Blender magazine lines my cat's litterbox

Just when I thought nothing would bring me out of my blogging hiatus, something arrived for me in the mail today that deserves cyber-commentary. Negative cyber commentary. It's my latest copy of Blender magazine. This is also my first copy of Blender magazine for that matter and I should hope it's my last.

Where did this come from?

I didn't sign up to receive it, and I can't imagine why anyone would freely send me this craprag. So that you can appreciate it's suckitude, let me share with you what's to be found on the first few pages. When you hear this sound . . . brrrinnnnggggg . . . turn the page.

First of all the cover depicts Anthony Kiedis (who thanks to wikipedia.com I now know is a member of The Red Hot Chili Peppers) in, what can only be described as a poor rendition of a Catholic schoolgirl's outfit, complete with plaid skirt, white buttonup and necktie. This guy is butt ugly. The feature article about him is entitled "Sex, Drugs and Man-skirts." Other articles mentioned on the cover are an exclusive interview with Kid Rock about his Ex-mas in Baghdad. Page 153 features "The Horniest Band in America! " (exclamation theirs; not mine). As I study the cover I'd have to say the only thing on it that possibly makes me interested in opening up the magazine is an article called "Indie-Rock Dorktacular," not that I give a shit about anything to do with indie rock but there's something about the word dorktacular that I find intriguing.

Brrrinnnnggggg.

Like any magazine the first few pages are nothing but ads for things like The Gap, Nissan and K-Swiss. The Nissan ad has snowboarders in it. Why they are supposed to make me want to buy a Nissan I have no idea. Are guys who like snowboarding even old enough to drive? I live in a fairly temperate climate so I don't know these things.

The next few pages are also ads only they're for Guess jeans, some hair care product called Bed Head and finally Corona beers. I think the advertisers' idea is that looking at the guys in these ads is supposed to make me think I can someday look like them if I purchase these products. Fat chance. My hope for that ended about ten years and five pant sizes ago. Oh well. No hoyay here. Just bitterness.

An ad for Levis shows a picture of a barefoot guy in a wifebeater and bluejeans. The caption reads Chawson Ko wears Levi's Skinny 511 Jeans. Whatever. Interestingly enough, Chawson Ko looks a little like my daughter's pediatrician only with less medical training and a possible future in the Gaysian porn industry.

About the only thing I found of interest in this magazine was a brief write-up on Joan Jett that describes her as "a scrawny tough who mastered two topics: rock and roll." Who comes up with these headlines? The author also applies some craptacular rating system to three of her past songs.

In case you're interested, Bad Reputation gets four stars, while I Love Rock n' Roll and Fit to be Tied each get a mere three and a half stars. Why do I feel like I'm channeling Ed McMahon all of a sudden?

I've heard periodical companies like to arbitrarily send out magazines for periods at a time and then send a bill with the hopes that some poor mindless schmuck will just go ahead and pay up for a subscription he didn't ask for. That's not going to happen here.

If you're reading this and would like to treat me to a free magazine subscription, please make sure said subscription has some degree of female nudity outside of the occasional perfume ad. Maxim and Stuff though also riddled with high school quality writing and teen boy rocker fantasies are far better fillers for the bathroom magazine rack than this garbage.

Even mullet is too good for this shizzle.

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Sexual satisfaction and discount prices abound at the Lawrenceville Goodwill

Yesterday I dropped my kid off at my mother's while I toodled around town and enjoyed some alone time. I have lived in the same suburb of Atlanta now for almost 30 years, so I have seen Lawrenceville, GA transform from a sleepy one-horse town known mainly for being the place where Penthouse magazine publisher Larry Flint got shot to being the county seat of one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. throughout the Reagan years. When I get in my car I can't help but to play the I-remember-when game and point out how things used to be as opposed to how they are now.

One of Lawrenceville's strip malls that used to house a Food Giant, drug store, furniture rental joint and a barber shop among other things has made a 180-degree turn several times over. Food Giant apparently went belly-up some time in the early 80s and while it was briefly replaced by a mom-and-pop pseudo-equivalent named Quality Foods, and then that store also bailed out and the anchor unit in the strip mall has long since been the site of a Goodwill. Where there once was a drug store there now is a Latin American movie rental place. The furniture rental place is now a Cambianos Cheques and the barber shop remains the same, complete with confederate flag hanging on the wall.

