Darth Maul, whose character development begins and ends with his evil Southwestern facepaint
GateHouse — Went to see the new, 3Dmafied version of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” this weekend, and I didn’t hate it. I should’ve hated it. I didn’t hate it. What the hell is going on right now.
Like most “Star Wars” nerds and nerdesses, I have a love/hate relationship with “The Phantom Menace,” and by “love/hate” I mean “Just the hate, with a side of grilled This Sucks and a mug of What Is This Horse Poop?” I saw “Menace” in 1999 with a cadre of fellow nerdlingers (and, inexplicably, our fiances) and we spent the next two weeks struggling to think of nice things to say about it, fighting to justify the emotional investment we’d made, an investment that had been returned to us in the form of jokes involving flatulent space horses and the nuanced drama of intergalactic trade route taxation disputes.
More holidays should have Kung Fu Panda-themed cards.
GateHouse — If there is any place on Earth more bruisingly depressing than the Valentine’s Day card rack at Target on Feb. 12, I’ve yet to hear about it. OK, that’s not entirely true, I can think of plenty more depressing places, such as the offices of whoever has to do promotion for the “Chipmunks” movies and wherever Newt Gingrich goes to apply his pre-stump speech neck-grease, but at least the people shopping at Target have their own non-billionaire-provided money, now that I think about it, so I think Gingrich wins for most depressing? Winning! Aw, that’ll be a weird feeling for him.
What am I doing here on Feb. 12, you may ask, judgingly? Well, usually I’m like weeks ahead of the Valentine’s situation, because I’m really super-thoughtful at all times, except this year, when I’m scraping together a Valentine plan with two kids, which is making the card selection process a lot more enjoyable and family-oriented and part of a bonding ha oh I’m just kidding it’s a miserable nightmare please tell me someone stashed burlap sacks full of painkillers in the “Get Well Soon” section or something.
But it’s not a nightmare because of the kids, who are being great, except the one who keeps drooling on my face. No, it’s a nightmare because of the desperate surfeit of miserable greeting card manufacturers.
NickMom— Step 1. Slide left strap over left shoulder. Slide right strap over right shoulder. (Note: Step 1 may require dislocation of shoulder. This is normal.)
Step 2. On front of carrier, put the deal into that clicky thing.
NickMom— The baby is coming! The baby is coming! And your world is a blur of excitement and joy and harmony! But HOLD UP — what about the other child that already lives in your house? OH YEAH. THAT GUY.
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I mean, if you have to watch all those delivery videos then everyone should watch all those delivery videos, right?
It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image
GateHouse— You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”
(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)
And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.
Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.
This photo is not at all interesting to the average impressionable 7-year-old or anything.
GateHouse — The 7-year-old and I have been watching a lot of “MythBusters” lately. which is, needless to say, a fantastic idea when parenting a second-grade super-absorbent spongeperson who enjoys explosions and fire and large trucks crashing into other trucks to create explosions.
I justify this regular explosion exposure by sitting next to him and occasionally shouting “Science!” like the guy in that Thomas Dolby song. I mean, “MythBusters” isn’t an attention-deficit cartoon designed to overinflate action-figure profit margins or move units of cereal, right? Moreover, thanks to the wonder twins of DVR and Apple TV we get to skip the Commercials For Things, although I would probably feel a little better if Discovery could make with the less advertising of “Weed Wars” and that show about people’s first week in jail). Otherwise, it’s QUALITY TELEVISION. And if quality television so happens to involve endearing humans rocketing themselves down awesomely lengthy makeshift waterslides and crashing backhoes into things, well SCIENCE!
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).
Writer/editor at Nickelodeon's Nickmom.com, syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, music journalist and speedily graying dad based on the coast of Carolina. Bio/Clips.
second! and not in his usual creepy old-man-at-the-park way RT @jefito The new @GalacticFunk LP makes me want to jump up and down and yell. 9 hours ago
