NickMom — 6. Coldplay may make great baby-making music but Chris Martin gets all weird when you start screaming during contractions.
Rest of list, featuring no more Coldplay references I PROMISE, is here.
Author Archives: Jeff Vrabel
About Jeff Vrabel
Who cuts down real Christmas trees? REAL MEN, WITH AXES, THAT IS WHO
Basically what I looked like, except I had a larger axe
GateHouse — We never cut down our own Christmas trees when I was a kid, mostly because it turned out that they sold objects very similar to Christmas trees at the Target in Marion, Ind. — and get this: You could hardly tell the difference! Well, there were a few giveaways: Instead of dropping crisp needles all over the carpet the fake ones appeared majestic and invincible for what was sometimes months (taking down the Christmas tree is super-boring), and instead of having to be cut down they could be disassembled like Legos and returned to their spot in the attic. That said, instead of smelling like fresh forest pine they smelled like a Target in Marion, Ind.
As such, Christmas was as much about getting out the tree as it was getting out the box the tree spent most of its year in. Being lucky enough to have both a Christmas-loving family and large ceilings (mostly the latter), our tree was a beast, a monstrous army-grade Artifical Douglas Fraser Fir Pine something (OK you got me I cheated my way through horticulture) that came in a box large enough to, if needed, store the car.
When you are a small person, boxes of course are the coolest toys ever, or at least up there with such perennial childhood chestnuts as bubble wrap, pieces of broken cement, packing peanuts and handfuls of gravel. This year marks my 36th of wondering what in the hell we’re all doing departing Thanksgiving dinner to camp under neon signs for off-brand tablet computers when if we give every kid in the country a pile of UPS bubble wrap, packing material and about 30 pounds of dirt kids would all be murderous-eyed with joy (except of course for the selfish materialistic ones, but we could just throw gravel at them).
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Veggie Tales: Why Congress wishes to beplumpen your children, and 9% of you are totally OK with that
GateHouse — Last week a Washington Post poll revealed that the United States Congress currently enjoys a nationwide approval rating of 9%. That is nine percent, as in one integer, as in Very Close To Zero, as in if you asked “Do you approve of the job Congress is doing?” to a group of zinfandel-sipping monkeys with typewriters in a warehouse in Des Moines, they would all say “Dear God no not at all are you NUTS?,” because monkeys are actually pretty smart.
Needless to say this 9% statistic is shocking, mostly because I would have guessed somewhere between 9 to 40 percentage points lower. NINE percent approval? Are you sure you didn’t mean nine people? Where do you thumbs-up smiley-faced keep-up-the-good-work types LIVE I wonder? Do you live in Congress? Are you all Boehners? Do you know what the Gallup people meant by “Congress?” Do you think they meant “Con-Air?” Do you think you were approving of Nicolas Cage? Because if so that’s still a dismayingly high number.
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Trailer approval rating: 16%
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Hooray! My iMac broke for good this time!
GateHouse — Oh my God you guys the best thing just happened: my Mac finally broke! For good! It’s totally useless! THIS IS AMAZING!
Wow, this, I don’t need to tell you, is fantastic news if you are 1. a dippy Mac nerd and 2. a Vrabel, because the regular replacement of even sleek sexy Apple objects, whose very existence demands expensive upgrades at regular intervals, does not come easy to Vrabels.
Which is not to say that we eschew technology. My 80-year-old Uncle Jim, for instance, last year brought home a forehead-slappingly monstrous new iMac, one whose screen was easily large enough to humiliate most of the movie theaters in my hometown. It was terrifying, not just because my family wouldn’t have been more surprised if he came home and announced he had just purchased a previously undiscovered Jackson Pollock from an auction in Amsterdam, but whatever, it was way cooler than anything we had.
And what did he do with this glorious piece of sleek gorgeousness? He literally set it up on a desk that has been around since before I was, next to a computer called a Commodore Amiga that he literally purchased in 1989, on which we literally spent spent visits there playing hours of “Zac McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders” and which is literally STILL SITTING WHERE IT SAT IN 1989. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it functions or even turns on or has been totally gutted and is housing a family of vagabond gerbils, but it is there, this wonderful metaphor or progress, of the inexorable march of technological improvement, of my family’s still-lively inability to even remotely begin considering to throw things out if there is any chance it can serve some vague purpose down the road, or, failing that, if they can sell them to people for Bears-ticket money.
