xtcian

romulan ale

4/30/07

Apparently NPR got boatloads of hate mail when they played the sound of a dentist's drill over the air as part of their series on singular noises, so I won't recreate the scene for you here. However, I'm in the middle of a complete mouth overhaul, and today my left lower jaw got what had been coming to it for a number of years: two crowns and a filling. I feel like I just got sucker-punched by a Scotsman.

However, there have been four major discoveries in dentistry over the last thousand years: the tiny drill, injectable novocaine, nitrous oxide, and now... the MyVu Personal Viewing System!

Some commenter a few weeks ago told me I was materialistic and always talking about my products, so if you feel some righteous indignation coming on, please, for god's sake, turn away. But I gotta tellsya that Tessa and I picked up a refurbished MyVu on eBay for cheap, and it's one of the coolest things since the Colecovision. Just plug it into the top of your iPod or other mp4 player, and it recreates a 29" TV about eight feet away in your glasses. It has been indispensable on all these trips we have to take; watching it on an airplane is bliss.

Yes, you look like Geordi from Star Trek:TNG, but you won't care - you just put your living room on your nose. It still has a few quirks: it isn't quite like being at the movies. The amount of space around the "screen" negates the nausea problem past viewers had, and takes some getting used to. But halfway through an episode of "Lost" or "Battlestar Galactica," you feel like telling the rest of the world to kiss your 22nd-century arse.

My dentist always has a radio and headphones for patients enduring long procedures, so I figured, why not try the MyVu? I'm here to report that the MyVu downgraded the dentist experience from Total Misery to Vaguely Uncomfortable! And I got caught up with a bunch of my stories while my DDS did the dirty work. Even if she did have to tap my head a few times to get me to open wider.

After calling all the hygienists and other doctors in, my dental care professional is going to get one for her office. Might I suggest it for yours?

the oracle of wifi

4/29/07

I'm sure most of you know about this... George Tenet, head of the CIA in the early Bush years, is releasing a book in which he says Bush & Co. never seriously considered any other option than war with Iraq. He also feels betrayed by them using his "slam dunk" comment, that the Plame affair was a disaster, and he has several people around him that have come out to confirm that everything in his book is basically true. The Bushies are furious.

Now here's my own blog from almost four years ago, on July 11, 2003:

George Tenet, the director of the CIA was hung out to dry today by taking blame for the "Iraq has been trying to purchase uranium from Niger" part of Bush's State of the Union speech in January, even though any American with a pulse have got to figure there's way more to this than meets the press. Either Tenet is the biggest fuck-up in government, or else he has been told to take a dive by the Powers That Be. Or, more interestingly, he was told to take a dive, and did so, but has some revenge cooked up. God knows the CIA had to be under a shitload of pressure from Cheney's crew to find evidence of Hussein's "Al-Qaeda connections" or some other bit of ephemera, so Tenet may be folding in order to play a longer hand of poker. Both Nixon and Johnson (and JFK, if he'd lived long enough) found out what happens when you blame the CIA for your own screw-ups.

So, do I, like, get any credit for that one, or must I just content myself with being the 10th Most Hottest Daddo Blogger?

bella ragazza

4/26/07

In keeping with my desire to have a guest blogger once a week, may I present our next-door-neighbor: raised in Providence, feted in Chicago, the celebrated Broadway and television director David Petrarca - Honorary Uncle to Lucy and excellent all-around dude. I told him to post one of his insanely good Italian recipes, but he had other things in mind. With no further ado, here he is:

***

First things first. If you haven't voted for Ian as THE HOTTEST DADDY BLOG (Lord who makes these titles up) and BEST ALL-TIME BLOG please do it now.

After the many days and hours of pleasure we've all derived from this site, it's payback time! I know it's a pain what with the having to register, but take a few minutes and shine the love!! Let's get him on the front page!!

Now: did anyone watch the Democratic debate tonite? Probably not, since the election is almost 20 months away. It reminds me of how the retailers have slowly crept the start of the Xmas selling season from Thanksgiving to Halloween. I swear if they abolished the "no wearing white after Labor Day" rule, St. Nick would be selling back-to-school lunchboxes.

For those who missed it, there they were, all eight of them arranged in a choral semicircle looking like a South Carolina kindergarten class about to burst into a medley of show tunes. Hillary singing bass of course. They seemed so small to consider for what is surely the most daunting CEO job in the world.

The questions didn't help matters. They ranged from overly simplistic ("Raise your hand if you support an impeachment procedure for Dick Cheney") (duh) to the inane ("Name the top three countries threatening the US and what you would do about them if you become president"). Ok...90 seconds...GO!

There has got to be a better way for us to interview our next leader. Lets face it, sound bites are just as bad as 450-page position papers on health care (again, thank you Hillary... gold star, now erase the board and clap the erasers). Besides, our perverse desire for tearing people down and waiting for a fatal flaw to reveal itself is why most people tune in.

