God Has No Friends

I am totally going to be on the lookout for the Fake Jesus Church now.

Actually, the True Jesus was establised in 1917 and founded by Jesus Christ, according to their website. Which made me think I should check and see what else Jesus has been up to. It turns out he's on Facebook and has 366 friends. Way to go Jesus!

I also thought I'd check up to see if the Big Guy has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon too. Turns out he has! Except, God has no friends. Which is kind of sad. But also just goes to show you who must be busier these days.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar – A Very Short Review of a Very Short Book.

This book is short. Very short. You know a book is short when it needs cardboard pages to plump things up so that the buyer does not feel like they’re getting ripped off. I suppose it is slightly more subtle than increasing the font size to 78. With 222 words and a price of about $11, The Very Hungry Caterpillar will cost you about 5 cents per word. At that rate, you would have to pay $12,852 for the Harry Potter book the Order of the Phoenix.

On to the story though. (Or lack thereof. While I acknowledge this is a children’s book, still a little bit of plot would go a long way)

Our little hero, aptly named A Very Hungry Caterpillar (seriously, you couldn’t give the caterpillar a name? I mean there, are only like a bazillion caterpillars out there. Oh wait, maybe it’s a clever device to make the book an every caterpillar story).

Very Hungry Caterpillar spends the first five days of his life eating fruit. Which if you’ve ever been a Very Hungry Person, you know isn’t going to cut the cake, that you so very much want. So, on the 6th day, Very Hungry Caterpillar says fuck it and starts eating cake. All right, he doesn’t actually say fuck it, because that would be two more words and would probably really tire out the author, but it’s implied people, implied.

He doesn’t stop at the cake though and goes on to have some salami, cherry pie and many other assorted items which leads me to think that our Very Hungry Caterpillar has a Very Big Eating Disorder. My suspicions are confirmed when on the next cardboard page, he eats through one green leaf and feels much better. Oh, Very Hungry Caterpillar! Don’t do it! A lifetime, which in your case is ora month, of bulimia and anorexia is just not worth it.

(Spoiler alert)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar then predictably goes on to get fat, pupate (which I imagine is something like caterpillar rehab)and becomes a butterfly. The story ends here and we don't find out if he finds true happiness as a butterfly, but I imagine that there might be a sequel in the works-- perhaps one called The Even Hungrier Bird.

Croc-O-Shite

Croc-O-Dial Cell Phone Carrier



Seriously. As if Crocs weren't bad enough on their own.

I guess the ventilation holes are for, um, when your phone starts sweating from all the phone calls from people asking where you got such an awesome cell phone carrier. Or not.

But wait! You can also "creatively express your individuality" by adding plastic charms to your Crocs, such as this lovely surfboard charm.

When you consider that Crocs paid $10M to acquire Jibbitz.com, which originally made the charms, it's no surprise that Croc's most recent 10-K contains the line, "Our auditors have expressed substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern." Which I believe is accountant speak for, "Please put down the crack pipe."

The lone review on Amazon notes that it "fits my blackjack perfectly." Which I would be inclined to think was a typo but the person evidently also used "blackjack" to tag the item. I thought the tag, "god awful" was a much more accurate tag. Evidently I'm not the only one to have used this tag. Other items tagged by some one as god awful include Mary Cheney's book, Now it's My Turn and Kevin Federline's Playing with Fire CD.

Not Like Tea Time

All the literature about breastfeeding promotes it as this loving moment between mother and child, replete with eye gazing and bonding. They lie. They have not met the Barracuda. Or as people whose nipples are not clamped in the Baby Death Grip call him, Jonas.

Before I had Jonas, I pictured breastfeeding as something like tea time. Genteel and refined, we would discreetly disappear into the other room three, maybe four times a day to engage in this ritual. Perhaps we would have a biscuit or two. We would then emerge triumphant, doe-eyed baby and triumphant mother.

Ah, simple, simple me. Not only does he eat non-stop (the lactation expert called it “cluster feeding’ which I’m totally going to use the next time I finish off a pint of ice cream), but he makes sounds that spind roughly like that of a flesh eating zombie on speed. During these bouts of baby cannibalism, he also has a tendency to rear his head back and dive at my nipple like it’s the last piece of chocolate at a cannabis club. Which makes it really, really hard to discreetly feed him.

It was in the middle of one of Jonas’ marathon feeding sessions that I ran across The Case against Breastfeeding by Hanna Rosin in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly. In it, Rosin points out that many of the much ballyhooed benefits of breastfeeding are actually the result of observational studies, not scientific studies. The result is that is that it is difficult, if not impossible to separate what might be the benefits of breastfeeding from the benefits of other elements (e.g. the mother’s educational background in the case of the purported benefit of an IQ boost). Some scientists even speculate that perhaps it’s the act of breastfeeding and not the milk itself that is the cause of any perceived benefits.

Either way though, I’ve got my bases, if not my nipples, covered—The Barracuda gets a mix of both--after all variety is the spice of life.