Nancy has a playdate coming up with a friend from the art camp she went to the first week after school ended, and she is extremely excited about it, but she keeps having to ask me what her friend's name is. She can remember a bunch of oddly concrete details about her but the name is a mystery

"Big orange firetruck that goes all the way to the moon" by Melvin

Good example of my hobbyhorse re: how hard it now is for new cars to compete in this part of the market. It's got 60 miles of range, a max speed of 31 mph, and no airbags. Cute, and I love NEVs, but it would be very hard to choose one over a $9000 used car

Headline and subhed weirdly like a description on a hurt/comfort fanfic. Please read and review

I feel for Bears fans but I do kind of love suburbs across the state border from their cities. Great category of place

The main entrance to Nancy's school summer camp looks like a puzzle in a game from 2012

This is the only day of the year you're allowed to listen to June One, a very strong album from a member of Five Iron Frenzy made in the golden two-year period where guys would talk about how influenced by Weezer they were because Weezer had made two albums and vanished

Saw a shopping cart turned over on its back at the grocery store from about 20 feet away... extremely unfamiliar object

To answer this question I feel like I need a song with high levels of both "I think this is an amazing achievement" and "I want to listen to it pretty often," which lands me on Wouldn't It Be Nice

Nancy gets to play ten minutes of Smash Bros (against a lvl 2 CPU) before bed while I do the dishes. I asked her how her last fight went and she said "I won, I was Kirby and I beat the Duck who owns me." New Kirby lore

Cognitive Distortions 1. All-or-Nothing Thinking: It's not true that the only kind of Jest is the Infinite kind 2. Disqualifying the Positive: I can't ignore every time the Jest has been finite in the past 3. Mental Filtering: I shouldn't discount all the possible benefits of an Infinite Jest

I've listened to enough new jack swing in the last two weeks that I'm thinking about CD longboxes again. Evocative genre

Every time I see a newborn in the wild I find it difficult to believe I ever had one. What a ridiculous size those feet are. Completely unfit for purpose

One of the big "Japanese culture" touchstones when I was growing up was the movie Shall We Dance?, which I have never seen. Not one you hear about a lot now, but a structural component of late-90s "Japan Corner" sections in videogame magazines. Don't worry, I have no further point to make about this

Kindergarten Safety Award Winner

Got a dollar coin out of the vending machine at work... nice. I would lose out some if they ever kill rewards cards by cutting transaction fees, but I would make some of that up via the simple joy of using weird denominations on a regular basis. I'd be awash in dollar coins and two-dollar bills

I've been put into the position of defending cash for clunkers on Twitter, which is very silly because I both think it was bad policy and own a 1992 Buick Roadmaster, which makes me one of the few people actually hurt by it, because replacements for all the trim pieces are now impossible to find.

A 1997 Ford Taurus somehow ended up at a used car dealership called "Private Collection" that takes beautiful photos... thank you fellas, this is the treatment it deserves. Unfortunately I can only buy a 1996 because they decontented the 97 but I will treasure the photos

Lee Iacocca ebike?? You have my attention, marketplace seller

One of my favorite 80s music video effects is when a video plays inside a thing that's not a video. Key part of the CD-ROM look too. Immense power is just barely contained within this frame I pulled

Finally got the kids all the way into The Music Man. Huge

Nancy, who likes being newly big and helpful: Look, we're holding hands small, medium, and then big! Melvin, who likes dinosaurs and does not know what medium is: Meteors is BIG

When you tell your son about the trampoline area and all you get back is that Paw Patrol stare

Lindsay has me digging into "Rhythm Nation 1814" so I'm stuck making this Larry-King-notes-column-type observation: Janet Jackson's hits are SORELY understreamed on Spotify. All For You at half the streams of You Rock My World... this is not an accurate picture of the year 2001

On this Mother's Day, which appears to be the official Mother's Day of red light therapy masks, I would like to commemorate the unnamed and unremembered men who spent decades in silence beta-testing LLLT and RLT in an attempt to regrow their hair. Your forum posts known only to God

"Cowboys"

