Blessed Miscreancy, That Abides No Demarcation

Where am I, you ask? That this call to action should awake me from my slumber and renew the vital juices of my pallid, hunkering muse; this is your wish, is it?

I picture this deviceful anthropomorphism as a sort of shriveled salamander, crouching blind by some bio-luminescent underground lake, awaiting only the siren call of Yog-Sothoth to manifest a magnificent rebirth. No sound penetrates the Stygian darkness. No light falls on these unseeing eyes. It is the long, dark twilight of the soul.

Alright Boxer, you win. I'll blog something, I guess.

But hey, enough about me! How have you been? Google Analytics still periodically deposits a tangy and pungent digital turd in my inbox, so I know someone's reading this stuff. And to you I say: thanks for not giving up.

Here's a run-down of some random stuff that's been going on:

• Brother's completed his transformation and emerged from his Chrysalis a full-fledged American (or landed immigrant, or migrant worker, or something. I can't really get my head around the legal details). The whole family recently trucked off to Jersey for the foreseeable future, which is kind of sad. Son has been clamoring for his cousins ever since.


• Speaking of Son, he's turned Six! It puts me in mind of not-too-long-ago, when Six Years Old was the sort of unofficial demarcation between baby and childhood. Put away childish things, boy. You are of two worlds, now. Not man, not child, but some curious alloy, and subject to all the many challenges, and not very many of the rewards, of both your constituent metals. Here are some pictures of Brother and I, at a similarly tender age.


• That ridiculous Gold Buying thing is over and done with, but I'm not really allowed to talk about it.


• ThinFast has announced her departure from PerpetualStartup for the sunny shores of (ugh) Toronto. Her reasons are her own, but we are all very sad to see her go.


• Many other interesting things happened, but their respective statutes of limitations have expired, so I will light on them but briefly: IronMan and Goldylocks had a beautiful baby boy. The family and I visited The Boxer's farm and milked the chickens (turns out Son has a little crush on BigKid. His eyes still light up whenever I mention her!). Winter finally ended, and the rainy season began, with no end in sight. We've pulled Son out of his English/French/Greek school in favor of one that won't cause him heart palpitations every time we mention it.

...Meh, and that's about it for now. But wait! Big things coming.

Big, HUGE things!

We Are Confronted With Insurmountable Opportunities

ThinFast is headed to Vegas this week, for reasons entirely unconnected with CTIA. And next week, IronMan tags along with Pow for reasons that are CTIA-related.

I don't know why you would even care, or what would impel me to write about that, but there it is.

Son has, of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all mirth, foregone all custom of exercise. He's never been an enthusiastic scholar, but something (we think) happened last Wednesday at school to make him truly dread the engine of his education. Thursday morning, in the car on the way to school, he complained of a stomachache. When that didn't work, he basically freaked right the fuck out, so Wife, motherly pity in her heart, brought him back home.

And again on Friday.

Nearest we can glean from his sobbing attempts to explain through periodic panic attacks, the teacher yelled at him, or gave him a time-out, or some such, and he doesn't know why (because it was all in Greek). So now he thinks she hates him.

As I may have previously mentioned, Son is a sensitive soul, prone to emotion and histrionics. He gets this from his mother, of course (oooohhh, no you di in't!).

The sewn seeds of long and patient discussion and emotional exploration have born the fruit of increased confidence (to gratuitously torture a metaphor), and yesterday I finally managed to convince him that it was okay to go back to school, that his teachers don't hate him, and that as long as he tries his hardest, we're very proud of him, etcetera.

I rode in the back of the car with him all the way to school, talked him through the inevitable nervous stomachache, and watched my brave little boy confront his fear and enter the yawning maw of the dread portal of the kindergarten with head held high, walking as if a condemned man, to meet his executioner.

Later in the day, the school called us to say he was running a fever, so wife went and picked him up and brought him home.

This Will Be My Epitaph

"The day started out as uneventfully as any other, and continued thus to midday and from there it was nothing at all to ease into an evening of numbing, undiluted monotony that survived unmarred by even the least act of momentary peculiarity-in fact, let's skip that day altogether and start with the day after."

-- Jon Starr

Le Bilan

O, for the joys of higher education. Wife stopped by Son's school today to pick up The Report Card, and arrived home in tears after talking with the teachers, who feel he needs to be "evaluated" by an Ergotherapist.

