The Juney Bugs and the May Bee

Caleb, cousin Aidan, and Sam turn their backs on the streets of Old Milwaukee, the northern view from their Granny and Poppa's cottage on the 26th Floor.  The tiger has wandered in from a William Blake poem.

It is said that most people have three distinct laughs -- a giggle, a belly laugh, and a chuckle or chortle.  Sam's recently premiered his third laugh, which goes: hyuk hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Sometimes at night we like to reenact scenes from Kubrick's The Shining, except that Caleb's altogether too good humored to pull off the Nicholson part.

1. Find three things that roar in this picture. 

2. Find one that goes: hyuk hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Bubbles!

For reasons metaphysic and obscure, the boys have received a lot of bubble machines.  Recently, one arrived in the mail from friends in Minneapolis and I went to stow it away for a nicer day, finding two other bubble machines in the place where I thought to put it.  (And I'm certain we've re-gifted at least two bubble machines, which means that in two years worth of twindom, we've been the recipient of at least five bubble machines, which further means that we receive .21 bubble machines each month.)  Anyway, it seemed silly to have such a wealth of bubble-making power and not put it to good use, so despite the cloudy and chilly day, we made bubbles.

If anyone is short on bubbles, we've developed a bit of an assembly line in our house.  If you're interested in receiving bubbles, please place your order via e-mail and you'll receive a box full of bubble-wrapped bubbles in 7-10 toddler business days. 

Movie Reviews

You know what I did this week? I saw a movie. In an actual movie theatre.

The movie was not a good one. I wanted to see Iron Man, but was swayed by a so-called friend to see Redbelt instead. Redbelt is David Mamet's karate movie and was not good. (By Midwestern evaluation norms, "not good" is a notch below "pretty bad.")


I have seen no more than four movies in theatres in the nearly two years since the twins came home to us, so bad movies are a particularly bitter dissappointment. The two beers I had afterwards -- in an actual tavern! -- and the discussion with Chris about what made that movie so not good only partly made up for having wasted a perfectly good opportunity to see a decent movie in an actual movie theatre.

Kirsten has suggested that we get sitters for Friday night, and go see Iron Man. As a person whose interest in literature, comic book, and film put me squarely in the "geek" category of nerd taxonmy, I've withstood the lure of the Iron Man movie for about as long as I can without developing a stress fracture, and I'm lucky to have a wife who understands and indulges me.

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On Tuesday night, as Kirsten was finishing her book-club read of J. Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (an abolute fave of mine, and totally for and about lit/comic book/film geeks, by happy circumstance), I watched Away From Her, which from both a flim and story perspective, was devestatingly sad and beautiful. Highly recommended for the emotionally prepared.

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Here's a tiny review of Redbelt, extra-small so that it won't burgle your time as it did mine:

The Guy from Dirty Pretty Things/American Gangster/Talk To Me/Children of Men is the dojo of a jiu jitsu parlor in South L.A. He’s very honorable, which the film suggests means being naïve and super nice to people, and he has a sexy Brazilian wife who is sexy and from Brazil. (You know she’s from Brazil because A) she’s sexy, B) she wears shiny green dresses and listens to samba, and C) she is constantly talking about being from Brazil.) He also seems to have trained all of the cops in L.A. who are all very athletic, do not have mustaches or body fat, and who affectionately call The Guy “Mikey.” In a convoluted David Mamet kind of way, Mikey ends up saving a famous actor in a bar fight. Here, Tim Allen (the voice of Buzz in Toy Story) is essentialy playing James Woods, and to do so he seems to have bloated up his neck and face with booze, and become both pasty and splotchy at the same time, which is how you know he’s supposed to be James Woods. (It may be worth $9 to see Tim Allen play James Woods, but it’s not at all worth two hours. Also, there are times were you begin to wonder if this isn’t James Woods playing Tim Allen…) Anyway, Joe Mantegna (who may be played by Chazz Palminteri) is Tim Allen’s manager or producer or some sort of Hollywood halfwit, and for totally unclear David Mamet reasons he cons Mikey into fighting in a pay-per-view Unlimited Fighting Championship. Mikey doesn’t want to fight in this because he’s honorable, so he has to be tricked and betrayed into doing it, and then once the pay-per-view show starts he’s shocked – SHOCKED! – to learn that the whole thing is fixed. Mikey decides he’s going to jiu jitsu everybody involved in the pay-per-view so that he can get to the microphone over the center ring and announce to all the mouthbreathers who’ve payed $39.99 to watch 9 hours of Unlimited Fighting on their televisions that, unbeknownst to them, their Cheeto- and Cathode Tube-based lives are but the gelatinous by-products of a late-period capitalism that has begun its tail-swallowing decline through self-consumption. Of course, no one, including his wife and Joe Mantegna and other fighters on the bill want him to expose their lies, so he has to fight them all without ever going into the ring or on TV, and when he’s beaten them all the whole auditorium applauds and they give him the gold belt that they were supposed to give to the winner of the whole pay per view, and an old Brazilian in the audience bows to him because he is honorable. This was a big dumb Jeanne Claude Van Damme movie with some occaisionally smart Mametian dialogue, or -- perhaps -- the reverse.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?

