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• Roger Moore (who played The Saint on TV in the 1960’s) is behind a new push to revive The Saint yet again. Although he’s in good company (e.g., Barry Levinson), if past performance is any guarantee of future results, the new Saint will be sucktastic, at least compared to the canonical pulp-novella Saint from the 1930’s.
• Way 11c: on Thursday Ken Jennings lamented the loss of the old meaning of “gay” exactly as I did in 2006 in the above-linked Saint post.
• Strangeness update: the closer we get to consummating the Microsoft acquisition of Danger, the more I feel like Charles in the classic Ray Bradbury story, “Fever Dream.”
• They stole my idea: the celebrated guerrilla-performance-art group Improv Everywhere planted sixteen “agents” in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. At a signal, they suddenly staged a musical amid unsuspecting shoppers. Many years ago, in college, I tried to sell my friend Steve on the same idea: I wanted to perform the “Moses Supposes” number from Singin’ in the Rain in the school cafeteria. The main difference between me and Improv Everywhere is that they actually execute their hare-brained schemes…
• It’s been a good week for darnedest utterances from my kids:
  • Me: It’s a homework night. (for Jonah)
    Jonah: Aww.
    Archer: Yippee!
    Jonah: Wouldn’t you rather play with me, than me doing homework?
    Archer, leaning forward and whispering: Then I can play with your toys.
  • Most mornings, Archer and I drive Jonah to kindergarten, and then I drive Archer to his preschool. We have recently developed a ritual for that second leg: we each chew a piece of gum, spitting it out when we arrive. Here’s how Archer chose to stage that ritual last Wednesday: “You give me the gum and I open it and take one myself, then I close it and give it to you and you take one. I unwrapper [sic] mine and you unwrapper yours and throw your wrapper away in the garbage. When we get to preschool you spit your gum into my wrapper and I spit my gum into my wrapper too. You spit yours first.”
  • Jonah, who’s been learning about Europe in kindergarten, identified Italy (the “boot-shaped country”) on a map. Trying to recall the name of the island off the tip of the “boot” — Sicily — he ventured, “Shitaly?”

It all started when my dad painted a Friendly Lion to watch over my crib when I was an infant.

The painting hung in my room my whole childhood (and as of a few years ago hangs near my bed once more).

Years later I wrote a programming book for O’Reilly and Associates, a publisher known for decorating their book covers with animals. Their popular title Programming Perl is colloquially known as “the camel book,” for instance. I was hoping for a dog on my cover (after all, Alex the dog appears in the acknowledgments), but I was randomly assigned a giraffe. My disappointment was short-lived as the serene and stately giant grew on me.

The next year I went on a trip to San Diego and the famous zoo there. At the giraffe enclosure a guide explained that their youngest giraffe, Ahiti, was only just learning to eat acacia leaves by stripping them from the branch with his teeth. Some of us got a chance to feed Ahiti and help him learn! When it was my turn I held out an acacia branch.

Ahiti bent down, curled his long tongue around the branch, dribbled some surprisingly sticky saliva onto it and my hands, clamped his teeth and pulled his head back. Many of the leaves remained attached, sliding right through his inexpert bite. He tried once or twice more and did better — he was learning! Then it was someone else’s turn. But I was hooked: I had helped teach a baby giraffe to eat. Giraffes were now incontrovertibly “my” animal.

So when Andrea and I were expecting our first baby, the thought occurred to me that I ought to create a guardian animal for him like my dad had for me, and the obvious choice of guardian was a giraffe.

I abandoned my first attempt when I decided it lacked the cartoonish appeal that made my Lion so Friendly:

and settled on something much more stylized:

although we never hung it up by Jonah’s crib in favor of a beautiful custom quilt made for Jonah by a family friend, featuring giraffes and other animals.

As of a few days ago we’re now full circle: Jonah has just drawn his first fully realized giraffe, and it’s amazing.

Archer (age 3.8) has just read his first book — the same as the first book Jonah ever read.

We always suspected he was paying closer attention to Jonah’s reading than he let on, and he just proved it by making short work of this book almost a full year ahead of Jonah’s own schedule.

It was Jonah’s friend Liam’s sixth birthday. Liam’s into monster trucks and after the aforementioned party at his house most of the guests piled into their cars and drove to the OaklandMcAfee Coliseum. It was a miserable night, cold, windy, and wet.

