Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005 Let's Give the Boy a Hand When Trash and I left M. Tiny at home with his Grandma for a few days earlier this month, we were terrified that he was going to something for the first time and we'd miss it. Like crawl (which he'd been trying to figure out) or walk (which he'd also been trying to figure out) or eat his Intellitainer™ (another ongoing goal). So we left the video camera with them with orders to record the entire long weekend in real time. Which they did. Fortunately, he didn't do anything new while we were gone. Or while I was gone, at least. I came home a few days before Trash did, because she had a librarian conference in Toronto right after the New York TWoP summit. As such, she had to go almost a whole week without seeing him at all when I got to see him again three days before she did. As such, her fear that he would do something new eventually became supplanted by the fear that he would entirely forget who she was. So she talked to him on the phone every day, and had me show him pictures of her at every opportunity, and say "Mom" a lot. He didn't do anything new while I was home and Trash was gone, either. And of course he was beside himself with excitement to see her when she got home. Which is pretty uncomfortable when strapped into a car seat, as I'm sure he'd tell you. The end of that very same week, I had to leave town again for a day and a half, on business. When I got home, he'd learned how to clap in my absence. How is this fair? I was gone for less time total, and yet I was the one who missed something? We were all in the kitchen shortly after I got home and I noticed he was happily swinging his arms in wide arcs to bring his hands together in front of his chest, over and over, and I said, "Oh my God, he's clapping!" "Yeah, he started doing that last night," Trash said nonchalantly. I was aghast. I was agog. I was agawp. Clapping was something we'd been working on with him for weeks, figuring he'd get it any day. Turns out we were right. And as with any baby (or human, really) excited about having just learned a new skill, he kept doing it over and over. Mocking me with the fact that I'd missed the first time. And had that occasion been taped? Of course not. Over the next several days, he clapped at any occasion. When he saw a favorite toy, or a favorite person, or one of the cats, or food. And also for less appropriate occasions. You know what's funny? An angry baby applauding. "Goddammit, I don't want any more peas! I want out of my feeding chair RIGHT NOW! Also, bravo!" Or sometimes he even does it completely stone-faced, and it's a little tiny person doing the sarcastic slow-clap without even realizing it. He still hasn't figured out how to crawl just yet, and lately there's less incentive for him to do so now that he's figured out how to roll everywhere he wants to go (or, more accurately, everywhere we let him, which is a considerably more restricted subset of travel paths, seeing as how it excludes options like "off the sofa" and "off the changing table" and "under the bookcase"). So I don't know when he's going to take his first real "steps" on all fours. With my luck, though, I'm pretty sure it'll be while I'm at work. Today's best search phrase: "Use wal mart as an instrument of domination." Like it's good for anything else. posted by M. Giant 5:23 AM 8 comments 8 Comments:
I happened to be home when my boy walked for the first time, but my wife was still at work. She had already missed several firsts, so when she came home I said nothing and pretended to be surprised when he stumbled across the living room. She bought it, and three years later I still haven't told her since it was such a great moment.
By I wouldn't wait so much for him to crawl, some babies don't. I was a roller myself, and I turned out just fine!
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"Goddammit, I don't want any more peas! I want out of my feeding chair RIGHT NOW! Also, bravo!"
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Angry Baby and Sarcastic, Slow-Clapping Baby crack me up!
By Oh my god. The third paragraph from the end is the funniest thing I've read all day. You crack me up.
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The sarcastic slow-clap image is hilarious! Babies are wonderful - the more they learn, the more you have to mock.
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My nephew, who is now 7, never crawled. He scooted, he rolled, he scooted some more, then walked. He reads like a fanatic and loves books. I also never crawled, couldn't be bothered. I rolled and walked, have been reading since I was 4.
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Pictures! I demand pictures! I want to see his clap-and-scowl bit myself.
