That boy ain't right

agony aunt

It occurs to me that I've been providing a lot of advice lately, mostly solicited, which is a bit strange.
When I asked M why on earth I would be the one people would talk to, out of the blue, and drop all sorts of intimate details about their private lives, she said: "Well, you're trustworthy and you're very likable, so people talk to you."

Well, I'd agree with her on the likable part, anyway.

Not that I mind being a confidant for a number of our friends; I actually find it flattering. However, I kind of doubt my effectiveness in solving relationship problems. For starters, I don't really offer up anything more than tired platitudes and half-baked suggestions. Secondly, the advice I generally offer up -- especially in the marital troubles arena -- is advice M and I have generally been negligent about putting into action ourselves. Such as having one night a week be designated "Family Functional Night", for example, where both of us can air grievances without fear of arguments or reprisals or gun battles in the dead of night. Another relationship-saving suggestion seems to be to have a whiteboard somewhere in the house where on some other night every week, you divvy up chores between you. Or reflecting on how disdain, more than a lot of things, can doom a relationship if it isn't addressed. Then there's "Board Game Night".

To be quite honest, it's been hotter than Satan's bunghole around here, so we've been too lethargic recently to do much with any of these. We're sort of in recuperation mode still, and that's our excuse.

But I better offer up something... so, in response to Minnie, who asked me why men were so stupid one time, I offer this below. (On a side note, that comic is now goddamn 20 years old. Sigh.)

distracting horny frat boys -- with SCIENCE!

Who knew? You can trick younger men into accepting disadvantageous negotiating positions by flashing a headlight. (Item for the DUH! category.) You don't even need to go that far -- apparently the Victoria's Secret catalog is enough.

Yeah, I linked to it.

However, the study by those enterprising Dutchmen had some interesting data points:

The men's testosterone levels were also tested - by comparing the length of the men's index finger compared to their ring finger.

The results for yours truly are not good. My ring finger is slightly longer than my index, which would explain quite a few things.

The researchers are conducting similar tests with women. But so far, they have failed to find a visual stimulus which will affect their behaviour.

Silly scientists - Trix are for kids! I would also look askance at any study that didn't take into account, at the outset, that women and men experience eroticism in entirely different ways. (Hint: women are less visual, dipshits.)

Note to M: this is how you win at Lord of the Rings, since you can't seem to do it through normal means. I'm just saying.

(Still, however, my favorite SCIENCE! story of all time is this one, which achieves the triple whammy of monkeys, Shakespeare, and defecation, as in this snippet:

"The monkeys aren't reducible to a random process. They get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type."

I hear you, simian brothers. I hear you.)

with profuse apologies to M

...an anti-gay shadow group in Colorado has put up a webpage that supports yet another marriage amendment there. In support of their bigotry, they also put up a page that extols the benefits of marriage.

Um, yeah.

(Visit before it's changed, please!)

what I do in a bathrobe

See, rather than actually do something useful with my life, when I'm awakened at 5 in the morning by a screaming child, I change and feed said screaming child, and when he goes down for a nap, that's my cue to do battle with the troglodytes on the internets. Just to demonstrate that I am a fully-functioning, breathing dork of the highest order, for whom arguing on the internet is, well, like curing cancer and fully ensuring civil rights and liberties for everyone.

Can you tell I've had a lot of caffeine?

Anyhoo, I really did it to get in my wife's pants, 'cause she likes it when I get all ranty on LM's behalf.

But what she doesn't know is that I've been arguing for the past month on boardgamegeek.com about those damn Jews.

Why Daddy is Early to Work

Said to me just this morning while I was holding a screaming baby:

"Brian... how do I turn on the right front burner on the stove? What does it say there?"

yeah, whatever

After all that song and dance about getting L to pick up food and put it in his mouth, L is doing just fine with Baby Biters and zwieback toast, while not 2 minutes ago I walk in the kitchen and find a lot of guilty shuffling and guilty looks around the Cheetos.

M is so totally busted.

um... ok

You taste like baked alaska. Your sweetness is
only matched by your smooth and creamy texture.
You are sure to set fire to anyone's taste
buds.


How do you taste?
brought to you by Quizilla

not that anyone wanted to hear about this

...but a coworker of Mer's was in a picture recently that had this book prominently displayed.