Our first surprise came when traffic was backed up for two miles on the highway. All monster-truck traffic? (Turns out the Foo Fighters were playing next door at the OaklandOracle Arena at the same time, so it’s impossible to know how many were cool rock fans and how many were trashy demolition junkies.)

Our second surprise came when we needed cash to enter the parking lot and we had none. So we had to leave, get cash, and then re-endure the long line of cars.

Our third surprise came when we realized the monster truck rally was an outdoor event. Andrea and I were both fighting colds. Our sore throats tingled in unison.

I unhappily contemplated the possibility of another bout of pneumonia. The things we do for our kids…

Our fourth surprise came when we saw how many true fans had turned out in the cold and the rain for the dubious pleasures of sticking foam earplugs in their ears and watching those ridiculously modded vehicles struggling weakly through the mud, occasionally rearing up to expose their undercarriages, sometimes rolling over old, junked cars, but mostly doing donuts and spraying mud in all directions. (Surprise 4a was how often the crowd came to its feet. Surprise 4b was how often I thought of Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero battling the Mallachi brothers in the demolition derby.)

Our final surprise came on the drive home, mercifully just an hour later, when Jonah said he’d like to return to another monster truck rally as soon as possible and Archer averred, “Monster Jam is cool.”

A moment while I indulge in a little parental pride: last night Jonah and Archer were at a birthday party that included the obligatory piñata. After withstanding some unbelievably motivated bashing by six-year-olds (and Archer, who actually managed to score the first piece of candy out of the thing), it finally spilled its guts onto the cement floor of our friends’ garage. (For reasons of good taste I’ll omit any description of the brief carnage that then ensued other than to liken it to a pack of hyenas tearing at a fresh carcass.) In the aftermath, Jonah and Archer compared their respective hauls. Archer, holding a week’s worth of candy in his bag, lamented morosely, “I didn’t get as much.” Without missing a beat, without any hesitation whatsoever — indeed, with eagerness — Jonah immediately put a smile on Archer’s face with, “I’ll share mine with you!”

I’m pleased to report that after a brief plateau, Jonah’s reading skills are burgeoning beyond our best expectations. It’s amazing to see him power through his reading each week, mentally correlating (ever more quickly) the occasional unfamiliar printed word with its familiar spoken counterpart.

However, he still occasionally mixes up his lower-case b’s and d’s, and who can blame him? So to help him, I devised this little mnemonic.

I’m all set with a mnemonic for lower-case q’s and p’s if he should need it, though it doesn’t seem like he does:

Q and U are friends, so the stem on the q wants to be close to the u: qu. But P and U? Pee-yoo!

Today is my dad’s birthday! In honor of it, here is a reproduction of a web page I created for him on Father’s Day, 2001.

Goodbye, 2007. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see you go.

I was prepared to like you, but almost at once you caused my mom a lot of trouble and discomfort and finally took her from me. Then you took my dog. Meanwhile you kept busy breaking my rib, crashing my car, infecting my lungs, and dismantling my democracy. For good measure you effected the departure of some of my favorite co-workers. It’s almost as if you had a personal vendetta against me.

Well as M told James Bond in Goldfinger, and as someone should have told you twelve months ago,

This isn’t a personal vendetta, [2]007. It’s an assignment like any other. And if you can’t treat it as such, coldly and objectively, [2]008 can replace you.

Of course it wasn’t all bad. You did manage to keep my wife and children safe and sound, and we did enjoy some modest prosperity. Still, I look forward to your replacement.

While trying to get a reluctant Archer to go to sleep:

Archer: What if a boot came down a slide and kicked someone off?
Me: Then you’d have to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. Are you OK?”
Archer: Why?
Me: Well if you throw a boot down a slide and it hits someone, you have to apologize.
Archer: What if I didn’t throw the boot?
Me: Then no boot would go down the slide and hit someone.
Archer: What if it did?
Me: Well boots don’t go down slides by themselves!
Archer: Why?
Me: They’re inanimate. They don’t move unless someone makes them move.
Archer: What if it went down the slide by itself?
Me: That would be one amazing boot.
Archer: What if it kicked someone?
Me: Then that person would probably say, “Hey, who threw that boot?!”
Archer: But no one did.
Me: Right.

That satisfied him, and he rolled over and went to sleep.

Here are some of the top queries from various search engines that resulted in hits on my blog during the past year or so, reproduced verbatim from my server logs. (Last year’s results are here.) Each related family of queries is listed with a main variant in bold and selected other variants, plus the percentage of query-hits represented by that family.

I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.