Sure, there's always the chance someone might actually propose something of substance, or an unrehearsed moment of actual humanity could occur. Go to YouTube and watch candidate Mike Gravel's Lear-like rants to realize that the lack of campaign reform is NOT standing in the way of ANYONE.

The front runners provided no surprises: Omaba was stately, Hillary succeeded in carefully modulating her voice, and Edwards appeared circumspect (while wearing the obligatory breast cancer ribbon pin). It was a better night for the middle guys. Biden was the smartest and had the biggest laugh of the night. When asked if he could assure his fellow Americans that his history of gaffes and penchant for verbose answers would be curtailed if he were president, he answered simply "yes".

Richardson sweated profusely while trying to raise the level of discourse and, sadly, did not look presidential, even after the host reminded the audience of his four (that's right, FOUR) nominations for the Nobel Peace prize. Always the bridesmaid never the bride, he would be a great VP choice. Dodd just reminded me of Dukakis. I think it will be a long time before a New Englander gets the nod again.

And then the two crazies: Kucinich and Gravel (who???) Wow. If there was ever a case for a background check, these two could be the poster boys. Enuf said.

Maybe its time to rethink the idea of a single daddy (or mommy) figure running this mega-corporation. Maybe it should be a 3 or 4-person job. Our founding fathers couldn't have envisioned a country so big and diverse that it could impact the very survival of the planet. Heck, their own act of terrorism consisted of dumping some tea into Boston Harbor. I doubt they imagined a time when someone could dump a teabox of radioactive material into the same harbor and destroy a city with a greater population then the entire original 13 colonies.

Watching those little candidates, all lined up in their Sunday best, I couldn't help but see a glimmer of hope shining off all that hair gel. Just maybe, if all eight could manage to sing from their hearts AND stay in harmony, together they could make a sound way more beautiful then each on their own. Even with Hillary holding the bass line.

***

David Petrarca directing "Everwood," 2005

treason's harbour

4/25/07

There we were, in the existential, horrorshow aftermath of September 11, having spent all day helping ash-covered parents find their kids, making phone calls for 10-year-olds whose mothers were still in the Bronx, and wondering what the fuck had just happened to our city. Our so-called "President" G.W. Bush was on some airplane in an undisclosed location, and by late afternoon, the word started circulating that Islamist terrorists were to blame.

We were desperate for somebody to Be In Charge, and that evening, somebody was: Rudy Giuliani, our lame-duck mayor, standing with some city officials in front of a big clock on the wall, as if he was somehow going to slow down time enough for us to catch our breath. And he did.

His exhortations for us to stay calm, to dispel thoughts of retaliation against other religions or races, was so brilliant, so soul-fulfilling, so necessary - that Tessa and I turned to each other, and, having once despised the man, smiled through tears. Someone had actually said it: even on this day, the worst day in America, it is NOT OKAY to savage other people for believing differently.

If many Americans thought this Giuliani was too good to be true, they were right: apparently, these days, it's not okay to savage other people unless they happen to be Democrats. Today he said that Democrats "do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us" and if they were elected we'd suffer "more losses." Giuliani is worse than just an asshole - he's a cynical, tragic bastard, because he has proven than he knows better.

How often can the Republicans flog this horse before even the staunchest cowboys say "enough already"? It's one thing for five-time draft-deferrer (and Known Coward) Dick Cheney to say this crap, but Giuliani? This is someone in whom we'd put an enormous amount of faith, someone who seemed genuinely changed by the lunar landscape of Ground Zero and had not just made political party affiliation meaningless, but had forged insoluble ties between Christian New Yorkers and Muslim New Yorkers. The man probably saved lives in those early days. And now he says if Democrats are elected, we'll have more losses?

This is beyond sad, it's despicable. It's the Republican playbook all over again: stand on the smoking mountain of charred remains and announce that you possess the only secret that will keep it from happening again. Rudy, you kept us sane for those horrible weeks, and for that you'll always have my gratitude. But for now, honestly, go back to your mistress and leave matters of national security to the adults who don't need a national crisis to find their moral compass.

$1.95 away from salvation

4/23/07

Item 1. Yes, I can be a little obsessed, especially on the Mother's Little Helper, but I've been looking for this tiny electrical part for weeks now, and I can't find it. Y'see, at our farm, we have this overhead ceiling fan with a light in it. The light is not ordinary: it is a "mini candelabra base" (E11) socket, which is even smaller than your run-of-the-mill "candelabra base" (E12) light you find in chandeliers and wall sconces.

They make incredibly bright lights for the mini-candelabra, all the way up to a blinding 500 watts, enough to give you a Cozumel tan and fry funnel cakes. However, with our ban on old-style lights (incandescent and halogen), I'm trying to find an adapter.

