Shape

So while looking at facebook I have discovered several of the people I have known over the years. at least in name. most of them, like me, have added a hundred pounds to their once youthful frame and sired a brood. As i peruse the pictures of once svelt revelers in their new occupations as fathers, engineers, world savers, i am brought back to my own youth. specifically the first year of community college. My hair was a little long, i was thin, and the only thing that was important to me was being happy in the long run.
a lot more though should have gone into that. Now I have two children. the oldest will die if I don't put fresh batteries into her learn-to-annoy laptop and the youngest would rather smile at me than latch on to her bottle and immediately screams when the nipple ultimately slips out of her toothless grin. I want to be in shape for them.
Pundits will tell you "pear is a shape". oh. ha. ha.
So we traded the thrift store double stroller with a bad case of ambli-wheel-ia for the jogging stroller. And my rotting fall-off-the-feet ($5 new) velcro closure trainers have been upgraded to size 13 wide nike trail running kayaks. I got an ipod... or at least thats what i've sharpied onto the lovely and less expensive coby mp3 player. and i'm ready to get back in shape. human shape. I can make it up a flight of stairs shape. I can run with my kids shape. i can instill the value of healthy play without being a big fat hypocrite shape.

Only now, i've got to feed the babies. change the diapers. stop the screaming. fold the stroller and unfold it in the front yard and hope nobody steals it while i bundle and load the babies and wander out without stretching to a world of shin splints and jostled kidneys.


will it be worth it? of course. even if i only make it a mile the first few days. it will be worth it to have ben folds screaming in my ears under my red terry cloth headband and the wind rushing by.


it will be worth it to have my pants fit better and my heart beat stronger and my friends say, have you lost weight?

There are a lot of "mommy bloggers" out there. Its nice. but this is the beginning of the daddy blogger era.

welcome to the two screaming monkeys, getting my fat ass back in shape, hacking things with linux, looking at cool pictures of sci fi junk and building a couple dalek high chairs blog.
maybe dooce will follow me!

oh yeah... buy an mp3 player

Brookstone Stops Selling Frog-O-Spheres

Hoisted from Peta via Sister in Law.

01-25-2011

• 59 Comments

After 18 months of protests, thousands of calls and e-mails, and appearances outside Brookstone stores by our giant "frog," Brookstone has finally decided to pull a cruel product called the "Frog-O-Sphere" from its shelves!
PETA started campaigning against the tiny plastic frog prisons after receiving complaints from Brookstone customers and after a whistleblower reported that frogs and snails housed in the tiny 4-inch-by-4-inch plastic boxes were neglected, deprived of veterinary care and adequate food, and kept in filthy water. The whistleblower told PETA that when frogs became obviously ill and "unsaleable," they were moved to the stores' storage rooms, where they often wasted away and died.
PETA's undercover investigation of Wild Creations—the company that came up with the idiotic idea of throwing two frogs and some gravel into a container smaller than a shoebox and leaving them there for their entire lives—revealed filthy conditions and deadly neglect. In some cases, frogs were so hungry that that they chewed each other's legs off.

juhansonin/cc by 2.0

Brookstone joins Magic Beans, Target, and other retailers that have stopped selling these cruel products, but Coach House Gifts is still selling frogs in "EcoAquariums" to make an easy buck. In one shipment to Coach House Gifts, 37 out of 40 frogs died after they were left in a container so long that they suffered from heat prostration. Please take a moment to urge the company to stop selling its deadly EcoAquariums.
Written by Michelle Sherrow

Posted by PETA

And then... 
After some clever marketing, Brookstone has now re-released the product as the Frog-Arena-O-Death. A spokesman for Wild Creations stated Thursday, "It is important in these trying economic times, that children learn the value of competition in a way they can comprehend." The media attention was a potential fiasco for the company, whose Pre-School-Rat-Face-Cage sales fell off dramatically in 2007, when children's facial reconstruction advocate, Mona Lott of Toledo, Ohio, accidentally read the instructions.
"It's a frog-eat-frog world," a Brookstone attorney's response stated.
Meanwhile, Baby's First Leech Tank is still the most popular toy among Medieval Reenactment families.

Posted by ME!!

dumpstershire, scotland, uk

so what kind of people get a dvr, thats a digital video recorder apparently, so they can watch the late late show in the morning? I realize that Craig Ferguson is recording his show, probably around noon, so he can continue writing things like etc. maybe its the two screaming babies thing.

Booby-trap (hee hee)

I'd like to talk about PORN! First of all- the word pornography  comes from the root πόρνη which in Greek means harlot, and sounds a lot like porun, and of course graphy which means write about or study. Porn is a word that slams the biggest engine into first gear. People are wieeeerd around porn. Even the suggestion of Porn. People call art pornography if they disapprove of its look. James Joyce's Ulysses the greatest literary work of the 20th century was banned for decades because it was reported to be pornographic. I've read it. I practically majored in it in college. I wrote my thesis in Dublin on Ulysses. The truth? Not pornographic. The story-- short form-- Leopold Bloom leaves the bedside of his wife Molly to go to a funeral, knowing full well she is going to sleep with her manager, 'Blazes' Boylan. he wanders around, has a couple beers, a sandwich, a stroll on the beach, jerks off in his pants and goes home. How is that NOT pornographic?
Because its written in such a way that you wouldn't know it was happening unless you were exceptionally focused.

