(Illustration / Stacy Lenz)
NickMom — What? You’ve all thought about it.
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Read the full list over at NickMom.
Pictured: Right before then became now.
GateHouse — I rarely pay heed to news out of the world of Science, mostly because we’re in a recession, people, and I’m not made of heed.
But it’s also because such news often arrives in the form of sizable and startling-looking words, many of which contain prefixes (ugh), in periodicals that I do not subscribe to, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society and Redbook. I also find it overly scientific, and the people who write it tend to be like super-obsessed with things like molecules and dark matter and large hadrons colliding, and I had plenty of biology in the 10th grade, thank you very much. If Science talked more about Facebook and quidditch, maybe we’d have something.
You disgust me.
That said, now and again Science produces some actual news that makes me sit up and call my momma, which apparently is something I have to sit up to do, as it is very hard to dial the phone while reclining. Last week Science announced that coffee not only provides your primary reason to get up in the morning (yeah, I said it, CBS’ “The Early Show”) and is literally the only reason I can complete all basic tasks between the hours of 2:30 and 6 p.m., but it has other, more additional health benefits as well, such as not-dying, which is a pretty good benefit, frankly. I’d like to see other beverages come up with a benefit like that. Looking at you, Mello Yello, what do you got in the way of extending the average life expectancy? What’s that? Jack squat? I thought so. Just sit there and be mello, loser.
Anyway, and it goes on for a while, but the study basically reveals that coffee is good at making you die less. Now, depending upon the kind of either human or Romney you are, this news will elicit one of two reactions:
This is how it's done, suckers
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GateHouse — Despite growing up in a reasonably comfortable Indiana suburb, I never really got into the music of Tupac Shakur. This put me in direct conflict with my younger brother, Dave; while I would spend my formative Camelot Music-stalking time making important purchasing decisions about Tesla and the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack and, God help me, that Styx album with “Show Me The Way” on it (I KNOW, I ALREADY KNOW), Dave was able to leverage his good grades and positive attitude, as well as our parents’ divorce, into permission to buy pretty much anything with a parental advisory sticker and an Intro on it between the years 1991-1994.
I bring this up because none of the girl-pantsed losers I listened to in high school would ever remotely be considered for immortalization in hologram form; you cannot be baked enough to clamor for an all-projection version of Tesla’s “Five Man Acoustical Jam,” which I owned in both CD and cassette form and which may be an inaccurate reference, as I’m pretty sure no one is Tesla has died yet. I should probably fact-check this point before emailing this column to my editors, but Siri is all the way downstairs. Hang on. “SIRI! CAN YOU COME UP HERE AND ANSWER A QUESTION ABOUT TESLA?” Ugh, nothing. These phones are so buggy.
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Pictured: New York City school cafeteria
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GateHouse — You hear a lot about pink slime these days, because frankly, pink slime is an a-MA-zing turn of phrase. It’s a writer’s dream, a lyrical, almost onomatopoeic slice of verbal sleight-of-hand that grabs your brain and demands it to conjure up an image, requires you to stop what you’re doing — eating a hoagie, feeding your baby, delivering a baby — to consider it. Frankly as soon as someone coined the phrase “pink slime” it was over, stick a fork in it. Actually that wouldn’t work because sticking a fork in an industrial-sized vat of gelatinous goo wouldn’t be practical and actually probably really frustrating; maybe you should go with a spoon in this scenario. Or an ice cream scoop. Ooh, soup ladle!
We think about pink slime for the same reason most people think about pink slime: Because we are writing “Ghostbusters II.” But also we think about it because with a meaning that evocative, especially in an age where headline value is measured by the level of instinctual milliseconds it takes someone to click on something distracting while they’re supposed to be working and/or driving, it’s perfect. It’s like “swine flu” or “SARS” or “Newt Gingrich” — your brain can’t help but think “THAT SOUNDS JUST AWFUL AND UNELECTABLE YET I CANNOT STOP MY HAND FROM CLICKING ON IT,” and there, before you know it, you’re 12 pages into pink slime material on the web and vowing to never eat beef, or slime, for the rest of your life.
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NickMom — Is this normal? Because basically the highlight of my birthday parties was Big Mac Container Stacking.
NickMom— You put a fish tank in your kid’s room because you think it’ll teach valuable lessons about nature and responsibility, and then the fish more or less try to kill themselves.
3. “I said, ‘Maybe we SHOULDN’T put the moray eel in the aquarium,’ but nooooooo no one EVER LISTENS TO ME.”
Pictured: What shopping with kids looks like. Sometimes they're even the tantrum-my ones.