A simple goddamn adapter. Something that will turn a mini-candelabra base into a Plain Old candelabra base. They have an adapter for everything else on earth, including all other light bulb sockets. Shit, they have treasonous adapters that turn French light sockets into German ones. But not this motherscratcher. After plowing through the web for almost three hours, I finally found a site that had one, along with a picture:

Gleefully, I hugged my wife and jumped up and down, until I noticed this written at the top of the page:
NOTE: This part is now either discontinued with no available replacement or completely out of stock with no estimated in-stock date.
GOD DAMMIT! Can someone PUH-LEEEEZE tell me if they know anything about an E-11 to E-12 adapter before I explode in golden spasms of geek asscockery?

Item 2. I'm writing a FAQ for a semi-redesign of this site. What questions would you like answered?

Item 3. Looking at my statistics, I started getting a bunch of hits from something called Blogger's Choice Awards. Lo and behold, the awesome Ms. Cluver had nominated me for both "Best Blog of All Time" and, hilariously, "Hottest Daddy Blogger."

Now, I don't need kudos of this kind to assuage my ancient demons, but my 8-year-old self does, and if you vote for me, I get to go back in a time machine and tell that weird-looking kid with the violin that he might get to be one of the Hottest Daddy ANYTHINGS if he can just make it through another thirty years of acne.

So here are the image links if you're inclined to login and vote. Feel free to add snarky commentary while you're there!

lit by knowledge and the fireflies above

4/22/07

Even when we were in school, I thought Earth Day was boring, and I still do. Despite being a rabid, frothing environmentalist, there was always something so kumbaya about the whole thing, and my only tangible memory was being a Cub Scout and having to plant little saplings outside the power plant in Cedar Rapids, IA. It was hot, we had shitty shovels that couldn't dig a big enough hole, and honestly, I just wanted to go home and watch Mork.

It's impossible to speak about your environmental convictions without putting your audience into a coma. I don't mean arguments about global warming, which always descends into a slugfest if you happen to be hanging out with Republicans, I mean talking about composting and recycling and all that shit. I was recruited by SEAC (the Student Environmental Action Committee) at Carolina because they thought I could make the whole thing palatable to your average student, but it's pretty hard to make the Dioxin Problem sexy.

That said, I thought I'd use this Earth Day to show you something:

That's my bedside table, and yes, that's a convertible Carolina blue Volkswagen radio/iPod player, and guess what, I'm already married so I don't have worry what the chicks might think. More importantly, however, is the bedside table lamp, which is an LED light bulb.

It looks and behaves just like an ordinary light bulb, but is technologically ahead of both your ordinary incandescent bulb and even the new compact fluorescents. It replaced the 15-watt bulb I used to keep there (low light so I wouldn't bother Tessa when she was sleeping) but it uses 1.4 watts. The bulb I used to have in there was rated to last 1,000 hours; the LED bulb will last 100,000.

I think that's frickin' awesome. I bought it here and it's only a matter of time until LED bulbs come down in price and shoot upwards in brightness. In fact, that's why I took this picture. It won't be long until all lights are LED (aka solid-state, or SSL) and this was our first. Consider it a picture of a guy standing proudly next to his Model T in 1909.

Here's the problem with new technology: the first edition of anything can ruin its reputation. For instance, CFLs - compact fluorescent lights, the twisty ones you now see at Walmart and Home Depot - spent a few years putting out ghastly, bright, blue-white light that looked like the opening scenes of "Joe Versus the Volcano."

Those days are completely over, but it's hard to convince anybody. I'm here to tell you that we swapped out every last incandescent bulb in our house and replaced them with CFLs, and if/when you visit, you'd never know. They come in ordinary bulb shape now, they emit a nice comforting yellow-white light, and many of them are dimmable. We get ours here (with the ordinary-looking ones here), but as long as they have a color temperature of 2800K or below, you can get them anywhere, cheaper by the day.

Sitting in our house in Los Angeles, I added up all the wattage we use for lighting, and it came to 1055 watts. After replacing them all, it came to 155 watts. 155 watts to have every light on in our entire house at once. We just lopped our lighting power bill by 85 percent, and the bulbs last around 10,000 hours.

Okay, I know several of you just fell asleep, but THAT, my friends, is SEXY. 22% of all power in America goes to lighting. Just think of the possibilities for a split second, and then you can forget about Earth Day.

babies and bathwater

4/19/07

The Worst Conversation My Wife and I Have Ever Had:

Ian is in the bathtub recovering from hoops. He yells to his wife in the adjoining room.

IAN: So, like, is the rap on the French preschool that it's too frou-frou for the parents, and after a few months they can't stand the whole "our students are little trees" thing and get tired of their kids going to Oz every day and so the parents start feeling left out?

TESSA: No.

Twenty seconds pass.

IAN: That may have been the worst conversation we've ever had. Actually, that may be the worst conversation we'll ever have.

TESSA: I wouldn't say that. Give us time.

