That Guy

Back story? I think we need a back story.

Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Flavors That Have Not Sold As Well As Hoped For

• Chunky Skunky
• Fat Wife
• Couch Cushion Crunch
• Camden, New Jersey Super Fudge Chunk
• Abu Grape

A Bull Dog With a Squished Nose Playing a Fender Bass

Ask and ye shall receive (unless it's something weird about poop or illuminated fruit).

I'm Concernced

On the (admittedly infrequent) occasions when I catch a bit of a daytime soap opera, somebody's always wearing an eyepatch. Why is that? Is Soapville full of sharp, pointy objects imprudently placed at eye-level? Does OSHA know about this? I'm concerned.

Auto-logo-coin-itry

I like it. By the power vested in me by My Overblown Sense of Importance, I proclaim this Make-Up-Your-Own-Word Week.

Why kowtow to the dictates of His Imperial Highness Merriam or Herr Fuhrer Webster? Throw off your shackles and be free! You say it's a word? That's good enough for me. Whazzit mean? You decide. Don't know what that thing on that thing with the other thing is called? Make it up. It's already got a name—something with a "t"—but you just can't quite remember? Eff 'em. Make another. Hyphens, low-phens, any kind of -phens; prefixes, suffixes, intra-fixes, exo-fixes—smash it all together. It's all fair game. Who needs The Best Word in the Whole Wide World? (You heard me, Mr. Saucy-pants.) Down with patriarchal imperial hierarchies. Up with the jumbled detritus of our over-heated brains. It's democratational!*

Whatchya got?

* Apologies. I got a all dander-fied and perhaps a touch ker-fluffed. I think I need to take a walk.

All in the Family

Of our eight gazillion family photos, there are hardly any of us all together. (There are hardly any of me at all, for that matter.) But here's one from the wedding. Thanks, Maysey.

Faded Glory

So, is "saucy" truly king? Is there some brash young upstart willing to enter the ring? A new generation with hunger in its eyes? Or do we grow weary of this cruel game?* Do we let the aged champion cling to its faded glory, telling every passerby who will listen of the day it became "Best Word in the Whole Wide World". I don't know. I don't know.

* I like to imagine a bloggy-purgatory where all my neglected series idle away their days: "saucy" talking endless trash about "squelch", Joe rambling on about the time he trapezed over the snakes, the President lamenting that he hardly has a thing to wear...

Wedding Bells A-Ringin'

Congratulations, Ana and Zack—lovely nuptials* and a bang-up throw-down. We couldn't be happier for you.

* And our little ladies were very good flower girls.

A Monkey with a Scandinavian Bolo Shaking a Saucy Cocktail

Ask and ye shall receive (a strangely terrifying monkey—I think it's the fur).

Interactive-Tronic Mad-Lib-O-Graphia

God only knows how this will go:

You mad-lib it. I consult the tickling of my fancies and, just maybe*, draw it:



And don't forget this is a family blog, you filthy beast.

* All the usual caveats apply: I'm slow, lazy, and unreliable; prone to manic enthusiasms and easily distracted. As my daughters like to quote to quote to each other, "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."

"Girrrl..."

Louise talks like a teenager.

As a wee lass of modest PBS-centric TV-exposure attending small fairy-centric preschools, she knew comparatively little of the pop-vernacular. But her horizons have expanded, and she's learning fast. The following phrases are now in heavy rotation:

• "And I was like…"
• "Oh yeah, baby."
• "Girrrl..."

The other day I heard her say "Oh snap!"* It drives Sarah crazy. I find it kind of funny.

* She actually picked this one up, she claims, from her teachers who are both in their early twenties.

And She Smells Like One Too… Too

My lady also turns thirty-five today, though she remains a shining light of youthful vigor compared to my wizened, geezerly thirty-five-year-and-twelve-day-old self. Happy birthday, lady.

Things To Do When Your Co-worker With the Indecipherably Thick Accent* Launches Into a Lengthy, Animated Monologue/Diatribe

1. Randomly rotate between a small set of neutral interjections: "mm-hmm", "yep", "that's for sure", "wow", "huh".
2. Laugh when he smiles.
3. Shake your head when he frowns.
4. Raise your eyebrows when you're not sure.
5. Periodically say "Well…" and glance at your computer in hopes that things might wrap up soon because it's going on twenty minutes and old Muppets skits are running through your head and you're not sure how much longer you can maintain this fragile ruse and you might start laughing at that funny thing those chicken puppets are doing and your co-worker might think you're laughing at him and that would be bad.

Yours to use, free of charge.

* Good guy. Very friendly. But my comprehension rate, honestly, is in the low double digits. And it didn't help that this was during yesterday's Still-Phlegmy Wish-It-Was-Still-Hooky Tuesday and I was slack-jaw-stupid and having a hard enough time understanding the monosyllabic utterances of my own dim brain.

The "Music Truck"

As the warmer weather settles in, a new element has appeared in our neighborhood sound-scape, the "music truck".

The ice cream truck is a near-constant presence in our neighborhood for eight-or-so months out of the year. When Louise was younger, we—not wanting to be burdened with endless entreaties for treats—engaged in a little parental disinformation*: "It's a 'music truck'. It travels around giving out music to make everyone happy." Louise seemed to think this was quite reasonable.

