Cerebrate Good Times

While Sam and I were trick-or-treating tonight, he asked me this: What if trick-or-treating meant you visited other people’s houses and brought them candy? Awesome.

This little thought (thoughtlet?) has been in the back of my mind for a while. And it's ridiculous, but I need to get it out of there. So here it is. Babies are fascinated with shiny things. Also, they can stare at their hands for a long time, just watching them move. So... babies kind of act like potheads? Am I terrible for thinking that's funny?

After much soul searching, I have decided not to dress up for Halloween. First of all, it's on a Sunday this year, which immediately takes about 90% of the fun out of it. Then, if I were to dress up at work, it's 2 days early, which makes me feel dumb walking around dressed up. Also, nobody at this company dresses up, apparently. Like literally nobody. So the only way anybody would see me is when I take Sam trick-or-treating on Saturday. But it's all dark then anyway, so it's pointless. Instead I have decided to focus my creative efforts on pumpkin carving. I'll keep you posted.

One day while I was carpooling with Rob , I found a buzzer from the board game Taboo in his car. It didn't take me long to realize that it could be used to effectively interrupt the speech of others. So I decided I need to carry one of those around with me at all times and use it when people make nonsensical or blatantly untrue statements. I predict awesomeness. Or a black eye. Only one way to find out!

Meet Dortmunder, named after the character mentioned in this post . We got him yesterday from animal services. After a day of being really skittish, he settled down this afternoon and has become pretty affectionate.

Last night I asked Sam to tell Allison a story. Here's what he said, as best as I could get it written down. Once upon a time there was a frog, and he wanted to be a reptile instead of an amphibian. So he hopped home to his log. One day a predator came and moved to the log, but he got away. And then he was happy to be an amphibian. If he had just made a connection like the frog hopped away from the predator and that helped him realize that being an amphibian was great, it would be publishable as a children's story.

It's interesting to me that the subject of cats is, like politics and religion, a polarizing one. Most people I have talked to have strong feelings one way or the other. "Cats are evil!" "Cats are cute and cuddly!" "Cats hate me!" "Cats are just good at detecting those who hate them!" "Cats are crabby and self-centered!" "Cats are sweet and loving!" Anyway, I'm thinking of getting a kitten in the next week or so. Jer is going to get a puppy, and we'll house them together to socialize them and so they'll have company. I'll keep you posted on what happens.

Okay, here we go again. Some of you may remember my post about how breast cancer gets all the media attention. Today I'm going to take issue with a different aspect of the same media coverage. My problem now is that every time there's a story about breast cancer, there is an accompanying photo of a naked woman with her hand over her breast. Seriously? First of all, will we really not know what they're talking about without that photo? What about a photo of a (clothed) average-looking survivor, or a doctor holding a mammogram? And second, doesn't that sort of cheapen the cause by associating it with sex? I bet everyone would object if, adjacent to a story about prostate cancer, they had a photo of a naked man with his hand over his crotch.

This week's experience: Navajo Hogan Go check it out. The blog entry, I mean. Well, actually, you should go check out the restaurant too.

I'm not a terribly competitive person, and I challenge anyone who disagrees to a sack race. But even with my mild temperament (I only placed third in my age division at the annual tri-county Jerk Festival last month), the animosity that often accompanies sporting competitions and even politics disturbs me. Now, to a point this makes sense. I understand that our brains are lazy, and it's easier to just cram everything on one side or the other of the us/them fence, rather than consider multiple viewpoints. But the weird thing is how we'd rather spend our time throwing flaming bags of dog poop across that fence than building an awesome bowling alley on our own side. Case in point: the 2004 presidential election. When I asked any supporters of John Kerry why they were voting for him, this is sort of how it went: "So why did you decide to vote for him?" "Bush is terrible! He's gotten us stuck in a useless war, and he's secretly in league with the Ku Klu...

The first real communication we've had with Allison, as far as her really responding to something we say, is for her to "punch" us. She's especially willing to do it to Sam, for some reason. Anyway, this isn't the best example, but it sort of illustrates how it works. She usually does at least wave her arm around a bit when we tell her.

My friend and coworker (and soon to be famous author) Rob started a new feature on his blog which involves us eating out and reporting on it in a witty manner. You can read the first entry here . And on an unrelated note, I just had to delete 35 spam comments that came in overnight, so I am going to have to make some adjustments to the commenting procedure. I'll keep it as simple as possible, only escalating the procedure when the spambots overwhelm the current settings.