She also found this review somewhere (emphasis mine):
This infant training method involves establishing signals between mother and infant for elimination. At first, the mother simply predicts or observes when the infant is eliminating, and holds the child in a specific position while making a specific sound. Within hours or days even a newborn infant becomes aware of the position and sound and begins to eliminate on cue. Soon it begins to signal to the mother when it is about to eliminate so that she can hold it in position over the pot. As the infant gets old enough to move around on its own, it will crawl to the pot of its own accord when it needs to go, and by the time the child is walking, the child is already trained, without tears, arguments or battles.

1) Feng shui knows when you have to take a shit.
2) Ah yes, the brown note. So handy. So full of comic potential.

And there are other reviews:

Whether you are interested in the history of infant hygiene (ie: life before diapers), infant life and hygiene in other cultures, or how to go about living a diaper free life, this is the book for you!
Jam packed with information and pictures, this book can help you and your baby go diaperless, or at the very least communicate better.

Whew! The soaring plotlines and page-turning action of the history of infant hygeine!

Or how about this?

Ingrid's own experiences helped encourage me to try this with our own son, with astounding success... our son is out of diapers, but more importantly we are continually communicating about his needs and providing response to his inborn instinct not to soil himself.

Speaking of which: I've made it my life's work to find a particularly disturbing program that was shown at 3AM on French TV. I think it was a British show (go figure) translated into French.

Maybe I should explain.

Mer and I were taking a hiking tour throughout the south of France, and we'd just landed in Avignon and had found our bizarre motel-6-looking hotel immediately off the freeway.

When we got to our room, we could see immediately that we needed to buy a lot more heroin in our lives. The toilet sat inside the shower stall, which was a self-contained room off to one side. Every available wall in the room was painted matte black. The furniture hadn't been changed since about 1985. There was a small TV bolted to the ceiling. And the whole room was about 5x5. We tried to go to sleep, but we were severely jet-lagged; so while the world went on outside, we spent 4 in the morning in our room watching TV.

I think both of us would've preferred to have been high at that moment. Or at least drunk. Because what came on the TV defies description.

It was a series of babies against solid color backgrounds, doing various things with turds. Some turds were in toy toilets, some were just out on the ground, and some turds were ice cream designed to look like turds. There were static shots (without babies) of turds just sitting there with large bugs crawling on and through them. Babies were playing with the turds. And then there were shots of babies eating the turds. It still disturbs me to say that we couldn't immediately tell whether the turds the babies were eating were fake or real. All throughout, there was a female announcer, the sort you'd find during inflight announcements or the computers on Star Trek, calmly and brightly saying things we couldn't understand, under the French dubbing, which we also didn't understand.

The experience was indelible for both of us. I think I have to find tape of this just to be able to excise it from my life. Or at least inflict it on others, because it's just too bizarre not to make some attempt at finding it.

I made an attempt just now but only succeeded in finding this site. It's a very long, hard, and ropy heart of darkness I'm traveling, my friends.

horrifying image for your Sunday

Mer has told me, on more than one occasion (including today), that I seriously missed my calling by not being a stripper.

I'll leave you to think on that for today.

adventures in fertility and too much information, part MMIII

Last Friday was my appointment at the PAMF again. To see a urology specialist.

One visit to Dr. Jellyfinger later, I find out that there's nothing wrong with me. Even though my percentage of abnormal sperm is high at around 83% or so, 17% of 18 million sperm is more than enough to achieve pregnancy.

What he said next was a little disconcerting, though.

He said he'd be really surprised if we weren't pregnant in another year, but we had to try it a certain way: we're supposed to have sex every other day for a week before Mer ovulates and a week after. Two weeks of sex every other day.

There is good and bad in this.

I think we're going to need more porn. Does the peanut gallery have any, um, recommendations?

The problem here is that the concept of eros for your stereotypical heterosexual man vs. your stereotypical heterosexual woman differs dramatically. Men want HOT XXX ACTION (it's not only work safe but hilarious... and I'll probably get some unintended visitors with that particular phrase) -- we are visual animals, after all. Women want to be carried away by Viggo Mortensen, Jon Stewart, Clive Owen and above all Colin Firth. Or at least Mer does.

(And you're welcome.)

We have the concept of Hump Island, where you are allowed to have a list of about 5 celebrities to screw on Hump Island without endangering your marriage. Such as stupid fantasies go, it's not bad.

My Hump Island would probably include the likes of Minnie Driver, Liv Tyler, Hilary Swank, Christina Ricci, and above all Emma Thompson.

I do find an Irish or a Scot accent sexier than a Brit accent, though. (Mer and I differ on this point, although I think Bono is on her Hump Island as well.)

Anyway, I don't think there is such an animal, where a porn title successfully gives both men and women what they want without being either unintentionally hilarious or mildly disturbing.

it's all patriarchal and shit

Mer went to the Social Security Administration and changed her name today.