Evaluated? (Visions of hot lights and uncomfortable probes danced in my head.) Ergotherapist? What the hell, they want to make him more ergonomic? Improve his posture? Does he have carpal tunnel syndrome or something?

I took a look at The Report Card, and obviously it was time for a Long Talk. I put on my Serious Face and called Son to the Big Bed. (You can tell I was serious by the copious use of capitalization.)

Gone are the days of grading by percentages, letters, numbers, shapes, happy faces, mysterious odors, or anything resembling your old school rating systems, though our particular school does provide a fairly simple "1 to 4" rating, except for the final grade, which is "Tuna to Chartreuse". So simple, even a parent can understand it.

1 is good, and 4 is bad.

I tried to explain to Son the difference between English, French and Greek, as The Report Card indicated he seems to get them mixed up.

"Think of all the words you know. There are a lot of them. They buzz around in your head like flies. Some of the flies are red, and those are the words you use with Mommy and Daddy. English. Some are Yellow, and those are the words you use with Mme Lianne. French. Some are Blue, and those are the words you use with Yaya. Greek."

Then we tried to think of some "Blue" words, and some "Yellow" words. In the end, I think I just confused him more. I've been a little leery of trying out metaphors on him ever since I explained to him that his conscience was a little voice in his head that always told him right from wrong, and that he should listen to his little voice.

And then he went around telling everyone he heard voices in his head, telling him to do things...

Another thing that caught my eye: Son has missed 13 days of school this semester. I often bust Wife's (figurative) balls about keeping him home from school on the slightest pretext, so it's nice to have actual, shocking statistics to back up my arguments. He missed fully 25% of his school days this semester. I cocked an eyebrow at Wife, but did not belabour the point. Discretion is the better part of continued survival, after all.

I don't think I missed 13 days of school between grades one and eleven.

Maybe it's time to think about outsourcing this parenting thing.

My own performance evaluation is coming up at work (or so they've been telling me for the last three months), and I do not anticipate superior results.

Imagine an architect. He's gone to school, got his Master's degree, apprenticed to all the greats in his field, built stunning edifices of surpassing elegance. Now the firm has been handed a contract to design and build the 2012 Olympic soccer stadium in London. This is his big chance. This is where he gets to make a name for himself.

"No," say the powers-that-be. "We will hire an overpaid, unskilled consultant for this job. Your responsibility will be to sharpen his pencils."

After a sufficient period of drunken mourning, the architect thinks "Oh well, at least I have all my other projects".

"Think again," say the powers. "This stadium project is too important. we want you to transfer all of your projects to other architects and focus one-hundred-percent on sharpening those pencils."

And every morning, the head of the firm says "These stadium plans are terrible! Make those pencils sharper, dammit!"

PerpetualStartup has some sort of scheme going on where you buy a Valentine's card for a co-worker, and the profits go to charity. I got one for ThinFast, Queen of HR, whose brainchild this is, because I think she needs cheering up.

ThinFast gave a seminar today on Leadership. This was similar to the "Situational Leadership" seminar of last year, and the "Leadership in Action" seminar. Since so much of the material had already been covered, this one only took three hours. I took copious notes, against the possibility that I might be given the opportunity to, you know, actually lead someone at some point.

So far, in my brief experience as manager, I've had my entire team laid off, my product line closed down, and new employees fired out from under me by Obelix. I used to be a software developer, then I was a manger, then I was a developer again. And now I sharpen pencils. Perhaps I may yet aspire to be a leader of pencil sharpeners, a fisher of men, with a destiny ouside the ken of mere mortals. But I doubt it. I'm thirty-five, and I sharpen pencils.

IronMan recently returned from a trip out west with a gift for me of a cubic metre of hot-smoked wild pacific sockeye salmon, hand-smoked by the official smokemeister of an indian reservation. Artisanal style. Delicious. Like a heavenly marriage of sushi and cigarettes. Two of my favorite things!

Welcome! To the World of TOMORROW!

In the lead-up to xmas, I could see the fever of avarice burning like a cinder behind my spawn's eyes, alongside the twin spark of Christmas Magic. On the one hand, this was a season of joy and love, and decorations, and angels, and Baby Jesus, etc. On the other hand, PRESENTS! I WANT MORE PRESENTS! WILL WE HAVE MORE PRESENTS TOMORROW DADDY? It was this promise of Christmas Magic, brought to you by the good people at Toys "r" Us, that put me in mind of all the promises-of-a-brighter-tomorrow that we've been fed over the years. Or maybe it was too much listening to Obama.

