hipster's blog

Like, 10 1/2 months. Word y'all - Dominator here. Figured since Dad has become the World's Laziest Blogger, I'd drop a little holiday cheer on your grown-up arses. Not that he has any readers left ('cept you, Grandma, much love to my midwest homies). I mean, what's with the unannounced blog hiatus? He'd probably say raising me is a full time job and he's got no time to blog. Whatever. I'm probably the lowest maintenance kid ever - that ain't it.

 

Here's the real deal...he "discovered" Facebook. A real Dad-gellan, I tell you. Friggin' Pops de Leon of the Internet age. Always loading dorky new apps, friending about, attacking vampires. Snore.

 

Anyway, did a little Xmas photoshoot this morning and thought I'd bless you all with one of my pics. The rest were shoddy (photog was a total amateur).

 

Seasons greetings.

 

 

Peace out,

Dom

 

INSTRUCTIONS: Select five people to tag; those people must then go forth and copy on their own blogs:

1.       Kristan

2.       ChuckDaddy

3.       PinkHobbit

4.       DeeDub

5.       FXS

What were you doing 10 years ago?
Exactly ten years and eight days ago I moved to Portland from West Lafayette. Slept on a twin mattress on a friend's living room floor (and did so for eight months thereafter). Interviewed at a local temp agency called Adams & Associates, the first one listed in yellow pages; they wanted to place me as an administrative clerk at their top client, "Waggener Edstrom," some little tech PR agency in town I'd never heard of. I said sure.  

What were you doing 1 year ago?
Lying on a beach in Antibes, in the French Riviera, on my honeymoon. Enjoying food, wine, culture and time with my new wife. And freedom.

Five snacks you enjoy:

1.       Spreadable swiss cheese.  

2.       Ghetto bread.

3.       Pistachios.

4.       Haagen Daz rocky road.

5.       Trail mix.

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to:

1.       Name your butt rock song, esp. anything by GnR.

2.       Pink Floyd Dark Side (all).

3.       Most songs from the Wizard of Oz and Grease (No apologies, my mom made us watch both every year growing up.)

4.       Baby Einstein (no lyrics, but I have the f'ing music drilled into my head - trust me. What does it mean when you actually start enjoying it?)

5.       Suspicious Minds, Elvis.  

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

1.       Relive my honeymoon every year, only on the Amalfi Coast in Italy.

2.       Do pro bono PR for Laughing Cow, maker of spreadable swiss cheese.

3.       Work less.

4.       Buy the Cubs.  

5.       Give some of it away, most likely to the Autism Society and MAWF.

Five bad habits:

1.       Overt coolness.

2.       Unparalleled modesty.

3.       Speeding.

4.       Interrupting.

5.       Blogging.

Five things you like doing:

1.       Music.

2.       Cleaning (no shit). 

3.       Convincing people of their wrongness.  

4.       Movies.

5.       Reading.

Five things you would never wear again:

1.       Mullet.

2.       GnR concert tees.

3.       Braided belt looped up, under and down.

4.       A watch.

5.       Chuck Taylors. 

Five favorite toys:

1.       PC.

2.       Snowboard.

3.       Doorway jumper.

4.       XBox 360 (when operational).

5.       iPod.  

For the sad departure of Fake Steve Jobs from this world. Simply the funniest blog ever. The NY Times got him. He will be missed.

 

FXS: did you know all along?  

Dump Michael Vick now. I promise to never buy another piece of Nike merchandise until you do. Dog fighting? Fuck that.

I just caught wind that Mark Cuban applied to buy my beloved Cubbies. Oh, what a great thing this would be - the guy spends whatever it takes to build a winner, and, unlike the NBA, there's no salary cap*. We'd have a WS team probably in two years. Fingers, toes, eyes crossed.

 

*Just watch the league scramble to "re-think" not having a salary cap if this goes through. Cuban's estimated net worth is $1.8b, so he'd easily be able to compete with the AL's $200m payrolls.

 

 

Just started my 12-week parental leave from work, and to kick things off Carrie and I fed Dom real food for the first time last night. Rice cereal and formula. Delish.

 

See some of the action below...

 

 

Opening credits roll as we fade into a bright, sunny, mild spring day in Portland, Oregon. Our main character had just finished with some yard work and had adjourned to his PC to fix his broken internet connection. Part of the tedium, of course, is shutting down his computer - we join him here. It was the moment in the day when sunlight was directly on the window to his right, shrouded in white curtains.

 

His loud and rickety old 2001 Gateway stubbornly closes down, and rather than the moment's usual silence, our guy hears a steadily increasing buzz in his midst...

(zzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...)

 

Curious, he looks down at his computer to make sure it was really off. It was.

 

He looks to the windows to his right. On the curtains appears the shadow of what seems like hundreds of flying insects. Alarm sets in.

 

Cautiously he opens the curtain. GASP! A giant cloud of angry bees hover inches away on the other side of the window pane. Some crawling inches from his nose, trying desperately to find their way into the room - presumably to devour our hero.

 

He immediately jumps out of his chair, stumbles backwards and runs to the adjacent room to get a safer view, hoping his eyes are deceiving him. They are not. Well, actually, they deceived him the wrong way - there were in fact THOUSANDS of bees swarming against the front side of his house.

 

He pushes aside his panic to think (think goddammit, think!). He calls his father in law in hopes he'll have the answer. He does not. All he can recommend is opening the yellow pages to call a beekeeper.

 

"FUCK!" our hero thinks to himself.  (note: The hero and his wife, being the progressive internet-age yuppies they are, haven't owned an actual phone book in years. With search engines capable of rendering results in seconds, there's no need for such analog things as phone books. Unless...)

 

That's right, the internet connection is broken. What now? All kinds of insane ideas run through his mind: go find a bottle of Raid? Baracade all exits? Pack up the family and move to safe harbor?

 

The moment quickens, the plot thickens. The dog barks. His PC is dead. This was it. His moment had come, he was sure of it. He looked up to the heavens and asked for a miracle.

 

And then it came to him, as if spoken by God himself - "you fool! Your PHONE'S internet connection is still active!" Desperate, and at the brink of death by a thousand bee stings, he pulls up his mobile browser and punches in the search term "beekeeping portland, or"

 

First result: Portland Beekeeping Association - including phone numbers for everyone on its leadership team!

 

He dials the president's number. It rings. And rings. And rings. And then - another miracle - someone answers: "Hi, you've reached the Smith residence, please leave a message..."

 

He hangs up, nearly defeated. Who in their right mind would actually be available on a sunny, warm, mild spring day in Portland, OR?

 

He has reached his last resort. He dials the vice president - a fella named Pete. It rings twice and then there's an answer. A human. A woman. Mustering every ounce of courage and dignity, he asks for "Pete the beekeeper."

 

"Let me guess - a swarm at your house?"

 

"Yes, how did you know?"

 

"You're the third person to call in three weeks. It's happening a lot right now."

 

Embarrassed yet restored of a sense of calm, he asks if there's any way Peter could come over real quick and and help us out.

 

No, she says, he's out trying to get a swarm in Sellwood right now. But she will surely pass along the message and he'll call back just as soon as he can.

 

He thanks her defeatedly, and with beads of sweat forming on his forehead, he hangs up. He decides it's time to face the villain head-on. He puts on his shoes and heads outside through the back door.

 

The swarm had formed into a concentrated ball of madness just above his computer room window. With a sense of horror he now knew what he was up against - the ball of bees was roughly 18 inches in diameter, comprising about 5000 bees. All madly trying to penetrate the surge and find the Queen, who was busy somewhere in the depths of a gutter, building her nest and emitting the irresistible pheremone that had led them all here.

 

The phone rings suddenly. An unknown caller. "Hhhhelllo..?"

 

"Hi, is this John? It's Pete. I understand you have a swarm?"

 

(Fade in Coldplay's "I Will Fix You" to accompany a montage scene) Our hero hangs up with a deep breath of relief. Pete arrives, gets everything set up, dons his beekeeper get-up. Climbs a ladder and sweeps half the bees into a bucket. Pete doesn't get the Queen, and isn't sure where she is, so he sets a trap that will surely draw her and the others in by night's end.

 

Roll credits to Queen's "We are the Champions." 

 

With only minor embellishments, this is a true story. It all happened today. The Queen's still at large, so there's still a couple thousand bees balled up above my head on the other side of the wall. Pete's coming back tonight to get the rest of 'em. So far none have come into our house, which is good because Carrie's allergic and Dom could be too.

 

I'm including a picture of the bee ball below.

 

Anyway, this is my story. If the money's right I'll gladly sell this script to whichever studio wants it.

 

 

The final countdown is on, and if tonight's episode is any indication, it's going to be a thrilling ride. Chase & co. wrote/directed Johnny Sac's demise beautifully, was such a powerful symbol in an episode laced with references to waning legacies, mortality and the struggle for redemption. The diner scene was derivative, sure, but the crew's shooting of the sequence was extremely intelligent and cool.  And hey, if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

 

Pins and needles over here.