But one day, not long after our dear Ana had been babysitting, the truck rolled by. Louise exuberantly announced "Mommy, Daddy, guess what! Ana says they have ice cream in those trucks!"

Damn you, Ana. The gig was up. (Though perhaps it was nothing a bit character-assassination couldn't remedy: "Ana is cray-zee. Don't believe anything she says…")

Now, as a disillusioned, world-weary five-and-a-half-year-old, Louise is fully aware of the vehicle's true nature, but she persists in calling it the "music truck", which I like. And I like having it back in the neighborhood. Eternal off-key mechanical renditions of "Turkey in the Straw" never sounded so good.

* Do not judge me until you have walked a mile in my whine-enduring shoes.

Super Sunday

Apologies for the hushed silence that has reigned here many-a-day, but it's tough maintaining the delicate balance between my blogger-by-day and masked-avenger-by-night lifestyles.

Yesterday was Super Sunday. Though I didn't personally manage to see any Indians, my Sunday was, in its small way, super enough. I feel compelled to enumerate:

• In the morning, sitting in the sun, I assembled the recently purchased chairs and table for the balcony (more hex wrenches) as the girls puttered around and offered to "help". Our balcony is a lovely thing. The back balcony faces the looming figure of Baptist Hospital—less than idyllic—but the front balcony off our bedroom looks out onto a huge swath of sky. One can hear a grand array of sounds: the surging of traffic on Claiborne, the thumping bass of distant cars, accordion music from the Hondurans around the corner, hollered conversations, children playing, squeaky bicycles, birds, boats on the river, trains. It was underutilized before the storm, principally due to its being structurally unsound, but that's all better now, and it's fast becoming one of my favorite things in life.
• A chaotic lunch with bad service but good company.
• A drive across the Huey Long to purchase a weeping willow, a purple-leaf plum tree, an oleander bush, and a whole bunch of irises which I packed in my vehicle with amazing resourcefulness, drove home, and planted in the dark, fertile soil of our yard (rich with broken glass and roofing nails).
• A dinner of sausage, cabbage, and yellow grits. The sausage was from Kreuz's, a birthday gift from our darling Zack and Ana (who will be tying the knot here in mere days!) shipped from the smoky heart of Texas. The cabbage was from the clumsy hands of a float-rider in Saturday's St. Patty's parade*, the drunken-est, sloppiest, skeeziest of all our many parades. (Though I, parade-whore that I am, rather like it. It's a mess at the outset and it only gets worse. By the end it can barely be called an "organized"event as staggering, lecherous, tuxedo-ed men stumble down side streets looking for another drink and many float-riders, having long since run out of throws, gyrate wildly in their own private dance parties or slump lethargically in their seats with distant, unfocused stares.) The grits were from our pantry.

In the evening, alas, I succumbed to the vicious head cold bequeathed to me by my darling snotty three-year-old. This lead to today's Phlegmy Hooky Monday—far less super though alright in its way.

* I once again saw a lady get clocked in the head with a cabbage though not with the near-coma-inducing severity of previous years.

Illustration Friday: "Wired"

Pop Quiz: "Come at the King, You Best Not Miss" Edition

Pop quiz:

Why is The Wire so damn good?*

I try to sum it up but find myself hopelessly gushing or falling into a silent reverie. I'm a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.

* Yes, yes, I realize I'm desperately late to the scene and every critic on God's green earth has already written about exactly why it's so damn good while I'm still way back amidst the hookers and loading docks of Season Two, but time moves slowly in our quiet, cable-less corner of Netflix-land. Forgive me.

Dress Your President in Spurs and Leather

If there's two things I love it's dolls and the President, so I've decided to combine the two into one glorious creation. Slaving night and day in my Laboratory* of Glee and Delight buried deep within my Factory of Wicked Mirth, I've created my very own Dress-'Im-Up President™ complete with a wardrobe of pretty, pretty clothes. And now, free of charge, I'm sharing the fun with you!



The directions are simple:

1. Click on the image to make it nice and big.
2. Print it.
3. Color the duds and President your favorite shades of red, white, blue, and Texas-bred pink.
4. Cut them out.
5. Dress your President in spurs and leather.
6. Make "ka-pow! ka-pow!" sounds as you shoot the bad guys.

And stay tuned for more. Be sure to collect the whole series!

* Pronounced British style: 5 syllables, emphasis on the second.

And I Smell Like One Too

I'm thirty-five today. That's like... old 'n stuff.

Cousins

I was at the paint store buying a sample quart of (what turned out to be) a lovely shade of deep aqua to replace the Masengill-lavender in the upstairs bathroom. As the young black kid with the cornrows was ringing me up, he saw the name on my credit card.

"Some of my ancestors were named Olivier."

"Oh, yeah? Was that around here?"

"Well, back in France, but it changed some time to de Vezin."

"Really? Actually our full name used to be Olivier de Vezin."

