Man About Murfreesboro - blog - funny - politics

Max got himself an acting gig recently. He played a young pre-adoptive boy in a troubled foster family. He had about five lines and his portion of the shoot took three days. So, he basically gave up his weekend for this.

He took it like a trooper, though and we recently learned that his compensation will certainly make it worth his time. Here, however, is the quandry.

Months ago, Max and I were looking around online when he saw one of these. It's a robotic baby dinosaur with some sort of artificial intelligence chip that makes it act like a little pet, responding to its owner and learning behavior as it "grows." Max immediately flipped out. He became obsessed with it. He wanted one sooooooo bad that he was nearly in tears.

"Fine," I said in that smug parental way I've cultivated which really means the opposite of what I actually say. "You save up $350 and you can buy one."

At the time, I knew there was virtually no way he'd ever have his hands on that kind of cash. Then this video came up and suddenly he's got that and more. But here's the deal. He's nine and although he's certain that he will love it and pet it and call it "George," I know it will be a matter of days before this thing becomes another piece of little boy detritus scattered around his sty of a room.

As a responsible parent [cough] I have to break my promise and not allow him to spend his money on a robotic baby dinosaur. It isn't as bad as it seems. Max hasn't mentioned the dinosaur in a while and in all likelihood has forgotten about it. But I need to prepare my self for the next time he sees it, because it won't be pretty.

His mother and I have discussed it and we believe we've worked out a compromise. His other big want at the moment is a Nintendo Wii. The problem there, of course, is finding one that isn't being sold on eBay at extortionist rates.

We had some drama at home last night. When Dolls picked the kids up from school, they were in their normal rambunctious mood and apparently Max put his hand over Rozzy's mouth and, in the process, managed to wiggle her loose front tooth. It bled and Rozzy used it as an excuse to whine until bedtime.

She wrote the toothfairy a note on a series of Post-Its. The upshot was simply to ask what the tooth fairy did with all the teeth? Having recently watched "Hogswatch," I knew one theory – she builds a castle out of them.

Regardless, Rozzy's tooth was hanging in her mouth at a really odd angle. She wouldn't let me near her unless I agreed to sit on my hands. I'd suggested at one point to tie some thread around it so she could pull it out herself. She refused citing a story her mimi told her about tying the other end of the string to a doorknob and slamming the door really hard.

She didn't want to eat for fear of swallowing the tooth (like she did her first one). She didn't want to brush her teeth. She didn't want to pull the tooth and didn't want to go to bed with it still in her mouth. I put her to bed and told her what was going to happen.

"Look, you're going to lie here in bed and play with that tooth with your tongue and it will eventually come out," I said. "Then you'll come and tell us and we'll put it under your pillow. If it doesn't happen tonight, it will happen tomorrow."

That seemed to satisfy her and she went to sleep. Fast forward to 3:45 a.m. Rozzy appears at our bedside announcing that her tooth has had a nightmare and her tooth has come out. Dolls puts her to bed and tells me to make sure and do my duties before she wakes up in the morning. At 4:25 or so, she comes back down to say that the tooth fair hasn't come yet. I take her back to bed assure her that, despite the late hour, the toothfairy knows what's the deal-e-oh and slip a buck under her pillow, while secreting away her tooth.

Heath Ledger's death came as a huge shock. He was a gifted actor and I am looking forward to his portrayal of Joker in the new Batman movie. Some of the reports I've read suggest that it was the preparation for this role that led him down this path.

He holed himself up in a hotel room for a month reading graphic novels about Joker's exploits, keeping a diary in character and working on his craft. This resulted in his sleep patterns being interupted, which led to prescription sleep aids.

What does it say about me that I take pride in having the type of poo that Gillian McKeith would appreciate?

For those completely confused and somewhat creeped out by that statement, McKeith is a nutricionist with a show on BBC America called "You Are What You Eat." Around our house, we referr to it as the "fat bastard" show, which is not to be confused with "How Clean Is Your House" which is the "dirty bastard" show.