I ventured into the Goodwill mainly out of curiosity to see what I could find. The clientele there is an interesting mix of immigres looking to furnish their homes, Middle American Anglos looking for some trinket they collect and hope to resell on eBay, and grungy high schoolers hoping to replenish their Spring wardrobe a la cheap and esoteric. The area where I live was once a major site for Bosnian refugee relocation after the war and it's not uncommon in the Goodwill to hear employees banter back and forth to each other in Croatian. Incidentally my next-door neighbors are also Bosnian and whenever they have company over, my wife and I enjoy overhearing their music from the Old Country.

Most of what you find at a Goodwill is a combination of acid washed jeans, dated tablewear and lots of Barbie dolls in various stages of undress and dismemberment. Worth a look-see though in my book is the corner all the way in the back where they hide the cassette tapes, books and LPs. Some of the album covers don't even have records in them anymore, but the picture on the cover alone might make the purchase worthwhile. As for me, I spent a good hour in the book section.

I have purchased books from the Goodwill before. You don't find broken Barbies in the book corner like you do in other areas of the store, but you do find their literary equivalent. I spent ten minutes for instance thumbing through Dr. Laura's The Ten Commandments and, had I been interested in continuing my psycho-babble self-help education, which I wasn't, I could have picked up a copy of Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus. Also available was just about anything written by Deepak Chopra.

There are occasionally a few treasures to be found there though. In my personal library is a small paperback I picked up from the Goodwill a few years ago. It's a 1968 edition of Boys & Sex by Wardell B. Pomeroy, Ph.D. It's basically a primer written for teenage boys to enlighten them in the ways of their post-pubescent development. My favorite line is on page 36 in the chapter on masturbation. It reads, "At some time or other it occurs to most boys to try to put their own penises into their mouths." If after reading that you feel frustrated, don't. The good doctor goes on to say that only about one in a hundred boys can perform this iniquitous act and of those who can, very few actually go on to adopt it as their major method of masturbation. Aren't you glad I shared? The book retails used on Amazon for the exhorbitant price of $1.13, but you're not getting my copy. I still haven't read the chapter on petting.

Just kidding.

I've read it.

Okay . . . more than once.

Anyway, on my most recent trip I found a somewhat less lewd but certainly more practical book from the godly people at Reader's Digest entitled Practical Problem Solver: Substitutes, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions for making life easier, published circa 1991. The book is just a treasure trove of hints from Heloise, only it's not just Heloise handing out hints in this oeuvre. It's all kinds of people with all kinds of professional backgrounds. This way the reader is sure to get the information he needs.

The tome is arranged like an encyclopedia with topics ranging in alphabetical order from abdominal flab to zucchini bread. Sure it's chocked full of the more prudent topics like foot odor and brake drums but shortly after discovering the book, I found myself standing in the Goodwill searching for those topics that satiated my more carnal interests. This is due largely to the fact that discount and second-hand stores for some reason bring out the giddy twelve-year-old in me. Go figure.

Unlike Dr. Pomeroy's book, this one offers no tips on masturbation (entries jump from marshmalows to matches with no onanism in between) but there is a diagram of a bra-bearing woman who has ingeniously used a shoelace to tie her bra straps together in order to keep them from falling. Isn't that something?

There isn't an entry for sex unless you count sex education or sexual harassment. For sex education the book advises you talk to kids on their level blah blah blah and for sexual harassment it says suck it up, Toots. Just kidding. It doesn't really say Toots.

Some of the more enlightening and entertaining tips though are about things that, had you not found them in this book, frankly wouldn't have occurred to you. One blurb in the Common Things with Uncommon Uses chapter talks about how to take a plastic bottle and make it into a drill holster to wear on your tool belt. I'm not sure if I like their design though. The accompanying picure shows a guy whose holster allows the entire drill bit to poke out and point directly at his unmentionables. Ouch.