Gas prices are getting to where it might actually make financial sense to me to lease a VinFast... I'm glad I don't drink. Impossible to tell what might happen now if my inhibitions were lower

Obviously I don't want the hantavirus to spread, and I don't think it will. But I do want to participate in another vaccine trial. Silver linings

I don't really have a ton of Star Fox thoughts at this point but it's crazy that Star Fox 64 has cast this kind of shadow considering how people felt about it when it came out. Lots of complaints about how short it was on the grade school playground

I'm a big fan of "Paper Doll" by P.M. Dawn because the video looks exactly like one they'd put into a 90s comedy to demonstrate that a character who's become famous is now completely out of touch, but then when you hear the song it becomes clear it's the only video you could make for it

Activated Prop Cycle's alternate mode, J-Pop Video AirPlay Location

If we each alphabetized just a few books or DVDs at Savers the whole world would be different

Nancy made a late audible from watching Singin' in the Rain to Wizard of Oz and Melvin went from repeatedly singing "Singin' in the Rain! Singin' in the Rain!" to singing "Wizard of Oz" to the tune of Singin' in the Rain. Natural Weird Al instincts

Trying to figure out what's wrong with Nancy's little TV. Lots of videos on YouTube of people easily removing the VCR from their 90s combo unit for service but by 2003 they had successfully miniaturized everything until they could really jam it in there... no idea how this thing comes out

Tonight my children learned to roller-skate (kind of) on the stretch of carpet parallel with the rink... a tradition like no other

“in time of desolation, never make a change” i tell myself as i decide not to try the ‘big arch’ at mcdonald’s.

Mario Galaxy review: Characters are constantly landing after a big jump and then looking at each other for an instant. Within the framework of Mario 64 they would have to pound the ground every time for that kind of control

"Every Heartbeat" in the Walmart playlist this time of night is a gift to me in particular and it would be in the nature of a snub for me not to strut a little in the aisles while it's on

I had a very frustrating morning—flat tire with a bunch of annoying extra steps—and kind of had my heart set on being a baby about it all day. But then I got to our weekly social media meeting and everyone had coordinated to dress up like me, so I had to be in a good mood instead. Incredible honor

One kid gave Melvin a hug on the way out of daycare, and then another kid did, and then they were all giving him a hug and one of them said "I'll miss you!" He's going to be back tomorrow, they just got caught up in the moment

Hit the best pickleball shot of my life tonight. Now it's just about declining gracefully from that point for the next 25 years

One thing LLMs do have in common with other public sources of knowledge is that Google's AI search suggestions are all "Map out my first marathon" or "How do I become an Astronaut who's also President?" but people are more likely to look for "Show me a hot person who's also super into me"

Occasionally I'll get on a run where two or three books that I search for in a row are available as library ebooks and I'll feel like I'm invincible. It's as close as I can get to being on fire in the NBA Jam sense

Obscure little Mexican Grill Nancy and I know. She's showed me her makeup, described every classmate whose name she can remember, and asked me which state is my least favorite

One of my favorite things when we're in Japan is when Lindsay hears a J-pop song that she had burned onto a CD in 2001 and I get a tiny window onto her life as a 16-year-old desperate to live there. We heard this one while getting ramen and it instantly set off her alarm... great stuff

Had to take drop Nancy off at the cafeteria because she had an early appointment. I love the way six-year-olds will add any adult to their existing conversations—her classmates had a remarkable amount of information to impart to me about water bottles, recess, etc in the five minutes I was there

Just picked up a copy of Blazers' travel itinerary back to Portland. Should be there in plenty of time for Friday night's Game 3.

Had never seen a Trip Shakespeare video before now... the 1990 requirement of having guys singing into a microphone together at hair-metal camera angles fits into their weird Edwardian-poets-at-a-state-college deal surprisingly well

I bought a big floppy hat this morning, because today was my day to go up on the roof and bring the swamp cooler online, and the kids absolutely hate it. Getting bullied in my own home when all I want is to bring cool, humid air to their desert lives without getting a huge sunburn

"The dog doesn't like my toy. But that's okay. Dogs can have their own opinions." - Nancy