Why then was it called pornographic? Because a reviewer mentioned the contents. A learned literary scholar, not a local newspaper book section freelancer, or a (god forbid) blogger.

So an entire country spent 20 some years without the greatest literary work of the 20th century because of hysteria?
Yep. odd, huh.

Lets look at woman bathing. Doesn't matter who painted it. if it has that title or something similar it fits the criteria. monet's pontilism, rembrants dark stroked photorealism, matisse bold pencil lines. there is on a canvas in a museum near you of a beautiful nude full hipped woman bent over a tub or a pond or bucket.
Now, google woman bathing. uncheck the safety filter. whats the difference?
none

i used to collect things that i call accidental porn. it included signs that could be misinterpreted. professional misspellings. unclear messages.
I called them accidental porn because it was a guilty pleasure of mine, but it wasn't generated by anyone for any prurient interest. they were just accidents.

this morning i took a few pictures of my daughters. i have two, you know. one just flops around. the other is hard to catch.

I spent a good portion of the morning feeding both of them and then chasing Julie about. Once i had a couple minutes to sit (with a baby on my knee) i put a picture of each girl on the facebook. Julie scampering across the bed spread in order to put the remote in her diaper and a goldfish up her nose, and Annabelle... flopped in her bed. I put a mobile over annabelle's bed and tried to attach the fuzzy baby dice over her.
Annabelle regarded the dice with great skepticism.
it has spots and multiple colors and one side that has a funhouse mirror on it.
She did however enjoy drooling on it.

So i load the pictures on facebook, and about an hour after i look at the pictures.
in the funhouse mirror.
in the middle of the funhouse mirror.
there...
is a penis.

Mind you I was fully clothed at the time of the photography.
as far as i know there is no other penis in the house,
but sure enough
there
penis.

I downloaded it and zoomed in. the penis was irrefutable. or so it seemed.
a penis.
not one of those "i can kinda make out a..."
no.
this was fully formed
possibly angry.

but there was nothing there.
granted the mirror is of a quality to amuse infants and perhaps rocky dennis

but i didn't want to field questions and comments
about my penis
because the penis
was not mine

Now i'm not prudish. I enjoy being naked.
not hee hee i'm getting naked!
but in that you can say, i enjoy heat
or i enjoy showers rather than baths
i prefer to sleep naked.
i also shower that way
and under my clothing
naked.
i don't like being discovered naked
caught
i don't like it when someone opens the door while i'm peeing
i don't want to be caught sucking in my gut and stretching my fat rolls whilst brushing my teeth
but if theres a party and people are getting nude, count me in!

but in this incident of accidental porn
i decided it best
to crop

we'll save the nudity for parties and the penis for ghost photos

this... is... SPARTA

ok so its not 300 (Widescreen Edition) nor is it (500) Days of Summer (though zooey deschanel? too cute! the only reason i've seen Elf but seriously I'm not saying its a good movie, but i might get 3 cents from my amazing sponsors at amazon.com if'n you shop through my links. in fact if'n anybody out there in intrawebville gets a hankering for anything shopworthy-- i sound like a brown coat-- lemme know and i'll link it up on the ole blog-o-rama. you can't beat amazon prices for much) No, my subordinate clause tangled friends, its 100as in one hundred stinking reads on the baitshop wall! granted the first 30 were me and the last fifteen were me too and at least 5 were the wife and the rest were me, but i have had a fair dinkum 200 eyeballspheres pointed at my words on the compy screen, which is a hell of a lot more than i can say about any of my manuscripts. having written an armload of plays, i cain't say i never get a good lookin at my wordfigurations as whenever you write a play you have at least a hunnert or so eyeballspheres a looking at the script for auditions. can't complain there. but it makes me happy that my newfangled life as a writer hasn't even begun for true, yet a hunnert gawkers beheld my page. much obliged friends. keep reading. i'll stop wording like a serenity character.

it's hard. ain't it hard?

just a quick note to say, "i'm alive". been crawling around on hardwood installation. haven't been able to write/sketch/eat/etc. trying to finish this week. no longer care about aesthetic. just want to move in. babies are fine. send pictures of your boobs for christmas. and someone please explain how i have a bruise that starts on my hip bone and travels around my ass.

happy indigenous intervention to prolong manifest destiny day!

its thanksgiving. a morning off from plastering and painting on the house (House, M.D.: Season Six [Blu-ray])
it is incredibly difficult to get things done with a nearly one year old dragging your soul out of your body and putting it in her mouth. even blog writing or as Special Agent Gibbs would say "he keeps a blob"

 The boogins, julie, is well. standing, learning, soul sucking. The duck, annabelle, sucks. no, i'm not being mean, she feeds constantly. suck, poop, sleep-- repeat hourly until she begs to take my truck to the outer banks to go surfing.

But hey- its thanksgiving. its a day when americans celebrate the early settlers inability to survive unassisted in The New World. we do what we have always done. we over-purchase over-cook over-consume over-use. perhaps i over simplify. lets pretend we are honoring the early inhabitants of this county.Trail of Tears - A Native American Documentary Collection how can we honor those who thrived without negatively impacting their environment? Ah! Got it! we'll turn on EVERY GODDAMNED OVEN IN THE COUNTRY FOR EIGHT HOURS!!!!