Or get a load of this:

Halloween costume. Turn your youngster into a spaceman or Mr. Bubble by wrapping bubble pack around her arms, legs and trunk.

Right, like that's not an invitation to getting beat up on the playground.

Another suggestion is that several layers of bubble wrap be used on the floor as a guest bed. Please, if I come over to your house and I see you've made my bed out of leftover packing materials you used during your move, I'm just going to assume you'd rather I hole up somewhere else. How makeshifty! And that raucous twelve year old in me that I mentioned earlier wonders what would happen if you and someone you loved were cavorting on this substitute bedding. Can't you just hear it?

Pop . . . Pop . . . Pop pop . . . and then eventually pop pop pop pop pop.

I can't wait to see how my life improves thanks to this book. My plants will be greener, my skin will be softer and my meringues will be fluffier. That stuff is far more practical than what I ever learned from that Dr. Polmeroy.

Well, he did have a good tip on helping people fall asleep faster.

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Metroblogging is a cult

Atlanta Metblogs is anyway. I don't know about the other thousand and one cities out there with a local blog site. I joined Metroblogging Atlanta several months ago with the best of intentions. I wanted to write for a wider audience. I wanted a place to post with other local bloggers. Oh, what the hell. I'll say it. I just wanted to direct more traffic to my own site with minimal effort.

When Blackgayblogger, one of Atlanta's most sardonic and skilled blog writers, left the Atlanta MetBlogs site to go write for 9rules, that should have been a clue for me that the former was but a subpar venue for my infinite and humble wisdom. Being the attention whore that I am though I jumped at the chance to write for a more heavily trafficked site. Little did I know what was in store.

For starters, atlanta metblogs (I've just decided they no longer merit capitalization in my book) requests that contributers post three times a week, a rather hefty goal seeing as how they also ask that you not simply copy and paste something from your own blog. As it turns out the three-posts-a-week rule is only vaguely monitored by an automaton post bot who sends you a gentle reminder that you haven't posted in some time if in fact you haven't. After I got the first one, I had future reminders go direct to my junk mail.

What irritated me most about it though were the slew of listserve emails I started getting whenever one of the cult leaders would send out a group email requesting filler material. I'm sure to be blacklisted after writing this because a footer at the bottom of every email sent through the site requests that "like Vegas, what happens in metblogs stays in metblogs." Whatever! Why they think their shit is worth my confidentiality is beyond me. For the most part, their ad nauseum emails are slightly less poignant than this:

Cult Leader: Anyone wanna write about traffic in the A-T-L?
Cult Follower 1: Ooh, I will. I love traffic and I love writing about it. LOL.
Cult Follower 2: Great, Cult Follower 1, you might want to include the names of some major expressways in your post. Just an idea.
Cult Follower 1: Gee, thanks, Cult Follower 2. I'll do that. I love I-85 and I live inside the perimeter so that makes me superior and more knowledgable than most.
Cult Follower 3: Wait a minute. I haven't written anything in a while. How 'bout if I write on traffic too?
Cult Leader: Well, we've already got someone writing about taffic. Maybe you can write about the high occupancy lanes? Sound good?
Cult Follower 3: Thanks again, Cult Leader. I'm glad you're here to guide us and tell us all that is good about you and the site.
Cult Follower 2: Ditto that. LOL. Just want you all to know I love all you guys.
Cult Follwer 1: Word!

It goes on from there but I'll spare you the mindless details. Did I mention that a similar exchange like the one above might litter my inbox for days at a time as it slowly aggrandizes and then fizzles out? The saddest part is that when the aforementioned cult follower does go on to write about Atlanta traffic or whatever other blase topic has been handed out to him, the post will often read like a fifth-grade writing sample.

Don't get me wrong. There are some good writers on the site, but somehow when people write on shit they couldn't care less about, their writing sucks. It's as though they're just doing it to meet their ambitious quota or worse yet, please the leader.

