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What Did Caveboys Do?

Malcolm is playing with his friend Jack.  They are playing some sort of good guy/bad guy, with me alternating between bad guy and badder guy.  They each have a arsenal of weapons, ranging from double light sabers to machine guns to the ubiquitous, "I have all the powers."  I have it on good authority that Malcolm has never seen a machine gun, yet he knows how to hold it and what it sounds like.  He has never seen Star Wars, yet his light saber of fast and strong, and he makes the wam wam sound that appears in the movie. 

Certainly, Jack has helped Malcolm along in his weapon education, but Malcolm has been all to receptive.  I fully believe that love of guns is hardwired into a boy's brain.  This is based on my empirical study that A) all boys pick up inanimate objects and use them as weapons, and B) girls do not.  Don't get me wrong, some boys move past this and start reading books (I never did) and some girls learn to kick a little ass. At this point in their development though, boys love weapons.  Give a boy a stick, and he will show you the myriad of ways he can use it to remove your brain from your skull.

I wonder what little cave boys did to entertain themselves.  Sure they had sticks, but what did they pretend the sticks were when they were bludgeoning their friends?  Is it possible that kids have been using light sabers for the entire history of humanity, and George Lucas just ripped off the idea from all us mean boys?  Or, did kids pretend that little sticks were actually really big sticks?  Did cave boys not need imaginations because they were actually killing animals with sticks?    I have the feeling that if Malcolm actually killed an animal with one of his weapons, he would go crying to his room and never come out.  Luckily we will never find out.

Malcolm's Bath

I am not one for bathing.  When I shower (once a week, whether I need it or not!) I quickly identify all areas that have been soiled and quickly give them a how do you do.  It usually takes 5 minutes, and I am ready to go.  I rarely, if ever, have time to use my imagination in the tub, and when I do, it usually revolves around having my twig and berries cleaned by supermodels.

Malcolm, on the other hand, exhausts his imaginative capabilities while in the tub.  His baths are usually an hour long and are totally devoid of any scrubbing at all.  He has a whole repertoire, and will absolutely not get out of the tub until he is completely done going through his various tasks.

The first thing that he likes to do is play with his sea animals.  Somewhere along the way, he got a whole bunch of ocean dwelling foam animals that stick to the side of the tub.  They have no discernible names, Malcolm has opted to refer each of them by their scientific classification.  By far, his favorite is shark, who ruthlessly attacks the other animals and, when not actually consuming them, requires that they perform menial tasks.  Once, shark made octopus drive him all around town and then cook him dinner.  Little did octopus know that once dinner was finished, shark ate four of octopus's legs. Shark is kind of a prick, he chases around jellyfish, screams at whale, and has eaten lobster more times than I can count.  Shark is a lot like Gordon Ramsey.  Or Hillary Clinton.

After Shark is done, Malcolm starts with the Pirates.  He has a Backyardigans pirate ship and the ship sails around the tub obeying all traffic laws.  They don't actually do much pirating, as they spend a lot of their time running away from shark.  Whenever they get too scared, they go below deck to hide.  Occasionally, the pirates leave the ship to do some exploring, but these escapades usually end up with someone crying.  Personally, I think the pirates are a bunch of candy asses. 

At some point, Malcolm must concur with my assessment, because he opens up his lemonade stand.  He has a variety of small bottles lying around the tub, and he dutifully fills them up from the tap and then tries to sell me lemonade.  Most of the time, the lemonade is sweet and good, and we enjoy bottle after bottle of lemony goodness.  Once in a while, though, Malcolm slips me a mickey in the form of a glass of sour lemonade.  I contort my face to reveal my displeasure and he howls in delight at having pulled one over on me. 

Once he wraps up the lemonade stand he lies face down in the water and begins to swim.  I am not sure if he actually thinks he is swimming, or if he just likes the way his junk feels when it is trapped against the bottom of the tub.  This is a potentially devastating effect, because he splashes around so much that he will soak the entire room.  Invariably, he uses this opportunity to start eating the bubbles that are left in the tub.  For a while eating bubbles is fun because I tell him not to do it.  Then, the bubbles make their way down his throat, and he begins to hack and gag.  It is at this point, and only this point, that he will agree to get it out of the tub.  His fingers are pruney, his sea friends are dismembered, and his pirates' egos are shot.  It is finally time to get out.  Sometimes, it is a struggle to get him into the bathtub.  Even when we have physically drag him in there, he won't get out until all the different angles are explored.  I guess it beats daydreaming about supermodels.

