No, that’s not a typo. Disney, who once suckered me into thinking High School Musical was just a nice, family movie (I even bought the damn DVD for my oldest) instead of a marketing juggernaut, has decided to turn its mega popular hit into — get this — an ice show! Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, I know, because a movie about basketball doesn’t translate to ice skates, that’s fucking why!
This is in addition to an upcoming theater touring company (expected to be in over 60 cities by 2008, christ, does it ever end?) as well as a sequel coming this summer. Like the previous live performances, the top tickets are reserved for rich parents that want to spoil their kids at $75 a pop. I might pay $75 to see Zac Efron sliding around on the ice and falling on his ass, but none of the original stars will be appearing — instead, it will probably be a bunch of 20-something losers who had their Olympic dreams dashed trying to pass themselves off as teenagers.
It’s been 24 hours since I dropped off my wife and sons at the airport for a trip to Florida with Grandma. This should be the part where I start talking about how I’m pining away for the children’s laughter. How the creaky step on our staircase once reminded me that the house was a living, vibrant place but is now lonely and empty. How I’m sitting here in my worn, overstuffed chair, smoking a pipe, and gazing out the window counting the minutes — nay, seconds — until my precious family returns to the warm bosom of our humble abode.
Fuck that.
I’m as giddy as one of Gwen Stefani’s pets. I’m enjoying myself immensely. I picked up the house yesterday and it was still clean when I woke up this morning. Last night I poured myself a big glass of red wine and watched a movie with lots of violence and swearing. Before 9 p.m. I know, right? This morning I went to Target, and it only took ten minutes. I can’t believe how liberating it is to have the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Not shower until noon? Play the piano at 2 a.m.? Blast cheesy cock rock through the stereo? It’s all good.
And my level of efficiency has increased! Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far:
1. Cleaned the garage
2. Organized the bookshelf by subject, then author, then title
3. Wrote a 400 page memoir
4. Read the entire Bible — twice
5. Learned all 32 Beethoven sonatas (to be fair, not by memory)
6. Built two houses for Habitat for Humanity
7. Discovered a cure for cancer, won the Nobel prize, spent the cash award on craft beer and expensive bourbon
I can’t wait to see what I get done this afternoon! Ah, four more days of being responsible for no other living creature but myself and the dog.
About a week ago I opened my email and found that I had been officially “tagged” and presented with a Thinking Blogger Award by the lovely and talented Mom-101. Since I didn’t seem to make a good first impression, I was extremely flattered and it increased my respect for her in that she is open to discourse instead of the knee-jerk dismissal of opposing views common on blogs and forums these days. If Liz happens to make her way to my fair city for Blogher this year, the first round is on me.
Part of the responsibility of winning this prestigious award is that I’m to spread the love and pass the award along to 5 other blogs that make me think. And there lies the problem. It seems all of my thinking lately has been devoted to revenue generating activities for my clients. When I need a break I tend to gravitate towards blogs that make me laugh and entertain more than make me sit back with a pipe and contemplate my place in the universe, which is why I seem unable to come up with my own list.
That, and I’m inherently lazy.
So help me put together a list and pad out my feed reader, will ya? What writers/blogs out there make you think?
It all began with the prospect of a free burrito or burrito bowl at Chipotle. Innocent enough. The manager of Chipotle extended an offer to the company I work for, a marking effort to drum up some business for the new franchise down the street. I hadn’t been to one in years, but some of my co-workers invited me along and from what little I knew of Chipotle, I was confident I could find something that would be on my Weight Watchers plan. Even though I aware they were owned by McDonald’s, I also knew it was full of fresh ingredients, rice, and beans, all low fat alternatives.
Even though I was planning on being conservative and just ordering a salad, I considered this a big treat in comparison to my usual Lean Cuisines. I told the teenager behind the counter that I was on a diet and asked what she would recommend. She suggested the Chipotle Bowl, a burrito in a bowl, minus the tortilla. “The tortilla will kill ya,” she said.
It’s hard to believe that Chipotle is owned by McDonald’s. It just looked and tasted so healthy, and damn was it good! So good in fact, that I went again the next week. How could a salad “bowl” be so tasty? I could eat it everyday. In fact, it tasted so good, I started to become suspicious. I purposely asked for only a pinch of cheese, a smear of sour cream and a smear of guacamole, but something tasted fishy, as in McDonald’s Fish Sandwich caloric nightmare fishy.