Leader by the way is not my word; it's theirs. The metblog guru (who incidentally somehow warrants his own Wikipedia entry) is often referred to in the emails as "our leader." The people in charge of the various cities' blogs are called the captains. Again, whatever! I have enough going on in my blog life that I don't need to worry about answering to blog middle management, much less whether my writing and the pictures I attach to it meet their pisspoor pedantic guidelines.

Also get this. When a new site is started for yet another metroblogging city, we are all encouraged to pop over to the new site and say hello like it's some big love bomb festival or something. Somehow the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is behind all this. I just hope those remaining metbloggers don't taunt my family with spam as some sort of retribution for me leaving the group.

I've recently started reading Extraneous Kickassery who, after joining the group indie blogs, readily and jokingly admitted that he joined a cult. He also claims to be "making the internet a dumber place since 2006." I like people who put it to you straight. Not to mention the fact that his shit is funny. Maybe it's just 'cause I have some compunction for humorous smartasses who can swill hard liquor and down all-beef Koshers for hours at a time. OK, he never really said that, but read some of his stuff and you'll get the idea. Anyway, I'm not the only person out there who recognizes the blog cults out there.

Blog Antagonist used to use her blog postings to point out stupid things about blogging, and in fact she calls her blog Blogs are Stupid. She since has seen the light or been blog-saved or was struck blind but then could see and changed her name from Saul to Paul or something like that, but anyway I do wonder what she would say about these blog cults.

I'm not anti-cult necessarily. I just am not big on any cult that doesn't have me as its leader. People, I am the way.

Me.

Kevin. Of cocktailswithkevin.com.

Beware the leaven of these blog Pharisees.

I'm just saying, ya'll.

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Bringing you up to date

I have this unspoken rule that if I link to your blog and you go more than a month without updating it, I typically just cut you from my list o' blogs. It's nothing personal; it's just that my blog roll is there mainly for me to scroll down and check out people whose stuff I enjoy reading. If you haven't put up anything new to read in a while, I give you the pink slip so I can keep my list fresh.

Now I'm the one who's about to hit the one-month mark, so for those of you out there who still check in occasionally to cocktailswithkevin.com to see what's going on (I think now my readership is up to four -- count them FOUR -- family members and the occasional misguided googler) here's a brief update.

Christmas came and went, and while I had counted on fatherhood meaning I had seen the last of gifts that were purchased for me excusively, I really cleaned up this Christmas. As a rule, I'm not good at coming up with things on the spot when you ask me what I want for a gift. My theory is that if I want it, I buy it. If I haven't bought it, it's because I can't afford to buy it, and if I can't afford to buy it, I really wouldn't feel comfortable asking you to buy it for me. Sometimes I might want something but I don't trust someone else to go buy it so I don't put that on a wish list either.

Speaking of wish lists, the concept of making a list online of things I want but don't have sounds more depressing to me than it does intriguing, but for those of you who got a little extra Christmas monies don't know how to spend it, feel free to check out and purchase something from my wife's Amazon greed list. If she hasn't added them yet, we also need four new tires for one of the cars and maybe a couple of months mortgage payment. Thanks for giving.

Anyway, topping the list of wonderful gifties I got this Christmas was a Zen mp3 player. The thing's got 30 gigs worth of memory which easily should allow me to transfer my entire music collection from CD's and a computer hard drive to the unit itself. Because one gadget isn't enough for me, I then went to purchase additional gadgets for my new gadget. I wanted something to play the music on my car stereo so I spent $20 on an FM transmitter from Brookstone. It works like a Mr. Microphone so all I have to do is plug it into the headphone jack of he mp3 player and then tune a nearby radio to the same station it broadcasts out on.

Interestingly enough the same gadget can be used to listen to international radio on my home stereo system if I plug the gadget into the computer speakers and then point my browser to whatever radio station I want to listen to. Right now it's France Bleu Provence which is what my wife and I woud listen to on our first anniversary as we toodled around the south of France in a rented Peugeot. Let me just say that France Bleu rocks almost as much as my new mp3 player, and as geeky as it sounds, I like listening to the weather and traffic report en français. They also do this bit occasionally where someone calls in to offer something to sell. These brave souls give out their phone number to everyone on the planet with the hopes of selling some old laptop or a car or something. I want to ring them up just to chat, but I can't afford the overseas call. Lucky for them.