Retro-futurism has always sort of fascinated me. Well, to the extent that I pretend to be fascinated by any one thing, for purposes of blogging. It's 2009. We're living in the fucking future right now. So why is everyone still waiting for their flying cars? Their personal robot maids? Their jet-powered roller blades?

What nostalgia-for-futures-lost powers this endless undercurrent of proto-optimism? I can remember that beautiful hover-car like it was yesterday. Or tomorrow. Or something. The sleek lines, all that gleaming chrome. The promise of a brighter, antimatter-powered future. It seemed to stand in for all the things that I hoped and dreamed of for myself, my family, and humankind in general (as much as I loathe humankind).

I didn't really want to blog about this, but then there was that other blog post, and I can't go and delete it, because it's, you know... out there now, and that would be editorially inconsistent or something. So here, by way of retroactive cancellation of my previous crowing, is the anti-announcement: That whole pregnancy thing... didn't really work out.

And that's all I really want to say about that.

Hole in One!

Huh. Yeah, it's been a while, and it's likely to be another while, or maybe even two. So here's the bullet points - the highlights, if you will - of my Awesome Rise To Power (as foretold in revelations, movie rights optioned to Universal):

- Wife is pregnant. Which is AWESOME. Well, it's awesome for me, but she's going through hell. Hospitals and everything. So I guess it kind of blows. I'm conflicted.
- Yesterday was my 35th birthday, and it sucked. I worked an eighteen hour day and got no presents. Was supposed to do breakfast with The Boxer, but it didn't pan out due to unreasonable amounts of snow.
- Ironman moved to the West wing of PerpetualStartup, and now I work for Obelix. So far, so (mostly) good, but the workload is killing me.
- I haven't started my xmas shopping. And yes, I use "xmas" in the ironic sense, intended to piss off Christians (or "Xtians", as I like to refer to them). Spread the holiday cheer.

These are the dark times, the calm before the storm, the darkest before the dawn. I am become death, destroyer of morale, a horseman of the apocalypse.

But, like, on a bike. Horses are expensive, apparantly.

...but delicious.

Speaking of delicious, Ironman treated me to a birthday risotto at Bueno Notte this noon. Yum.

And that's the nutshell. I know I'm forgetting something (natch), but whatever. It can wait until next fiscal quarter, when the terms of my release dictate I must once again blog what passes for my thoughts, fodder for the brave brave souls of Homeland Security surveillance units everywhere.

The question for you to ponder over the course of these arctic frigid freezing windblown arid icy killing months of perpetual darkness: Zombies vs. Vampires. If a zombie bites a vampire, the vampire will turn into a Zombie Vampire. But if a vampire bites a zombie, the zombie will turn into a Vampire Zombie. In the end, no one wins, and everyone is twice as hungry as before. This is a maquette of the futility of war.

You're welcome.

And so, in the spirit of the holidays, I bid you a cheery Kwanza, and a happy new year. Wait... Is that mistletoe?




....hey, where are you going?

Maybe I Have, Like, A Problem?

Well, I went and did it. I bought another guitar. Am I addicted? Is it time for an intervention? What am I, crazy? Stupid?

Yeah, okay, I walked into that one.

Still, it’s a pretty sweet axe and all. No way will my loving wife, indulgent of my multitude of vicissitudes and eccentricities though she may be, allow me to ever buy a third one, surely? Only one way to find out, I guess...

FYI, For they initiated in the super-secret “we’re so cool” lingo of the guitar dork, and just because I want to crow, here’s what $500 gets you:

• Quilt-top PRS McCarty clone (very high quality. I actually played this one before I bought it).
• Seymour Duncan Pickups (SH-2n “Jazz” neck, SH-4 “JB” bridge)
• Sweet abalone vine inlays

Check out Raven West guitars. You’ll thank me later.

I Don't Mean Maybe

Well, it has finally come to pass, as foretold in Revelations. Ironman and Goldilocks have had IronBoy. No names or details on this blog, other than that it's a boy. Of course all of our love goes out to them, and I hope everything goes smoothly.

In case you missed it, The Directrix also popped one off a short while back, and she and her little family are doing well.

It really almost amounts to peer-pressure, doesn't it? All these babies?