That night, I went to look up my Chipotle diet treat, but nutrient and caloric information is suspiciously absent from their website. I had to go to www.chipotlefan.com to get the real scoop and it wasn’t pretty. I was so incredibly shocked by what I found out, I confirmed it on Weight Watchers online database, only to find out, even with my “smears”, we were talking 18 points. I only get 25 points a day!! So, I was eating 2/3 of my daily total on that asshole salad! Dieters BEWARE!!!!
No wonder I was stagnant with my weight loss. I was going on two or three weeks without a change, until this week, when I’ve lost another 4 pounds. My experience demonstrates how you can’t just assume something is low calories or low fat, you really need to do the research and read the labels.
Total loss since January 1, 2007 — 19 lbs. (I just couldn’t push it to 20, but close enough!)
In Italy, an aborted baby fights for his life. The unborn fetus was aborted due to a false diagnosis and false interpretation of an ultrasound, but the diagnosis turned out to be incorrect and now they’re trying to save the aborted baby at 22 weeks gestation. Of course, the procedure will most likely kill him:
FLORENCE, Italy, March 8, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Italian doctors are struggling to save the life of a baby whom they aborted after hospital pre-natal tests misdiagnosed him as deformed, a victim of the inaccuracies of pre-natal testing, which in many cases leads to abortion.
The best parenting advice I received from a good friend during my first son’s infancy, “When he starts walking – knock him down.”
Once toddlers become mobile, the party is over and it will continue to be over until you are over. Like 6 feet under - Over. It is like running a triathlon on a steady diet of super-human reflexes and adrenalin.
You have to feel for his mother. In theory, Connie Robinson should have several more months knowing six-month-old Reuben is safe and sound where she leaves him.
Reuben, however, has other ideas and has left his mother nonplussed by getting to his feet and toddling about under his own steam while most babies of the same age are happy to lie back and watch the world go by.
“It is exceptionally early,” said Dr Martin Ward-Platt, a consultant paediatrician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle. “At a year about half of babies have started to walk. A few start at nine months and about five per cent at 10 months. Before that is very unusual.”
Yamhill countie’s Prosecution, in McMinneville Orgeon ought to be ashamed of themselves — arresting and detaining a frightened 12 year old boy for acting out a stupid TV show, “Jackass” and prosecuting him for crimes that may leave him a felon and registered sex offender as well as putting him behind bars.
Apparently, along with other classmates, they were acting out a game they saw on TV where “Jackass”-es swat girls on the behinds and then they have to swat another person on the behind. The teacher grabbed the child and the child was sent to jail for days without being able to speak to his parents, scared and confused.
A judge reunited the seventh-grader with his McMinnville family after six days in custody, where he spent time rooming with a 17-year-old the family’s attorney described in court as a juvenile delinquent.
“I was so scared, I was throwing up the first and second night,” the boy said.
His mom, Tracie Mashburn, said she would have disciplined her son herself had school officials told her about the problem.
“You shouldn’t be doing that, but they should have let us know,” she said. “Had we known … we would have gone to the parents and had him apologize to them. Nobody even gave us a chance to do that.”
Since then, some of the girls have said they felt pressured to tell authorities and school officials what they wanted to hear - that the boys were doing something much worse.
If you are as outraged as I am, that we are now going after little boys, instead of properly educating them for a behavior issue that should not have to ruin this child’s life, write the principal of his school today:
Nicole Uribe, 23, a Mexican immigrant currently living in Pueblo, Colorado, was placed under arrest for trading her 5-month-old son for the down payment on a used Dodge Intrepid. My first reaction was, “A Dodge Intrepid? Used? Down payment?” I thought babies were worth way more than that, and I immediately stopped typing up my Craigslist ad.
Jose-Juan Lerma, who was on the receiving end of the baby deal, was also placed under arrest along with his wife. They were all charged with baby trafficking, a Class III felony. According to USA Today, however, Lerma is claiming he just had the child’s best interests at heart:
“I just tried to help them out with the little boy,” [Lerma] said. “They didn’t have no place to stay. I grew up with no mother so I don’t like to see people suffer.”
He also claimed that he didn’t want to buy the boy. Whether he’s telling the truth or just trying to save his ass, who knows, but the certain fact is that the kid is the real loser in this whole mess.
"Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways." -- Samuel McChord Crothers
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Posted
March 31, 2007 at
6:34 pm by
Prescott 
No, that’s not a typo. Disney, who once suckered me into thinking High School Musical was just a nice, family movie (I even bought the damn DVD for my oldest) instead of a marketing juggernaut, has decided to turn its mega popular hit into — get this — an ice show! Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, I know, because a movie about basketball doesn’t translate to ice skates, that’s fucking why!
Comments (0)
Posted
March 11, 2007 at
10:14 pm by