Between Christmas and the New Year the world watched as Hussein was executed for committing crimes against humantiy. I don't know which is more disturbing: that one person could do such horrible things and still look at himself in the mirror the next day or that the whole world salivated over his hanging. Gross on so many different levels I don't like to think about it.

My wife and I threw a party New Year's day and invited friends to help us ring in the new year. Our friends, like us, have for the most part followed the same general path in life. We've all gone from sinful cohabitators to married twenty-somethings to married thirty-somethings to married thirty-somethings with kids. Now that Elaine and I have a kid of our own, we didn't want anyone to feel left out, kids included, so we opened up the invite to everyone who was old enough to show off their new toy, laugh hysterically at a movie they had already seen, or crap their diaper. Kids, I mean. To my knowledge none of our adult guests crapped his diaper.

Elaine and I always say that if we throw a party and she and I don't see each other until the party's over, that usually means it was a good shindig. That's kind of how this one went. There was plenty of food and drink, great cameraderie and nothing got broken. We resolved to make this our new annual event.

My new year is off to a new exciting twist as I start a part-time gig in the evenings teaching English to non-native speakers through a nearby community college. Additionally I've decided to try and drum up some more real estate business. I had a recent closing with a dear client this past Chrismukah season and while the transaction had headaches galore, I realized how much I miss the rigamarole of marketing a home and getting it sold. The stress a real estate agent can go through is frankly unimaginable to some, but somehow shaking a new homeowner's hand across the closing table makes it all worth it.

A year ago I wrote about how I spent the last work day of 2005 knee-deep in Kleenex soaked in my own snot. If that's not enough detail, you can read more about it here. This must be an annual thing for me because once again I seem to be fighting off some mung-ridden typhoid. I also wrote about how I don't generally make resolutions for the new year. That's true for the most part, but I've decided to make a few this time around. Here they are so you can hold me to them:

I will be better about thanking the people I need to thank whether it be through an email or a mailed thank-you card or a phone call. Everyone appreciates being appreciated. The intricacies of my busy life are no excuse to avoid being kind to those who deserve my gratitude.

I had more but as today is January 2, I've already forgotten them.

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Bright Starts Around We Go Show

You know when you hear some cheezoid song on the radio and for hours you can't seem to get it out of your head? That's kinda like I am now only I'm not hearing a song. I'm hearing the voices of the characters in my kid's favorite toy. I'm talking about the Bright Starts Around We Go Activity Center. If you've never seen one of these things (and if you don't have children under the age of two I can't imagine why you would), it's a pretty jazzy toy.

I guess you could say it's an activity table with a wheeled seat attached so the kid can scoot around to the different diversions. Meryl's favorite seems to be the five piano-like keys that make different sounds depending on what setting she has them on. Sure, she can play do re mi fa so and every possible combination thereof, but with the flip of a switch the friendly cartoon characters on the keys pipe up and either play a tune or say some catchy phrase.

There's a monkey, an elephant, a lion, a giraffe and a zebra, and they all play different styles of music. Furthermore they also have very distinct personalities and voices. The monkey has a Spanish or maybe an Argentinian accent. Oddly enough he's sporting a headdress kinda like Carmen Miranda only his is made up of blue balls. Blueberries maybe? I don't know. Anyway. He plays a salsa tune and when you flip the page of the music book that changes the settings, he says either I am a monkey; I love to swing from my tail, I am purple or I love to dance the salsa.

The elephant is orange and plays some New Orleans style jazz music. In addition to announcing his species, something they all do, he says I am orange and I have big ears.

The lion is yellow and he plays classical piano and sings Figaro figaro figaro.. His personality is probably the most distinct because he's clearly nelly. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying he's nelly. You can tell he's also kinda stuck on himself because before he announces his color he clears his throat like he's calling for your attention in a way the other animals don't. Also when he says I am a lion; I have a mane he makes it sound like he's better than the other animals because they don't have additional fur framing their faces the way he does. I don't know if he thinks his musical genre is more sophisticated than the others or if he just has king-of-the-jungle syndrome or what but there's definitely an air of superiority about him.

