Friday, August 15, 2008

Has anyone ever stopped to consider that I might be pro-Oxidant?

As science gets less scientific, food gets moreso. Why? Why does food have to be so... enhanced? And not good enhancements, either.

Sweetie and I went grocery shopping last night. On a week like this, that qualified as a high point for us. Sweetie's had an especially rough week of it, beginning with Mr F trying to get out of going for his nap by head-butting her so hard that she almost had to go for stitches. She called me at work to tell me about it, and this is what I heard:

"I may neev to vo vor svives."

She turned out to be okay, and didn't need to go to the emervenvy room. Having to onlyput ife on her lif was probably the high point of her day, given how the week went. The news was so bad this week that at one point I told Sweetie, quite seriously, that I might have to stop calling home from "work", and then told her, too, also seriously, that I was going to have to have her stop calling me.

I wasn't going to stop the calls because I was "busy." Reading Wonderella, blogging, and googling "Paul Is Dead" to see why everyone thought Paul was dead doesn't exactly qualify as busy in anyone's book, and is yet another example of why I never, ever, complain about having a hard day at "work." The worst day I've had at "work" this year was the day the Internet went down, and it was the worst day I've had because I had nothing to do but actual "work." I've never gotten so much work done in one day. I was miserable.

It wasn't business; the reason I was going to stop taking phone calls from Sweetie and stop making phone calls to Sweetie was a lot simpler: I couldn't take the bad news anymore.

It wasn't Sweetie's fault, and we kept the phone calls up because I'd have had to hear all the money we needed to spend and all the other bad news at some point, so it might as well be at "work," where I'm not doing anything important anyway. And to be fair, it wasn't just this week and it didn't start with Sweetie. The bad news actually started last Sunday, when The Boy and I "fixed" the garage door -- fixed it to the point where it no longer did anything.

I blame The Boy, which is what I'd do anyway, but in this case it kind of almost is actually his fault, so blaming him is almost kind of sort of fair.

The Boy and I fixed the garage door because it had been acting up a little, stalling sometimes and not opening or closing right all the time. So Sunday, two weeks ago, I'd been doing some work in the yard, and The Boy, for some reason, had come outside -- a rare occurrence in itself, since so far as I knew the TV was still working and there were still at least sixteen different ESPN channels available on the TV, and those two things usually meant that The Boy wouldn't see sunlight; he won't get off the couch if there is the possibility of seeing something related to sports on TV.

I had finished up the yardwork, which was to make a path to nowhere in our backyard out of the bricks that used to be a path that led to our shed. Having torn out the shed, I decided that it looked dumb to have a path going to where the shed once stood, a path which now led to a shed-shaped area of dirt with the kind of scraggly bushes that you can buy for $1.50 at Wal-mart if you get there late enough in the season. Rather than have a path going to nowhere in particular, I had The Boy pull the bricks out, and then I dug up a different portion of the yard starting at the path that already led around the house, and extending that path out into the yard. But I misjudged the number of bricks I'd need to have this new path go somewhere, so instead of a path that leads to a dirt area bounded by the Sorta Great Wall, we have a path that winds gracefully between the trees I got for $4.50 each and ends... nowhere in particular. I'm thinking that next year, I'll use some of the lumber we have left over and build a shrine to the Backyard Basketball at the end of the Path to Nowhere.

Once I'd finished the dead-end path (I knew I was done because while I had plenty of yard left, I was out of bricks), I was heading inside when The Boy met me in the driveway and said he thought he knew what was wrong with the garage door. What he thought was wrong was that some of the hinges were loose. So we tightened those, and found that the garage door didn't work any better. Thinking "scientifically," we then loosened the hinges we'd just tightened, but that didn't help. We then tried tightening and loosening other things, and had the garage door opener go up and down and up and down, and loosened the things we'd tightened, and tightened the things we'd loosened, and ran the opener some more, until we got it just right. It worked perfectly. The Boy was outside and I was inside and it had worked perfectly and I said "Don't touch anything, I'm going to adjust it like that."

The Boy said "What?" and hit the opener to run the door so that he could hear what I said, and it never worked again after that and now I have to open and close the garage door myself like it's the 1970s or something.

That began a run of bad luck and expenses that included paying for Middle's senior pictures, and their athletic fees at school, and their parking fees at school, and Chocolate Herman James Brown The Wonder Kitten's trip to the vet because he'd taken up peeing on the carpet for some reason, and more fees at school, and then more equipment for school, expenses and bad news and sick cats that just seemed to keep on coming.

