeated about 20 times a day. I can only blame myself when she wants to read the same book ten times before bed each night next year.

Another cute but somewhat unfortunate development is M.’s kissing skills. She was learning how to blow kisses when we were in KC, so some of you saw that. She puts her palm against her mouth and holds it. She hasn’t really learned how to blow it away yet. If you asked her for a kiss, though, she would slowly lean into you and put her forehead against yours. Very sweet. Yesterday, though, she spit out her binky and came at me with an open mouth. Like 20 times. I need to explain that we’re not in Kentucky (no offense to any Kentucky readers out there) so French kissing your dad isn’t cool. It is pretty funny though. When I turn and put my cheek towards her, she thinks it’s great fun. She’s now connected “Give daddy/mommy a kiss” with the action, too. “<a href=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/quotes”>So that’s how it is in their family?</a>”

As I mentioned above, she likes to clap. What’s scary is she now knows when the appropriate moment to clap during her Baby Da Vinci DVD is. A week ago, she wouldn’t clap until she heard the clapping from the screen. Now she starts clapping at the exact moment the kids on-screen clap.

I forget if I mentioned we got M. a wading pool that now sits on our deck last weekend. Thanks to a week of rain, she’s not been able to use it much. But Sunday we took her out and stuck her feet in. She shrieked with delight. 30 seconds later we had stripped her down and dropped her in naked. She loved it. I hope this isn’t a habit that carries over to high school and college. The picture at the beginning of the post was obviously taken last week when we still had the good manners to put our daughter in her bathing suit.

Happy Monday to all. Hope to return Monday night or Tuesday, electrical availability allowing.

Now Playing: Feels Good from the album “The Revival” by <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Tony%20Toni%20Tone%22″>Tony Toni Tone</a>

Observations From The TV

December 17, 2004 / DB

Things seen on TV last night.

1 – A Charlie Brown Christmas. M. cried, keeping up a tradition her dad started many years ago. I was a sensitive little lad, and the overwhelming negativity of Peanuts animated specials were always too much for me to take. Whether it was the ridicule of Linus while he waited for the Great Pumpkin, or the persecution of Charlie Brown in pretty much every show, I always got upset while watching the Peanuts gang. Things came to a head when I was 5 or 6 and watched Snoopy Come Home. My mom warned me that she wasn’t going to let me watch Peanuts specials anymore if I continued to get so worked up over them. Well, Snoopy Come Home is pretty much the saddest animated show for kids ever, so within 15 minutes I was hiding between the sofa, a large fern, and the crate my parents kept their stereo on quietly sobbing away. My mom peeked into the room, didn’t see me, and searched until she saw me curled into my small hiding space. I had been crying silently up to that point, but when she saw me, I lost it. I don’t think she even let me see that Snoopy did indeed come home, she just sent me to my room, where I wept the good weep of a small boy until I fell asleep. Thankfully, after reading Amazon’s reviews, it seems like a lot of kids in the 70s bawled while watching Snoopy Come Home. I might as well keep M. away from Charlie, Lucy, and Linus from here on because she definitely got the gene.

2 – Fred Hickman hosting Sportscenter. Not sure where he’s been hiding, but the former CNN sports host has surfaced after many years out of the national eye. Young readers may not recall this, but once upon a time Sportscenter actually had competition from CNN. Fred was ok back in the day, I remember stealing a few of his lines for stories in my high school paper, so I’ll hope he keeps his schtick to a minimum and doesn’t try to compete with the other hacks in Bristol.

3 – Speaking of no competition for ESPN, I guess that’s why they can run their Dale Earnhardt movie 3 on ESPN, then immediately after, again on ESPN2 while they’re simultaneously trying to sell a DVD of said movie. Makes perfect sense. I’m sure they promoted their next movie during each commercial break on both networks as well.
The network did show one of the reasons why they have no competition by providing excellent, in-depth coverage of all the action in baseball’s hot stove league during Sportscenter. Then again, they’re showing some high school kid’s press conference in which he’s going to announce what college he’ll be playing football at on ESPNews. This isn’t LeBron James or Greg Oden. Just some really good player most sports fans have never heard of. I think any high ground the network tries to claim when discussing the overexposure of athletes has been lost. Overall, C-/D+ for ESPN last night.

4 – Entertainment Weekly’s Top 15 Biggest Little Things of 2004 on Bravo. Any list that includes coverage of the extended DVD of Showgirls is worth watching. Actually, it was a very good run down of the biggest issues in entertainment this year. A little snarky, but not the surfeit of snark that VH1 will no doubt provide in their year-end shows.

5 – Thanks to the DVR, a couple classic episodes of Cheers. For fans of the early days, TVLand rolled the tapes over last week and are still in season one if you’d like to go back and watch the brilliance of Coach or the early days of Sam and Diane’s relationship. One episode I had recorded was Tortelli’s Tort, in which Carla attacks a Yankees fan who comes to the bar and harasses the Red Sox fans after another bad loss to the Bronx Bombers. Somewhere, Carla Tortelli, Sam Malone, and Ernie Pantuso are smiling now that the Sox have finally won a series.