The giraffe is green. Go figure. Though I suppose this is no more out of the ordinary than a purple monkey or an orange elphant, huh? His accent is clearly Caribbean. I don't know if he's supposed to be Jamaican or a Trini or what but he's from somewhere in the West Indies. He plays reggae music complete with steel drums and says I have a loooong neck and I am a jammin' giraffe, Mon.

The blue zebra brings up the rear and he has a sort of thug quality about him. I don't just mean he has an urban dialect; I mean he comes across as militaristic or possibly just angry at The Man. He seems happy enough when he says I'm a hip hoppin' zebra, but when you press him again and he says I have stripes, it just sounds like he's annoyed that he had to deliver his line. Sure, his words say I have stripes but his tone says something more like Why don't you leave me alone and go bother that friend of Dorothy two doors down? Somehow though, I just picture him being the voice of reason. A protagonist caught up in the midst of animalia oblivion.

When Meryl bangs on the keys I hear them say these things over and over and over to the point that I think I'm hearing them when I'm not really hearing them anymore. Also, when my mind races I imagine them having conversations with each other kinda like the're acting out their own version of Toy Story. A scene might go something like this:

Setting: Backstage at the Bright Starts Round we Go

Lion: (clearing his throat as he runs his fingers through his mane) I am a lion. I have a mane.
Zebra: I don't know about these other people up in here but I for one am sick of your tired ass going on and on about your mane.
Lion: Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!
Elephant: Ha! I have big ears.
Zebra: (turning to Elephant) Let me ask you something. Why when Twinkle Toes and I are having a conversation do you have to butt in and go and announce something so nebulous as the fact that you have big ears? If we can see his mane, we can see your big ears. Hell, the Weebles down the street at Playskool can see your big ears.
Monkey: I am a monkey. I love to swing from my tail.
Lion: (oblivious to the conversation) I am yellow.
Zebra: (turning to Monkey) And let me guess, you're purple, right?
Monkey: I love to dance the salsa.
Zebra: We know. And swing from your tail. Why don't you go back to whatever jungle you came from? We have enough problems here with you people takin' all our jobs.
Giraffe: (playing a calipso beat on his steel drums) I am blue.
Lion: Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!
Zebra: (turning to Giraffe) What I said to monkey goes double for you. Who do you think you are anyway banging on that thing in here while some of us are trying to get ready for a show?
Giraffe: I am a jammin' giraffe, Mon.
Zebra: High on ganja is more like it.
Monkey: I am purple.
Elephant: Ha! I am orange.
Monkey: I love to swing from my tail.
Lion: (clearing his throat) I am yellow.
Zebra: Y'all can all just shut up.
Giraffe: I am blue.
Monkey: I love to dance the salsa.
Elephant: Ha! I have big ears.
Zebra: Can a zebra get a little respect around here? I said shut up.
Elephant: Ha! I am orange.
Giraffe: I am a jammin' giraffe, Mon.
Monkey: I am purple.
Zebra: (standing on his chair) SHUT UP!!!!!

(there is a brief moment of silence while all the animals fidget nervously at their dressing tables.)

Lion: (clearing his throat) I am yellow.

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Shit happens

Why after my daughter comes down with her first urinary tract infection can we no longer smell her dirty diapers? Granted, I've known my shit didn't stink for years now, but when you've got a baby in diapers, especially a girl, you kinda appreciate it when you can smell the need for a diaper change. Sadly however in her time of need, I am constantly being surprised by a seemingly wet diaper that upon further inspection calls for the institutional sized box of wipes.

The funny thing is that until recently ever since we brought Meryl home from the hospital, her gas alone would cause paint to peel off the walls. My wife and I argue over who she takes after when it comes to this, but the fact is for months now we've been peeking into many a noxious diaper only to find it empty save a green cloud of escaping poisonous gas. Now that she's come down with a urinary tract indection, something we've identified she contracted from her craptacular diapers, our olfactory senses fail us. Or more accurately her shit don't stink.

