Half right

Tanya and John are in town with their little girl Elle. She is a real cutie.

Miss Sally keeps predicting that she is having a boy. We both would like a girl to complete the set.

It seems that 95% of the people that want to talk about the sex of our upcoming child have some secret knowledge into what the sex of our child will be. Here are the criteria that these child sex experts have brought up:

How low the baby is
If the belly button is in or out
If the mother's butt got fat
If the mother is craving meat
If the mother is craving sweets
If the mother has let a metal object swing above her wrist and if it circles or swings back and forth.
If the belly is sticking out or rounded
If


*********

OK, that's as far with that post as I got. Before I could finish, we had the breaking of water and so on and so forth.

As you know, we had a girl. And as predicted, 50% of the people who guessed were incorrect.

I've always loved the statistic that 50% of American women are below average while half of all American men are above average.

It's good to be half right, 50% of the time. It's better to be half wrong, 100% of the time.

Baby Ann



Baby Ann Marie was born August 27th at 6:10pm. Five pounds, seven ounces. Nineteen inches long.

Baby and Miss Sally are doing very, very well.

Here are some photos on FLICKR

We've replaced your regular article with a photo of a gay guy

I got caught up writing about something else and now I don’t like where it went. So instead of reading five pages of drivel, please take a look at the following photo:



I believe this was an attempt by my previous employer to meet and exceed the quota for affirmative action. The guy you see in this photo was:

black
gay
bald
and he stuttered

If he would have been a chick, we would have received an award.

It doesn’t count for affirmative action, but the guy was also not that smart. At least he made some very bad judgment calls. Lucky for us, the guy last strawed, was let go and we hired Lacey.

The other person in the photo is Anne. She is the cat's coffee. She is the corn on the tinternet. She puts the crazy in crazy crazy. And I'm realizing that I miss her.

Elevator Terror

My co-worker, Angie, got a phone call from her very distraught mother. Here is her mother’s tale:

Angie’s mom walked into her office building and to the elevator on the first floor. Her mom is in her late 50’s so she is familiar with technologies such as the phone and the elevator. Being familiar with the elevator, she pushed the button and got in. She pushed another button to go up. A second after the doors shut and the elevator started going up, the elevator jerked to a stop.

She waited for a bit. No movement. She did what all normal people do and tried pushing all the buttons that weren’t red. Numbers. Open door. Close door. (I don’t know why she even tried those as they don’t work anyways.) All the normal buttons did nothing so she hit the red EMERGENCY button. It was the type that makes a ringing sound when you press it, but stops making the ringing sound when you stop pressing it. A doorbell for people who think they are going to starve to death. She hit it again and again for longer and longer amounts of time, but no handsome fireman’s voice came through the neatly drilled holes in the stainless steel.

Time passes.

She was getting worried. Then she noticed the phone in the little glass booth. She was familiar with that technology.

There were no numbers to dial, so she put the phone to her ear. It was ringing. A woman answered. Something like, “Otis emergency elevator service. How can I help you?”

What do you say in situation like that? Me? I’d joke around about sending up a pizza or that they’d better hurry because the elevator was filling with water and piranhas. Basically, you give them the address of the building and tell them you are stuck. It would probably make them happy not to get a prank call.

What did Angie’s mom say?

“I’m sorry. I have the wrong number.” And hung up.

After this, she started to get panicky. And what does a woman in her 50s do when she is stuck in an elevator with no food or water and gets panicky? Why, with the strength of 80 drunken men she wedged her fingers in between the elevator doors and ripped them open! She then put her fingers between the outer doors and ripped them open! The elevator was about 18” above the first floor so she got on her hands and knees and climbed out of the elevator and flopped (the ungracious kind of flop) out on to the 1st floor. A co-worker was the solitary witness to the floppage. He had heard the emergency bell and called for help.

Why hadn’t the help arrived?

Because between the button pushing and the emergency button pushing and the phone calling and the panicking, she had been stuck in the elevator for a total of five minutes.

Perhaps elevators distort time. When the doors shut, time speeds up on the inside while remaining constant on the outside. Different elevators have different levels of time distortion based on how stinky the elevator is and who is in it with you. When I had sex in an elevator, it seemed like hours, but when we got out, only a few minutes had passed.

Angie’s mom made it out with nothing more than a bruised psyche. I have not asked Angie how many days her mom took the stairs until she got over her fear of that elevator.

Shorty.... OUT!

We all knew it. No one wanted to say anything. Finally someone did and then it was a Who concert stampede of agreement. Shorty was, in his secret life, Lance Bass. How a Dayton native could grow to receive so much fame was beyond our reasoning, but yet he did. He kept the media circus to a minimum and some how was able to tour and hold down a design job while spending 12 hours a day at DeFabCo while painting Gaelic designs on refrigerators.

Of course, there were rumors. Questions. Elle magazine subscriptions. We all, once again, began to wonder how the fame would go to his loins. Shorty would spend a lot of time at choir practices and The Columbus Men's Origami functions. We knew the news would break... we just didn't know how big it would break. PEOPLE magazine came out with the story. We still love you Lance/Shorty. Just now it the other 50% of us that are more frightened.



Thanks for breaking the news Meshell

Greg the Psychic Artist

I asked our household psychic to help us find the murderer of JonBenet. He drew the following sketch to assist the Boulder police in locating the murderer.