Exeunt.

rhinoceros

4/18/07

one of my aggressively stupid pictures of Jamie taken for art class, June 1989

Tonight Jamie Block showed up on one of his whirlwind visits to Los Angeles - if you're unfamiliar with Block, I've waxed romantic about him in these pages heretofore. He was due to play a gig at the Mint just south of Hollywood, with the two other members of his band flying in from New York and Texas. I got there at 10:30 hoping to see the boys, but instead was ushered into the green room, where the band was loading up on Coronas and scotch. They'd been told a booking error had scheduled them a week from today, and thus crossed the country for no apparent reason.

There was also a music journalist there, an extremely nice woman who gamely interviewed them despite their lack of actually performing. After a few minutes, the manager came in and said they had a recording studio out back, and if the band wanted to play for the journalist, they could do it back there. Insulted yet sanguine, they said sure.

So we wandered through the bowels of the Mint, like Spinal Tap trying to find the stage via a janitorial labyrinth. At last a door led outside, where we were met - no lie - by giant bales of hay. Like for elephants. Behind the hay was another door, which led into a recording studio.

Dark red velvet was draped from the cavernous, twenty-foot ceilings, all covered with eggshell foam and velour. 40-year-old guitars and basses hung on the walls, including a late-60s Hofner violin bass made famous by Paul McCartney. I have been in a lot of recording studios in my day, and frankly, this was the most elegant, creative space I'd ever seen. It was like a piece of New Orleans in 1967 had drifted into Hollywood.

The band quickly set up shop and played songs some of you heard in the East Village in years past, and also new ones several of you downloaded from iTunes. I was present only as an amicus curiae, strictly moral support; however, by the third song, I was placed in front of a gorgeous Rhodes electric keyboard forged sometime in the 1970s. After a couple of chords, I was jamming on that thing like Billy Preston.

Block even pulled out Bob Dylan's "Mozambique," a song from a collection Jamie and I should have entitled "Songs We Played in 1988 to Seduce Unwitting Pi Phis." We've run through this one countless times, and I thought we'd perfected the definitive version a decade ago. Not so. The four of us unleashed the prettiest, dead-on version ever. At the end, the recording engineer, usually the most cynical heard-it-seen-it-all-before brand of human available, was speechless. Used to kicking people out, he invited us to play all night, and I did make it to about 1am thanks to the bar's foresight in possessing a delightful Macallan 18.

In the end, losing the spot at the Mint turned out to be the best thing Block has done in a long time. Like Gill Holland, Lindsay Bowen and other UNC luminaries, he possesses an uncanny ability to land on his feet in the most insane situations; they're the kind of guys who'd never book a hotel room for road trips, because they'd always run into some old friend with a waterbed for each of us.

I'm incorrigibly social and unrelentingly gregarious, but I never had the serendipity those fellas had. When I'd lose my motel key, I'd be sleeping upright in a train station with all my money stolen. The key is to stick as close to the cats with nine lives as you can.

jamming at the farm while snowed in, December 2005

e=m(lux)2

4/17/07

Hey, guess who might have turned two this weekend?

and other living things

4/16/07

A moment of silence for fellow ACC school Virginia Tech, suffering the worst single-gun rampage in American history. This is the part where I add my knee-jerk liberal comment about guns, but let's just skip it: working for real gun reform in this country is hopeless. It's so ingrained in our culture that I confess I occasionally think about getting one for the farm in case Everything Falls Apart.

Either way, it's unknowably sad for all the families. Those kids could have been any one of us, schlepping our way to class at 9am on Monday, seventy years of their lives left to enjoy. Chapel Hill had its reckoning back in 1995, but this is leagues worse, an abominable tragedy. Can't we make bullets as least as hard to get as prescription drugs?

festival of ones and zeros

4/12/07

If you're not a fan of self-congratulation, solipsism, navel-gazing, narcissism or, for that matter, onanism, please look away now: this is where I'm going to try and pinpoint some excellent (and depressingly sub-par) moments on my own frickin' blog. In five years I have approximately 1,452 entries to choose from - I say approximately, because my family (and the occasional guest) have filled in when I was either too sick, too preoccupied, or in jail. More on that later.

For the first year or so, I blogged every goddamn day. I guess it was part of the healing process, and besides, I didn't know who was reading, so I didn't differentiate for the weekend. After a year, I dropped Sundays, then Saturdays. I know I said I'd blog less since this New Year, but almost every weekday, I feel an inexorable pull - or responsibility - and thus I rarely skip a day. Back when we were building dot-coms circa '95-'01, all research showed that a site that didn't change every day quickly atrophied, and I guess that's still in the back of my mind.

Anyway, on to the categories!

The Morrissey "I Can Laugh About it Now But at the Time It Was Terrible" Award: Getting thrown into Homeland Security detention at the Canadian border, October 2003. Coming home from an awesome weekend up in Prince Edward Island, Canada, the border patrol took one look at my car - and then me - and decided neither were up to any good. It didn't help that they searched my backpack and white powder fell out (it was baby powder for post-hoops games). My only way out of jail rested on one talent. Read for the thrilling conclusion!