A brief apology is in order for those who came to cocktailswithkevin.com today with the hopes of finding the meaning of life or the secret to world peace. Yes, I realize that my usual antics have over the past few posts been usurped by anecdotes on fatherhood. I promise to get back to my regularly scheduled rants soon, but someone is taking up quite a bit of my life lately and I feel the need to share. As my urologist informed me once he learned my wife had given birth, having kids really does change you. This he said after charging me $40 to finger my ass and tell me to lose weight, but that's another story.

Before having a kid, when I would express hesitancy over changing a dirty diaper, women would say You'll see, it's different when it's your own kid. You know what? These women were lying. I no more want to change my daughter's crap-filled diaper than I would Ronald McDonald's or Rush Limbaugh's. Well, considering what Ronald McDonald must eat, his diaper is probably worse. After all, I hear oxycontin is constipating. Anyway, I digress.

Garbage in our house has three degrees of separation. Closest to us are the trash cans in the kitchen, Meryl's room and the bathrooms. For large packaging and overly fragrant food waste, there's the trash bag in our garage. And outside the garage is our trash can which we reserve mainly for trash day but also visit when there's something so abhorrent that we can't stomach it being anywhere inside our home. Usually this is reserved for week-old cat litter and the severed body parts of fat-bottomed girls who won't put the lotion in the basket.

Crap-filled diapers are some of the few things that actually bypass the first two degrees of garbage and go straight outside into the big trash can. Come to think of it, if I suspected our trash man was within five blocks of our house when the crap filling occurred, I would probably run down the street holding the diaper as far away from my nose as I could with the hopes of chucking the thing directly in the back of his truck. I wouldn't even care if it was our garbage man really. Any garbage truck would do so long as he was driving away from my home.

Making matters worse is the antibiotic she's on. Not only does amoxicillin cause her to experience regularity on an irregularly frequent basis, it also makes her dumps the consistency of mashed potatoes. Instant. Mashed. Potatoes. Regardless of what goes in whether it be mango, peas, prunes or what have you, it turns into a greenish brown yuck that sometimes isn't even content to confine itself to her diaper. Today was one of those instances.

I picked her up and felt something spongy on her back so I started messing with it and squishing it. I thought maybe it was a sock or something stuck in her p.j.'s. Almost instantly I started to see a stain soak through her pyjamas where my fingers were. Then it dawned on me. I was fondling her moist dung through her clothes. Gross! I cannot possibly convey to you how disgusting these crap diapers are. Maybe I'm a poop phobe.

I know there are mothers out there who take pleasure in talking about their kids' bowel movements. I do not understand this, but you can click here and find the blog of one of my favorites. My wife is another one who likes getting the poop report. I've started emailing it to her or leaving it on her voice mail at work if I can't get in touch with her directly. It's basically just the shart chart for the day. Again gross! I can't believe I'm even typing this.

I have read Everyone Poops written by . . . ummm . . . hold on, let me ask my librarian wife . . . some Japanese person she says. Anyway, I know this is a normal function and all, but somehow discussing it after having had to come into close contact with it is bothersome.

Gone are the days when dads never had to change diapers. I understand that, and as I'm the one usually at home with her during the day it's pretty much a responsibility I can't shuck unless I want to try knocking on my neighbor's door and see if they'll oblige.

Wait a minute.

Maybe that's not a bad idea. The neighbors don't speak English, but I'm sure with the right body language and Meryl providing the visuals I could get the message across. I'll let you know how that goes.

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Baby walkers take off eh

Each time I take my baby to the doctor, a nurse runs through a slew of questions once we get into the examination room. I'm not talking about general run-of-the-mill questions an adult hears when going to the doctor like What hurts? or Would you please stop stealing our copies of Architectural Digest? These questions are more like an interrogation, the purpose of which, I fear, is to determine how my wife and I are doing as parents. If we answer enough questions correctly, our kid goes home with a sticker that says "Dr. So-and-So loves me"; if not our kid goes home with a social worker.

