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I was on the fence about watching the Oscars tonight. Chris Rock is an inspired choice to host, and Scorsese will probably get his Susan Lucci moment. But then again, I haven't seen anything except the brilliant Eternal Sunshine, so it's hard to give a shit.
Then I read this.
My little protest will drop ABC's rating in New York by 1/73763 of a point.
Friday night in the big city, and where am I? Beside my lovely, girthful wife and watching NUMB3RS, a show that wants very desperately to glamorize applied mathematics as a crimefighting tool. It's so unbelievably bad, it's wonderful. Lots of awkward expository dialogue aimed at the lowest common denominator (ha), and Rob Morrow thinking he can bury Joel Fleischman by acting all bad-ass and growing cheesy sideburns.
Then there's the title. If they had to beat us over the head with the leitmotif and spell "numbers" with a number, they could have at least called it NUM8ERS. Because NUMB3RS looks like "numb-three-ers" and makes the show's creators look like charmingly dyslexic six-year-olds.
Basically, it's a CSI knockoff for math geeks, and I wanted to like it, because math makes me happy. All it wants to do is simplify. You measure the sides of a few million right triangles, plow through trial and error, and when the tumblers align and the lock slides open, you've got a formula that saves everyone else the trouble. And you shout "Eureka!", because you know your name will be beaten into every teenage brain on the face of the planet.
This is my goal, because one day I will solve the Morning Evacuation Conundrum.
Every morning, after Robert wanders into our bed at around 6:30, he whispers "Daddy, I have to pee" in my ear. (Please note where that quotation mark is placed; he does not want to pee in anyone's ear. I don't think.) From there, however, any of the following can occur:
The randomness is maddening, but that's only part of the problem. If Robert has a preset idea of how the urination schedule is to unfold, and it doesn't unfold that way, he gets agitated and tends to grab for things that should not be grabbed for in that special grabby way. No one should have to deal with that at six-fucking-thirty.
I've had enough of this chaos. I need to know, so I can prepare. I need to synthesize the variables (Is the date a prime number? What was the starch content of last night's dinner?), throw in the Golden Ratio and a constant or two, and uncover the elusive pattern. One day, more three-year-olds will wake up happy, and fewer dads will suffer pre-dawn nut punches, and the world will be a better place, despite the overwhelming preponderance of insipid crap on T3L3V1510N.
Today, the three of us went with Nana and Granddad to see the Gates, which will be dismantled and chemically mulched this weekend. I was genuinely curious and determined to keep an open mind about the experience, despite my misgivings. Because let's face it: the true art of this installation is the bamboozling of millions of people into spending tens of millions of dollars, just so they can freeze their butts off while gawking at a bunch of giant orange staples.
We knew Robert would dig cruising through all the "tunnels" at top speed, so we brought the trike:
And though I spent most of the time keeping the boy from kneecapping tourists, I enjoyed what I saw. The Gates looked especially dramatic set against the crisp, blue sky and the gray/white winterscape. Pictures don't do the Gates justice, but here some more anyway. They are at least distinguished from the billions already on the Web, because these pictures have snow on the ground.
Also: Please note that my son's headgear is not in any way GateSwag. It is a Tonka "Worker Guy" helmet that came with the gi-normous truck his babysitter got him for Christmas. Let it be known that my son was wearing saffron long before saffron was cool.
For as long as I've lived in the noisiest city in America, I've had the same downstairs neighbor—Archie the architect. Archie has trapezoidal wraparound eyeglasses, lots of black cashmere turtlenecks, and an aloofness that makes you think he's been TiVoed and is being played back on a 2-minute delay. Whether he was always daydreaming of the limitless functionality of AutoCAD, or just baked off his ass, he was the ideal person to have below decks.
When Robert discovered velocity, we wondered whether Archie was PO'd about the extra thumping. But when we mentioned this to him in the hallway, he smiled that enigmatic smile and assured us he never heard anything. "Dude, I wouldn't have even known you had a kid up there." After which he promptly returned to the movie playing in his head.