In "You Are What You Eat" McKeith finds a fat bastard and watches him (or her) for a week or so and documents everything he (or she) eats. She then puts it all out on a table and berrates him for being a fat bastard. At least that's what I get from it, I only catch bits and pieces. Last night I walked in during a segment in which she'd made everyone in the family poo in some Tupperware. She lined the boxes up and made them all guess who's poo was who's before berrating each for having substandard poo.

"You always come in during the poo segment," Dollie said as I stood there stunned at what was playing out in front of me. As McKeith was fussing at the daughter for not chewing her food properly (as evidenced by such big chunks of it remaining in her poo) Dollie explained what McKeith looks for in a good poo.

"It should have form and shape," she said. "It shouldn't be too smelly and it should be in more-or-less one long piece."

Without getting too scatalogical (too late) my poo fits all those categories, no doubt as a result of the immense amount of fiber I consume daily.

To be fair to McKeith, some of the people she features are fat bastards who could use a good kick in the bum. One woman liked to have a midnight snack of a sandwich made of french fries and mayo. Why not just serve it with a side of brown gravy?

So, I avoid the fat bastard show. I also avoid the dirty bastard show, which involves two women who go into these poor sad people's apartments and berrate them for being disgusting. They are. Some of these people have not cleaned in years. The filth is stacked on top of filth. These women take samples of the filth so they can show the homeowners the disease and bacteria they are living with. Then they clean the house.

Both shows have the desired effect of making the viewer feel better about his or herself, provided said viewer is neither fatter or dirtier than the featured bastard.

As long as we're on BBC America, there are three series on there that I do enjoy. The first is "Top Gear" which I've written about recently. The second is "Life On Mars" which I've also written about and just saw the last episode last night. It ended in a somewhat confusing yet entertaining matter. I look forward to both the spinoff, "Ashes To Ashes" and the American version of the original. I understand Colm Meany will play the role of Gene Hunt.

The character of Gene Hunt was the key to the success of the original series. He deserves to be recognized as one of the great television cops. His use of slang and his accent required us to turn on the closed captioning to understand what he was saying half the time. Meany has some big shoes to fill.

The final is a new one that Dollie found. It's called "The Catherine Tate Show." It's a sketch comedy show with Tate playing a huge number of roles. It's very funny. The stock characters are clever and the makeup and costuming are well done. She's a funny Tracey Ulman.

Another British import I'm enjoying plays on the Sundance Channel. It's called "Swinging" and it's a sketch comedy show as well. Most of the sketches deal with relationships and sexuality. One of the reasons I like it is that I recognize one of the cast members from the Scottish sketch comedy series "Velvet Soup."

It's a TV-heavy entry today, but it's either that or politics and heaven knows future entries are going to be heavy on the politics.

When I was young, one of my favorite shows was "Happy Days." Fonzie was the epitome of cool. Sure, the show lasted too long and literally gave us the term "jumped the shark" for shows that last too long, but to my grade-school mind, there was nothing better.

I can still hear my dad cackling at Fonzie when he tried to say he was wrong and it came out "wrrrrnn."

I used to have a poster of Fonzie on my bedroom wall. I had a t-shirt that showed his trademark thumb's up with the phrase "Sit on it" emblazoned across the bottom. Looking back, I'm amazed anyone let me wear that.

Eventually we all grow up and turn our attention to other shows. "Happy Days" gave way to other sitcoms, "Welcome Back, Kotter," "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons," "M*A*S*H," but you never forget your first.

Some folks in Milwaukee, the setting for "Happy Days," have raised $85,000 to erect a bronze statue of Arthur Fonzarelli downtown.

As for the politics . . . I'm having way more fun watching the Republicans fret and fume over their choices than watching Obama and Clinton bicker. My big decision is which Republican I'm going to vote for in the Feb. 5 primary.

I haven't picked up my Xbox 360 controller in more than a week. There have been just too many other pressing issues. But after reading this, I've decided to get back and finish that second game of "Mass Effect" I have saved.