By Sunday, June 12, 2005 Tuning In Something interesting has been happening to Twin Cities radio lately. Specifically, it's been getting interesting. Let me go back a few years. We had an alternative station for a while. And then it got shut down, and all the DJs ended up out on the street, including a certain local personality who also happens to be Paul Westerberg's sister. One morning it was the best station in town, and when I got in my car to go home that night I was suddenly listening to Foghat. And I thought, Oh, those wacky alternative DJs. Is there nothing they won't play for a joke? And then after the song was over, there weren't any wacky alternative DJs and no one was joking. And then after a while we got another "alternative" station, which was nowhere near as good as the old alternative station, but at least there was a lot less Foghat than the classic rock station. I think Paul Westerberg's sister was on that incarnation as well, along with a guy I went to high school with. They did the morning show together, and it was great. And then I turned on my car radio and heard disco, and this time I knew nobody was kidding. The really sad part was that the only station I could stand to listen to at that point was the AOR station, which, in its favor, was where the DJ from my high school had ended up. Working against it was the fact that it was and remains a Clear Channel station. Sad. The 80s station was a decent option for short periods, but it was never long before you heard the Jets again and you remembered that the best thing about the 80s is that they're over. But then the alternative station came back, way high up the dial and fragmented along three frequencies depending on where in the metro area you happen to be. And that has continued to be the primary "alternative" station in town ever since, right up to the current era in which it takes its cues on the hot new bands from The O.C. If you wanted to get more alternative than that, you'd have to go with silence. Until recently, when my former employer, Minnesota Public Radio, bought out a station way down at the bottom of the dial and turned it into an "alternative to the alternative" station. Among the many good signs for this station is that they hired a bunch of people from the old-old alternative station, including Paul Westerberg's sister (although the guy I went to high school with is still at the Clear Channel station; he's got kids now and bills to pay). And then they get to play whatever, from some dinky little band you've never heard of to Radiohead to Dizzy Gillespie. Paul Westerberg's sister likes to say, "Here's the latest from Lindsay Lohan" and then play the new Mike Doughty or whatever. I generally skip the morning show (as one coworker put it, "too many jug bands"), but it's required listening for my commute home. Best of all? It's a public radio station, so no commercials. The thing is that after the novelty of never hearing the same song twice in one month, let alone twice in one day, it begins to get a little exhausting, and you want to tune back to something familiar. So I occasionally turned back to the "alternative" station, which is working hard to drop its air quotes. That was the first time I've ever hear Hüsker Dü on commercial radio, and quite possibly the last. That alone was almost enough to make it an 'alternative' station. But of course, that station still has commercials, so one morning I flipped over to see what was going on at the 80s station. It didn't take more than a few bars of a single from U2's second-to-last album to tell me that it wasn't the 80s station any more. Format change? Kind of. It had a format, and now it doesn't. Or it does, which is self-described as "we play what we want." Now it's a 60s-70s-80s-90s-00s station. Trash plays a game where she tries to think of one other station in town that would play both the song that just ended and the song that's just started. Which can get pretty tricky, because I think in order to find another Twin Cities station that plays both "Hotel California" and "Jungle Boogie," you'd have to go back in time. As for the Clear Channel AOR station, I have no idea what's going on over there, because there's too much interesting stuff going on elsewhere on the dial. I don't have the Arbitron ratings in front of me, but I can't help thinking if at least some of this is the work of the new alternative station. If maybe they stole enough market share that the other stations figured they'd better do -- horrors -- something different. Could it be that sticking to the same, safe practices in radio isn't as safe as it used to be? Someone tell Clear Channel. Today's best search phrase: "Is there anything more adorable than." I would have to say posted by M. Giant 5:46 PM 29 comments 29 Comments:I like Jack and Live 105 okay. What's the frequency of that public radio station you were talking about? I'll give it a try but, to be honest, I usually don't want to work that hard.
By Does the new alternative station broadcast on the internet? I live in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and even the NPR here is sub-par.
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http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/thecurrent/streams.php
By Regarding your Foghat experience, I felt your pain! In the late 90s, we had the best alternative station in Orlando: SHE-100.3. I vividly remember leaving for a solo drive to the beach on Memorial Day with the top down on the jeepster and the SHE on the radio. They were playing things like "Under the Boardwalk" and stuff like that. There were no DJs that day, but they followed every song with an ultra-cheesy harmonized "Cool-One-Hundred!" I had the exact same thought that you described, M. Giant: "Those crazy DJs. What a great stunt! That is so like SHE." When I heard Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World/Jeremiah Bullfrog/etc" during the drive home, I was no longer amused. Great radio is not something to taken for granted!
By Apparently Jack is taking over the world one city at a time? We have a Jack here in KCMO where they play whatever they want. GOod in theory, but you sure get some wierd stuff!
By One of the DJs is Westerberg's sister? Awesome!
By Wow...Jack sure gets around. We have him here in LA, and I found him higher up the dial when I drove down to San Diego last month as well.
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Sorry about Jack FM...it first appeared OTA here in Vancouver (although they copied it exactly from an online broadcaster...and had to pay for it after the fact through the nose)
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ZV and I were talking about the Jack stations on our trip to VT (we found another in Ohio). We were thinking it may be caused by the iPod/iPod shuffle craze: it's a lot like all your favorite pop songs played with the shuffle function.