Sure, they always start out with the more banal questions like whether or not our baby is sleeping through the night, how many wet diapers she might have during the day and so forth, but eventually the questions get hairier. They ask things like whether or not she attends daycare, whether we have pets in the home and if so what kinds, and are there firearms in the home. This last one gets me because although a swimming pool poses a far greater risk of death than a firearm, we've yet to be asked whether or not we have a pool.

On this last visit we were asked a new question though, i.e. whether or not our daughter uses a baby walker. She doesn't, but the question threw me for a loop nonetheless. I remember babywalkers, not from my own use of them, but when I worked at the world's biggest toy store in my youth we sold them. It was basically a suspended vinyl seat with a plastic tray in front that rolled around as baby was learning to walk. The more upscale versions had little spinny things on the tray to keep baby entertained during those long stretches when he got stuck on an unwielding carpet strip or kitty's tail. After only a week's worth of use, the tray bore stains from upturned sippy cups and the seat was encrusted with secondhand Cheerios. Ah, the joys of babyhood.

When we got home that day (yes, apparently we answered enough questions correctly to take our kid home unescorted once again) I started looking up the straight dope on baby walkers. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics states very clearly on their site "Throw away your baby walker."

When I ran across something that suggested they were now illegal in Canada, I looked that up too. Sure enough, according to the official website for Toronto, our neighbors to the north are advised they cannot buy, sell or give away baby walkers. A further directive goes on to say, "If you have a baby walker, take it apart and put it in the garbage."

I suppose another option for unscrupulous Canucks would be to sneak them down across the border and sell them to American parents not in the know. Or since they're technically not illegal here in the U.S. but only discouraged, maybe shady Canadians can only sell them on the black market in their own country. Can't you just see someone peddling them out of the back of a van alongside human kidneys and U.S.-bought cigarettes? A red-coated mountie would gallop up alongside and shout, "See here, you hoser, you can't be selling those here, eh!"

I did locate an article on the Health Canada website that outlines walker restrictions in several countries. The article's written en français but I think I can translate the highlights for the benefit of the non-francophone reader.

Canada - Walkers are made illegal as of some time in 2004. You can't even bring them into the country legally.

US - Doctors advise against their use, but you can still get one off Amazon.com if you can't find it in your local baby store. The Consumer Products Safety Commission suggests walkers only be used while baby is exposed to countless hours of television viewing.

New Zealand - Walkers are legal in kiwi country but parents are advised to keep an eye on baby and make sure he sticks to clean smooth floors and avoids running into hot surfaces like stoves and barbies.

Australia - Again, still legal to sell but must have caution labels on the packaging. Aussies are encouraged to closely monitor baby's activity in a walker when playing near stairs , hot surfaces or dingos.

France - French doctors don't recommend walkers any more than American doctors do, but in a spirit of anti-American sentiment tour operators hand them out at certain tourist destinations such as the Arc de Triomphe, on top of Notre Dame and on the third level of the Eiffel Tower.

Interestingly enough, in Canadian French a baby walker is referred to as a marchette while in French French it's called a trotteur or more colloquially a youpala. Go figure.

Kazakhstan: As if these people weren't already facing enough troubles as a result of this latest Borat movie, it seems as though they also are doomed to danger due to their lackadaisical attitude toward walker safety. While I wasn't able to find any printed information about the use of walkers in Kazakhstan (not that I could read it if I did), I was able to find a photo on the innerweb that depicts a baby in the former soviet bloc country in a walker. Don't believe me? Click here.

Tonga - Sadly not in the article mentioned or anywhere else on the internet was I able to find any pertinent information on the use of baby walkers in the kingdom of Tonga. Is it any wonder their population is declining?

In light of all this, I can't see us buying Meryl a walker even if they are still legal in the United States. I suffer enough parental guilt thanks to the slew of baby guides and unsolicted advice I get from well-meaning strangers in the grocery store. I don't want to add to my burden. I'm sure she'll learn to walk one of these days, and in the meantime she'll just have to be happy sitting on the floor chewing on carinogen-filled plush toys while Daddy wrestles with the frayed Christmas tree lights.

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