Since then, Archie has gotten a live-in girlfriend, someone who weighs about 80 pounds and spends a lot of energy trying to look like she doesn't spend a lot of energy on her look. In view of recent events, she may have realigned his temporal phase and/or gotten him off weed.
For several nights last week, at around 10 o'clock, we heard hammering and drilling coming from right below our bed. When I finally went downstairs to look into it, I found out Archie was installing wall shelves. At 10pm. My wife was trying to pass out after a long day of debilitating sinusitis, so I asked him (politely, I thought) how much longer he was planning to use power tools four feet from her head. "Another 15 minutes," came the reply. And then he asked me (politely, he thought), "By the way: We hear Robert all the time. Especially in the morning. Can't you get him to stop running around?"
"Ha," I said, momentarily setting aside his feeble attempt to wrest the moral high ground. "Can you stop the birds from singing? Or tell the pope to lay off the gay-bashing? No, sir. For we are who we are, and we must be true to our essence. Unfortunately, Robert is almost three, which means his essence right now is (a) running like a rhino and (b) not responding well to reasoned arguments. Perhaps you and that un-fashionista chippie of yours will come to understand this one day, if you ever decide to bless the world with your progeny."
OK, I said that in my head. The last thing I need right now is to start a war with a guy whose stereo has 2 billion gigawatts per channel. Besides, I feel a little bad for him. I've lived with noisy neighbors before, and we're already doing our best to keep the racket at a minimum. If he thinks it's loud now, just wait until number two comes along. If I were he, I'd start gluing egg cartons to the ceiling.
I never get tired of finding out stuff like this.
God bless my referrers' log.
April as the cruelest month? Balderfriggindash. Given my workload, and the undertow of sickness that is only just now beginning to relent, February has been consistently concaving my butt cheeks. As a result, we've built up several layers of crud on the bedrock layer of crud that forms the primary crust of our apartment floor.
Until I'm ready to re-surface, here's an oldie thing I noodled with when Robert was a month old and this blog was but a glint in my severely nearsighted eye.
As my wife chases after Mr. Schizo while battling a raging sinus infection, I hope she will find solace in this--the ultimate Valentine for Blog Nation.
Happy Hallmark Holiday, sweetie. I'll be home soon.
Why is Robert's protracted convalescence a good thing? One, he tires out a lot sooner than usual, giving Mama and me a lot more Couple Time. And two, when he passes out in his clothes, we avoid the Sturm und Drang of the bedtime ritual and he wakes up dressed and ready for Bagels With Butter TM. As long as you don't mind a little funk, it's a win-win.
This morning, the BWB tour branched out to the Big Bagel Place up the street. We don't go there very often, because a trowelful of cream cheese somehow transforms an ordinary, 90-cent bagel into a $3.50 "sandwich." But it's a little farther away from our local, so we can use the trike and burn off a few Kiddie Kilowatts. It's also half a block from the policy academy, and Robert likes to marvel at the uniforms and myriad beltwear.
When we got there, the place was packed with wannablues, and we found a table next to two cadets who happened to be identical twins. If the NYPD doesn't have some sort of Perp Confusal Unit, made up solely of twin interrogators, it should. The good-cop-bad-cop routine would be weird and disorienting enough to draw out all kinds of confessions. I happened to mention this to the twins, and they were surprisingly receptive. They must not be that far into their training.
Then, a conversation on the way home, as we waited for Walking Guy to let us cross 20th Street:
Robert: "Why are all the cars going that way?"
Me: "This is a one-way street. The cars only go one way."
Robert: "But on the other street, they go the other way."
Me: "Right. That's also a one-way street, but in the other direction."
Robert [pointing to Third Ave.]: "But these cars are going both ways."
Me: "Right again. This is a two-way street, and then it becomes one-way."
Robert: "Oh. Hey Daddy?"