By We have Ben FM near Philly. But it's the same as Jack, their commercials say "playing anything we want". On April Fool's day one of the independent channels did a spoof on them saying that "we play anything we want, weather it's good or not". So true, so very very true.
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Clear Channel just did this to our local "oldies" station. Yesterday, I heard MC Hammer, followed by Jane's Addiction. It was really scary.
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I love The Current. I discovered a lot of new music there, although at times I too wish to hear the same song twice in the same month. Didn't they beat all of the estimates on the first fundraiser that they ran? Maybe that's why the other stations started following.
By Oh dear, JACK-FM does appear to be taking over. The best alternative (no "air quotes")here in Seattle was gone overnight, JACK popped up in its place. It's evil. They play like 2 cool songs in a row to try to win you back over, that's when they slam you with El Debarge or something similar. Bitches.
By Our 33 year old oldies station just got flipped to Jack last week here in NY. From day one I have played the exact same game as Trash. It's like a format that might be cool if every song they played wasn't in frequent rotation on at least one other station in this market.
By JACK is the best thing that's happened to Nashville radio in a while...no g-d morning show, for one thing.
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Wow, this posting and the subsequent comments have taught me that Jack FM is indeed spreading like the plague.
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Hey - ran across this link about the emergence of Jack stations across the nation...
By Nooo ... JACK recently cropped up in place of my favorite San Diego radio station. I go to school elsewhere and I have always looked forward to getting into frequency range to listen to that station on the drive home. Then, over spring break, it ...wasn't there. I really dislike the bi-polar nature of the JACKesque stations. I need a radio station for each type of music, so that *I* can pick. I don't want to listen to random songs other people pick for me.
By Now LA doesn't have just JackFM, we also have the 'Jill' counterpart. Jill plays the 'soft rock' hits of the past four decades. Because apparently girls really like Michael Bolton.
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But did you JOIN Public Radio because of the new station? I sure did.
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Since there are no DJs and Jack is suddenly available everywhere, are they all working off the same playlist? Have we actually reached a point in radio where, throughout the US, we will all be listening to the same music at the same time?
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Since there are no DJs and Jack is suddenly available everywhere, are they all working off the same playlist? Have we actually reached a point in radio where, throughout the US, we will all be listening to the same music at the same time?
By There is a bar fly in the local watering hole in my little town that would play Foghat "Third Time Lucky" ten times in a row every time he was in there. For some reason that song was on the jukebox three times, and he could give you the number of all three off the top of his head at any time. Nice.
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I stream the Current, too - thanks Zen Viking, for reminding me to support MPR while I'm at it!
By I tried out The Current through internet streaming, and I am impressed. I've never heard so many different types of music. My only complaint would have to be that, I too would like to hear a song I already know at least once a day. Still, I wish LA had something like it.
By I have a strange question, but is this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/104-9817256-9157521?%5Fencoding=UTF8&id=13X4IVNBIGNE3 M Tiny's Amazon wish list? Because that's the cutest thing I have ever seen. And I now want a corn popper, too.
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Hey Anonymous 6:02 PM, thanks for the link to that Newsday story!
By Not to push or anything, but when do we get to see new pictures of M. Tiny? He's 8 months old now, right? We need updates!
By They call it Ben - FM in Philadelphia. Same concept.