She now has two middle names -- Hope and her last name (redacted to protect the guilty) and my last name tacked on at the end.

It all sounds very Hamptons.

I'm not sure how I feel about it -- she can do whatever she wants, as far as I'm concerned. I never expected any name changes on my behalf, although I was on record in my youthful college years spouting off one piece of sexist nonsense -- wanting any spouse of mine to take my name tout suite. It was vitally important to me then; I could care less now.

At any rate, I think she did it for two reasons: 1) to provide a more consistent environment for eventual bambinos and 2) because many of our friends were/are doing it.

Mer and I are always slaves to peer pressure.

yes, I am a panderer

(Apologies to anybody who's vegetarian.)

As part of the Atkins diet we're on, Mer and I have dived headfirst into the racket that is the diet industry.

Atkins-branded breakfast bars, shakes, ice cream, and even pancake syrup. Which costs a damn lot.

I tried to make pancakes for dinner one time with the flax mix and the Atkins syrup. It took over an hour and the pancakes were less than 1cm thick. Paper thin and hell to scrape off the pan. Definitely not the hearty, heart-clogging, inch-thick, butter-soaked monsters of my youth. They did taste like banana walnut, however.

Initially, it was sheer hell the first few days, having to give up all forms of carbs. All forms of sugar. Most forms of alcohol -- I couldn't have a beer when I got home from work. No starchy vegetables. No breads or cereals. No fruit.

I would find myself staring at the vending machine for minutes at a time, desperately wanting everything in it. I found every spare thought cycle was devoted to thinking about food. I was diet-crazy.

After that, though, it's been going reasonably well. Both of us don't really have daily sugar cravings any more (both of us are recovering sugar addicts), and that's a major victory in itself, especially considering I shouldn't be anyone's model for self-control or restraint. I've lost around 10 pounds.

So Mer and I went to an expensive dinner last night after our workshop, mainly because I was demanding a manly-man dinner of steak and some sort of alcoholic beverage I could drink (these are mostly restricted to the hard alcohols derived from non-starchy vegetables, such as gin -- thank God for juniper berries).

It was there that an amazing discovery took place. Mer discovered that she has a taste for a nice steak. (I feel slightly guilty about this, as it's one of the few vices I have that has a more direct effect on the environment -- beef farming sucks. I almost feel as if there's a brand of SUV I enjoy driving around. Damn, I like steak though. At least we don't have it that often, in spite of our being on Atkins.)

My wife developing a taste for beef is nothing short of earth-shattering.

I tried to come up with some sign that would tell me she'd entered the final stage of her corruption, or that she'd been taken by aliens and replaced with a pod person.

Mer has a mortal fear of rollercoasters; an actual phobia. She rode on one when she was a teenager and she passed out from sickness and fear. She says her corruption will be complete if she rides a rollercoaster. Eating beef in the front car.

I almost want to pay a comic strip artist to render that scene.

all of me

*Extreme* gushiness and sappiness to follow:

Things I Love About My Wife on my O-So-Office-Space-Workday

1. Her laugh. There are several different kinds of these, and I love them all equally. There's the one she has when something's just sort of more-than-average amusing, usually when we're watching TV. She'll crinkle her eyes, smile almost to herself, and bury her face in her pillow. Then there's the full-throated laugh she has when she can't contain herself and throws caution and propriety to the winds. The one I love the most, though, is kind of in-between: it's a laugh that's hard to put your finger on, but it's guileless and sweet. There's love in that laugh -- and it also helps that I've usually done something dippy beforehand.

2. Her smile. Corollary to #1. It's no exaggeration to say that it's the air I breathe. You can see it in a few of our wedding pictures. There's this one picture, extremely contrived pose and all, where we're both lying down on a stump next to each other. One of us is holding a flower. It's a good picture, mainly because it's in black and white and you can't see our compulsively-chewed nails from that distance, but the unearthly magic in that smile of hers...

3. The three gray hairs she desperately wants dyed out -- there will probably be a salon appointment made after she reads this -- but these, along with her laugh lines, show me I'm alive, with her, in the best way possible. Alive.

4. Her hugs: all-enveloping, luxurious, all-giving. They always take me by surprise.

5. The nape of her neck.

6. She is endlessly fascinating, and endlessly wonderful.

7. ...and this last is a selfish reason: she always indulges me, even if I spout off in public like a degenerate. Sorry, honey. ;)

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Mer this morning: "I smell like coleslaw."