News and Notes - December 13, 2005

Hello all. I realize that it's been one month plus one day since my last posting - at this point, my population of readers has no doubt shrunken from nine to three, but as always I press on with the sole intent of entertaining what's left of my following. So away we go...

- Let's see, there has to be a good excuse as to why I haven't written anything in a while. What could it be? Oh, that's right - one month ago today, Michelle gave birth to our son Brooks (please, hold your applause until the end). When you're a surprisingly selfish, set-in-your-ways individual who's spent the last 32 years of your life focused primarily on doing things that are intended to give you pleasure, let's just say that parenthood can be somewhat of a shock to the system - a very heartwarming shock, no doubt, but a shock nonetheless. We are often told by more experienced parents, "don't worry, it'll get better" but that sentiment is often difficult to embrace when your boy urinates on the wall at 3:30 AM. On the upside, I never knew how well I could funciton on such little sleep, I never knew how proficient I could become at changing a diaper (I had done that exactly one time before he was born), I never knew formula smelled so funny, and I never knew one little person could warm your heart so much just by making noises while he eats. About a week after he was born, I heard Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" and nearly lost it. Let's just say I pray I never hear the words "But what I'd really like dad is for you to give me the car keys - see you later, can I have them please" because, well, that's just poor sentence structure, rhyme or no rhyme. He's one month old today and, as those more experienced parents keep telling me, it just keeps getting better. Now if he just learned to sleep for 8 hours at a time...

- After Brooks was born, I spent about 2 1/2 weeks at home helping him get assimilated to life outside of the womb. This gave me the chance to catch up with an old friend - daytime television. Oh how I missed you! Between Oprah giving people LCD TVs and catching sexual predators, TNT's Primetime in the Daytime, and the unbelievable quantity of courtroom dramas, I hardly knew what to do with myself. As many of you know, one of my favorite things is to catch up on what the dregs of society have been up to, and these aforementioned courtroom shows offer an insider's view into the life of America's loser class. One episode that particularly grabbed my attention was a disagreement on Divorce Court featuring a couple with the following problems:

1) The man, a 23-year-old, refused to get a job because he needed to work on pursuing his ambition of playing in the NBA. His intense regimen involved practicing with a Junior College team of which he is not a member.

2) The woman, a 26-year-old, apparently seduced this gentleman when he was 16 and playing high school basketball. Shockingly enough, she became pregnant with their first child shortly thereafter.

3) Despite her attempts to straighten her man's life out, the woman was unable to get him to fully embrace fatherhood, and she asked him to move out of the house. She became pregnant with their second child shortly thereafter.

4) After the birth of the second child and the man "playing house" for "a couple of months", he once again seemed to tire of the fatherhood game. In one instance where he was responsible for babysitting their oldest child, the woman went to find him at a friend's house, where she found her child sitting with "some FE-male". She then found her man in the basement, which was engulfed in some sort of smoke, and stormed out with their child.

5) She became pregnant with their third child shortly thereafter.

I didn't stay around to watch the end of this fine program, but something tells me that these two crazy kids were going to be just fine.

- I was fortunate enough to come across an unedited showing of Police Academy the other day. Not #2 (Their First Assignment), #3 (Back in Training), #4 (Citizens on Patrol), #5 (Assignment: Miami Beach) or even #6 (City Under Siege). We're talking O.G., the real one, the only one - the first great romp through the police academy. Mahoney in his prime. Larvell Jones and his wide array of hilarious sound effects. The evil Lt. Harris and his two goons, gun-crazy Eugene Tackleberry, hilariously inept Commandant Lassard, man-child Moses Hightower, and soft-spoken Laverne Hooks. Oh, and lots and lots of gratuitous boob shots. More than I ever remember, to be quite honest. The brilliantly-designed women's shower with an open window facing out on campus. The sexual romps of the faux-Latino cadet. The glorious bonfire scene featuring all of the female cadets dancing nude around the fire. The pot smoking prostitute that felates Cmdt Lassard under a podium. I still have no idea why this movie appealed to me so much when I was 12.

- I have recently gotten sucked into NBC's The Apprentice (thank you, Thanksgiving catch-up show), and I can honestly say that if I ever had to work with any of these smug, pompous asses, I'd be fired for physical assault. What gets me more than the gratuitous ass-kissing of Donald Trump is the measured, calculated speech patterns - I have yet to hear anyone say anything that would remotely resemble something from the heart. Every word is so carefully planned, every story so skewed in their favor, every problem not their own that...ah, I got nothing else to say.

Until next time...