Heard on my deck earlier tonight during pumpkin carving

“No, in fact, it is not a rotten spot. It is an exit wound.”

Polite company

“Sweetie, know what we’re gonna do tomorrow night?”

“No, Mommy — what?”

“We’re gonna carve pumpkins!”

“YAY! And scoop out the — “

“P-p-p-p-”

“I can’t remember.”

“The pulp.”

“Yeah, the pulp.”

“Good night, sweetie.”

“Good night, Mommy.”

(door closes)

“Hey, sweetie?”

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“You know what another word for pulp is?”

“No.”

“Pumpkin guts!”

(giggles) “Pumpkin guts?”

“Yup, pumpkin guts. Now, that’s not the kind of thing you want to say around other grownups or polite people. Around them you want to call it ‘pulp.’”

“OK.”

“But if it’s just you and me, you can call it pumpkin guts if you want.”

“OK, Daddy.”

“Goodnight, sweetie. I love you.”

“Goodnight, Daddy Pumpkin-Guts.”

Serpent’s tooth, meet my skin

Hooper: “Daddy, turn on music.”

Me: “OK, buddy.” (singing along) “Tell me you will try/To slip away somehow/’Cause I need you, darlin’/I want to see you right now.”

Hooper: “No, Daddy!”

Me (singing along): “Can you slip away/Slip away/Slip away-ay-ay-ay ah,/I need you so.”

Hooper: “No, Daddy! Hurts my ears!”

Me: “What?? Buddy, people actually used to pay your daddy money to sing to them. Granted, most of ‘em were higher ‘n paper kites, but still.”

Hooper: “No, Daddy! You make my ears sad!”

Me (sighs): “OK, buddy. I won’t sing anymore.”

Hmph.

Hee

When passive-aggressive drivers go bad.

Battered but unbowed

The Tigers played their best game of the season on Saturday … and still got killed.

The other team wasn’t particularly good, with one exception who was phenomenal: a little girl, even shorter than Victoria (who’s the shortest girl on her team), who had more speed and better ball-control skills than anyone else on the field. In fact, I think she could’ve been competitive with 9-year-olds.

I know for a fact that there’s only one other person I’ve seen execute a 135-degree cut with the speed and grace she showed … and that was the late Walter Payton.

I think the final score was 9-3, and this girl scored seven of the other team’s goals. Victoria had a goal, and if soccer recognizes assists, then she had assists on the other two. She also made some stellar defensive plays, including at least two that prevented goals, and was the only Tiger who could even come close to keeping up with the other team’s little star’s breakaways.

Hard to believe, but the last game of the season is this Saturday. Memie will be here for it. Note to self: This time, let’s remember to bring the camera.

Something special?

I’m pleased that the Panthers beat the Saints on Sunday, of course. But I’m even more pleased that the team did something I’ve never known it to do: It played a not-so-good game and still managed to beat a not-bad-at-all opponent.

Whose child is he again?

How sweet is my 2 1/2-year-old son? I’ll tell you how sweet he is:

Ann was in bed with a bad cold. He figured that if he likes to have a ceiling fan on when he’s in bed, she might, too. So he goes to big sister’s room, drags the chair from her desk into our room, climbs up on it and turns on our ceiling fan.

He must’ve gotten all that nice from me because Ann still has hers.

Dear America

Army Sgt. Garth Talbott of the 82nd Airborne has written a letter home in which he asks some good questions.

Sushi, or she sues

Sushi is in the news this week. Rather, it shows up in two stories that are really about something else and might be far more related than just the involvement of raw fish.

First, there’s the meticulously researched sushi memo, in which a paralegal at a high-dollar Manhattan law firm prepares advice for a lawyer on where to go for good raw tuna. The lawyer apparently had ordered up the research after getting a bad order of takeout.

“This is what people fear,” said an associate at another law firm, speaking generally and anonymously out of fear of partner retribution. “It’s some sense of arbitrary, dictatorial relationship that we all fear goes on between bosses and their underlings. People really do make people do these things.”

I seriously doubt I’ll ever become a lawyer, but if I ever do and ask a paralegal — or anyone else, for that matter — to do something this ridiculous, someone please smack me.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles (where else?), the hottest catering trend is body sushi, “a very special presentation during which pieces of sushi [are] served on the mostly naked prone* body of a very lovely young model.”

*I’m pretty sure, to judge from this picture, that the writer meant “supine,” which means face-up. “Prone” means face-down, although it’s frequently used to refer to any lying-down position. I know this because when I used to target-shoot, I shot from the “prone” position. I was not allowed, despite repeated entreaties, to shoot from the supine position, and I’m still kind of bitter about that, but that’s a post for another day.