I spent August-September of 1997, when I was unemployed and new to Oregon, reading every novel Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote. Was a great summer. He will be missed.

 

HGv6 - top 5 Vonnegut novels

 

1. Cat's Cradle

2. Slaughterhouse Five

3. Deadeye Dick

4. Breakfast of Champions

5. Player Piano

 

What do you think?

 

UPDATE: NPR had a great tribute to Vonnegut Thursday night, with comments from other American writers. John Irving mentioned something Vonnegut said to him once - "He hated semicolons. He called them hermaphrodites." What a great line.

...ever since the previous post about Hillary Clinton's vote and her refusal to own up to the giant, awful mistake it was. Is it understandable that future political aspirations motivated votes by Clinton, John Edwards, Harry Reid and other democrat leaders? Should we be ok with it? The conversation boiled over in my head tonight when I heard a radio report about the shanigans going on in Washington between Congress and the Oval Office, each grandstanding their indignation in a silly political power struggle. It all strikes me as shameful.

 

Told a co-worker about a flight home from Portland to Indiana five years ago, when I happened to be seated next to a woman who was heading back to see her brother off to Iraq for his tour. She was in her mid-forties, and she told me he was pushing 50. 50 and going to Iraq. I don't know the rules/age limit for sending soldiers to war, and frankly I can't remember the exact circumstances that led to his being called up to fight. I suspect he'd enlisted in the Reserves some time ago and was nearing the end of his obligation when, as damn bad luck would have it, his number came up. The president's men created a phantom war and the cowards in Congress approved it. A 50-year-old person with a life and family gets shipped out. Pretty jarring to say the least.

 

A few days later, before boarding my flight back to Portland, I was sitting in Indianapolis International nearby a gate where several young soldiers were also waiting to board - they were all dressed in Army standard issue desert fatigues, minutes from shipping out to Iraq. One fella caught my eye - some tall, lean, young kid (I'd guess 18 or 19) standing apart from the group, hunched over with arms draped around his wife or girlfriend, trying to fight the urge to break down sobbing. Eventually he lost the fight. Head buried in her shoulder trying to muffle his outburst, both of them tearful and shaking. It was one of those moments where you wanted to just stand up and shout, why is this happening? what the hell is this for?! 

 

This is probably the moment that solidified my view of the war. I had always had philosophical issues - considered it an amazingly illogical response to 9/11 - but these two experiences reminded me this was not a philosophical thing, it was a real thing involving real people, many of whom would die. 50 and 18, with sisters and girlfriends. The wrong war. Not noble or moral and, as we now know, ineffective and damaging.

 

President Bush, Clinton, Edwards, 75 other senators and 296 members of congress should not be given a pass for voting in favor of the war. There are a few things that, naive as it it may sound to cynics, should always supercede politics. For instance, a decision over whether to send teenagers and baby boomers into battle to die. The first questions should not be, "how does my vote impact my political future?" or "will I appear weak?".  It should be "could I send my son or daughter, brother or sister into this fight and live with myself? Is this worth their lives?"

 

And then, "do the ends justify the means?" and "what outcome do we want and are we ready to achieve it?"

 

In short, I guess the answer to whether I'm ok with a senator protecting her political future by voting in the affirmative remains...absolutely, positively, 100% no.

 

 

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton is going more hard-line in her unapology for voting to support the Iraq war. To wit:

So the AMA has launched a campaign to get Hollywood to assign 'R' ratings to films featuring characters who smoke. It's kinda funny to envision what would happen if their new standard was applied retroactively.

 

Tom, of Tom & Jerry fame, was known to light up from time to time. I heard Wilma Flinstone had an on screen smoke too once. Re-file them under adult anime?

 

David Straithairn smoked maybe 10 packs in Good Night & Good Luck. By AMA standards, we'd prolly have to call this otherwise PG-rated movie...NC-17? 

 

A&E's "Intervention" is one of the more powerful TV programs on earth. It regularly shows kids and adults shooting up, whoring themselves, vomiting etc. The subjects also routinely smoke. Re-list it on the Spice Channel?

 

Two daytime sitcom legends, Greg Brady and Kelly Kapowski, both confronted smoking (one tobacco, the other pot) in very special episodes of the Brady Bunch and Saved by the Bell. Would the AMA cast that to late late night TV, shown simultaneously with unedited Comedy Central movies and the Girls Gone Wild commercials?

 

You get the idea. Smoking in movies causes kids to smoke like video games teach kids to kill and music to do drugs. I hear they're also considering going back and editing movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's so the mindless viewers aren't seduced by Audrey Hepburn's irresitible cancer drags. What, pray tell, would the AMA have her hold instead? A chicken flauta?