We've made it through April unscathed (or perhaps only lightly scathed), which is not always proven so easy to do.

My week has been long but somewhat interesting.  We're trying out potential new Deans at the school, and the interview process has involved a presentation before the full faculty and staff.  Sort of like a pin-striped American Idol.  The decision is now in the hand of the Provost's office, though maybe they'll set up a 1-800 number for voting.

I've also started to contribute in the effort to create a 20 year reunion for the Rufus King High School Class of 1988.  I had a very long conference call on Friday night with old friends I haven't seen since graduation.  (Check out the developing website, by the way, at www.king1988.com.)

According to the check-in system at my office, I advised 100 students between Monday and Thursday this week.  Welcome to the special brain-blanking that is Priority Registration.  Advising is an incredibly not-hard job for 10 months of the year, and an endurance test in April and November.  Not because what I do is brain-science or rocket-surgery, but because talking to 25 different people in 8 hours (not counting time away for Dean presentations and maybe a sandwich) is just plain exhausting, and doing so for five days a week for three or four weeks makes maintaining energy hard.  One starts to recommend Managerial Accounting where one ought to have said Managerial Economics.  One becomes unable to visually separate Linguistics 210 -- Diversity of Human Language (cough - gut course - cough) with Business 210 -- Business Statistics.  Worst of all, one gets cranky in the mornings at home, and lumberingly stupid in the evenings, which tests the p

atience, empathy, and reserves of one's spouse.  (By the way: LOVE.)

Now, because my head is otherwise empty, fun pictures:

Sam, who says "Cheeeeeeeeeze," shows signs of ham as well.

The withering worried look of Sam, who is sometimes unsure of how he feels about his Caleb's demonstrative and somewhat shovey version of brotherly love.

Cousin Aidan and Caleb in the sandbox on the back porch on a fluke 70 degree day in mid-April.  These boys shovel real well.  And the look on Caleb's face slays me, as Holden Caufield used to put it.
Aidan's new puppy Krypto, who's named for Superman's puppy (PRIDE), gives Caleb a run for his money.

Caleb has been drawing with a red marker. Given the picture above, and in the time alotted, please list the places in the house or on his person that were newly decorated in red.  If you run out of room, please continue your answer on a separate sheet of paper.

Proud Papa

This morning, at 6:48am CST, Sam Hinshaw -- aged 26th months -- pointed to the above Caped Crusader and said:

"Batman."

Who wants a cigar?

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And, confidential to the unknown person or persons who may have helped themselves to 4 Brewers tickets from my work mailbox: You are a bad person. You've likely brought tears to the faces below.

For shame.

(If it turns out that the tickets were misplaced by administration, then hey, no hard feelings, it's just a game. There'll be others.)

How Are We Going To Keep Them Off the Farm?

Grampa Jim found a John Deere riding tractor at the church rummage sale. The boys had good fun plowing leaves and filling the front-end loader.

While we were getting ready for day care this morning, they both complained about how Agri-business is suffocating the independent farmer, particularly those interested in organic or pesticide-free produce. They were also saying stuff about ethanol subsidies and the myth of the estate tax, but as a lifelong city-dweller, I had no idea what they were talking about...

Ruination Day

I don't care for the month of April, and not because of taxes (which provide funding for infastructrure!) or the weather (which brings May flowers!) or T.S. Eliot (he wrote "The Wasteland"!)