Props to the Pig

There is a lot going around about swine flu right now.  In fact, I thought Malcolm had it last night.  He had a high temperature, oinked when he sneezed and was wee wee weeing all around the house.  Classic symptoms.  When he woke up, they were gone.  Close call!

I took the opportunity to think about pigs and realized they they are easily my favorite animal, to eat!  While most people are out there trying to protect themselves from swine flu, I got me a bad case of swine lust.  What an animal!  You can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner.  You can eat it for fine dining or at a taco truck.  It comes in many different flavors, colors and textures.  Try as you might, you will not be able to come up with one organism that provides so many different amazing things to eat. Take that you stupid old cow!

One of the crazy awesomest things that the pig has given us is pulled pork.  It is pretty easy to make, so I thought I'd share the recipe.  This is a simple version.  I have a more complicated version which involves brining the meat and sleeping with your neighbor, but I'll leave that for another time.

1. Buy a 5-7 pound pork shoulder from the store.  Ironically, this means you will be looking for what they call pork butt, even though it is from the shoulder, not the butt.  Why is it called the butt?  American's love butts!  Can you imagine Sir Mix Alot singing, "I like big shoulders?"  I can't.  If you can, buy pork raised humanely.  Being a pig sucks at the end, when the pig is slaughtered to become out food.  The least we can do is let the pigs have a little fun before becoming our breakfast.  I trust Niman Ranch, although I can't always find it.

2. Take the meat out of the refrigerator an hour before beginning to cook it.  Put a rub on it.  I use a couple of tablespoons of paprika, chili powder and onion powder, with a hefty dose of salt thrown in there for good measure. Rub it all around the outside of the pork until it has a nice coating over it.  Then wash your hands, you have the residue from rubbing spices into a butt on your hands!

3.  Cook in an oven at 175 degrees for around 5-6 hours.  It is done if you stick a fork in it, pull it away, and a chunk of pork comes with it.  It is not done if if you stick a fork in it, and it squeals loudly.  Take the pork out of the oven and let it rest for an hour.  You can pull it apart without waiting, but the juice that squirts out of the roast will burn you and set fire to the kitchen.  While the pork is resting, play some nice mellow music for it, maybe Jack Johnson and try your hardest not to pick at it.  You entire house will smell like pork deliciousness, so leaving it alone will be tough.

4.  Put the pork on a cutting board and pull it apart with 2 large forks.  Small forks will cause your hands to cramp, so the larger the fork the better. I rip off a big chunk from the main carcass and then pull it apart until the meat is in long, thin chunks.  Toss with liberal amounts of barbecue sauce.  This expression is why I am a liberal.  Being conservative with anything, especially barbecue sauce, is just plain wrong.  Put it in a sandwich and you are set.   It will change your life.  When done, it should look like this:

If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them

I love fantasy football.  I love fantasy football more than I love my cat.  If fantasy football asked me to the prom, I would say yes, even if I were a senior and it were a freshman.  Sometimes, when I am with fantasy football late at night, I make eyes at its naughty parts.  I have a problem.

Our marriage used to be strained by fantasy football (not because of the naughty parts though!).  I spend Sundays at a sports pub watching all the games.  I obsess about trade proposals.  I lose sleep.  Amy, at first thought all this was funny.  When she realized that it happens every week of the football season, she got concerned.  She never got hostile, but occasionally she would make her true feelings known, feelings that I didn't necessarily find flattering.  (I do not, under any circumstances, like being called a loser!)  After some time, she started to root against me, hoping that an early elimination would return me to my normal self. Sadly, I am usually not eliminated until quite late in the season, meaning I am a sick little man from September to December.