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Well there goes a perfectly lucrative career in the field of cheese sculpture
Note: Actual artist not pictured, or a mouse
GateHouse — So I had this AMAZING idea to be a person who sculpts things out of cheese for a living.
Genius, right? Think of it: All the rewarding creativity of a life spent in art, coupled with the incredible opportunity to feast on raw hunks of tastiness without even having to take off the welder’s mask, coupled with years of increasingly confused looks from the FedEx guy. It would have been grand. Also, as a person whose work experience has been primarily in the newspaper/magazine fields, it would have been nice to have some job security for a change.
(Plus it actually made a lot more sense than my other idea, which was cheese painting, which turns out to be a total mess, is murder on the carpeting and basically makes the whole room smell like a long-expired otter, which reminds me: If the kids even ask you for an otter as a pet YOUR ANSWER IS NO.)
Oh, what a glorious future it would have been, my cheese sculptures and me, traveling the globe in privacy (turns out the TSA frowns on flying with massive cheese blocks, whether they fit in their precious “carry-on dimensions” or not), enjoying orange-tie openings at galleries and farms worldwide. I was going to be a STAR, at least in the shadowy realm where cheese meets art, which, let me tell you, isn’t a realm that generally produces a lot of 1%-ers, if you catch my drift.
So imagine the crushing disappointment in learning this weekend that someone has totally beat me to the cheese game. (No, not Mousetrap. The other one. Mousetrap I knew about already.)
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The Daddy Shower: “THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” according to this press release, which lies
OMG this looks so amazing.
GateHouse — If you have ever been a parent and/or subjected to one on Facebook, you know that child-rearing is filled with people doing strange and terrible things, such as affixing leashes to their children in theme parks, motoring to a Walmart at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday to purchase Harry Potter costume components or posting six-minute videos of sled rides on the Internet, and trust me when I say I have only done two of those things so I CAN CLAIM MORAL SUPERIORITY HA HA HA oh my God why aren’t more people liking this picture of my son’s Harry Potter costume.
(It also, according to the coffee shop at which I am currently quote-fingers working, makes grandparents do things like attempt to facilitate a conversation with a 6-year-old on a speakerphone in the out-of-doors because it’s not like anything could remotely not work in that scenario, which reminds me: If you take someone else’s iPhone and then throw it in a parking lot and then drive over it and back over it and then then drive over it again until it is dead is that still illegal?)
Anyway, because parenting is filled with strange and terrible things it is ripe for people selling stranger and terrible things, which brings me to the idea of the “Daddy Shower,” which I learned of via one of those caffeinated press releases (“THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” it lies) that indicates that Brooklyn, Paris and Dubai have been secretly hosting underground Daddy Showers for months and is written in such a way as to indicate the author had been viewing adult human males for years with binoculars from behind trees but had yet to risk approaching one.
“Think baby showers are just for moms?,” it continues, addressing a problem that no one has ever complained about ever. “Not anymore!” And it is here that I offer ALLELUIA because seriously you guys I had just gotten through telling my friends “I mean it’s nice that we make more money and never deliver babies and have totally invented a way to wield phrases like ‘Strategic Content Financial Control Analyst’ as though they have any meaning at all, but dammit why do all the gurlz get to sit around rooms full of matching centerpieces opening presents for three hours at a time? INEQUITY!” And then I pounded my table importantly and sipped Scotch and I think harumphed? I can’t be sure, that was a really long sentence to remember.
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Springsteen’s father’s baby shower gifts: disapproval and detachment, and maybe a rattle forged from human pain.
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No one is safe from the Sexy Halloween Costume movement. Not even you, Canada.
Pictured: Mountie (Non-Sexy Variety)
McClatchy/Tribune – I am not a very good-looking woman, which I think is the primary reason I’m having trouble coming up with a decent Halloween costume this year. (It’s also the main reason I kept getting turned down for sororities, not that I’m still bitter about that, stupid Zeta Tau Alpha, I hate you so much.)