I usually call home and check in with Sweetie just before noon. I'll call and ask how things are going, and we'll trade celebrity gossip, comparing notes on which celebrities we want to make fun of that day. Sweetie herself is on top of the news and reads the paper and watches the nightly news and has opinions about presidential candidates and murder investigations and the oil prices and things like that: actual knowledge about actual events. She's married, though, to someone who can kill two hours reading those "Paul Is Dead" websites while listening to "New York Groove" by Ace Frehley, and that tends to limit the conversation she can engage in.

This week, I'd call home at noon and instead of getting updates on, say, Jennifer Aniston (whose side we are still officially on in the breakup although there's been a little thawing because Sweetie saw a picture of Shiloh that was cute), I'd get her saying The Boy needs a sleeping bag because he's going away to camp for football and they're supposed to bring it. The next day, it would be that Bluey, our old car, had to go into the shop. The day after that, The Boy also needed an air mattress for camp (so football players apparently do not rough it.)

It wasn't just coming from Sweetie's end, either; I had to be the bearer of bad tidings, and not just "I've run out of internet comics to read" bad tidings. For example, we've been trying to refinance our house and I had to call her one day this week and let her know that it didn't look like we were going to refinance the house in August, at all, as we'd hoped to do, because the guy we were using to refinance, as it turned out, had his license revoked. "At least," I said, "This explains why I could never get a hold of him on the phone."

So the week was getting expensive and getting us down, and ordinarily we'd take a little break and go out someplace fancy, like Dairy Queen, but we also had to grocery shop this week, so our romantic night out was a trip to the grocery store, where Sweetie left me alone to pick up the pizza sauce we needed to use for the meatball sandwiches we're going to have on Saturday. That usually cheers me up pretty well; there's no week so bad that finishing it up with meatball sandwiches on a Saturday can't bring a smile.

But in this case, I was disturbed. When left to buy pizza sauce myself, I head to the bottom shelf, to the unglamorous steel cans of pizza sauce that aren't fancy, that don't have pictures of Paul Newman on them, and don't have accent marks in their name; I head to those because they don't cost a lot and pizza sauce is pizza sauce. I am certain that there's just one pizza sauce factory out there, and it makes one kind of pizza sauce, and then various companies go buy it and package it up and sell it under their own names, kind of the way Ben Stiller keeps making the same movie over and over again but they just change the name, so why pay four bucks for a jar of pizza sauce?

But I wasn't cheered up this time, because the cheap pizza sauce that I like to buy to show that I'm no patsy getting taken advantage of by Big Sauce had a little label on it that said "Now with antioxidants."

Let me be perfectly clear: despite having an education currently valued at many tens of thousands of dollars, I have no idea whatsoever what an "antioxidant" is, because my entire education was geared at getting me into the kind of job where it's perfectly acceptable to have a working knowledge of which websites have the best Ace Frehley downloads and also perfectly acceptable to have no apparent duties and no way to measure whether I'm actually doing anything. I have a degree in "political science" and people used to ask me, in college, what a "political science" degree was good for. "What can you do with that?" they'd ask, and I'd shrug and tell them "Lots of things," while privately thinking "Beyond go to law school, I have no idea." I took political science mostly because nobody else including the professors knew what it was, either, so they couldn't fail students on the exams because nobody knew if anyone else was right or not.

If I could have looked into the future, I'd have said this about my major: "It's good for making people think that you know something about politics, so you get to be an expert every four years, and it's also good for getting the kind of job where sometimes in the office people will actually start drinking at eleven a.m."

That's exactly what happened today -- people were celebrating something, a birthday or winning a case or something; I never know because I try to avoid talking to people at work -- and they started drinking at about 11 a.m. "Aren't you drinking?" someone asked me, and I shrugged and said "No," but I wanted to say "No, because I haven't even eaten lunch yet." I stayed in the office until 5 today. Almost nobody else did.

It's not a bad job to have, though; when all your coworkers are drunk by 2, it's a lot easier to kill an afternoon watching Batman Lego videos on Youtube. Still, you probably shouldn't hire our firm to do any serious legal work.