Son starts "big boy school" (Kindergarten) on Monday. Big yellow bus and everything. I'm, like, all choked up about it. I may be too emotionally distraught to maintain my usual, clockwork-like blogging schedule. Try to contain yourselves.

Are You Sitting?

Big, big news. HUGE news! Son lost his second tooth this week, which officially makes him twice as grown-up as before (yikes!).

This change has been characterized recently by some frank and open discussion on beer, babies, and the causal relationship between the two, as well as several other thorny subjects from out the dark heart of that haunted, grown-up province.

Also, there is a tendency of late, rather than run around the house, or throw things, or scream, or bounce off the walls like a coke-addled RedBull connoisseur, to crawl into my lap, look soulfully into my eyes with his gigantic blue peepers and straight-out declaim: "Daddy, I want some attention."

If you've tuned into my previous rant on the topic of male/female communication, you know that the direct approach works best with me, and this is something that Son seems to have figured out on his own. Which also proves my point about men not being very complicated. I mean, if a five-year-old can figure me out...

Oh yeah, hey. Happy Father's Day, Dad!

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Since I'm always looking for more people to tell me what to do, how to act, and what to think, I was intrigued by this list of 1001 must-read fiction titles. And since anything that's vaguely interesting to me is bound to be earth-shatteringly life-altering for you, I share it with you now.

More lists:

- 100 essential Jazz albums

- The Thousand "best" films of all time (I will save you the cruel suspense: Ironman did not make the list)

- And, not quite a list, but a review of a list in book-form (can't wait for the audiobook!), Your Essential Reading List for Becoming a Literary Genius in 365 Days.

I love that last site, because a) it's called "Bookslut" (two of my favorite things!), and b) she mentions Neiszche, which as you well know is a primary symptom of pedantic nitwittery (see my previous posts).

Go forth and be enlightened, my delicious little monkey-lickers.

Hah! And I Bet You Thought I Was Some Sort of Fuckwit

Deliberate stupidity is something of a hobby of mine, or I like to pretend it is. When I can't honestly blame my behavior on public drunkenness, it sometimes serves my purposes to feed the furnace of your convictions, and buttress your appreciation of my nincompoopery.

Here then, for your edification and amusement, a rogue's gallery of false-false-meta-sub-meta-stupidity, a platter of crudités, typical of the type of primitive methods I employed in my youth, still in obvious high season out and about the interwebs, should one care to look.

Exhibit A: Spelling mistakes. This is really the low-hanging fruit of the blogging world. Spelling and grammar will evolve from toy to tool. Wield the awesome power of strategic misspelling, and an unplumbed depth of subtle double-entendre is yours for the taking. But true power lies in the dark side of grammar. Spelling is for n00bs. Grammar is for misanthropes. To boldly split infinitives, mis-structure sentences, abuse punctuation, dangle participles; all these are things you must be master of.

If reading that last sentence caused you physical pain, then you are almost pedantic enough for Exhibit B: "Bait and Switch" vocabulary. Start your post by rambling on (albeit from a creative and refreshing point of view) about Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (you can go with Kafka for a low-fat alternative), spout nonsensical philosopho-babble about the Apollonian and Dionysian blah-de-blah, then throw in one of the following:
- Some swearing ("Nietzsche was a dick-hole")
- Some misspelling (Nietzsche is a good one for this. With a minimum amount of effort you can misspell his name about fifty different ways).
- Some totally inappropriate pornography (and no, I will not link to the infamous boob post, so don't ask).
- Some self-deprecating false-modesty.
- stupid acronyms, like LOL, or STFU, or TL:DR.
- If you can't be bothered to be lazy, at least try to fake it convincingly. Links to Wikipedia are great for this.
- Some overuse of a current (or very recently post-current) internet meme. Good examples: lolcatz, 2Girls1Cup, "Somebody set up us the bomb", "series of tubes", "interwebs", etcetera. There really is an inexhaustible supply of stupidity out there for you to draw from.

So it would be useful to pretend that I'm blogging drunk right now, but that would be a lie, AFAIK, instead, I'm going to pretend that all these recent spelling errors and grammatical miscalculations and run-on sentences and the like are a deliberate fishing expedition. So far, no nibbles, but it's been good for crew morale.