The "My Wife Groaned About It All Day" Award for Silliest Entry: There's so many to choose from, including how I dealt with my third kidney stone, what happens when you accidentally snort three Extra-Strength Excedrin and Don Knotts vs. Hitler, but I think we can all agree that Ski New Orleans! pretty much wins in a landslide.

The "Pill-Popping Left-Wing Stooge" Award for the Commenter Showing the Least Amount of Class: Yep, you know him, you hate him. His initials used to be J.B., but severe agoraphobia made him use a variety of moronik monikers as the months passed. Sure, I get way worse in my inbox all the time, but our little friend from New England is so publically chunder-headed that even the conservatives avoid him at the virtual lunchtable.

The "That Insurance Job" Award for Most Loyal Commenter: All of you are fantastic, but truly LFMD has swum through thick and thin to be with us. Since this blog is firewalled from her work, I don't even know how she gets here. Honorable Mention goes to caveman, as our resident Id.

The Morrissey "Sun Shines Out of Our Behinds" Award for Tactless Entry: Well, there's the time that Tessa's stepmom got so mad at an entry she wouldn't give us Blakey's bow-front cabinet, but my dumbest foot-in-mouth moment came two years ago when I accidentally outed an old college friend before he could tell his own parents. Thankfully I was able to delete most of the entry before Google cached it, but it still made me look like the entitled, indelicate buffoon I was at 20.

The "Easiest Way to Get 37 Comments" Award for Salacious Topics: Religion and Global Warming. Nothing even comes close.

The "Easiest Way to Alienate Your Readership With the Opening Sentence" Award: "While Fedexing my urine to Chicago today..." from the awesome week-long adventure of having to collect my wee-wee for research, November 2002. Sample fun: "I'd go so far as to say I was the only guy lugging around a bucket of his day's pee in a backpack" (and it only gets worse from there).

The "Iceball Hurled at Ear" Award for Inspired Week of Bloviating: This set.

The "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors" Award for Botched Blog Book Deal: I had gotten a lot of work based on snippets of the blog, but none more than American Coastopia in 2004, after which two different publishing houses were interested in the book version. Not downing Mothers Little Helpers yet, I was slow to react, and when I submitted the proposal a month or so later, I was told the moment had passed and shown the door. I would still put that proposal up there with some of the best - maybe I'll post it here someday.

The "I Told You So, I Fucking Told You So" Award for Prognostication: Well, this prediction was pretty good from March 2003: "we do a thorough sweep of Iraq and come up with absolutely no weapons of mass destruction; Bush and his team are humiliated on the world stage. Americans begin to think he's a liar." But I think you have to give me credit for this from August 2004: "I have but one team left for all of my heart: the North Carolina Tar Heels, a university and sports team I love that just happens to be in the United States. You will have to pry my cold dead fingers off my replica of the 2005 NCAA Championship Trophy."

The "Dodgeball Thrown in 1976 That Hit My Balls in 2003" Award for Shit That Made Me Feel Bad: The vaguely-cruel rancor I got from a particular message board after I described my wedding in August 2003. These days I'm quite used to the deluge of vitriol that accompanies a public blog, but back then, I really let it get to me. It's all a big lesson in skin-thickening.

My Favorite Entry Award, Cerebral Division: The curious Parallelism of Generation X and Y, November 2005. Dime-store pop psychology at its most inexpensive. Also my fave blog title, but I don't think anyone reads those.

My Favorite Entry Award, Emotional Division: I suppose it's a tie between two important characters, one coming while the other was going. Lucy's birth in April 2005 is the most amazing thing I've ever known, and as for guest entries, I thought our dog Chopes was pretty heartbreaking as he left us nine months later.

The "Heavy Sigh That Says a Thousand Words" Award for Supportive Spouse: This chick.

The "She'll Probably Hate Me in Middle School" Award for Overanalyzed Progeny: This chick.

Best Picture: Man, this was hard. According to my FTP client, there are almost 2,000 pictures on this site. I mean, there's a cool wedding one and my odometer and a Pangea Brooklyn Greeting Card and a mystical pre-Katrina New Orleans and my cousins in the late '80s, but when it comes down to it, this girl keeps hogging the awards ceremony:

There's a lot more in the last five years that would be fun to pick apart, but there's only so much archivism any of us can tolerate in one sitting. If there's something in the back issues that you like, or something you said that was awesome, here's your chance to tell the world, yet again, that you are here!

And I thank you guys, as always, for reading. With my Celexa purring along as normal, and my self-indulgences nicely fed, I couldn't have gone on this long without the incredible commentary you bring into our house each day. I bow, omnidirectionally.

i'll give you five good reasons, officer

4/11/07

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to announce that today is my Fifth Blogiversary! That's right, some of you have been listening to me rant and/or rave for an entire half-decade!!! When I started this thing, I was a 34-year-old, single nincompoop with a chemical imbalance, and now I'm a 39-year-old, married dad with only a slight chemical imbalance! Ah, the inexorable march of history.