This is typical of hysterical "conservative" "commentary" you get on Townhall.com. It's as if they give every nutjob who can string a few sentences together about the apalling state of the country a column. It is obvious the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He's never played the game, never did any research about the game and is manufacturing outrage over a strawman. Take a gander:

Hyperbole? You've got a call on line 1, it's Mr. Kevin McCullough. Where to begin . . . how about at the beginning? "Mass Effect" is a science fiction adventure game that pushes the boundries of storytelling. It is rated "M" for mature, meaning you must be at least 18 to buy it. It isn't marketed to 15-year-old boys."

While you can custom design the way your character looks, you are bound by relatively modest constraints. You cannot, for example, fight the enemy using Jessica Rabbit. The main character is Commander Shepherd, a soldier, and so the models are all physically fit, but not exagerated like the American Gladiators. That's not always the case, but in "Mass Effect" one of the early criticisms I read was that the character design engine was so limited compared to other games.

There are scenes that involve sex, but they aren't graphic, can be avoided without detriment to the story and aren't player-guided. This isn't porn, it's Star Wars. McCullough goes on to suggest that the next president should push legislation aimed at protecting "pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult males" from the evils of videogame sex. Yet another example of a conservative who wants bigger government when it comes to policing what you find entertaining.

Much like today's film industry, the videogame distributors voluntarily submit to a ratings system designed to ensure that only adults play "Mass Effect."

McCullough suffers from the antiquated notion that videogames are marketed to children. That may have been the case in the past, but no longer.

In fact, the top three games for the Xbox 360 are rated M, "Bioshock," "Mass Effect," and "Assasin's Creed." Stores aren't allowed to sell these games (which cost upwards of $60 apiece) to children. If McCullough wandered in on his 15-year-old playing "Mass Effect" then the problem is he isn't doing his job as a parent. I don't let my son play and if he's in the room while I'm playing, I concentrate more on the story: dialogue, character development and plot and less on killing aliens and robots.

Regardless, McCullough's column will no doubt reinforce among his readers that videogames and sex is evil and pre-schoolers are playing them and they should all vote Republican because that will get the government off the backs of big business and peeking through your bedroom windows where it belongs.

Late update: I actually wrote this yesterday and never got around to posting it. In the meantime, McCullough was innundated by "gamer-nerds" who took him to task. As is so often the case when windbags are confronted with their distortions, this guy chose the most vile and unintelligent responses to highlight as a representation of them all. Classy.

He goes on to defend his assertions and distorts what he actually wrote in doing so. He demonstrates a distinct lack of intellectual curiosity and a wholesale dependence on his "gamer-nerd friends" for information.

He watched a clip on YouTube of a "sex" scene between the main character (in this case a female) and an alien (who appears female, but actually belongs to a race that does not have gender). Here's how he describes the scene:

Would you call this an accurate description? I wouldn't. Granted, there is one other sex scene in Mass Effect that is more . . . vivid. You can actually see someone's computer generated butt in it and the two characters are making out pretty hard. But there is nothing vulgar and nothing that hasn't been shown on network TV.

The whole point of his original article seems to be that the government should step in and make sure that this sort of thing isn't available for purchase. This seems like an odd argument coming from a "conservative," but what do I know?

I received my first email from dad. It was a forwarded email warning that Barrack Obama is a Muslim.

Today marks the anniversary of the great Boston molassas disaster of 1919. A 58-foot tall tank of crude molassas housed a railroad freight yard split open dumping tons of the sticky syrup on the unsuspecting employees before flowing into the town proper. The waves crested at 8 feet tall, destroying the railway, the public works building the firehall and killing 24 people.

It's a new year and I'm starting it off by welcoming a new reader. My dad has joined the ranks of the online community. He called me the other day to ask me to send him an email so he could have mine. Welcome, dad.

Dolls and I went to Washington D.C. for a few days after the new year. She attended the American Historians Assocition conference. I went to poke around our nation's capital and to be her arm candy. Our previous trip to D.C. was on our honeymoon, some 14 years ago. It was June and extremely hot. This time it was January and bitterly cold. One day, we'll get it right.