But both the subject and the article say it’s not about sex. Really:

First of all, [chef Gary] Arabia points out that the photo does not in anyway truly capture the tenor of the event. And it’s true that even the most benign photos can take on a pornographic cast when viewed on the Internet — something about the lighting. Body sushi, Arabia says, must be considered in context. “This is a celebration of beauty and food and environment,” he says, leaning over a plate of very delicious crab cakes in his restaurant on the Warner Bros. lot in Hollywood. “It is about the beauty of the food and the beauty of the woman. This is not a bachelor party experience.”

I doubt that, but more on that in a moment.

The story doesn’t say how much the model gets paid for her 3-hour gig, but I’ve got to wonder whether it’s enough: The job seems to combine an exquisitely distasteful combination of physical discomfort and spiritual debasement in the form of public humiliation:

A sushi girl is required to lie perfectly still for three hours. There is a pillow for her head and she may speak to guests if she wishes, but mostly she has to concentrate on steady breathing and other muscle control.

Arabia stresses that in body sushi, the food is the star. But looking at the photos Arabia has in his portfolio, which are similar to the one on his Web site, it is difficult to keep one’s mind on the food. I found myself contemplating the often unpredictable nature of the human body and its many necessary but unappetizing biological duties (the “other muscle control” referred to above). Three hours seems an awfully long time to impersonate a piece of dinnerware, even with great abs. One also wonders where exactly “body sushi girl” fits in on the resume or if the full nature of the young woman’s job description has been relayed to her mother.

For crying out loud, if you’re going to take off your clothes and put food all over yourself, shouldn’t it be fun? I say let’s keep getting-nekkid-and-being-covered-in-raw-food behind the bedroom door, where it belongs.

Bzzzzzzz

It probably won’t be up much longer, but this e-commerce site set up by a biz-school classmate of Ann’s as a class project is pretty cool. I’ve got a bit of javascript that does something similar with my computer’s day/date settings.

UPDATE: This one is pretty entertaining, too.

Protect your right to vote

(UPDATE: I was going to be keeping this post up top, but permalinks are more important.)

For the first and probably only time in this blog’s history, I’m going to try to sell you something. But what I’m selling is so important that I’m also going to tell you how you can get it for free.

It’s a book, “Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century,” by Bev Harris. The book documents that so-called “touch-screen” electronic voting machines, far from being our means of delivery from the ballot screwups of the 2000 election, are far less reliable than their makers claim and are so insecure as to make possible vote fraud on an unprecedented scale. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past couple of millennia, it’s that if a system can be rigged, it will be.

The book documents many, many performance problems with the machines. It explains why they are not secure — and how the makers knew this fact but sold them as reliable anyway. It documents how security procedures supposedly in place to ensure the security and reliability of voting machines aren’t being followed. It explores the conflicts of interest among many of the voting-machine makers’ owners and executives. And it offers solutions to these problems — but because voting machines are typically purchased by elections officials at the state or county level, it will take a true grass-roots effort to educate these officials so that they’ll do the right thing to protect your right to vote and to have your vote counted.

Full disclosure: I edited the book (and am so credited within it), as a freelance project, with the prior knowledge and permission of my employer. As a consequence, of course, I’m recusing myself from any coverage of the issue by my employer. I’ve been a registered Republican for 25 years, but this is not a partisan issue and the book doesn’t treat it as one except in cases in which party membership is directly relevant to actual or potential conflicts of interest. Also, for every copy of the paperback that sells, I’m going to get a little spare change.

But the author, the publisher and I agreed that the information it contains is so important, and the need to disseminate the information widely so great, that the book also is being made available for download (in *.pdf format), for free. No charge. I don’t get paid that way, but as you’ve probably figured out by now, none of us is in this for the money.

The paperback will be available from the publisher (www.plan9.org), Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other outlets. But you can download several chapters now, for free, at www.blackboxvoting.com, with more chapters to come. (Note: Bev’s previous site, www.blackboxvoting.ORG, was shut down; the .com site replaces it.)

Our political discourse has become so polarized and poisoned in the past 40 years or so that sometimes it’s hard to remember that there are still a few issues on which all of us, regardless of party, ought to be able to agree. The sanctity of the vote has got to be at the top of the list, because without that, nothing much else in our politics matters.

So whether you buy the book or download it, please get a copy, educate yourself and tell all your friends, and then get into the faces of your local elections officials. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of our political system depends upon it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

My daughter’s having her first slumber party Saturday night.

Love story

Julia of Tequila Mockingbird tells one exceedingly well. It’s about a ring, but of course it’s not really about the ring.

Higher Lower learning

Forthwith, the lyrics to “Baby Got Back.” In Latin. (Thanks to Nancy Nall.)

Yeah, baby

Carolina Panthers 23, Indianapolis Colts 20, OT.

Other Panthers teams would’ve found a way to lose a big, close game like this. This year’s Panthers find a way to win. This team could be turning into something special.