Doing something for five years on the internet should surely qualify you for some kind of plaque, or at least a parking space with your name stenciled in messy white paint. Hell, it ain't easy keeping a personal outpost here in cyberspace; people keep calling you fat! I have another beef: I've been doing this longer than 99% of all bloggers, and I don't get invited to all the cool conferences, like Dooce and Dave Winer. "Zap Your PRAM" was fun, but I want bags full of cell phone swag, Peter! WHERE'S ALL THE RICHES I WAS PROMISED?

We have a fantastic community here at the corporate headquarters of xtcian.com, but like any school play, it's not real unless somebody's having sex because of it. So? Have any of you had sex by hanging out in the comments section? If not, I really have to start buying the top shelf drinks. I don't get it - I think Ketel One tastes the same as Smirnoff when it's in a Woo-Woo.

I'd like to change the look of this site, and fix all the links at left - the one for my dad hasn't worked since about 2003. Also, the "About Me" link is hilariously out-of-date. What's this "Pink House" movie, anyway? Is that something I worked on? And I helped write a book in frickin' 1993? Did I do it on rolls of papyrus using the blood of Abyssinian slaves?

I guess what I'm asking is, what have I done for you lately?

Anyway, I know people don't read blogs on Fridays, but I'm going to present my own little awards for the five-year anniversary of the site. Any suggestions will be welcome, as well as deconstructive criticism. And since my focus group testers say that I "need more images" to "promote eyeball stickiness," here is a picture of Annie and Lucy to increase ratings. Salut!

left non-deciduous mandibular central incisor

4/9/07

I've had several fights with God (or, as I prefer, an Occasional Higher Power of My Choosing) over things inflicted on me in my childhood and adolescence. First off, he/she pulled the "appendicitis" thing, and I had to be rushed off to the hospital at five years old. I made it, and actually, I thought the hospital was Super Cool.

Then came croup, and thankfully, my parents had heard enough stories from the pioneer ancestors to put vaporizers in our rooms. Then came a horrible bout with acne, which I managed to vanquish in 1986 with Accutane, but not before having the shit kicked out of my face. Next? Unsustainably bad eyesight, which I LASIK'ed in 1999, lifetime chemical depression which I Celexed in 2002, and massive, burdensome lethargy which I Dexedrined in 2006.

And yet still, there were my teeth. Sean and I have teeth that have always skirted the edge of acceptable, and therefore we never had braces but always felt like we needed them. For my part, I had one tooth in the bottom front that came in poorly and just seemed to get worse.

I became deft at hiding it in pictures, and when I would bite an apple, I would look down at the marks and grow despondent. In ninth grade at Norfolk Academy, one of my friends (whose father was a famed orthodontist) once looked at my lower teeth and said "man, those are a goddamn mess," one of those things you never forget, even 25 years later.

Thank God my teeth were always pretty white, made even better by the fine folks at BriteSmile a few days before my wedding four years ago. Yet I always looked upon them, especially the one errant tooth, as a reminder that I could make all the cosmetic changes I wanted, and still be basically, unfixably flawed. I would watch the interviews I did on television back in the "13th-GEN" days, and all I could see was that bottom tooth, threatening to take over my entire body.

I have a great dentist in LA who uses cutting-edge technology, USB cameras, indestructible crowns, the whole thing. She and I went over everything wrong in my mouth, and we set about to fix the fillings, crowns and canals I'd let slip during those desperate years when I was still trying to keep the Purple House phones from being disconnected. I asked her if there was any easy way to get my teeth straightened without braces.

Turns out, not really. Teeth-straightening technology stalled at some point in 20th century; sure, there's those plastic mouth moldings you can wear at night, but they don't do any heavy lifting. Even behind-the-tooth braces offer little but slight nudges - if you want your teeth fixed, you're talking about full braces for at least 18 months. Needless to say, at this point in my life, I didn't see it as an option. I'm already married and I'm not a TV weatherman.

But, she said today, she can smooth down the edges of my problem tooth so that it matches the others. As long as I wasn't planning on getting braces, she could make it look, at any casual glance, like my bottom teeth were pretty much straight. I immediately said "yes, by all means yes" and she lay me down in the chair, and I heard the familiar squeal of changes inside my mouth.

When she gave me a mirror, I was astonished. I'm not going to make the cover of Dentist Fancy anytime soon, but it looked amazing. She'd even fixed a little bit of my two front teeth so they ran gracefully along my mouth. All the way home from Beverly Hills, I kept looking in the mirror: I had pit myself against the Higher Power of My Choosing, and I'd played him/her to a draw.

Hours later, Tessa and I were watching the premiere of "The Sopranos," and I'd settled into a melancholy. I realized I had this habit of touching that errant tooth when I was nervous during a movie or a show. I kept putting my finger on the tip of my bottom jaw, but after twenty-seven years, the tooth wasn't there anymore. I ran my finger along the row, and it was smooth, odd.

