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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2005-03-02 ... 3:40 p.m.

BECAUSE THE INSIDE OF HER HEAD RESEMBLES NOT SO MUCH NEATLY LABELED CATALOG DRAWERS AS A RUMMAGE SALE HELD BY TWEAKERS IN A TRAILER PARK, OUR HEROINE ONCE AGAIN RESORTS TO THE NUMBERING TRICK.

1. It is a convoluted Googletrail that brought me here, but can I say that I just love the idea of the "TMI Family Association" newsletter. Hi, we're the TMI Family! Did I ever tell you about the time your mom and I tried anal? Here are some photographs of Grandpa's throat polyps! Your sister's boyfriend seems nice, and these online photographs of him simulating sex with a goat as part of his fraternity initiation don't change my mind one bit! (Talk about TMI: the URL has the word "scat" right inside it!)

2. Toddlers Are Often Loud And Inappropriate. The other night Nora was apparently pretending that our armchair was a mud puddle, and an area in front of the couch was a bathtub. She would fling herself into the imaginary puddle and shout, "Oh my goodness! Nora is a dirty girl! Dirty! Dirty girl Nora!" before heading to the couch to get "clean," and the whole thing, particularly if there were an audio-only version, was simultaneously cute and somewhat disturbing.

3. Toddlers Are Often Loud And Inappropriate, Part 2. In picture books, dogs are often portrayed with bone-shaped bones. This kind of annoys me, as it seems like just one more example of the deep-running assumptions of our culture, like how kids learn so early what sounds farm animals make or how we all know about zithers and yaks as a result of alphabet books and Sesame Street, when what are the chances you are going to run across a zither or a yak as a preschooler? I am not saying one should never have familiarity with zithers or yaks, but why make zithers and yaks such a priority for America's toddlers? The parsimonious explanation, of course, is a simple dearth of concrete nouns that start with Z and Y and I should just shut up already.

Anyway, Nora has all these books with dogs and bones, and she points to one of the pictures and asks her VERY FAVORITE QUESTION OF ALL TIME, the one I hear eighty times a day, which is, "What is that?" That's a bone, I tell her. She still looks puzzled, having no frame of reference for a "bone," since we are not The Flintstones and don't have piles of them in every corner. I explain that a bone is like a treat for a dog, and her face lights up. You see, after a recent semi-traumatic haircut, Nora ate her first lollipop, and I think the word "treat" was used, and now she associates treats with things you can suck on or bite. Hence, Nora leans back over the book and starts pointing and emphatically saying the following to the dog illustration:

SUCK IT, DOG! SUCK BONE! DOG! BITE BONE! SUCK! BITE! DOG SUCK BONE! BONE! DOG! SUCK IT!

So between "dirty girl" and "suck it, dog," we have had some really fantastic porn dialogue around the Smartypants home lately. Let's not take it to preschool, Nora.

4. Girl Fight Tonight At The Jerry Springer Preschool.Nora has a classmate in her fancy-schmancy Montessori school who has an unfortunate stripper name, which will be a burden to her in later life should she attempt to seek nontopless employment. StripperName really likes LT and the other day she ran over to him and begged to be picked up when he came to collect Nora from school. He did, and all was well until Nora noticed her main man cradling StripperName in his arms, and came booking across the room, demanded to be picked up in his other arm, and then got in StripperName's face and said, "StripperName, no thank you, get down, Nora daddy. StripperName's mommy over there." I really enjoyed Nora's use of "no thank you," particularly when the subtext is all STEP OFF, BEEYATCH.

5. Chubby zombie babies explain it all to you.

6. I am kind of obsessed with the term "bloodfeast." Lately there have been many nighttime conversations like this:

Me [grandma voice]: Ooooh, a bloodfeast! How nice! [lots of giggling, because I crack myself up]
LT: I thought we were going to sleep now.

If you Google "bloodfeast" or "blood feast," you get some horror movies and vampire role-playing games and many, many, many lyrics to death-metal songs, but never anyone's first name. Why is no one naming their little babies Bloodfeast? It would go particularly well with an Irish last name. Bloodfeast O'Shaughnessy. Of course, any time you think of a funny made-up name, you are bound to stumble across a real name that is even better, as I did today with Lester Zebrew Titsworth. His mother was Jewish, his father was a zebra, and since ancient times the family was known for getting their tits' worth.

7. I have joined Netflix for the free trial, although I may cancel once the free part is over, since three or even two movies a month is pushing it in terms of the time I am able to allot to televisual entertainment. I really wish you could just pay for what you use instead of this per-month billing model, but I am enjoying the sit-on-your-ass convenience of it all and watching every episode of The Wire. Although having the main character be a Detective With A Drinking Problem And Problems With His Ex-Wife is clich� and yawn-inducing, the story is pretty good---classic cop-show stuff at the beginning (with lots of strip clubs and "cocksucker" thrown since it aired on HBO) and a more sophisticated storyline taking shape by the end of the first season.

8. A butcher on Devon has a sign proclaiming HISTORIC BABY GOAT SALE. No word on whether this is a mummified Civil War-era baby goat for sale or just a really amazing deal on baby goats, but I plan to head over there as soon as possible to find out.

9. I have either done something very wrong in terms of preserving my daughter's Chinese heritage, or else done something astoundingly right in terms of raising her in a truly multicultural family, when she delightedly identifies a picture of a steamed pork bun on a dim sum cart as "pierogi!"

---Mimi Mimi and the Cult Jam.

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