• April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis.
• April 12, 1861: The Confederate army bombards Fort Sumter, effectively beginning the Civil War.
• April 14, 1865: Writer, emancipator, and re-unifier Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre.
• April 14, 1912: The Titanic sunk.
• April 14, 1935: Twenty dust storms swept through the plains on a day known as "Black Sunday." In the following days, dust darkened the skies as far east as New York and Boston.
• April 16, 2007: Seung-hui Cho rampaged at Virginia Tech, killing 33 students and teachers, wounding 29, the country's worst school shooting.
• April 18, 1775: The Redcoats landed, and Paul Revere rode, effectively beginning the Revolutionary War.
• April 18, 1906: The San Francisco earthquake killed an estimated 3,000 and destroyed 80% of the city.
• April 19, 1993: The FBI/ATF siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX, ended with 79 dead, including 21 children.
• April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh car-bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, OK. The blast and collapse killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 800 more.
• April 20th, 1999: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 Columbine High School students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves in the U.S.'s most notorious high school shooting prior to Virginia Tech.
• April 29, 1992: The L.A. riots broke out following the verdict in the Rodney King case. Of the more than 50 people killed over the next six days, about half were African-American.

Bad things happen in April. People do stupid and inhumane things.

In his books on writing, John Gardner put forth the idea that one should always strive to be life-affirming in what one writes, on the basis that within the audience for any particular piece of writing there may be a person who is quite seriously considering suicide. With that as a possibility, Gardner suggested that the only moral requirement of writing is that it nudge -- to the extent it can -- towards tomorrow and possibility and humanity.

Every now and then I like to take out that idea of Gardner's and walk it around a little. It makes the world seem brighter, particulary on a sunny Spring day by the lake...

We're In The Jailhouse Now

Last week, Grampa Jim took the boys to visit their Aunt George Ann and ended up in the dog house. (Not to be confused with the Dogg Haus, a hot dog joint near us on Brady Street.)

Also, how fantastically great are the Backyardigans? A new episode last Friday ("Blazing Paddles") reconfigured the familiar Wild West shoot-out/Lone Ranger story by replacing guns and bullets with ping pong, all set to Algerian Rai music. That the Lone Ranger analogue (Uniqua, the Pink Fury) is pretty clearly voiced by a young African American girl, and that Rai has a rich history among Middle Eastern women, is just the radical icing on the awesome B-Yards cake.

Next week's episode, "Le Master of Disguise," is due to play with Pink Panther/Orient Express 60's caper movie tropes, featuring songs set to Nigerian Juju. (Which is right up my current alley. I've been listening to the Highlife music of Ghana and Sierra Leone since introduced to it in the "Mission to Mars" episode.)

I just hope that Sam and Caleb don't mind missing another "Face the Nation" so that their Daddy can watch cartoons.

Augh!

Over and over again, I get excited by upcoming elections. This is where it's all going to change, I think to myself. The choices seem so clear and so logical, and I'm convinced that everybody else sees theses things, too. (This is where the construction of the idea of "common sense" comes from -- the idea that everyone else understands things just as we do.)

Then election results come in and I have to recognize my complete disjunction with the majority of the electorate.

I voted yesterday and all of the candidates I supported lost (but for some uncontested races). These were good people who valued things like civic services and public transportation and human beings, and they lost to conservative, corporatist, intolerant japeholes.

And here I thought we were on to something.

After looking at returns before work this morning, I compared counted votes versus census population for Milwaukee County and the city. About 166,160 votes were cast in our race for county executive, with the incumbent keeping the seat. (He's a city services slashing japehole of the type I mention above). The 2006 Census lists the population of the county at 915,097. With 26.7% below the age of 18, that leaves 670,760 eligible voters -- this means a turnout of 25% of the electorate in the county.

Turnout from the city worse: 81,339 voted for mayor; Barrett was a shoe-in, but the votes offer a good indication of total voters. The census lists the city population at 586,941, with 28.6% below voting age. This leaves 419,076 eligible voters, and a turnout in the city of Milwaukee of 19%.

By these numbers, it's clear that most of the county executive japehole's votes from outside of the city, which may help to explain why he's totally willing to cut city services to spare county taxes.

Good grief.

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Here's a palatte cleanser, clearly left over from yesterday: Muppet bloopers!

The Third Way

Given the recent in-fighting in the Democratic party and the liklihood that we'll lose to McCain in the general election, I'm incredibly pleased that Wisconsin's junior senator has decided to run as an independent candidate for president. I've always liked Feingold, and I think it's time that we had a viable third party contender in American politics.

It'll be particularly interesting to see what McCain's reaction will be to Feingold's announcement, given that the two worked closely together on campaign finance reform. It will also be interesting to see whether Feingold sticks to his dollar-per-voter budgeting in such a contested, ad-heavy election season.

Show your support for Russ Feingold and the Progressive Party!

This was an April Fool's thing. Feingold is not really running as a third party candidate.

Unless he is.

But he isnt.

Yet.