GateHouse — I approach clothes shopping like most people approach their pet’s funerals.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I guess with pet funerals there will be at least some part of it you’ll enjoy — warm-hearted memories of being lovingly licked all over your previously germ-free face, or the way your little Scotch terrier used to whizz like a French fountain on the pants of everybody new who entered your house, or that time you drank a giant glass of milk and then your dog got out and you found yourself sprinting through your neighborhood at the age of 13 with a full quart of milk slorshing around in your stomach, and when you found the dog you were overcome with relief at both locating the dog and the knowledge that now, finally, you could walk home slowly to throw up. Naturally, all of the preceding stories are accurate.
Anyway, point is, there is some joy in the funeral of a pet. There is no joy in clothes shopping, which, by contrast, is a miserable few hours of staring into a gaping hellmouth filled with things I am now too fat for.
I hate shopping, mostly because I’m terrible at it. This past weekend — and I feel no small degree of pride in saying this — I went into a few stores and successfully obtained a series of t-shirts that were, in essence, perfect clones of t-shirts I already owned, with some minor and in some cases molecular-level variation on the order of “Well this gray shirt is slightly more gray than that gray shirt I already own, but I like that gray shirt very much so maybe a grayer version of the gray shirt, plus the original gray shirt, is in truth a wise financial and stylistic decision.” I am a real party to go shopping with. If it’s one of the three days per year in which I’m required to try something on, I whine like a three-year-old getting a haircut.
Zoltan Kohari, known as the Slovak Batman, poses with a portrait of himself in his home in the town of Dunajska Streda. (Reuters)
GateHouse — So obviously everyone wishes that Batman was real, that both our valuable streets, as well as those in Detroit, could be kept safe by some crazypants vigilante with a black-metal baritone and a wellspring of dark psychological horrors he took out on Antarctic-themed umbrella-packing supervillains, SURE, I mean who WOULDN’T want that? I can’t think of a town in the world that couldn’t use more justice distributors in capes, except for Cape Town, South Africa, which is frankly overdoing it a little bit.
But you all TALK a big game, in your plush fluffy recliners watching the same four teams win NCAA games (aw, good for you plucky underdogs of Kentucky) eating made-up foods like “Triscuits” and “queso,” the latter of which isn’t even a THING, I checked with Siri. Who among you is man enough to actually make this fantasy happen, to slough off the shell of your hellish quotidian existence and bring Batman to reality? Aside from all those weird roving gangs of self-appointed Batmans who put on black sweatpants and childish face masks, get their mom’s permission and hit up the go patrol the brutal streets of Park City, Utah, or whatever? (Also, it’s Batmans. Batmen looks sillypants. If anyone from the AP Stylebook would like to debate this point, please email me at shutupnerds@gmail.com.)
No, for Real Amateur Batman Action you have to go to — wait for it — OH YES THIS SAYS SLOVAKIA.
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A NASA probe speeds away from the sun's recent solar flare, which was destroyed by the Empire.
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GateHouse — HEY, SOLAR FLARE.
YEAH, I’M TALKING TO YOU, LOSER. THE FLARE LOOKING THING, IN SPACE, THE ONE THAT’S SOLAR. You suck. You are the worst solar flare ever. You are a pink fluffy unicorn of solar flares. You are a fragile porcelain mouse of solar flares. You are a Hallmark Christmas ornament of solar flares, one of the ones with a basket full of puppies waiting for Santa with cookies or something. One time in 1999 I had to evacuate my hometown for a hurricane that ended up sputtering out over the Atlantic and arrived as the kind of autumn shower best used for frolicking and making sure one’s azaleas are sated. You are the Blooming Azalea Spring Shower of solar flares. Try to look cool in front of your black hole friends now.
Sigh. My apologies for using valuable Internet to yell at a galactic event that I do not remotely begin to understand, but I have good reasons:
GateHouse — Many years ago, I had a son.
Well, OK, I still have a son, but “I still have a son” is a crazy-boring lead, and “MANY YEARS AGO,” which I imagine to have been spoken aloud by a drunken Sean Connery, makes this column seem more akin to an epic clash of skygods and dragonlancers instead of what it is, which is a belated attempt to pin months of my son’s misbehavior on a 6-year-old named Brayden.
Many years ago I had a son in kindergarten, a son who was getting in trouble. A lot. Two or 3 times a week, for most of the winter. Our kindergarten reported behavior via a series of stoplight-coded cards — green (for Gallants), yellow (for Goofuses) and red (for the criminally insane) — and my son had been a Green for months, which I promise I’m not saying with that obnoxious dadblogger “MY PRECIOUS ANGEL CHILD SPENT THE ALLOWANCE HE EARNED PLANTING PEONIES FOR THE NURSING HOME ON EYEGLASSES FOR NAMIBIAN ORPHANS EN ROUTE TO HIS MOST RECENT SOCCER GAME WHICH I SHALL NOW TELL YOU ABOUT ALSO” thing — whatever, he was usually on green. Until one week, where a yellow snuck in. Then another, and then another, until there were yellows many times a week, and I began to dread asking about colors when I picked him up.
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