Grouchy.net

First, I don’t care for them.

Second, I always thought David Lee Roth was hilarious, regardless of that doodley-doodley-do guitar and his obvious indentureship to some Chinese spandex factory. Therefore I urge you to listen to this a cappella version of “Running With the Devil“. I think he uses a slide whistle about halfway through. (Read story or scroll to bottom for MP3)

My little kook JH is sick today, which means Fountains of Mucous. I should try and get it on YouTube, as everyone loves babies doing disgusting things, and fountains. So he gets sick, and his autism gets in the way of telling us what is wrong and instructability on how best to rid the body of snot, i.e. tissue and nose. So, he swallows, and as you may expect after a pint or so, his stomach rebells and he becomes my little Mucous Fountain. (I think the italics make the whole thing a little more classy, right?) I do run around and give him “nose hugs” during the day but it’s really like throwing a baggy of sand at a coming flood. Gah.

The thing that drives me the most crazy about this autism thing is the simple lack of communication. It’s been awesome with MTE and his developing vocabulary (current faves of mine are “purkle”, “what doin?” and “let’s take a blue’s clues”) but with JH it’s like we’re both struggling to learn a language that neither of us is really sure of. You know, like that Star Trek episode, Darmok. (Look, at least I had to look up the title, so IANAT!)

So that’s what I did today - I was an attendant at the Mucous Fountain, and I yearned to get away to my current video game hideaway Blue Dragon. It’s so twinkletoes fairydust crazy anime style I can barely look at it. It also has a strange obsession with poop, which is a little disconcerting, but the combat is solid and fun. It better be, as it’s supposed to clock in at 100 hours of play or so which, you know, gets harder to accomplish when you have kids. Or a social life, for that matter.

I try and refrain from commenting on politics here, as so many other places do it better. But the media is driving me crazy, and Mr. G is getting sick of my wild-eyed ranting. I admit, I do it to myself as every night we watch Hardball, Countdown and, please forgive me, Tucker (I considered doing a blog called “Fucker” for awhile, as I so loathe Tucker Carlson), coupled with a lot of C-SPAN (oh, they’re holding a debate on a motion to hold a debate on a motion? cool).

Let me say first that I’m not really a Clinton supporter, but the media’s processing of her candidacy is bordering on the ludicrous. Let’s see the way they’ve covered her campaign:

Frankly, I’m tired of the media making my decisions for me. And I’m pretty tired of the sexist rhetoric being used against Clinton. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on MSNBC tonight, Romney cried three times during appearances, including once on Meet the Press, and it didn’t make the freaking evening news. My “idea” of media’s function is information, not decisions, but media has become half corporate tool, half talking head hot air. And in the end, the only candidate talking about standing up to corporate media is marginalized. I am so not looking forward to the actual campaign.

Today is my crazy baby’s birthday. JH has now hit the big 4. He got balloons and a couple of toys and a cake he didn’t eat any of because he’s just that way. I’ll be enjoying that cake at approximately 10:45 this evening, if you’re in the neighborhood.

While he is awesome, and I love celebrating the fact he’s, you know, alive, his birth was excruciating. It was a three day induction followed by a c-section. By the time he was born I just wanted to get the fuck out of the hospital, and Mr. Grouchy had contracted the kind of flu that you only get in a place where there are hundreds of sick people laying around being sick.

So, I’m reminiscing with Mr. G, this evening and I remark that probably at this point in the birth there were twelve people standing around looking at my vagina* (some monitor thing or another) and he said I was weird, talking about how people were all looking at my special lady area. Then he says, “you women never seem to get over giving birth.”

All I have to say is the contract is out on you Mr. G, and you will never see it coming.

* There is an upside to this - I can now endure almost any embarrassing medical procedure without blinking. Due to a technical glitch I recently had to stand around with one boob in a mammogram machine for 40 minutes, and my doctor remarked that I was handing it really well. “Oh”, I said, “I can do anything, since during the birth of my son I had twelve people looking at my vagina.” See? Upside.