As the show finished, Tessa continued work on her computer, and I just sat there, wondering if I'd done something terrible. Had I taken away a basic part of my personality? Had I removed a key part of something bizarre that fueled creativity? I know this seems ludicrous, but I turned to my wife and said I felt like I had punished one of my children, told him he wasn't good enough, and shaved him down to make him look like everyone else. I even started to tear up, and believe me, with all the problems in the world, I know how that sounds.

It must be something else, it must be emblematic of a bigger issue, it must come from a deep well of self-hatred that takes a drill to discover. I have this great new smile and I'm stuck mourning something so ugly.

yolk of heaven

4/8/07

looking for the last egg - oddly, you can see it elsewhere in the pic

Here's the way I see it - sure, they might be a little young for holidays. Lucy remembers one thing about Christmas, and that was a giant tree in our living room that we covered with crazy-colored crap. And today's Easter Egg Hunt? It took everything just to keep her from impersonating Cool Hand Luke by eating everything she found, especially the eggs that were covered in dirt. And I agree, dyeing Easter eggs in those little vinegar bowls is bizarre, almost as weird as disemboweling a pumpkin and putting a candle inside.

But this way she will never know a "new" holiday. She will carry with her an inkling of the same day from the year before, even if it's the vague notion of looking for eggs or rooting for presents under a tree. This essence of repeated ritual translates to "twas ever thus" for her, which gives the few rituals we still possess a more mystical meaning.

When I was two, my older brothers were still eleven and twelve, not to mention the 30 kid cousins milling about. For the Mormons, and even my own lapsed-faith family, these holiday traditions had gone on, as far as we knew, for 17.5 million years. When Tessa talks about how good I am at holidays, my only feeling is that it seems preternaturally disturbing not to do these things right. Somehow it offends the Easter Gods, the souls on Hallowed Eve, or even the Pilgrims and Indians giving thanks.

Today, as you read this, is Saint Gautier's Day. It's also Saint Casilda's Day too, but like you, I knew neither. Because so many days are non-descript, without celebration, it's important to sanctify the days you can. Ironically, for some of us without religion, the religious holidays are more important. Not just because the manufacturer of Marshmallow Peeps or Cadbury Creme Eggs tells us so, but because it allows parents to give their kids one thing that makes life worth living: something to look forward to.

oh yeah, she made her first pancake this morning too - nice shape! kinda looks like P.E.I.

hippety hoppety

4/5/07

Happy Easter, everybody!

texodus

4/4/07

Ian said he would rather stick a fork in his eye than write his blog tonight. I am Heather, staying with my old friends Tessa and Ian, and I am here in LA on a mission to get the fuck out of Dallas, TX and relocate to a bigger city filled with blondes and plastic surgery, closer to the Pacific Ocean.

I hate apartment hunting. I have a long history of bad luck with housing. I once lived in a lower corner two-room apartment in Astoria---before it was hip to live in Astoria. My landlords were, not surprisingly, Greek and my earliest memories are of the Greek husband landlord spitting fig refuse into the gutter while he sold me on all the fabulous renovations he was going to do on this "charming junior" and how the strange, mysterious train on the track above the building only ran "once a month."

And the Super that stood on the corner and would shout out one-liners like Burgess Meredith circa Rocky: "That Marian, she's a whore!" Now, I don't think anyone harks back fondly on the place where their first psychic break took place, but when Bill (in the apartment upstairs) had his Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits on repeat in the piss-smelling sweltering balm of New York summer, I felt like noosing myself.

When the roof caved in from faulty plumbing that burst during one of Bill's all-too-frequent post-coital showers, I watched Baywatch and dreamed of being CJ to ease the pain. When he would bellow out his second-story window at his partner-in-coitus Marian - in a heavy Queens' accent - "Come out and PLAY-EEEE- AYY!" the deli meat carver (in the weed lot that doubled as the "garden") seemed like the long lost friend I never had.

I must admit that during this year, one of the longest years of my life, my judgment was sketchy and I couldn't shake the feeling I was being followed. But ten years later I know the truth. It wasn't that I was leading a life in my head closely resembling that of (in my personal opinion) the great pioneers of going mad -- Francis Farmer and Virgina Woolf. (Oy, those headaches). It is, in fact, that Queens Sucked For Me.

So is it really "Location! Location! Location!"? Or, will it all be okay because once you get your "sanity cherry" popped, things will never be the same again? Oh, and as for the train, well, I bet you can guess.

spartan final

4/3/07

It was close, but due to Florida's (overwhelmingly boring) repeat as national NCAA basketball champs, our old friend Sean Marier is the winner of this year's contest! Meaning, of course, he gets to write today's entry.

For those of you who don't know Sean, he was an indispensable PA for the Pink House movie shoot, hailing from Michigan State, of all places. He'll have to say how he ended up on our set, because he was just one of those quality dudes that seemed like they had always been there. Appeared out of nowhere to make things better for everybody, which was invaluable on such a disastrous shoot as ours.

