Cute Apparel for Children of Thick Parents

I'm at JFK.  We're going to Iceland for ten days in an hour or so.

If you're at JFK too, of if you feel like coming out here, you can pick up on of these "Top Gun" jackets for your kid (if its not clear from the photo, this thing measures about eleven inches from top to bottom and would fit a three-year-old):

Can you imagine the type of dipshit parent you'd have to be to stick your kid in one of these and think -- what?  Think that it'd be cute?  That it'd train your kid to grow up and be a Real American?  People like this live with us here in the U.S.  As a liberal -- sorry, "socialist" -- latte-sipping, closet-terrorist-sympathizer, the thought of that makes me really, really ill.

(A side note: doesn't one generally sip coffee of any type -- or, any type aside from iced coffee?  When did sipping a drink become a bad thing?  Are there coffee-pounders out there?  Coffee is hot.  You sip it unless you want to burn the shit out of your mouth.  Whatever.)

Google Operating System

My hunch is that the arrival of Google's new operating system, meant of course as a competitor to Microsoft Windows but also to the Macintosh OS, amounts to one of the top three ways in which personal computing will change over the next ten years.  I think it will change things in ways we really shouldn't try to predict.  Google has proven itself over the past decade to be a more innovative and more nimble company than either Microsoft or Apple, and has figured out how to do what almost no other company, in any sector, has done: be a large, successful public company while retaining the instinct, energy, and creative spirit of a start-up.  And, with one disappointment that I can think of, while doing so in  non-"evil" way.

I also predict that there will be glitches early on, and that they will be widely reported in the media, but that these glitches will be just that: small distractions.

Windows and Macintosh are both over two decades old -- not just (some of) the computer code that drives them, but the systems themselves, and the way users expect to interact with them.  Google, on the other hand -- partly because they're lucky -- has a clean slate here.  And they've got the marketplace muscle to take advantage of that clean slate.

Go Google, I say.  Microsoft and Apple have both become, in their own extremely different ways, very, very, very smug.  Let's see you go nuts.  Knock the smirky smile off of Mac Guy's face.  Give PC Guy a job, because he's a good guy; at least have him in for an interview -- he's not what he seems on the surface.  Hire him if you like.  Or not.  But go nuts.

This Post Will Not Make Your Day (But It Won't Ruin It Either, Plus It's 12:18 EDT, So Your Day Is Probably Almost Over Anyway)

I was working on some freelance stuff yesterday afternoon when the door buzzer rang.  When the door buzzer rings during the day, it's usually either a mail carrier (but yesterday was Sunday) or, if she's lost her keys again, PH.  But PH had gone shopping three minutes prior to the ringing of the buzzer: hmm.  I pressed "talk" on the intercom -- "hello?" -- and then the "listen" button.  PH: "There's a baby bird down here; you have to come down."

I found her on the second-floor landing of our building holding a baby bird with both hands which she'd found on the banister of the staircase which leads to the Turkish restaurant on the second floor of our building; he'd looked confused and freaked out and had been chirping loudly and energetically.

We brought him upstairs to our apartment, stashed my cats in the bathroom, and put Habib (PH's name for the bird, "darling" in Arabic) in a Salad Spinner with the rounded, cylindrical basket-thing turned upside down.  We put paper towel, a saucer of water, and some English-muffin crumbs in there with him.

We couldn't figure out what he wanted; he couldn't tell us how we could help him or what he wanted or if he wanted anything.  He held his mouth open like this a few times, as baby birds do when they're hungry...

...but just as often, he held his head back like that, mouth closed.  He also spent some time gnawing on the edge of the china saucer.  He also clawed at the edge of the clear-plastic Salad Spinner as if he wanted to be outside of it, but when we took him out and put him on the floor, thinking that maybe he wanted to walk around or fly away, he just sort of stood there.