 

Speaking of which, considering the "epidemic" that obesity is becoming in the US, should we expect the AMA's next frontier to be getting R ratings for movies that glamorize eating? Would Big Night and Water for Chocolate be hard-core porn in the AMA's world?

 

AMA: get back to driving up health care costs. You have no place in pop culture.

 

@$!#$!!

 

-Dom

So Mom and Dad put all these clothes on me this morning and take me off to see the doctor for my first check up (nailed it). It's all yuppie kid brown and rainbow and whatnot, with a matching hat. They squeeled. Me, I was pretty annoyed - too many layers that were too constrictive, and the baby seat strap is uncomfortably situated, if you get my meaning.

 

Making matters worse, they put a cookie-on-a-stick in my hand and snap a picture. Take a look - do I seem happy? Note to mom and dad: 1) I'm always hungry, 2) I can't eat solids, 3) putting a cookie next to my head when I'm hungry, and then taking a picture for your own amusement is full-on bologna.

 

We'll see who laughing when I launch a three-phase attack on my diaper around 3 AM. And again at 4.

 

Peace out,

Dom

 

 

Hi everyone. I'm Dominic, son of "hipster." Dad is feeling a wee tired and asked me to fill in for today's update. He's tired? Just four days ago, without any reason whatsoever, these knuckleheads went and turned my world upside down (or, more accurately, right side up since...well, you get it). I was just floating there all warm and snuggly, getting food through a direct link with that Mom person, and they went and cut her open and yanked me out naked as the day I was, um...

 

Anyway. Felt it was a good opportunity to drop a note to everyone to say thanks for all the friendly comments to Dad's post below - turns out I am damn cute, and it's a testament to readers' sharp eyes and intellects to say so. Please, go on you wise and wonderful old people.

 

Now then, I hate to be pessimistic but it's been a helluva few days. First my blood sugar drops right after the harrowing incident described above, then they take me to the nursery and stick tubes in my hand and start pricking my foot every couple of hours. Top it off, Dad was constantly coming in and staring at me as I tried to sleep. Goes like this - I'm sleeping, Dad walks in, I ignore the laser gaze for a few minutes, and then, sure as I'm typing this, he leans in and kisses me with that coffee breath of his. I mean, it's like he's never seen a baby before. Yeah, the glucose count is stabilizing, whoop-dee-dum, how's about we celebrate by letting a baby get some sleep without ol' stubbleface-coffee-guzzler bugging me at 1 AM?

 

At least Mom's around. She's gone through prolly more insanity than me these last few days - to recap, they pump her full of who-knows-what, make her stew for a day, make her use all the energy she's got left to push me out, and then perform major abdominal surgery because my mellon's too big. And yet she dutifully wakes up every two hours to feed me. I really love that. Best part is she still smiles and seems to enjoy herself, even when I'm hammering her with defcon 1 shrieks and shakes. Ah, what a great woman.

 

So back to the point, we're still here in the hospital resting up. Good news is I'm in Mom's room now, finally out of that godforbidden nursery. I'm feeling good, everything's in working order, the nurses have stopped their persistent jabbing, and now it's all about sleeping and feeding before we head home tomorrow.

 

All in all, the 'rents look happy and tired. I'm pretty whipped too, I'm hungry and my toosh just made that weird gurgling sound again. I have to go. Thanks again for all the well wishes, look forward to meeting you all soon.

 

Peace out,

Dom

Early this morning our son, Dominic Joseph, was born. He is pretty big (9 lbs 5 oz) and very tall (22.5 inches). He got his dad's frame and his mom's adorable face - perfect all around. He comes to us after roughly 22 hours of labor and, ultimately, a c-section to get him across the finish line. I've posted the first two pics of our little man to your right.

 

Mom and son are healthy, happy and exhausted. They've gone through Hades these last couple of days. My happiness is mixed with a heavier cut of relief - it's amazing to go through the process, and extremely humbling to be powerless over it.

 

Anyway, the news is great from NE P-town. Much more to come, including more baby pics we took with a real camera.

 

Cheers!

That Boise St. victory was maybe the greatest bowl game ever. The hook-and-ladder to send it to overtime, the brilliant decision to go for two (Oklahoma was repeatedly baffled by Boise State's play calls), the perfectly executed statue of liberty to seal it. Wow. Brains almost always beats braun, and Stoops got plain out smarted all game long. So amazing.

 

So take heart, Ducks, Beavs, Cougs and Huskies. Glad one program didn't find a way to embarrass the region. Maybe some day your program can be as good as BSU's. Or maybe not.