Melvin keeps inadvertently picking fights with Nancy by saying "I'm thequeen!" while they're playing. She instantly snaps—No, I'M the queen! You're the king!—because she does not understand that he's saying he's Lightning McQueen from Cars. For some reason I cannot explain this to either one of them

The crazy thing about the John Cheever bio is that Cheever is one of the great American drunks and his father and brother (both named Fred) were at least a full step drunker than he was. Read the Shady Hill stories though

Those are two very different comics strips so there are going to be very different answers

They're just giving EVs the normal names now... we did it

Subreddit eclipse

As a Darnold fan who went to a nondenominational grade school in the mid 90s this graphic is huge for me

Weezer absolutely crushed it at the Prohibition Party's Super Bowl Halftime Show, wish you guys could have seen it but everybody thought everybody else was going to bring the camera

I am nearly 50 years old. If anything in popular culture has the barest whiff of familiarity to me, I am hyper-aware that I am being directly targeted by a marketing strategy

Rereading the John Cheever biography. My review is "Man, moth... you're troubled."

Listening to the rest of Keiichi Suzuki's MOTHER MUSIC REVISITED album from 2021 today (I'd mostly only heard Flying Man before this). The little "I miss you" sample in Fallin' Love... nice

I've been told that I do not have to hand it to the Church of Scientology, but they had somebody doing strong magazine ad work in the late 80s

It's my pleasure to announce, after a few years' consideration, that "Come Dancing" by the Kinks has received the coveted Perfect Song/Perfect Video award from copywriter and longtime music listener Dan Moore. Ray Davies can come pick the award up from my desk at his earliest convenience

Celtics bringing in Nikola Vucevic to mentor Luka Garza... that's how you build long-term success

Insupportable is an amazing word choice

The only limit on the number of videos about "Peg" by Steely Dan that I'm capable of watching at 10:30 on a Saturday night is the number of times the various players have been interviews about it

Thackeray illustrating Pickwick... kind of a fun hypothetical but he and Dickens absolutely would have come to blows before it ended

I don't think I'm ready to try Vollman but this is a high-level cover for a debut by a weird novelist... like, the stranger your book is, the harder it should be to determine the year it was published, what it's about, etc. Ideally you dump "A novel by" too... go fully inscrutable

Related to this, I've been thinking about the category of "Tech that is real but exists almost exclusively in glossy children's books." What am I missing? 1. Astronaut jetpack used three times ~40 years ago 2. Monorails (also represented here) 3. Hovercrafts 4. Hydrofoil boats

Nancy's homework has writing in it now so I finally got to put the children's dictionary I bought years ago into play. Love that it has the astronaut MMU photo that universally denotes 80s/90s educational content, just like my childhood encyclopedia did

Yes!!

This guy's book kind of changed my life last year... did not know what he looked like but frankly I'm glad it's this. I'm like the guys in midcentury novels who traveled east to learn from Buddhist monks in the Himalayas, only the wisdom of the ancients is unfashionable baby-boomer self-help stuff

"IF THE THREE STOOGES WERE STILL ALIVE TODAY"

It's a Dynamite Coolguy day for me

Not sure where Melvin picked this up but this morning he kept calling his daycare friends, who are the same size as him, "my little friends."

I've done a lot to fix my mood and productivity in the last 5-6 months, which has been great except that I keep running into parts of my life and my surroundings that the previous version of me ignored. I'm going to be scraping our backyard griddle for the rest of my life

Emma is the toughest Austen reread because the first third's just a gentle but inexorable breeze blowing you to a big awkward scene Emma creates for no reason... this would be a better post if I didn't have scruples about spoiling a 200-year-old book, but I'm not going to get in Jane Austen's way

FYI: The Wikipedia page for ska has the names of various late-80s third wave bands from around the world on it. If you were in America in the late 90s, you need to know that wide vistas of novelly accented ska tracks are now open to you

NES: Mega Man let's say 3 Game Boy: Metroid II SNES: You know the one Virtual Boy: Red Alarm N64: Mario 64 Gamecube: MVP Baseball 2005 Wii: Acknowledging every Smash game here Wii U: Love those NES Remix games Switch: Breath of the Wild

There's an Asian market here that mostly sells food but also has appliance and tchotchke inventory that I think predates my moving here, and you don't know how badly I want to have a use for this National-branded electric fish roaster

Been working on improving my handwriting as a mini resolution for the new year. I've been really surprised at how much of a difference just trying to stay on the line makes, which is a lesson I learned from Nancy's homework. We're both learning to write legibly at the same time

Google hitting me with a variety of Dog Bites Man news in my notifications this morning

For pricing and packaging reasons the Sony Car is one of the most obvious bombs in the history of cars but I can't wait to buy a used one for $8,000 in ~2034

Somebody in our pickleball group had her parents in town tonight. Her dad borrowed a paddle and stood up there in jeans and a plaid button-down and proceeded to hit the 10 most beautiful backhands I have ever seen. Did not play tennis, had never seen pickleball. Bewildering. Instructional video form

"I would never walk up to people looking strange and mysterious." - Nancy discussing strangers (unprompted)

We're back

A John Updike story set in a grocery store... good luck man, they barely even sell them at book stores anymore

At a birthday party with Nancy and was shocked like a wrestling heel who thought The Undertaker was dead when the big present was revealed to be a Furby

Had to pass on these stools at the estate sale shop because they were part of a set with a table, but I did not do so without regret

Looking like he's about to get up to some Clifford (1994) stuff

Just realized we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the miraculous appearance of the Third Great Weezer Album

When the Faith No More guy says "What is it?" in response to the guys chanting "It's it!"... one of the great uses of a funny voice in popular music

Been reading some washing-machine-collector forum threads again, which led me to this nice, extremely 2000 ad for a famous (among washing machine guys) Noble Failure www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWpO...

Kotatsu activated

As a parent, I prefer to call it Balloon Cooperating

Free billion-dollar idea for GM: Get some cool decals printed up and rebadge this as the Oldsmobile Silhouette EV

Nancy and Lindsay bond over their shared love of arts and crafts, Japanese, etc, while Nancy and I have always bonded over our shared loves of walking around aimlessly and Chipotle, which we can combine now that it's over by our house

Listening to First Impressions of Earth again. It's way too long but I love it... an album about being so sad that you have to get unbelievably good at the guitar

Melvin kept asking to hear "Nannyko" yesterday when I got him from daycare and it took me a couple of minutes to realize he was saying "Let It Go." Incredible amount of staying power on that song... the original Nannyko requesters are now 15 years old

Totoro is a magic trick, because it has a plot that you could break out into little story beats like in a normal movie but it never feels that way while you're watching it. It's extra fun for us now because Nancy's been watching it long enough to have seen herself in both sisters

Don’t really care where they’re from, as long as they’re safe for the baby