When I sensed her uneasiness, I tried to incorporate her on my team to A) make her feel like my team was our team, and B) stop rooting against me.  I would consult her on trades and ask for her suggestions on which players to use.  She gave me feedback and we became somewhat of a team.  The problem was that the advice she gave me was absurd, and I would never follow it.  Even so, she didn't really vest as a true partner and she kept calling it "my losing team," not "our losing team."   She still rooted against me too.

This year was different though.  She has her own fantasy football team!  She manages it every week, talks trash to the other gals in the league, and has to make the same tough decisions that I have had for the past few years.  The kicker is that she actually enjoys it.  She doesn't really put in the same amount of time (or tears) that I do, but I don't care.  I don't know if either of us will win our respective championships, but at least this way we can enjoy an obsession together.  The significance really hit me last night, when we settled down after dinner and watched the Sunday night game.  We were both rooting against the Pittsburgh defense, and I fell in love with my wife all over again. I may have even checked out her naughty parts, but she didn't notice because she was enjoying a Ben Roethlisberger sack. Yay!

How Do You Take Care of Someone Else's Kid?

Our neighbor kid has no one else to play with, so he has been coming over to our house this week in the afternoons. I like the arrangement, because the boys occupy themselves and it frees me up to get stuff done.  However, since his daddy (also a stay at home dad) remains home with the other child, I supervise the boys by myself.  (When I say supervise, I mean that in the sense that I situate myself somewhere in the house so that I can hear the cries when one of them brutalizes the other.)  It does bring up an issue though, and that is what the heck do you do with someone else's kid?

I know every bullet in Malcolm's arsenal. I know the look in his eye when he is about to do something drastic.  I know how he is going to react to various things when he is a) cranky, b) hungry and c) both.  Our neighbor kid? I know nothing.  He is like a little llama, I haven't the faintest idea of what makes him tick. He chastises Malcolm for mistakes that Malkie made hours before.  He alternates between being irritated by and obsessed with what Malcolm is doing. He says that our apple juice tastes like it has tomatoes in it.  I have no idea how to arbitrate disputes between the two, as I don't really understand what their arguments are about. I feel kinda useless.

For now, I treat Jack like he is a Japanese tourist who understands little english.  I speak V-E-R-Y L-O-U-D-L-Y and V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y to him and mutter things under my breath when he turns away.  I make up arbitrary rules and roll my eyes constantly.  I say things like, "well that may be the custom in your country, but we do things differently here."  I figure that at some point I will learn how to tame the llama, but for now, I struggle with my Japanese. 

P.S. I believe that this was the first time in the history of the English language that the last sentence has been uttered before.  Talk about originality!

Book Review: I Like Me! by Nancy Carlson

I hate this book.  It is about a pig that has no friends, save the grey cat that follows her everywhere.  While all the other kids are out playing, the pig paints pictures of cats, eats cookies in bed, and has sad tea parties with her cat and some stuffed animals.  Then, the pig dances around in her underwear and makes a couple of cakes.  Picture after picture, the book shows the pig enjoying things alone, and, in one sad depiction, the pig falls down while roller skating and all the other animals laugh at it.

Are you freaking kidding me? This book teaches kids to grow up and be crazy old cat ladies! I wholeheartedly support a book that teaches kids to be comfortable with who they are.  It should not, however, teach kids to be sugar addicted hermits.  What's wrong with having a few friends in there?  If you ask me, if you have a grand total of zero friends (cats never, ever count) you should take a long hard look at yourself, not pat yourself on the back.  I don't know the correct way to get kids to be comfortable with who they are, but neither does this author.

I am also a little uncomfortable with the pig eating so many sweets.  Isn't it a little stereotypical?  What do you call it when someone goes to town on cookies in bed or scarfs down an entire cake? Pigging out! Jeez, why not have the loser be a dog, or better yet, a miserable fucking cat.  (I am still a bit irritated at the neighbor cats for shitting all over our yard, can you tell?) Hey, sweets have a fine place in this world, but you shouldn't tell kids that they are for making yourself feel good that nobody else likes  you.  Go make a friend and enjoy a ice cream sundae with them.  If you read this book to your kid, you are asking for trouble.  I am hiding it from Malcolm.

Grade: D- (no guns, no sex, no drugs, so it had something going for it.)