PH went to the supermarket to buy ingredients for an elaborate baby-bird-food recipe I'd found on the web (lots of interesting bird-feeding-related stuff on the web, including a forum post by one woman whose bird was "pregnant" and who wanted to know if she should be feeding her differently because of that -- and take a minute, if you like, to think about whether the words "bird" and "pregnant" belong in the same sentence), and I went to check on Habib but he was asleep and I couldn't wake him up.

I said, "wake up, bird" and "time to wake up, let's wake up now" to him several times, and I really wanted for him to wake up, but he didn't wake up.  By the time PH returned from the supermarket ten minutes later, his body was stiff.  He hadn't made it.  PH and I wondered to each other if we should sing "Nearer My God to Thee" or something to him, but neither of us knew the words, aside from the "nearer my God to thee" part.

I put him, still in his little Salad Spinner house, out on the terrace for the night, and I'll admit that I went out there two or three times to see if he was "really dead" (I believe this is called "magical thinking").  Then this morning, I took him and put him under a bush at the edge of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Whenever my mom sees a dead animal on or by the side of the road, she says, "bless your furry little soul."  Unless the animal is a bird, in which case, she says, "bless your feathery little soul."

So, Habib: bless your feathery little soul.

Here's What I Assume

So following a court decision yesterday -- and a concession from Norm Coleman -- Al Franken is going to the Senate.

Here's what I assume.

I assume that everyone who thinks Franken is in some way not qualified to serve in the Senate (or that Minnesotans are "idiots" or similar for sending him there) because he is a "clown" who was great, maybe, on Saturday Night Live but has no business serving in Congress was, in 1980, at least willing to entertain the possibility that Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be President of the United States on account of his past career as a B-movie actor.

And I assume that everyone who claims that the fact of Franken's past career as an entertainer has nothing to do with whether or not he's qualified for public service never referred to Reagan's B-movie past when discussing his ability to effectively govern the country.

Also, I assume that everyone who feels that Coleman got a raw deal yesterday has at least considered the possibility that Al Gore got a raw deal during the Florida recounts in 2000.

Furthermore, I assume that everyone who felt in 2000 that Al Gore was "robbed" are at least willing to consider the possibility that Norm Coleman was "robbed" yesterday.

Finally, I assume that people's personal political convictions and affiliations absolutely do not affect their assessments of what's "fair."  Because fair is fair.  Right?

M.J. Celebration

Yesterday afternoon, by the Tweed Courthouse, outside City Hall Park, New York.  I assume these guys are out every weekend, but yesterday, all the music was Thriller and pre-Thriller Michael Jackson:

Do You Remember, Dear Reader?...

Do you remember, dear reader, the spring of 2009, when it rained for 748 days straight?  Of course you don't.  I forget: I am ninety-eight years old and you were but a twinkle in a twinkle of the eye of someone who, himself, was a twinkle in someone's eye in 2009.  That was before the National Weather Service abandoned the misguided idea that it was possible to passively predict the weather and got into the business of actively controlling it.  That was in 2024, but I doubt you remember that either, nor do I expect that you remember Delaware.  Delaware?  Well, if you're like other East American children, you've taken a class trip or two to Very Large Fan Alpha.  So, VLF-A used to be a state.  It was called Delaware.  The word "Idaho" probably doesn't mean anything to you either, does it...  Jesus, don't they make you guys take history?

That's alright.  Just know that you're lucky.  Just know that when we used to get rain here on the east coast, it didn't arrive promptly at 5:30 in the afternoon and depart promptly at 6:05.  Some days, it would rain all day, followed by another day of rain, and another.  And that day would be followed by rain too, a day which itself would be followed by eighty-two days of rain, after which it would rain for maybe a week or two more before pausing for seven minutes at 3:47 in the morning before raining for another month.

I made the above image in the summer of 2004.  (The original said "...or in a fucking rainforest."  I took out the "fucking" before publishing this image on my site.  Very unlike me; I wonder why I did that.  It disturbs me a little that I did that, actually.)

Pain Vultures

"Angelina's Birthday Ends in Tears"!  Oh my God!  "Brad Tries to Call a Truce But the Day Ends in Another Explosive Fight about Jen!"  It says so on the front cover of this week's this week's In Touch magazine!