Clearly you can see the drawing of a one finned porpoise. Inside that animal is a street level map of Leadville, CO. There are also two hieroglyphics representing toilet and forge.

The porpoise is winking.

Our analyses of the drawing are probably the exact same ones that you have derived from the sketch:

1. Porpoises are fish that breathe air
2. Leadville, CO once had the 12th largest Jewish community in Colorado
3. The two symbols together can be roughly translated to John-Smith.
4. Porpoises do not have maps on their insides, but have been known to swallow fish sized globes.
5. Do not trust winking porpoises

Here is what can be surmised from the drawing:

The father did it.

The psychic may also have been influenced by me asking him to draw a picture of mommy with baby in her belly. This is still being investigated.

Sorry


I’m as guilty as the 97% of everyone else who thought the family was involved. I just like to place my blame on the media.

**Please note: I woke up this morning and decided that I think this guy is lying. It was just dusting of doubt over my brain. Since then, more tidbits of information have started coming out about this realy scary dude. I'll withhold my judgement until the DNA tests come back.

I guess I'll need to edit my little drawing.

The rPiec... iecPr... riceP... Prcie.. PPPPP is Right!

If you have five minutes to kill, please watch the following clip from the Price Is Right. Some say this girl is an idiot. I like to believe she is a savant.



I love how Bob sits down at the end.

Fat Cats Pizza is dead to me

“The only way to hurt a man who has lost everything is to give him back something broken." – Thomas Covenant

There was a survey on FARK a few days ago about where readers thought the best pizza in the world was. Everyone had their hometown favorite. My hometown favorite was Fat Cat Pizza in Lancaster, OH. “Was” is the word that puts the anchovies in that sentence.



We started picking up Fat Cat Pizza around 1979. They wouldn’t deliver out to our house out in the country so we had to drive through the bad side of town, the West Side, to get it. They had the BEST freaking pizza. The crust was thin and crisp. The sauce…(Here’s where I realize I am not a food critic nor am I keen to taste adjectives. Let’s just say it was great pizza.)

There was a Fat Cat’s West and a Fat Cat’s East. Rumor had it that a happily married pizza business couple became unhappy and split the family business, as well as the town of Lancaster, in half. The wife took Fat Cat’s West and hubby, Fat Cat’s East. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she had a dog named Bear.

My brother started working at Fat Cat around 1983. My sister in 1985. I started in 1986. It was a family affair. You’d go in at either 4 or 5 and work until midnight. The dough was made in the morning and allowed to rise in wheeled, Rubbermaid trash cans. You would grab a ball of it and throw it in the flattening machine. A toss here and there and then on to the pie pan. There was some hand held, mid-evil torture device made from plastic that put dents in the dough. Add sauce, cheese and toppings. Into the oven you witch! Ta da, magically a cooked pizza came out the other side. In the box and cut it into squares with the giant, stainless steel scythe. In between pizzas there was time to fold boxes and drink free pop out of flour coated mason jars. What a job.

Then three-a-days started with Coach Redmen in football and I pussied out. I couldn’t keep up with going from 6am practices through midnight making pizzas. So I quit Fat Cat Pizza.

I didn’t quit eating it though. In my opinion, nothing beats a pepperoni/mushroom. I dreamed of it in Alaska and wrote about it in my journal when Acton and I went to Europe. At family gatherings we would always get Fat Cat’s the night before turkey. If you were late, dad would heat up slices in the oven. If you were really late, the microwave.

Now I live in Columbus and Fat Cat’s is still within reach. If I drive down, I can order it from the car and pick it up right as it comes out of the oven. It would still be warm when I got it home, but half of it would get devoured in the car. Corners first and eat inward.

Greg had a party recently. We went out to the Lancaster bars. I left my credit card at one. The perfect excuse to go back to Lancaster and get Fat Cat’s. The following Monday I drove down. I ordered. Picked-up. I was eating a corner within three minutes on the way back to Columbus…

And something was horribly, horribly wrong. The crust was different. Some kind of French bread crap. It was slightly thicker and had a taste that was not Fat Cat’s. The sauce was the same as well as the pepperoni and the mushrooms, but the combination of flavors was not Fat Cat’s. I kept eating squares, hoping that something would change. Nothing did. Doug wept.

I immediately called a few friends. I finally tracked down one that corroborated my taste buds. He had it a few weeks ago and it tasted different to him too. It was true. And an era was over.

Farewell Fat Cat’s.

Author’s note: I haven’t done it yet, but please feel free to call Fat Cat’s at 740-687-1966 and voice my displeasure. Tell them HolyJuan is pissed.

Photo Spots

I don’t appreciate the Disney parks as much as I should. Didn’t make it there until I was 29 and by then I was looking at how the fake rock was sculpted and where the electronics were hidden. I’ve never had the opportunity to think it was real and that Mickey wasn’t actually just a 19 year old aspiring actor who was two years from finding out that he is gay.

My favorite part about the parks are the Photo Spots. In case you are not smart enough to figure out that the huge Chinese gateway or the monolithic statue are a good place to snap a photo of Uncle Bob, Disney helps you out by posting a sign telling you that it is.

Here’s a photo of Bill at Epcot and a photo of me at somewhere that is not Epcot.