It is the kind of job that can be held by people like me who have no clue what an 'antioxidant' is. It doesn't matter that I don't know what it is, because whatever "antioxidants" are, I don't want them in my pizza sauce. I don't want scientifically enhanced pizza sauce that's good for me. If I wanted food that was good for me, I wouldn't be getting the ingredients for it off the bottom shelf of a mega-super-market and I wouldn't be putting those ingredients onto a meatball sub.

But there you have it: food is getting healthier and enhanced and good for us, even if we deliberately avoid things like vegetables and meat that hasn't been fried. A guy like me can keep his life moving in a good direction, in the direction of sandwiches that get ever more and more delicious/bizarre, like a sandwich that has sliced up bratwurst and cheddar cheese and potato-stick-snacks and Ranch dressing, a sandwich I actually ate this week -- a guy like me can keep pushing ahead with that kind of life and then one day he realizes that his pizza sauce is chock full of antioxidants and his orange juice has calcium in it.

That's something I can't tolerate, either: adding calcium to orange juice. Calcium comes from milk, and milk is to be ingested only as a side effect of cereal, or when used in certain cake and brownie mixes. If you eat enough brownies and Captain Crunch, you'll get all the calcium you need. That didn't stop food manufacturers from adding calcium to orange juice, which grosses me out to no end, because when I see that calcium has been added to something, all I can think of is this: Calcium means strong teeth. There are probably teeth in that orange juice, just floating around. And then I can't drink it. So now I'm not even getting the one good thing about orange juice, which is vitamin C, and I have to hope I get my full daily allowance of that from the Crunchberries in my cereal.

Food manufacturers keep on doing this, adding healthy things to food and further limiting the choices for people like me who don't want to be healthy, we just want a meatball sandwich that doesn't have antioxidants and teeth and guava in it And all the while they're getting away from adding things to food that should be added, things like "Funfetti."

It's a good thing for me that some food manufacturers still understand what the public really wants: "Funfetti." On the same trip in which I had reluctantly bought the antioxidanted pizza sauce and glumly concluded that my meatball subs would no longer be oxidanted and I would have to just live with that, Sweetie had used a coupon to pick up some brownie mix. In the baking aisle, she'd said we needed to get brownie mix, and she'd picked up a mix of chocolate and "Funfetti" brownies, the box for which promised not just that the brownies had "Funfetti" candies, but also that they were Extra Rich and Fudgy. That's an additive for you: forget about antagonizing the oxidants; start adding extra Fudgy to the foods and we'll all do just fine.

To make matters even better, Sweetie said, too, that for the coupon we needed to get frosting, also, which is a rare treat because I'm the only person in the house who likes frosting on brownies and cakes; Sweetie and all the kids say frosting is "too sweet," as though such a thing was possible. So she picked out a frosting, and the frosting, too, had Funfetti!

I tried to play it cool: "You don't think that's too much Funfetti?" I asked, and held my breath. Sweetie said it would be okay, and I pushed us on ahead before she could reconsider.

So when I put the scientific cancer-curing pizza sauce into the cart, I tried to focus on the fact that we also had copious amounts of Funfetti, and that helped cheer me back up, because while I might be forced to eat meatball subs that would be good for me, or would at least be not so bad for me, I'd also be topping them off with a Funfetti Festival, since with frosting on them the brownies would almost certainly be all mine to eat. Probably while watching Ace Frehley videos.



Want to see what I mean about science not being scientific? Read "Me: 2, Science: 0"

Or, find out why tearing down the shed showed me I'm no Indiana Jones.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

4 down, 8,000 to go.

I've figured it out. I'm counting through songs at the rate of about 1 per week, so I'll finish this in just 15.3 years! Except I keep adding songs to my iPod, too.

Today's song is "Off the Ground" by Paul McCartney. I've got this song on my mind today because The Beatles came up in conversation the other day. We were joking about Ringo Starr's appearance on Larry King Live because Ringo was all cranky. (I saw it the "The Soup" -- I'm not old enough to watch Larry King). The Boy said that Ringo shouldn't be so cranky since he's the only living Beatle.

I was going to remind The Boy that Paul McCartney is still alive, but then I remembered... Paul is dead! In the whole world, only The Boy was not fooled by the massive publicity campaign put on by the Fake Paul Society.




Sometimes I forego the music and spend quality time with the family -- like I did when I went for Sundaes In The Park With Sweetie!