Okay, I know I said that I would be here a little more often. Really, I meant to. You got the gift basket, right? Well, if it makes you feel better, please choose from the following reasons I was unable to compute:

a) We moved to a new town, and I painted the whole inside of the house by myself and that pretty much wiped me out.

b) My funny weird little autistic son was acclimating to a new preschool, and that pretty much wiped me out.

c) The holidays came along, and I ate too much sugar (right now there are three pies, half a cheesecake and a box of chocolates in my house mocking me as I write), and that pretty much wiped me out.

d) There have been sooo many fantastic video games released in the past couple of months, and I got a little distracted.

e) Some boring combination of all of the above, or fill in your own excuse. Wow, I was leading an exploratory mission to the Arctic to try and beat the Russians to claiming the undersea region? I’ve been researching the genetic makeup of the lemur? I started a guinea pig farm? Fascinating.

Anyway, I’m trying harder in the new year. New Year, woo hoo! I understand I’ll be attending a party in Paris with George Clooney and Jenna Bush. Sounds fab. Cheers!

If you’ve ever played Tony Hawk and attempted some crazy trick off a building or some ramp and your skater lands in such a way that would pretty much guarantee the pulverization of their skeleton, then this footage is for you. I can’t believe the guy actually walked away. Also, I know nothing about skating*, so excuse my abuse of the vernacular.

*In fact, my only ever actual skateboarding experience involved one of those toy store little plastic “boards”, a long steep hill and an acorn. Needless to say, that was not an exhilarating thrill ride.

No, really, holy crap. Being killed by a spider bite is bad enough for an arachnophobe such as myself, but the rest is just icky and very, very disturbing.

Oh man, this is awesome. And it’s true - the little red hand prints make it so much better.

If I had vanity plates, they’d say ABBA. If those were taken, I’d probably go for CHOCOBO since I am a dork. As if you couldn’t tell already seeing as ABBA was my first choice.

My toilet paper has a community. An online “common sense” community, apparently united in their love of thrifty toilet paper. I’ll be honest here - I’ve been pretty loyal to my brand of toilet paper over the years, with maybe a few dalliances with other brands when a more, um, delicate approach was needed. I’ve always come back though, as this particular brand’s rolls actually do last longer than the budget brands.

So what’s going on in my First of all the parent company, Kimberly Clark, would like you to know it stands behind absolutely nothing its customers have to say anywhere on the website. Next, if you’re not a mom and you’re here looking for a good common sense community you single loser, maybe you should check out another brand’s site. Maybe the one that took the rejoinder “does a bear shit in the woods?” a little too literally. And if you are a mom, you should realize that you have a veritable cleaning army at your disposal in your precious offspring.

Okay, there is some actual common sense in the tips forums, but really, who is writing these posts?  I find it hard to believe that there’s enough people who read the wrapping on their toilet paper or paper towels to form a community.  Even if there are enough people, I suspect such a community wouldn’t have common sense as it’s organizing principle.  I should know, as I’d be a member.  And I’m still waiting for the bidet to catch on in America.

Soooo, I’m watching the breaking news about the Libby commutation on the Hardball last night (we love Tweety, though he is loathsome in his tactics), and I wondered how the other networks were covering the story.  Here’s what I found:

- Hardball was bringing it with one of the Tweetster’s round tables.  I’m pretty sure Craig Crawford was involved, and there was lively discussion including phone-ins from various campaigns.

- CNN had their in-house legal analyst and some call-in guests, including Paul Begala.  Once again, lively discussion about the Libby story.

- Fox was showing an interesting clip of robots playing soccer.  Then they went to footage of the California wild fires.

Huh.  Fox news, where it’s only news if it’s not.  Because what kind of positive spin can you put on the pile of poop that is our executive branch, anyway?  Ooooh, look, robots!