We paused. He got a big funny grin. I got a big funny grin. And then we properly introduced ourselves as—most likely—cousins.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirits

My beverage-count/frequency matrix looks something like the following:

1 – almost always
2 – usually
3 – not infrequently

You may ask, "Three beverages! What the hell are you doing with three beverages." Really, it's quite simple. There's water (everybody knows you're supposed to drink your weight in water everyday—it makes you supple and youthful and long-living and shiny), there's coffee (my near-constant companion), and there's drinky-drinks. Sometimes they all overlap, and I find myself with a large array of glassware and ceramics in front of me.

I like to think of this as the Holy Trinity of Beverages: coffee up, drinky-drink down,* and water to prevent the crushing headaches and general withering into a husk that would result from the exclusive consumption of the other two.

But which is which? Spirit? That's got to be the booze. Father? Well, water would seem to be the father of all other beverages, so let's go with that. Which leaves coffee to be the Son. Sure, in coffee we are reborn each morning, made whole and new.** Sounds good to me.

Is there a theologian in the house? Can we vet this?

* Though follow this logic too far and you'll wind up like Johnny Cash in the sixties.

** I forget, which level of hell is reserved for me?

And That's One to Grow On

"Not on your eyebrows, honey—chap stick is for your lips."

Battle Royale: Scallywag the Dog*

So by now we've probably jumped a whole school/pod/gaggle/really-what-is-it? of sharks, but that's okay. Let's just sit back and watch the spectacle: our metaphorical Evel Knievel of a series tumbles over its handlebars with a terrifying crunch, fracturing every bone its body, but somehow—miraculously—staggers to its strangely askew feet and through its shattered, bloody teeth murmurs, "I will ride again!"

Round three (…ish. I think…):

• squelch
• wag
• scallywag
• saucy
• sauced
• drizzle
• falafel
• scrawl
• walrus
• rascal
• gallop
• wiggle
• cagy walls
• scallion
• scullduggery
• huzzah!

Place your vote.

* We cheeky-blogger types are supposed to slip lots of puns and wordplay into the titles of our posts. Check! But the puns and wordplay are supposed to make some sort of sense. Oops! "'Scally…wag the dog?' Alright—'wag the dog'—I see it, but what's the joke? Is he referencing the movie? Is it a Dustin Hoffman thing? I don't get it...." Forgive me, I have failed you. Now, as honor dictates, I will impale myself on my laptop. (Unless you can figure out some plausible angle to make it work, and you can whipser it in my ear, and I can say "huzzah!" and proclaim it to the world, and my cheeky-blogger cred will be restored, and I will give you 50% of my immense Slimbolala royalties, and you will be happy, and I will be happy, and we will sing from the rooftops, and all will be beautiful.)

Fut-on, Fut-off

For the first time in out adult lives we don't own a futon.* It went over the balcony last night and landed with a satisfying ploomf! in the front yard. The ten-year-old, falling apart, low-grade pine frame followed shortly behind. (I did confirm the all-clear before tossing them.) The futon's place was promptly taken by a gen-u-ine sleeper-sofa. Look, ma, we're big kids now.

* It's been a big weekend for furniture migrations. After many years of lobbying, Sarah is finally getting her queen-size bed (apparently, sleeping in a cramped double with my big, gangly, hot-blooded self ain't all that), and the gorgeous but small antique half-tiester will be traveling down the hall to take on new life as Louise's "princess" bed (though tonight she declared that she no longer wants to call it a "princess" bed; she wants to call it a "half-tiester").

But here's the kicker—the guy who sold us the mattress? Glyn Styler. For real. The one and only. (This means nothing to most of you but a lot to a few of you. Seriously, imagine how strange it was: Glyn Styler… Veteran's Boulevard… selling us a mattress. We talked of spring counts, pillow tops, and memory foam. As the credit card machine whirred, we talked of lost houses (he lived in Lakeview), the joy of returning home (he'll be back in a few weeks), and the possibility of future shows (yes, though there are obstacles: "I don't even have any wigs!").

Weird, man, weird.

A Beaded Gown and Tiara…

Perhaps we're a bit late to the scene (fashionably late, I like to think), but this blog will now be all Anna Nicole Smith all the time!

Battle Royale: Squelch Squared

I suspect this feature may have jumped the shark, but when has that stopped us before? And maybe I'm wrong. YOU decide!

The results are in:

"squelch"	3
"marplot"	2
"troika"	1
"kerfuffle"	1
"delicious"	1
"rabble"	-1*
a bunch of other losers	0

And "squelch" emerges victorious once again! Staggering! Unbelievable! Huzzah!

Maybe "squelch" is unstoppable, maybe only a fool would would think he can beat it, but gall-durn-it, this fool's going to try. I'm diving right back into the fray with a few new challangers of my own:

"wag": The noun form. My 9th grade English teacher once called me a "young wag". It was a formative moment.

"scallywag": Same, just "scally"-er.

"saucy"

"sauced": The drunken form.

Maybe they can form an alliance and bring down that uppity "squelch" once and for all before finally succumbing to vicious in-fighting.

* Zena's nominee loses a point due to Zena's flagrant violation of the appropriate protocols. Nominate, then vote. Nominate, then vote. Damn it, Zena, we have rules! It's what separates us from the lemurs.