Speaking of good for morale: I'm on vacation this week. Or more accurately, I'm on wife's idea of a vacation, which involves me repainting our home to more accurately reproduce the splendor of the Borgia papal apartments. Anyhoo, Ironman texted me while Wife and I were out today watching the actual Ironman movie (how... Ironic! LOL!). Something about how life at PerpetualStartup is a sunless, timeless void without my effervescent presence and the inextinguishable light that shines from my ass at all hours.

I responded hastily, not wishing to disturb the one other movie patron with the light of my cell phone: "remember that next time I do something stupid". Ironman made some sort of answer about his short attention span, and how he couldn't think that far ahead, which I took as a flattering comment on the rarity (and therefore presumed high market value) of examples of my incompetence. So that was nice.

But really, what do I know?

Tune in next time for more on the subtle art of being really unapologetically thick. Actually, screw that. I think I've provided you horrible paparazzi with enough ammunition for one sitting. This post alone is a fucking goldmine of self-referential silliness, which is really the ultimate form of anti-enlightenment.

Gaze into my navel!

I'm Not Telling You Anything You Don't Already Know. I Know.

Isabella Rossellini is endowed with a universal hotness that transcends age, gender, or sexual orientation. Which is how I know that you, perverted little monkey that you are, will be excited to discover her recent forays into insectophile pornography. Titled "Green Porno", it's apparently a commentary on something or other. You know, the beauty of nature, purity of the insect's libidinous urges (carnivorous mantis-booty is a particularly vivid example), etcetera. Whatever. This may be the only chance you have to witness this Italian goddess starring in insect pr0n.

Go. Go now.

[Edit] Oh yeah, and she aways plays the male insect, which is totally a metaphor or something. Very profound.

Oh Yeah, I Forgot

Really interesting article on memory training and the human brain over on Wired. My favorite quote:

We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

..."Swim in the epicene"? Awesome.

The Time For Questions Is Over. Now Is The Time For Unbridled Optimism

Son (aged 4) lost his first tooth yesterday (I'm so proud)! So last night we sent the tooth fairy an email together, and wrote a little note and stuck it to his door.

And in the morning was a shiny new dollar, and a thank-you letter from the tooth fairy, extolling the virtues of flossing, and encouraging continued good will toward members of the professional order of dental hygienists.

But what stuck with me after that was how we (Son and I) had started the day talking about how he's a "Big Boy" now, and the tooth fairy was going to bring him a dollar for his tooth, to celebrate, and somehow this devolved into a discussion about How Can We Extort More Money From The Tooth Fairy? Son wanted a minimum of fifteen dollars, and a toy to be named later. I tried to explain to him that baby teeth were a commoditized good, that it was a buyer's market at the moment, and that enamel futures were rated "underperform". My protestations fell on deaf ears, as they always do, and we lay down for bed-time with visions of avarice dancing in his big blue eyes.

To distract him from his inevitable disappointment (The tooth fairy has bills to pay, after all), we spoke instead of What Does The Tooth Fairy Want With All These Teeth, Anyway? Son and I came up with the following:

- Use them to build a house (a gruesome image of a castle made from drawn teeth briefly assailed me, but I pressed on)
- She grinds them up and uses them to fertilize her garden (or the Amazon Rain Forest)
- She grinds them up to make snow.
- She puts them in a machine (the purpose of this diabolical engine is, as yet, unknown)
- She eats them. ("She eats teeth?" I asked. "Yes, they're good for your bones!" explained Son. This is logic I cannot refute).
- She makes affordable and unique costume jewelery, which she sells on a blanket at the park on Sundays.
- She plays dice with them.
- She is building a Doomsday device, powered by teeth.

Wife chimed in with:
- She plants them in new babies' mouths, to make new teeth. It's like recycling!

Here we face the thrilling diversity of human experience. It's obvious that Wife and I have a very different thought process (hers tends more toward the sunny, happy, "Whole Foods" approach, mine is a little more macabre). I wonder which path the boy will choose?

We are abjured, nay, forbidden to refer to him as "my baby", "my little boy", or any such term of endearment containing the words "little" or "small". Having lost his first tooth, he is now officially a "Big Boy", so of course he wants beer. To be clear, I rarely, if ever, have beer in the house. It's just a habit I never got into, so I'm not sure how he made up his mind that beer = grown-up, but there it is.

