brainflak.com

An important safety tip that I’m sorry to be in a position to impart:

“If you happen to keep both sunscreen and toothpaste in your desk drawer, make sure they’re not in the same kind of container.”

Trust me on this one.

Three Socks

I do admire their consistency, I suppose.

Barnacular Vision

A neighborhood boy, desperate to get inside and get access to the Panda, snivels and pleads with Boo to let him in. Boo finds the interaction delightful.

I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus

A novel in blog form? Possibly. A neurological disorder in http form? I hope not. Should I stop? Probably. Will I stop? Not anytime soon.

It was written just today. I couldn’t quite make out the words, so she had to read it to me:

“Once there was a little girl who walked in the street. She didn’t tell her mama. But she didn’t even get run over by a car. That was good. She didn’t want to, so that was the good thing, ending of her madness. Her name was Annida, and you don’t even know what happened to her because there’s only two pages – one with words and one with her picture. And then she found a golden goose, but she was caught in a trap. And that’s the end.”

I always enjoy it when I misread text out of the corner of my eye, rendering an ordinary sign or poster into something far odder, but the really good ones are those that my brain stubbornly refuses to fix on a second or even a third look. Like when I had to drive around the block to re-read the sign on the shop called “Cookies in Bloom” and found that even on the second pass it seemed to say “Cookies in Blood.” The latter arguably makes more sense than the real name, but it suggests a very, very different clientele.

Just today I passed a doormat that seemed on first (and even second) glance to indicate the shop behind it was called “Stabby Chic.” It’s really “Shabby Chic,” of course, but that’s not as interesting. And unlike Cookies in Blood, which I do not wish to visit, I’d love to stop by Stabby Chic and see their wares. Briefly.

My daughter was putting on a series of brief and largely nonlinear puppet plays using some little rod puppets I had made for her, with myself and a neighborhood boy as the audience. Each story ended with all of the characters coming on stage and announcing the moral of the story. For the first story the moral was:

“All persons love all chocolate milk”

but the other four-year old present protested: “Um, excuse me, not everybody likes chocolate milk,” causing the Panda to revise the moral:

“Everybody loves chocolate milk who isn’t allergic to it.”

The second story, which seemed to involve a zoo, frequent and involuntary changes to people’s names, and many bitter recriminations between the little bird and the little robot, ended with:

“Chocolate milk is made of the people you share it with”

which I think is an important thing to keep in mind.

In case you’re finding this all a bit too Family Circus, the neighborhood boy piped up shortly afterwards with a bit of Dysfunctional Family Circus-appropriate dialog:

“Pretend that blood is spraying out of my armpit”

which I agreed to do, in my own, quiet way.

Kids at this age seem to want to poke around the edges of the concept of death, as when a few days earlier the Panda, speaking of a school friend who apparently enjoys learning:

“He likes to learn until his learning bobo-head is…dead.”

I like to think that my learning bobo-head is, much like my daughter’s, still among the living learning bobo-heads of this world.

When one becomes a parent, one is supposed to learn many things. It’s a major rite of passage, and one I got pretty tired of hearing about before the Panda was born: “Dude, you have absolutely no idea of what you’re in for!” That “no idea” notion was very important to some people. I would argue that surely I had some idea, as a member of this society, from books and film, from watching Read more

I’m frequently reminded these days – by our diligent Boo – of something I learned about from our first daughter: the Baby Checklist. I had always known, vaguely, that there was some regularity to the ages at which babies master various skills, and the sequence in which they do so but it wasn’t until I had children that I realized how obsessive they are about it. I don’t know where they hide Read more

Wanna hear me grumble and whine? Of course you do…

Movies and TV:
Magical Image Enhancement: You’ve seen this many times, I’m sure. A low-res image from a traffic camera, or a grainy blow up of a photo from the 1930s is enhanced with magic software, turning a tiny, indistinct grey rectangle that was comprised of 768 pixels into a fully readable copy of a shipping manifest or an Illinois license plate complete with expiration date stickers. I don’t think you need Photoshop Kung Fu as strong as mine to know that this is crap. The data is just not there, people. Read more