Pain vultures circle overhead, looking for pain.  They spot it and they swoop down and snatch it with their beaks and examine it to make sure it's the pain of a well known person and then they report on it.  And then they sell it on newsstands to another breed of pain vultures, vultures who don't have the means to spot the pain themselves but who do have a dollar or two to spend on a few other-people's-pain pellets.

I don't think it's quite that simple, but I think it's very close to being that simple.  It makes me ill to think that I've purchased other-people's-pain pellets.  I have kicked the habit, in the same way that I kicked the habit of drinking: by just saying no.  In both cases, when it came down to it, I disgusted myself into abstaining.

I see a copy of In Touch such as the one above and I think again of David Foster Wallace pondering our pathetic and brain-dead fascination with the lives (and, we hope, the misery) of celebrities: "It's almost impossible to look away, or not to feel that special kind of guilty excitement in the worst, most greedy and indecent parts of yourself...  But that doesn't mean the fascination is is good, or even feels good.  Aren't there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?"

American Ingenuity Will Get Us Through These Trying Times

Why America is the best country in the world: Coors' new "Cold Activated Can."  How does it work?  Well: when the beer is cold enough to drink, the fucking mountains on the fucking can turn fucking blue.  Because this has been a huge problem for beer drinkers over the past eleven millennia: there is a container of beer in front of you, and you really want to drink it, but you don't have a thermometer on you, so you have no way of knowing if it's cold enough to drink.

Except that now, you do.  Because of the mountains.  Because the mountains turn blue.

This is the sort of thing that makes people want to firebomb our country.

(It also won't work; nobody will care.  I am so sure of this that if the Cold Activated Can is still around eighteen months from now, I will donate $2,000 to SarahPAC.)

Question

In 2001, I accompanied my friend NE to a veterinarian's office to have her cat, William, put down.  He had terminal cancer.  He had a tumor the size of a tennis ball under one of his arms.  NE and I had dated several years before.  We'd lived together, in fact, and lived together with Willie.  (That relationship had ended in 1998, but we'd remained very good friends.)  So Willie had been "our" cat for a time, but really, he was always NE's cat.  He was a good cat, though, and I loved him.

The vet hooked Willie up to an IV drip.  Willie didn't seem to understand, or care, what was going on.  His tumor seemed to cause him a lot of discomfort; he was focused on licking it, messing around with it, maybe wondering what it was and where it had come from.  The vet released into the IV a stream of some drug which, instantly, made Willie go to sleep.  Then he released another drug into the IV, which killed him.

He was alive, and then a second clicked past on a clock, and then he was not alive.  He was alive, and then a second clicked past on a clock, and then there was no "he."

His eyes were still open afterwards.  That seemed wrong to me.  I tried to close them but couldn't, so I covered them with a towel.

We left the vet's, which was on the Upper East Side.  We walked on Park Avenue in silence for a bit.  Then NE, who is not a religious person, said that she wanted to go to the Russian Orthodox church, a bit further up Park, to light a candle for Willie.  (NE's parents had emigrated from Russia in the late 1940s; the Russian church was her church.)

We went into the church.  NE got a candle from one of the nuns and lit it and put it on an altar with several other candles, and we sat there for a while.  As we left, one of the nuns asked whom the candle was for; the nun explained, in Russian, that later in the day, they would pray for the soul of the person who'd died.  NE wrote "William" on a slip of paper the nun gave her, not explaining to the nun that William was not a person.  And then we left the church.

Where do we go when we die?

Photo is of William, taken in the late 1990s.

This Is Ed and Justine's Idiot Son Stephen

Me, 1974.  I'm pretty sure a rather large temper tantrum preceded the taking of this photo (I didn't really have temper tantrums that weren't rather large), in which I smiled as much as I was going to smile.

It's been, on balance, uphill since this photo was taken, which is (clearly) saying very little: it would be really, really, really sad if things had gone downhill from here.

Nice shirt, by the way.