Retrosnark

Well, that was an experience

My wife, my son and I just returned home from a three-day stay at Children's Hospital in Birmingham. Seems little Jacob has both an intestinal virus and faulty nursing mechanics, so he was dehydrated and malnourished. Lemme tell you, being told your child is malnourished really makes you feel like a good parent. (Also, Faulty Nursing Mechanics would be a great name for a rock band.)

But, thanks to a godsend of a nurse named Debbie, we got his nursing mechanics suitably tweaked, and he's eating like Jethro Bodine now. Maybe they won't call Child Services on us now. And blogging will resume once I get a little less bleary-eyed.

Now, where was I?

Long time, no post, but young'uns will do that to you. And this isn't a full-scale throwdown of a post, but still, it's something.

To catch you up on things, Jacob will be two months old this coming Monday. They grow up so fast. I've become acquainted with colic, and I've given countless prayers of thanks for Mr. Hoover or whoever invented the vacuum cleaner. (Why is my irritable son soothed by the roar of an upright vacuum cleaner? I don't know, and I don't really care. However, if he's into loud sounds, his old pa has a few CDs he's going to introduce him to that will really boost his spirits.) I've become a CrackBerry addict (Curve, for right now, but I'm seriously craving that new Bold, when it's released. iPhone, Smiphone, I say.)

I've also discovered a few sites I'll be adding to the blogroll shortly. (I'm always thinking of you, you big lugs. <chin chuck>). There's It's Lovely! I'll Take It, which posts wretched pictures from real estate listings, along with snarky commentary. And there's Totally Looks Like, which is just getting started, but has lots of promise. It's like those old "Separated at Birth?" things.

And here's the aforementioned blog post. Not much, but the flywheel of posting has a lot of inertia, and I'm still trying to get it up to fully operational speed. The selections are from the Better Homes & Gardens "Meals with a Foreign Flair" cookbook of 1963. Enjoy.

Strawberry porcupines forever

This is like one of those pictures that's an old lady if you look at it one way, and a bobsled team if you look at it another. A dessert inkblot, if you will. I love strawberries, so this looks delicious on one hand, but then the Sputnik-ness of that porcupine thing makes me want to slap some food designer with an industrial-strength tussy-mussy.

Penguins are so sensitive

(Cause nothing's cooler than Lyle Lovett.)

I don't go for fancy cars
For diamond rings
Or movie stars
I go for penguins
Oh Lord I go for penguins

Throw your money out the door
We'll just sit around
And watch it snow
I go for penguins
Oh Lord I go for penguins

Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
Penguins are so sensitive
To my needs

Ach du lieber!

Once again: I was almost a German history minor in college, one of my goals in life is to make it to Germany, and I think German is the coolest language not currently rolling around in my head. (Although I'm shaking my fist at the Volkswagen people for choosing Tennessee over Alabama. Grrrr.)

However, I have to question if, in fact, there is such a place as Germany, and whether or not anybody who ostensibly lives in that ostensible country ever lives past, say, 25. Or do they issue an automatic external defibrillator and angioplasty certificate when you order fat German sausages, boiled beef, pig's knuckles and weinkraut?

Don't get me wrong. Plop that down in front of me and I'd go blitzkrieg on it. I'm just saying, that's a notarized application for a coronary.

My kingdom for that sweater

First, just ignore the horrible scanning job I did. I don't have a honkin' big scanner like those snobs Charlie and Simone over at Modern Mechanix. (They think they're so much better than I am, just because...well, they are. But they could at least keep that fact to themselves.) So that never happened, these are not the droids you're looking for, etc.

Now, just look at the awesomeness of a couple of things. For one, they're gathered around that most cliched of cliched sixties/seventies eating shindigs, the fondue pot. It was 1963, they had a young, handsome president, and they were happening people. So why not indulge in a bit of the old fonduing?

And finally, Give. Me. That. SWEATER! Or blazer, or whatever it is. The white thing with the red lapels. I'd break several federal laws to get my hands on one of those, and I'd never take it off. And I live in Alabama. That's how supremely awesome that thing is.

My name's Joe Friday, and I wear a badge

A badge imprisoned in a video file the idiot running this blog can't extract and code correctly. I should have my partner run him in, but he's so pitiful that I guess we can let him go.

Translation: I've got some old "Dragnet" episodes from the early fifties, long before Jack Webb became craggy-faced. Shoot, I'll say it: Jack Webb was a handsome man. And the show was different from later years, too. More of a film noir kinda thing, although not really. Just different, and good.

In the meantime, would it appease you if I posted a picture of another handsome feller?

Okay, here he is. And I know that you're not going to believe it, but he's standing up on his own two legs, and can even walk forward and backward! Just take a look and see.

Wait. It just occurred to me that you might want to see the other new feller, Jacob, instead of Humphrey the dog. Okay, I can handle that, too.

Here's one with his grizzled, bumfuzzled and sleep-deprived dad, earnestly wishing there where a convenient mask or paper bag around.

And this one:

"Put me in, Coach! I'm ready! Grrrrrr!

At first, we feared an alien facehugger had attached to him, but turns out, it's something called a Soothie pacifier. Even if it does make him look like he's about to join Peter Frampton in some "Do You Feel Like We Do."


Aunt Ginger dropped by.

Now, if we could just mount a flat-screen on the ceiling, I could do this all day. "Deadliest Catch," "Dirty Jobs," old "Dragnet" reruns...I'd be set!

Some of the established pack members check out the newest, hairless, kinda funny-looking member.

And finally, a really, really, really tired daddy, a daddy not up on nursery rhymes and lullabies, resorts to the only vocal soothing he knows: Drive-by Truckers and Robert Earl Keen songs. I'm not kidding. I picked out the more droning kinds of songs, the ones I didn't have to really sing on, let him lay on me so he could feel the vibrations, and it helped calm him down. (The t-shirt was just coincidence.)

I'm back! Kinda sorta

Colicky baby is slightly less colicky, and a July 4th weekend of sleeping, sleeping and more sleeping have me feeling saucy. So I'm planning--no promises, mind you--on posting some new stuff this week.

In the meantime, go to your DVR or VCR or PDQ or whatever you use to record television programs, right now, and program it to record Turner Classic Movies this coming Saturday at 1 a.m. central (U.S.) time. TCM is showing "Skidoo," one of the all-time WORST movies ever. Groucho Marx plays a gangster named God, Carol Channing does a striptease to seduce Frankie Avalon (seriously, unfortunately), and Frank Gorshin, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, Burgess Meredith and a host of other people who should have known better combine to produce something so bad, it defies mocking.

Please understand that when I say the movie is bad, I don't mean "bad, but kinda funny in a cheesy way." No, I mean bad, as in "you'll want the proverbial eye bleach after watching it." As the Interwebs say, be warned: what has been seen can not be unseen.

Now if TCM or some such will just show John Wayne in "The Conqueror."