We took in the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery. It was a bit crowded, but I learned a great deal about the artist. One of the final paintings in the exhibit was of light coming through a window of an empty room. By the time you'd worked your way through the paintings of the New York City streets, the houses on the sea coast of New England and the figures of women standing in hotel room windows, that last image really distilled what Hopper was trying to convey. It got down to the meat of it.

He evokes a mood and you could feel it in the crowds that meandered slowly around the galleries to look at paintings of drug store windows and train cars – subjects that weren't so much beautiful or inspiring as they were truthful and human. Also on display was one of the artist's notebooks. It gave an insight into how he worked – sketching out scenes, making notes about color and light. Under each he would make a notation of how much he sold it for and what his cut was after his agent took out the commission.

As it always the case, the last room led to a giftshop full of Hopper-themed baubles and gewgaws. The funniest, as far as we were concerned, were grey fedora hats that roughly matched the type Hopper wore in one of his self portraits.

When we came here right after our wedding, we took a lot of photos of each other "touching" the tops of monuments. It's a thing we do, I guess. This year we had varying degrees of success as we were stucking using my lousy phone camera and perspective was not on our side.

We hiked our way to the Washington Monument only to find out that the tickets for that day's trip to the top were gone and if I wanted to make it up there, I had to come back the next morning at 8:30 a.m. No thanks.

From there, we hiked over to the World War II monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. That was where we discovered that the closes Metro stop was another five blocks north. We limped back to the hotel that day.

I went to the National Zoo and got some video footage of the giant pandas for Max. He's been going a little panda crazy lately, having amassed a small army of stuffed pandas. He's named them all and when he gets a new one, he introduces it to each of the others. It's sweet. And a little creepy.

We stayed at the Omni Shoreham hotel which is an historic site in itself. It was where Clinton had his first inaugeral ball. Part of "Pretty Woman" was filmed there. Sinatra played there in the late '80s. The piano lounge is named for Mark Russell.

On Saturday I was on my own and I made my way to the Smithsonian Castle to take a look at some of Smithson's personal effects and learn a bit about the history of the institute. The two museums I really wanted to see: The American History Museum and the Museum of Science and Technology were both closed for rennovation. So I walked over to the natural history museum to see the dinosaur skeletons and view the exhibit on evolution.

We had some good food and met some interesting people. All in all, not a bad way to spend a few days.

We were in D.C. when the results from Iowa were announced. All the politicians were gone, so there wasn't much brouhaha about it, except in the pages of the Washington Post and on the TV. One thing that should be noted during the five days between Iowa and New Hampshire: the media, the pollsters and the pundits completely misread the situation.

I never bought into the idea that Hillary was some kind of underdog going into New Hampshire. So she lost in Iowa. Big deal. It wasn't even a real primary. In terms of delegates, it doesn't count for much. But oh the sturm and drang over her campaign "collapsing" she was "falling apart" she was going to hire Begala and Carville to help her pull it out.

When she had a genuine moment of tears in New Hampshire, the pundits were perplexed as to how to spin Hillary as both a weak woman who can't take the pressure and a calculating witch who faked the tears to gain sympathy.

Hillary's win in New Hampshire only really decides one thing: Edwards is done. Richardson is done. Dodd, Biden and the rest never stood a chance.

Less than a month from now, we'll have Michigan, South Carolina and some more scattered primaries. As a responsible electorate, we should take the lessons of New Hampshire to heart. Don't let the media write the results before you've had a chance to cast your vote.

Then there's the idiot Bill O'Reilly who physically assaulted an Obama staffer who stood between his camera and the candidate. Let's be clear: O'Reilly was out of line here. First of all, he was standing in the public, not press area. Secondly, he had no call to get physical with the guy. Thirdly, he was verbally abusive to the staffer. Lastly, when he finally got the senator's attention, he didn't ask anything relevant or pertinent to the campaign. Here was his one shot at a question and what did he ask? "Will you come on my show?"

Let's not forget that one of O'Reilly's favorite things to do is sandbag unsuspecting people by sending a camera crew to confront them in parking lots or grocery stores.

O'Reilly is a loud-mouthed jerk who proudly showed the video of the incident as if it somehow exonerated him. Then claimed that he had no choice because he was "defending the Constitution."

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