Indeed, if you have visited any costume stores lately, you might have noticed that they look less like costume stores and more like places that Britney Spears might shop, if she could stay sober long enough to park the car. Costume stores these days feature an irrationally large percentage of rack space devoted entirely to Sexy versions of average things: Sexy Nurse, Sexy Doctor, Sexy Soccer Player, Naughty Navigator, Sexy Mountie, Support Our Troops Sexy Adult (really), Sexy Wilma Flintstone (I can send you the link to these if you want). One newsroom staffer reported stumbling across a costume for a Sexy Cab Driver, which is, of course, something that has never happened in the history of the human experience. (However, if it does happen, I suggest immediately that we cancel Halloween and institute National I Found A Sexy Cab Driver Day, which we could commemorate by briefly increasing the national speed limit to 200 mph and growing splendid beards.)
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• Ministry – Every Day Is Halloween
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I can’t help but notice that no one is fleeing in terror from the hairy crazy ants
GateHouse— Before the hairy crazy ants came, everything was going pretty well: Ohio State was losing, the AL East was being proficiently escorted out of the playoffs, I dropped a 98-point monster on my friend Matt in Words With Friends (“QUAILS” — holla!) Michelle Bachmann’s candidacy was fading into that permafrost netherworld and the only people still paying attention were lunatic nonagenarians from Iowa. Oh, and get this I FIXED A TOILET, by myself, USING TOOLS, sort of, and it stayed fixed until the next day when it was clearly still broken, but man, that was a deeply satisfying 12 hours.
And then, with everything swimming along swimmingly, I learned that the South — one of America’s largest, most buttery regions — was being invaded by hairy crazy ants.
This is their actual name: “hairy crazy ants.” This is their actual name because coming up with any other name for them would be pointless; you could call them “formicidae inferi” or “streptococcus abugslifei” or “Stuart” and it wouldn’t matter because everyone would just say “SWEET CHILD OF HOSANNA WHAT ARE THESE HAIRY CRAZY ANTS DOING IN MY SCRAMBLED EGGS?” (Or I guess I should say “WHAT ARE THEY DOING ALL OVER MY NASCAR FUNNEL CAKES AND TAYLOR SWIFT MUDFLAPS” because, again, American South. On the plus side if they’re invading the South and least this isn’t one of those plagues sent to wipe out gay people trying to get married.)
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Overweight man’s beef with White Castle finally connects “White Castle” with “beef”
GateHouse — The grassroots protests spilling across the streets of New York against the excesses of Wall Street are raging into their second week and showing no signs of slowing, yet I am going to write about a dude who is too fat to sit at White Castle, because the Internet is very very large and plenty of people are talking about Wall Street, but who is standing up for White Castle in its hour of need? THIS MOTIVATED SLOVAK, THAT’S WHO.
Indeed, my blood brothers at the Castle know that I stand with them whenever some yappy 23-year-old energy drink consumption machine from The Media tries to besmirch, befoul or befmirch them with stories of “ghastly nutritional conditions” or “obese-American prejudice” or “fact-based stories about what animal remains actually constitute their Triscuit-thin patties.”
They know this because White Castle IS IN MY DNA. No, seriously, my Slovak grandparents lived pretty much across the street from a White Castle in Whiting, Ind., and my grandfather was known to spend his days there from about 7 a.m.-6 p.m. — moreso if my dear Slovak grandmother God bless her soul was feeling particularly prickly about the volume of objects he hoarded in the basement (official figures are hard to come by, but let us just say that special arrangements had to be made with the Dumpster Company in Whiting, Ind.). So when I say that White Castle is in my blood, I mean, no really, that stuff is straight IN MY BLOOD, probably slowing down the entire circulatory process and gumming things up something awful around the aorta.
NASA’s plummeting death-satellite: Cloudy with a chance of spaceballs
All of these objects will one day fall out of space onto your house, but try not to worry too much.
GateHouse — I think if we can agree on anything, it’s that none of us have ever had to worry about satellite parts raining on us from space.
Oh, sure, there’s a lot we have had to worry about this week — George Lucas adding more stupid crap to “Star Wars,” panther attacks, our ridiculous doomed “government,” that stupid ticker on the new Facebook that just keeps yapping away about what my friends are listening to on Spotify which is about 500 kinds of obnoxious and also I need to talk with my friend Aaron about what is evidently some kind of Sunday morning Phil Collins fixation — to name a few.
But if there’s anything that brings us together as a people and binds us as humans, besides football, it’s the ability of the American people to band together, join their figurative hands and say, “None of us need worry about being whumped by plummeting space satellite debris, because when our broken space junk starts raining home someone with a computer will know what town it will be-crater.”
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