During filming, he said he wanted to have a little part in the film, and I told him that we were planning a scene that required a bunch of campus right-wing Aryan Youth types. Jokingly, I told him to dye his dark-brown hair yellow like a good Aryan, and damned if he didn't show up the next day with almost lemon-platinum hair:

Sean is far right with some other actors, including now-stunningly-fantastic-artist Casey Burns far left; August 2001

By god, he got his scene. He was made ARYAN #1 and Casey became ARYAN #2. During the party sequence at the Pink House, a group of them bust open the front doors and demand payback for the LSD the residents baked into their brownies. Zola confronts them:
ZOLA: Ha. Well, you look like you survived.
ARYAN #1: I've been talking to my backpack all day!
ARYAN #2: I signed up for pottery class!

And for those 50 or so of you who saw that early cut of the movie - indeed, the only people who will ever see any cut of it - you know how it all goes from there.

So we remained friends with Sean, throughout his various travels, and he always keeps up with us on the blog. So, without further ado, here he is:

************

Sean M's very first blog entry ever. And quite probably his last.

So, when Ian emailed this morning and told me that my prize for winning the NCAA basketball pool was my own personal blog entry, my first thought was "sh**!" My second thought was "what's going on in my head or life that's so important, so relevant to the times, that I need to make sure everyone in the blogosphere (or at least Ian's substantial corner of it) knows about it?" After determining that answer to be "nothing", I though I'd just share the first 10 random thoughts that pop into my head. And here goes…

Random thought #1 – Only in Ian's basketball pool would the gay guy win.

Random thought #2 – "Planet Earth" on the Discovery Channel... brilliant, addicting, beautiful, humbling.

Random thought #3 – Two words: Sanjaya Malakar. I feel so sorry for this kid. He's clearly not the most talented kid on American Idol, but he keeps moving on based on sites like VoteForTheWorst.com and schoolyard rabble-rousers like Howard Stern and Perez Hilton. If you don't like the show, don't watch it. If you don't like the singers, don't buy their albums. But to blatantly mess with the system just because you're able just seems so messed up. And for the show and his friends, parents, etc to have to keep telling him/themselves that he's there for the right reasons (America loves you!) saddens me, and I'd hate to have his therapy bills once this is all over.

Random thought #4 – Alanis' humps. Remember when Alanis Morissette was this dark, intense, angry little singer/songwriter from Canada with no sense of humour about herself, but with many very important things to say about relationships and the world around her? Well, she's back... minus the intensity but with added fun. Check out her (ironic? dontcha think?) cover of "My Humps":



Random thought #5 – GLAAD Media Awards Los Angeles, taking place on April 14th at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. In LA and want to support a cause/organization near and dear to my heart? See a great show, eat a fab meal by Wolfgang Puck, and help raise even more money by participating in the silent and live auctions (which I’m the co-chair of)? Go to this link for more info. If you're not in LA, but you get the Logo cable channel, the awards will be broadcast there on April 21 (and many many times thereafter). Check your local listings.

Random thought #6 – "Heroes" – I miss you. Can you come back before April 23rd? Pretty please?

Random thought #7 – 10 random thoughts is too many.

And that's that. Thanks to Ian for the forum. I don't know how you do it 5 days a week!

Thanks to Florida for winning the tournament.

And lastly, my apologies to anyone who comes here each morning for a shot of thought-provoking inspiration, but had to settle for this. If I had a cute kid, I'd end with a picture of him/her. Someday. Fingers crossed.

Adieu.

************

above the fruited plain

4/2/07

Okay, see if you can help us out here. We're trying to make a list of Things Americans Do Better than Anyone Else in the World. And no, it can't be stuff like "demoralize Iraqis" or "be insane Fundamentalist Christians." Nor can it be sports that only we play. It has to be actual products that we export, currently in widespread use.

We came up with:

1. visual entertainment, especially TV and movies - yes, there's a lot of crap, but we also make "House," "Law and Order," "The Simpsons," "Six Feet Under" and "Battlestar Galactica."

2. computers (yes, we don't make the chips, but we make the units: Apple, Dell, etc.)

3. beef

4. maple syrup (yum)

5. tobacco (sadly)

6. jeans (or do the Europeans do it better now?)

7. athletic shoes - Nike alone kicks everyone's ass, and yes, I know they're actually "made" by slave labor in Djakarta, but the designs and concepts come from Oregon.

Then we tried coming up with another list, this time "Things Americans Try to Do But Everyone Else Does it Better":

1. cars (not even close - Toyota is two decades ahead of us)

2. chocolate (Ghirardelli is pretty good, but have you ever had Belgian chocolates?)

3. coffee (Kona coffee from Hawaii is awesome, but the beans from Ethiopia and Kenya are sublime)

4. home theater systems, DVD players, flat-screen TVs, stereos

5. pop music (the Brits will always be better, and it's time to face it)

6. comedy (again, Brits are funnier, as are Canadians)

7. stem cell research

I know these two lists are paltry, can you guys add to either of them?