Important Mug




Rachel's not sure where she came from or what she's supposed to do, unless she really is trying to take over the world with a little help from her Octopus, a Valkyrie, and her lover Brigitte. Read Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Thinking The... Science May Be Over, But Lisa Loeb's Still Got It.

Was it only six short months ago that "scientists" got bored and decided to just start making stuff up again to try to fill the lonely days between research grants? We all remember those heady days when "scientists" got tired of pretending that velociraptors actually existed and instead pretended that planets didn't exist, or did exist, or existed in another dimension, or something. Frankly, I'm still confused by it all.

But at least some good came out of all that "science," and that good is that Lisa Loeb really did write that song about how to remember all 417 planets, planetary-sized objects, objectary-sized planets, sizedary-objectified-planets and the rest of the crazy mishmash we call "the solar system" and "scientists" call "that thing we hope they never pay attention to as long as they keep giving us money."

The song is called "11 Planets" for some reason; why it's called that is not clear, since there are according to "science" 12 planets and according to "fact" only 9 planets, so while the song is good, it's about as accurate as "science" usually is. While you can hear it at this site, you can't, so far as I can tell, buy it anywhere.

Except on 2003 UB 313.


Read actual "scientific" proof that Velociraptors never existed!




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Rachel's not sure where she came from or what she's supposed to do, unless she really is trying to take over the world with a little help from her Octopus, a Valkyrie, and her lover Brigitte. Read Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!

Monday, August 11, 2008

The Papaya Personality.

It's hard to cook for a family; everyone has their likes and dislikes, some of which appear to be entirely random. I've many times wondered if the kids decided one day that they needed a personality of some sort, and that the best way to have a personality would be to like or dislike a kind of food.

It's easy to create a personality, after all. I've done it lots of times. I invented a new signature for myself when I was 19. I read an article about how people with flourishes and flashy signatures are optimistic, energetic people. I wanted to be optimistic and energetic, too, but that's a lot of work, always being upbeat and doing stuff. So instead of becoming optimistic and energetic and hoping my signature followed suit, I sat down for about a half-hour and worked out a new signature with flourishes and doohickeys and things, and once I had that down, I assumed that the optimism and energy would ultimately result.

I also made myself a fidgeter because a long long time ago, I read that fidgeting can burn up to 800 calories per day. Ever on the lookout for a way to work out without actually exercising, I decided that fidgeting would be a good way to go, so I learned to fidget -- and not just any old fidgeting, but cross-training fidgeting: I tap my heel, I bend paperclips, I go get coffee, I go dump out my coffee because the coffee we make in our office is god-awful terrible, I bend more paperclips.

The Fidget Workout (Copyright ME) is only one of the many workouts I've invented in my life in hopes of, like I said, not actually exercising. I used to be quite the exerciser; in my 20s I worked out 5 or 6 days per week. Now, I watch How I Met Your Mother five or six days a week, and my "workouts" are not so much workouts as brief breaks from TV. I'm not as bad as those people who look up how many calories are burned doing laundry, but I'm well on my way down that path. My workout this summer has been something I call "Baby Workout" and involves-- try to follow this now -- taking the Babies somewhere and playing with them. That somewhere might be the living room, and it might be the park. To get them there, I put them in the stroller and walk and jog behind it, so that we arrive at the swingset (or the couch) with me gasping for breath and covered in sweat, and the Babies! confused, a little, at the way we sped up and slowed down to get there, and also at why I am leaning down with my head between my legs and dizzy.

So I have experience in creating workouts and personalities, and that's why I think the kids sometimes use food to establish a personality: because it's easier than learning about current events or having hobbies. Instead of being "the kid who reads nonfiction a lot," because that's boring and requires reading, they can be "the kid who likes bratwurst as a sausage but doesn't like bratwurst patties because they are round," which requires no work whatsoever. The Boy has tons of these kinds of quirks; he likes salami but only if it comes from the deli. He has to have "real" mayonnaise and swears he can taste the difference between that and Miracle Whip. He might be able to do that, but he can't tell the difference between deli salami and Oscar Mayer salami; I know because we just buy Oscar Mayer salami and put it in a deli bag. We even told him that's what we do, in an effort to convince him that there's no difference. He didn't believe us: "You wouldn't go to that much trouble," The Boy told Sweetie. But we would, and we do.