Me: "Yes?"
Robert: "New York is confusing."
At the suggestion of my tech-weenie brother-in-law, I am now running Google Ads on my site. And my soul is alternately enriched and repulsed. [hunting socks]
On the one hand, a buck's a buck. (Well, almost.) And in the week since I joined I've made five of them—enough to buy me about 10 ounces of beer at any of my old neighborhood hangouts. (Sure, I could plunk for a pair of PBRs at the frat bar up the road, [Muenster cheese] but I've come too far in life to reduce myself to chugging hipster swill among meta-ironic pinheads. I'm somebody's father, for God's sake.) At this rate, with patience, diligence, and prudent re-investment, I figure I could have enough for a week's rent by Easter '07. [plasma screen]
The downside of all this loot is the thought that, right now, these words are being caressed by swarms of commerce-hungry nanobots [Willy Wonka] that are looking to match their ads [pointillism] with my content. (You may have noticed that after my post about Robert's glooey kerflooey, the ads were mostly for adhesives.) [cranial acupuncture]
As long as they're lurking, I might as well serve up something they can sink their little nanofangs into. [1965 Mustang] So in keeping with the Experimental Method, this post [widewale corduroy] should give the bots [hoof and mouth disease] several diverse topics to munch on [badminton], and I can just sit back [crisp Bibb lettuce] and see what new faces [Somerset Maugham] will steam up my little window of financial intercourse. [intercourse]
Godspeed, and happy shopping. [rampant consumerism is killing us]
Thank heavens for Janet Jackson's right boob. If it weren't for all the nipple-induced trauma of last year's Super Bowl, and Fox's ridiculous compensatory prudence, this year's game wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. Here are the highlights:
6.30: The teams take the field. Thus begins the clash between the two most colonially significant cities and their jingoistic mascots. America resplendent!
6.42: An ad depicts a pilot jumping out of a plane and plummeting to his death, just for a six-pack of shitty domestic beer.
6.58: Robert passes out in his high chair. I, as the family disposal, eat the rest of his dinner.
7.00: Queer Guy Carson ogles some guy's ass in a soda commercial, thus launching the night's Homosexual Agenda. James Dobson makes the first of several hundred angry phone calls.
7.01: Perhaps in the interest of equal time, Fox airs an ad in which terrible production values are overshadowed by a spectacular pair of breasts in a tank top.
7.21: Pats' CB Randall Gay causes a fumble. Phase II of the Homosexual Agenda is complete.
7.34: An ad for a snack conglomerate answers the question, "How far will MC Hammer go to humilate himself for a paycheck?"
7.35: A clip from Will Smith's new film features Kevin James waving his enormous behind at the camera. A queasy viewership struggles to digest its first bowl of chili.
7.48: Tom Brady fumbles, precipitating a pile-up of strong, sweaty men squirming and groping all over themselves. Dobson faints.
7.52: I take Robert off to bed. When I return, my wife tells me that I missed a lot of "strange kicking." I later learn she was talking about the baby.
8:20: Paul McCartney takes the stage, engendering the following banter:
My wife: Do you know what would make me the happiest woman alive?
Me: If McCartney pulled out his wiener?
My wife: You know me too well.
8.25: McCartney removes his jacket. Though he is disappointingly flat-chested, his jowls jiggle suggestively.
8:31: McCartney launches into "Live and Let Die" amid blinding pyrotechnics. Some interpret this as a tribute to America's foreign policy.
9.00: After nimbly avoiding the family-friendly 8:00 hour, Fox airs the first reference to "four-hour ere¢t10ns." My wife is appalled; she saw the ad begin with several older couples expressing affection for each other and thought it was about retirement planning.
9.12: My wife falls asleep with her legs in my lap, cutting off the blood supply to my upper body.
9.18: I pass out.
10.45: I awake to find that New England has won its third title in the past four years, thus cementing my theory that, under this Administration, it pays to be a Patriot.
