Eli lumps time into two big buckets: now, and next week. Whenever we tell him, “Your friend Josh can’t come over right now,” he says, “Can he come over next week?” It’s kind of like how dogs live in the eternal now.

That’s right, I just compared my son to a dog. It’s just the kind of loving parent I am.

This makes talking to him about time interesting. On our most recent car trip, he launched into his cover of the popular kid’s song, “Are We There Yet?” “When will we be in Memphis,” he asked.

“We’re almost there. We’ll be there in 15 minutes.”

“How long does 15 minutes take?”

The only answer I hit on was, “It’s like thirty nows from now.”

Eventually he’ll get a better concept of time. With luck, we’ll then be able to teach him to stay in his room while we sleep in.

Sometimes, a band’s disparate elements will come together into a single amazing song.

“Antarctica,” off of The Weepies’ new album Hideaway, is that song for me right now.

When we checked our bags today in Nashville for our flight to New York, Billy Bob Thornton gave us our baggage claim stubs and told us stories about pets.

It wasn’t really Billy Bob, but he did resemble him. And boy, did he want to tell us stories. “This one time, a guy wanted to check his squirrel in a cardboard box. I told him, ‘Don’t tell me that’s a seeing eye squirrel.’ He told me no, it was a rescue squirrel. He didn’t get the joke.

“So I checked our big list of animals you can bring with you. And you can only have two animals per plane, so I had to check that too. But squirrel wasn’t on the list. Rats and dogs and cats and all were. I told the guy, ‘I think what you have here is a rodent.’ He didn’t like that much. I had to get on the phone to corporate and eventually they let him go on with the squirrel, but he had to pay $100 to take him.

“Wait, one more story and I’ll let you go. This woman, she was old, like 90. She was a real fossil. She came up to check her bags and gave me a duffel bag. I picked it up and went to throw it on the conveyor belt and it woofed.

“I asked her, do you have anything you need to tell me about this bag? And it turned out she had a dog in it. ‘They told me I could bring my dog,’ she said. And I said, ‘Ma’am, you can, but it needs to be in a hard-sided ventilated pet carrier. We would have piled bags on top of this and your dog would have been dead.

“You have a good trip!”

So some words of advice to all you would-be airline travelers: put your dogs in an actual pet carrier. In fact, put your squirrels in an actual pet carrier, but bring an extra $100 for the trip.

This is not as good as when my friend Mike saw a box behind the counter that was labeled “CAREFUL: HUMAN EYES”, but not all stories can be about human eyes.

We’re headed to Japan tomorrow on vacation so I’m not sure how much internet we’ll have.

But now I’m looking at that sentence and I’m laughing because I’m quite sure there will be a lot of internet in Japan but I’m not sure how much access to it we will have.

So while we potentially take a few days off from posting, I leave you to read the notes I made for the grandparents on caring for Eli and Liza. These notes are not because I think that our family is unable to care for our children, but is an attempt to make their lives easier while they are caring for them. It is mostly a list of our methodology to keep from hearing Liza make the screech of melting doom.

This post is at Chris’s request because he swore to us last night at dinner that he once left a longer set of notes on caring for his cats, so he was sure that it must be humiliating to have our parenting reduced to a few paragraphs of notes.

Continue reading Travel Notes for the Children →

Hey, Reality TV contestants, what are your thoughts on friendship?

Ah, glad you cleared that up for us.

A while back I mentioned Starboortz Fish, a libertarian re-telling of The Rainbow Fish. Now there’s Goodnight Bush: An Unauthorized Parody, which is a version of Goodnight Moon with George Bush as the title character.

Goodnight Bush apes the look and tone of the original story with great fidelity, but replaces the rabbit, his grandmother, and his toys with well-known images and items from Bush’s presidency. Gone is the rabbit falling asleep; instead there is Bush as a young boy wearing flight suit pyjamas. What fascinates me about this is how they’re using the hook of a beloved children’s book to promulgate a message about the President. It’s something that looks like a children’s book but that is squarely aimed at adults.

Starboortz Fish was a straight-forward libertarian message for children. Goodnight Bush is a critique of Bush’s presidency that trades on memories of a much-loved childhood book. It depicts the Twin Towers as a pile of blocks being knocked over by a toy airplane and the color-coded terror levels as a xylophone. What raises it above a mindless mashup is how the medium is part of the message. Part of their critique is that Bush has treated us like children; in response, they wrote a children’s book about him.

When I first talked about Starboortz Fish, I made up a bunch of goofy libertarian versions of classic children’s books. I had no idea that my vision of those books being recast as political argument would come true.

As part of the ongoing fun of Dragon*ConTV, I’m soliciting questions for use in our bumpers. Ask any goofy question, preferably one related to SF or fantasy medium, and if you’re lucky I’ll use it. If you’re really lucky I’ll use it and make fun of it.

I loved paper dolls when I was a kid. I know it’s rooted in my obsession with paper, so it’s not really a surprise that any craft that involves cutting, folding and gluing paper is going to rock my paper socks.

Back in the day, paper dolls were hard to come by. When you could find them, they were printed and usually produced so you could punch them out–no cutting involved. You got cutesie girl dolls with sailor outfits and tiny black schnauzers to sit by their side. I had loads of fun with them when I was a kid but hadn’t thought of them until a couple of years ago when my sister-in-law sent me a link to The Toymaker. I had the most fun printing things out and making them for Eli. He played with his sunbox until it fell apart.

So it was a big surprise to me this week when I was browsing my seemingly 948 craft blogs that I found out paper dolls have gone all hard core. Boxpunx was a revelation. From there I got to Papercraft X. Toypaper has a really lovely message. Eli wanted to know why Derek the toast ninja was so mad. I told him that that was a ninja’s job. We also got a kick out of looking at Monkey Design USA and are sad that there’s no retailer near us or a way to download their designs.

All these are fun to browse through with your kid and to make if you have the desire. Who knows? You might just spark a love of paper that lasts a lifetime.

Did you know that, on this day in 1776, “the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress, setting the 13 colonies on the road to freedom as a sovereign nation”? Furthermore, “this most American of holidays will be marked by parades, fireworks and backyard barbecues across the country”? Thanks, US Census Bureau! Of more interest is the 3 in 4 chance that any fresh tomatoes eaten on hamburgers¹ comes from Florida or California. No word from the FDA about what your chance of catching Salmonella from those tomatoes is.

For my American friends, happy Fourth of July. For my non-American friends, enjoy an Internet whose tubes are less clogged with Americans.

¹ The US Census Bureau actually talks about fresh tomatoes eaten in salad. Really, US Census Bureau? Salad?

If you’re a packaging engineer, I imagine you have to put up with a certain amount of skepticism about having the word “engineer” in your title. After enough of that, you might want to prove that, dammit, you are too a real engineer.

I imagine that’s what led to this statement on a Domino’s pizza box.

While “CORRU-SKELETAL TECHNOLOGY” is great, even better is how it protects the pizza from “crushing forces”. Unanswered is how well it withstands shear stress, or if it has the tensile strength necessary to hold together during normal handling while still allowing pepperoni-craving fiends to rip the top right off of the box.