The kids also have no gray areas; everything has to be black and white with them. They can't just not be in the mood for something. They have to hate it. Make something they love for dinner, but they're just not hungry at the moment, and they hate it. We might order pizza for dinner, which they love, but they've been snacking and so they're not ready for dinner, and The Boy and Middle will both say "I hate pizza." Point out to them that they actually love pizza, that in fact they eat pizza for breakfast sometimes, that sometimes The Boy gets up late at night to come down and eat pizza, and they'll try to differentiate that.

"That was different," they say. Pressed to describe the difference, and they'll hit on whatever the can. It was warm, they'll say or I only like cold pizza or That pizza had melty cheese; this doesn't. Random, ad hoc justifications that might as well be I was facing east when you ordered that pizza.

Faced with that, Sweetie and I soldier on and try to make things that are new or exciting or tasty, which is how one night we ended up having "Rachael Ray's Jerky Turkey Burgers With Papaya Salsa." The "Rachael Ray" cookbooks we have were my retirement gift to Sweetie when we finally hit the point where she could stay home with the kids all day; I gave her those cookbooks and a Rachael Ray food processor because she liked watching Rachael Ray's cooking show and was excited about being able to cook fancy meals. It didn't work out quite like we'd all hoped. One day trying to make meatballs, I broke the food processor. Then the Babies! learned to walk, taking away any freedom Sweetie used to have because walking Babies! are Babies! that are capable of walking into their playroom, picking up the talking toy globe that they got for their first birthday, and walking back to the TV and hurling the globe at the TV, so walking Babies! are also "Constantly Supervised Babies!" Also, Sweetie went back to watching Law & Order reruns instead of Rachael Ray.

"Rachael Ray's Jerky Turkey Burgers With Papaya Salsa" is the official title of the recipe; in our house, it would not quite match up to that title. I made these for dinner a couple of weeks ago when I had some free time on a Saturday. I told Sweetie I would make dinner, and she asked what we were having. I read the title of the recipe to her, and said:

"We're having papayas!" I was very proud.

Sweetie asked: "Do they sell papayas?" she wondered.

"Sure," I told her, certain of it the way I'm certain of everything that I need to be true in my life, whether or not I actually know the answer. I'm certain even when I have no idea if I'm actually right.

"What do they look like?" Sweetie asked me, and I had to admit, I didn't know. I've never bought a papaya before. I guessed maybe they looked like a pineapple. "Are you sure?" Sweetie asked, but I wasn't, so I did what I always do when confronted with a question like this -- I googled it.

I google everything. I google anything that in a less-digital age I would have called one of my parents about. In the past, I'd ask my mom (who's a nurse) about various aches and pains or weird dizzy spells I'd had, or cooking questions, or child-rearing questions. I'd ask her those things even though my mom's answers to those questions was the same answer no matter what question I asked her: Drink more milk. It's like Mom works for the Milk Board. Call her up and say "I was out jogging with the babies and now my feet hurt real bad," and she'll say "Drink more milk." Call up and ask how to "saute" something, and she'll say "saute" is French for "drink the milk." When Sweetie and I were getting married, Mom left us a message that she had an idea for the reception; before I called her back, I was pretty sure that it would be to have all the guests drink milk.

I never asked Dad for as much advice as Mom's, because when I ask Dad for advice, the answer begins straightforwardly but works its way around, eventually, to one of Dad's three main topics of conversation: Social Security, gambling, or how he's going to move down South because it's cheaper to live there. I never, ever say that Dad might not need to live somewhere so cheap if he'd just gamble less. Eventually, Dad probably will move down South, where he'll move in next to a casino that cashes Social Security checks, so he'll have hit the conversational equivalent of the Unified Field Theory.

Luckily, I don't need to call my parents for advice like that because I can now just google it, like I google everything, and like I googled "papaya" that Saturday to find out what one looked like. I was unimpressed with it; it looked a lot like a watermelon on Atkins, a skinny elongated pear that looked boring. Tropical fruit shouldn't look boring. The tropics are exciting; fruit from the tropics should be exciting. If I'm going to have something with papaya in it, I want the papaya to look exotic. It should have had stripes, or spikes, or maybe little arms and legs so it could dance around singing some sort of catchy reggae song.