Other Cute Things The Boy Has Done Recently:

- The other day we were wrestling, and he wanted to eat a cookie. "You can eat a cookie if you can get out from under me," I said, pinning him for a three-count. He squirmed and kicked, and rather than fight me off with brute force, somehow squicked out the side and slipped out from under me all sneaky-like. "You're Sneaky!" I exclaimed. He giggled and struck a kung-fu pose: "Sneaky like a NINJA!".

- Wife came back from grocery chopping with a pair of sunglasses for the Boy, as well as two dollar-store water pistols. First he grabs the pistols and yells "FREEZE, Sucka!", then puts on the sunglasses, snaps his fingers and points at us: "looking good, ladies."

Short Round

Here's another nibble: Pulp Fiction, as written by William Shakespeare.

OhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGod

Stephen Fry has a freakin' BLOG.

Schrodinger's Blog

The annoying thing about a personal blog... okay, let me start over.

One of the many irritations about a personal blog is that you don't really know who you're writing for (besides yourself, I mean). I can't start writing like everyone on the internet's going to read this crap. Nor can I assume that no one will read it. It is weirdly, simultaneously private and public, riding a strange uncollapsible waveform of awesome philosophy (philawesomey?)

Here are a couple of things, to help you whittle away the time in whichever eigenstate you will eventually observe.

The Page 69 Test: So it may be true that you can't judge a book by it's cover, but I have recently been of the opinion that neither can you judge one by its contents. Marshall McLuhan suggested that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read the entire book. The Page 69 Test blog is evaluating McLuhan's suggestion book by book.

Here's one for the cat people (turn your speakers up).

Dorkiest pickup line (feel free to use): "CERN's gonna turn on the Large Hadron Collider soon, and this whole planet's going poof. This could be our last night together."

That's it. That's all I got. Actually, there is so much more, but it is all either very private, or else very public, and thus not suitable for print.

Samsara, Interrupted

The other day I was hanging out in front of PerpetualStartup with a couple of schmucks from work, and a homeless guy wanders by, asking for change. Now I'm as conservative and intolerant as the next guy. I largely see the homeless as a longish-term solution to the problem of dwindling food supply, à la Soylent Green, but I gave this guy a couple bucks. "For food", he said. Whatever. My compatriots mumbled their excuses, and Homeless Guy #1 wandered off.

"Why'd you do that?" asked Knuckles, unimpressed. I explained the concept of Karma, that I mostly donate to the occasional mendicant bard in order to continue being a dick to co-workers like him, and that next time I'd have to consider giving a twenty.

We turned our attention to other things, and after about two minutes another homeless guy wandered by with a Tim Horton's cup, asking for change. This time I (legitimately, I thought) explained that no, I didn't have any change, sorry.

Lipstick (helpfully), to Homeless Guy #2: "He gave all his change to the other guy that was just here!"

I guess with karma, as with all things, "Easy Come, Easy Go".

This is probably a lesson that Homeless Guys One and Two have already learned.

Years from now, when you trip over my unemployed, drunken, prostrate form in some dark corner on the street near where you work, and I hit you up for some change, remember karma.

Color Me Unorthodox

Well it's Good Friday, and you know what that means. This is the happy time of year when zombie Jebus rises from the grave and rides o'er the land on his fanged, winged, slavering Dark Mount, the Easter Bunny, and delivers chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps (a traditional Etruscan delicacy) to all the good Christian boys and girls. Then a month from now he'll do it all again, only this time in a funny hat, for the Orthodox Christians.

For Jews, today is Purim, sort of a cross between Mardi Gras (without the beads and public nudity), and Halloween (without the obvious satanic overtones). I'm not completely versed in the storied legacy of Purim, but I'm sure it has something to do with oppressed Jews overcoming tremendous odds, probably against a cruel (or incompetent) despot. I'm told that, in the grand narrative of the Jewish people's journey, it's something of a recurring theme.

A friend of mine at work has a four-year-old son who's dressing up for Purim as Indiana Jones, crusader for the preservation of Old Testament artifacts, and professional Nazi killer. I've never met this kid, but I know he rocks the clocks.

I guess my point is that we all do silly things in the name of the Invisible Sky Wizard, but what other religious holiday can you think of where drunkenness is required? Catholics may get chocolate bunnies, but Jews get liquor. That's just plain awesome.

Sláinte!

Stereotype me, I'm Irish!

Your Leprechaun Name Is:

Fluffy Potfiller

What's Your Leprechaun Name?