By Tuesday, June 07, 2005 I Like New York in June Biggest disappointment of my trip to New York this past weekend: The sleeping thing. You can't sleep in when you have a baby whose daily schedule has him up between seven and eight, eight days a week. And it's not like we can get him up, change him, and go right back to bed together either, like we could when it was just the diabetic cat who had to be ministered to at eight a.m. There are procedures that need to be followed, and by the time it's all over, you're not getting back to sleep anyway. You could grab a nap, but his next bottle's due in 45 minutes anyway. Not that that ever stops me from grabbing a nap, of course, but a nap's a nap. Sleeping until noon is something else entirely. Or so I would seem to recall. So with Trash and I going to New York for the TWoP summit and M. Tiny staying home with Trash's mom and aunt, I was looking forward to a good lie-in almost as much as I was to hanging out with some of the funniest damn people alive. And then on the first morning, I spontaneously woke up for the day at eight a.m. -- seven Central Time, for those of you playing at home -- and I thought, Goddammit! So then the next day, I decided to take a short afternoon nap. From which I woke up in excess of two hours later, having missed a chance to hang with some other folks from the site, and I thought, Goddammit! Now I'm home, and M. Tiny is at my mom's for the night, so I could go to bed early, but Trash is now in Toronto for a librarian conference, and I never sleep well when she's out of town. Goddammit. Plus there's another reason, but I'll get to that later. * * * Most pleasant surprise of my trip to New York this past weekend: It wasn't the fact that hanging out and eating and drinking and cracking wise with a roomful of recappers and their friends and plus-ones is a hell of an entertaining way to spend an hour or eight, because that wasn't a surprise. It wasn't the fact that after I visited Strega and Johanna at their hotel (which has a lovely rooftop terrace with a portable bar set up nights, and where I found a wine cork that someone forgot to pick up, which I immediately threw over the railing to see what would happen), I exited the hotel and found my wine cork, apparently undamaged from its fourteen-story plummet to 35th Street, because even I'm not that big a geek (although that didn't stop me from bringing it back home to Minneapolis anyway, just in case I'd accidentally trepanned a pedestrian who had already been cleared away and it was only a matter of time before Gary Sinise showed up with his fingerprint kit). No, it was the fact that after the reading on Friday night (where we killed, I don't mind telling you), who should come up to me and say hi but the marvelous woman who wants to stage a dramatic reading of The Sisters' Tragedy in New York City. We'd been in contact via e-mail, but in all the excitement of getting ready to go and arranging care for M. Tiny and figuring out what the hell I was going to read anyway, I had entirely forgotten to specifically invite her. So how lovely of her to come out anyway. It's not that I wasn't happy to see each and every other person who was there (especially you, sweet cheeks. Yes, you, you little minx), but this was a bonus. Especially since that little Vaudeville of mine (okay, a five-act, neo-Jacobean feminist revenge tragedy in iambic pentameter) turned out to not exactly be an easy day's work and I'd made it clear that she would have been well within her rights to look at the first page after Dramatis Personae, say "Fuck this," and drop the whole thing. But instead she's going ahead, and for that I salute her. And not just because I'm hoping she'll sell a shitload of copies in the lobby, either. There aren't any details yet on when this thing is going to happen, although it should be in the next couple of months assuming all goes well. We'll keep you posted. * * * The past few months, I've been promising myself that I'd start updating more regularly after the "non-stop season" of 24 (which thankfully, mercifully, stopped). As well as doing other things I've been letting slide, like answering e-mail and washing myself. But then I was invited to recap the last season of Six Feet Under, and of course I couldn't say no to that. Ah, well. Those other things can wait. Read the recaps, dude, because they're a hell of a lot cheaper than HBO and they contain more of my writing than a week of entries, even back when I used to update every MF'ing M-F (shiver). And, as one of the Fishers might say, I'll be clean when I'm dead. * * * Oh, and there was also the pleasant surprise that a Corona with ice and chili powder is, as Omar promised, really good. * * * Today's best search phrase "Sock feet mind control." Sure, I'd love to have total power over my fellow humans' every thought, word, and action, but not if I have to put on shoes. posted by M. Giant 8:57 PM 11 comments 11 Comments:Corona with ice and chili powder, eh?
By I live in Mexico and they put chili powder on anything that holds still long enough. You should try it with some lime juice over a ripe mango. Yum.
By A sprinkling of salt over a watermelon wedge is a childhood favorite.
By My gente call it a "Michelada." You're very welcome.
By Yay, my favourite recapper with my favourite show! Yay, yay, yay!
By Oh, and you were so, so, so funny last Friday. I would have to say that the midwesterners (you and Miss Alli, natch) brought the funny in a big way. I wanted to some up and say hi afterwards, but I was all nervous--you know, you might have thought it was WEIRD that someone who ony knows you throught TWoP and your recaps came up to you and started asking about your baby and cats, like, HI, I am a STALKER, but anyhow, I sat in the corner and knit through the whole performance and it was just lovely. Thank you for being there. :-)
By
I was in the house last Friday too and you did kill. It was great meeting Trash. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance go say hi to you as well because you were chatting with folks.
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I didn't think you were scary at all! I did have a moment of pure terror when M. Giant pointed me out to the crowd but y'all were so cool that it was fine.
By I'm so sad I couldn't be there. Next time you guys really need to give us on the West Coast more notice so we can get time off from work and buy plane tickets!!
By Couldn't you guys take the show on the road? Don't you have recappers and past recappers in almost all 50 states now? At least you should have regional events, like in CA and the midwest and the south. Then you could have groupies that follow you all over the country, like Deadheads.
By We make Michelada's in the summertime with Dos Equis and lime juice in a salted martini glass...also quite yum!
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