But I knew what one looked like, so I went and got that and the rest of the ingredients and came home to cook up the Jerky Turkey burgers with Papaya salsa only to learn that most of my ingredients were banned from our household because of e coli scares; specifically, Sweetie saw me getting ready to chop up the jalapeno pepper I'd bought and ruled it out because at the time, jalapeno peppers were the suspect in an outbreak of e coli. I tried to reason with Sweetie using various argument tactics:

First, I pointed out that it was only one jalapeno, and that it was very unlikely that there'd be much risk in one jalapeno.

When that didn't work, I said that I'd be cooking the jalapeno, which would kill any of the e coli germs in it. (I said that despite being completely ignorant about whether that was, or was not, true; again, I don't need to be right to be certain about something.)

That didn't work, either, so I tried resorting to definitions. "It's a JERKY burger," I said. "That means it's hot. It has to have the jalapeno or the recipe's wrong."

Still nothing, so I ended by pointing out that the e coli hadn't even killed anybody yet. I knew by then that I'd lost the argument; when your thesis in an debate is based on nobody has died... yet from doing whatever it is you want to do, you're not coming from a position of strength.

So we didn't have jalapenos for the burgers, but I forged ahead and made the Non-Jerky Turkey Burgers and while they were frying up, I tackled the Papaya salsa, which required that I cut up the Papaya, and I wasn't sure how to do that. I wasn't even sure which parts of the Papaya were supposed to be eaten or not.

That happens every single time I buy new fruit and it's why I mostly stick to apples and bananas, and why I even more mostly stick to Doritos and the like: It's far less confusing to eat a BBQ Ranch Frito than it is to eat a pomegranate. A bag of Cheetos is easy to eat; the bag is inedible, everything else is fair game. But cut open a pomegranate, and I'm in a mystifying world of pulp and seeds and skin and meat and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be eating or cooking. Am I supposed to get the seeds out? I wonder. Nobody eats seeds, so get rid of them, I think, but then I remember Persephone eating six pomegranate seeds and having to stay in Hades forever, so then I wonder if I am supposed to be eating the seeds, but also, if I do, will I go to Hell? All that reading and schoolwork seemed so helpful at first, but, as usual, Greek mythology just messes everything up.

Fruit is confusing and cookbooks don't help. Chop up Papaya, they say, without telling me whether I'm supposed to peel it, or eat it with the peel, or core it, or something.

I finally opted to peel the Papaya and chop it up, then mixed it up with the other ingredients, and mashed it around, and created what turned out to be about 3 gallons of Papaya salsa. Papayas are not only confusing, they're big. I had four burgers, four buns, and an entire punch bowl of Papaya salsa, which I was putting on the table when Middle walked through the kitchen, saw the salsa and said "I don't like that."

Parents everywhere can say with me exactly what I said: "You've never had it."

Middle was not daunted. "I don't like what's in it."

I said: "You don't know what's in it."

Middle said "That thing you were chopping." When I said that she didn't know what it was I was chopping, she said "But I still don't like it."

We had the Nonjerky Turkey Burgers With Optional Papaya Salsa for dinner, and I had apparently used the right parts of the papaya, because I thought they tasted excellent. Sweetie assured me they were very good.

Middle mostly moved hers around on the plate and ended up eating almost nothing of it; even after she scraped off the Papaya Salsa I'd made her put on, she didn't eat the Nonjerky Turkey burger; it had apparently been tainted by contact with "that thing I'd been chopping", and she wanted no part of it. She ended up having a dinner consisting mostly of Cheez-Its. I tried not to be offended or upset: that's just her personality.







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Sunday, August 10, 2008

3 down, 7,949 to go.

A task more daunting than what it takes to become a monk... posting and talking about every song on my iPod...

Last night, for about an hour, I played "Box" with Mr F. using the box leftover from a tv we bought to replace their old TV, which broke. When we went out to get the new TV, I mentioned to Sweetie just how different things were now, since when I was a kid, we didn't have our own TV and if we had, our TV breaking would certainly not have been deemed an emergency requiring people to try to go replace it that same night.

"Box" is a pretty easy game; Mr F stands in the box, and I put things in it, like a beach ball or a plastic firefighter, and he throws them back out because he wants to be the only thing in the box. Then, periodically, I shake the box and yell "Earthquake."

I'm saying all that because there's nothing else I've got to associate with today's song, which is "Bobby's Spacesuit" by Cloud Cult. This is also the newest song on my iPod.







Help Mateo and McHale! The Wonder Twins are medical miracles, but they can't do everything. Find out more about them, and how to help them with their medical bills, by clicking this link.