What?

“Catch” – The Cure
Sure, it’s a hokey a video, but it’s hard to find and a simply brilliant song. Plus, seeing Robert Smith looking that young warms my heart.

“One Minute More” – Civ
Not the greatest of songs, to be sure. However, the video pokes fun at the Jerry Spring/Jenny Jones cultural black hole our popular culture was in at the time, and so I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it.

“Gepetto” – Belly
I could offer a lengthy analysis about why this video offers some intrinsic value because of its playful nature, but I would be lying. This video is great because of three words: Tanya Fucking Donelly.

“Keep Fishin’” – Weezer
Weezer’s had a lot of great videos, but this one will always be my favorite, for sentimental reasons. Plus, is there anything better than watching the mildly-autistic Rivers Cuomo have to perform while covered in Muppets?

“Universal Heartbeat” – Juliana Hatfield
I’d had a crush on Juliana Hatfield long before this video came out, but I remember seeing it and being lovestruck. Plus, the concept was great then, and I still think it resonates today.

“She’s Crafty” – Beastie Boys
Nowadays, the Beasties are regarded for their inclusive music and far-out thinking, but back in the day when I was in seventh grade, they were cool because they were like a harmless version of the Sex Pistols. God bless ‘em!

“The Girl You Lost” – Sia
Never mind that MTV felt the need to censor the title of the song. The fact is the song’s great, and Sia’s got so many personalities in the video that she gives Tracey Ullman a run for her money.

“Toxic” – Britney Spears
Ahem. No comment.

“The Big Hand” – The Cure
Yeah, yeah, I know I already posted a Cure video. But this song’s so great, and it’s from their “secret gig” at the Town and Country II, just prior to the release of their Wish album. I remember being so very excited to see and hear new material out of them that they could’ve been playing potato chip jingles and I would’ve thought it was awesome.

I’d be interested in seeing what other people find as they fish around in there.

Lord help us all and, preemptively, I’m sorry.

In any case, I’ve made a personal vow to start doing some public posting again, if for no other reason than I’m probably more isolated these days than ever, and jotting down things for others to see is at least a primitive – albeit, admittedly, one-way – form of communication with the outside world.  So keep your eyeballs glued here, people: there’s more skullduggery, tom-foolery and general chicanery to come!

In each of my previous incarnations as a blogger, I always (as we say in the biz) “rolled my own” when it came to the nanopublishing software behind the websites. Even though lots of sturdy, popular and often free blogging tools were widely available each time I tackled a new blog project, I instead seized upon the opportunity to write the software myself so I could gain as much knowledge and technical competence in the matter as possible. In fact, it’s at least partly true to say that the challenge of the technical implementation of the blogs has been at least a sizable chunk of their genesis in the first place, often with a desire to tell the world what I ate for breakfast or which celebrity’s areolae I find most appealing.

That said, I’m sort of (again, as we say in the biz) “over it”, at least when it comes to prising apart the mechanisms behind the blogging tools to see what makes them tick. As it turns out, writing your own blog software is dead simple, but the effort that goes into maintaining it and adding new features makes one begin to resent it after a while, and soon the mere act of posting content feels like walking-on-eggshells, don’t-rock-the-boat experience, focused less on providing new stuff for people to read and more on making sure nothing breaks. In any case, I’ve now officially built enough of these things – both for personal and professional use – that there’s no longer any thrill involved in putting them together. Suddenly, those existing tools and/or blogging platforms that are out there which make all the magic happen me seem infinitely more desirable than writing even a single blog-related line of code.

And so, for this site, I’ve decided to embrace WordPress, the ubiquitous open-source blogging tool that’s so easy and pervasive I’m fairly sure my 95 year-old grandmother uses it for her site, and she’s dead. Let me state for the record that before tackling this site, I had never spent any real time looking at the underlying systems behind the major players in this software space: I’ve never used LiveJournal. I last used Blogger so long ago that they’ve changed platforms, toolsets and parent companies at least twice. And I’d never before done a darned thing in WordPress, aside from set it up for a customer or two to use as their blogging tool. Needless to say, these tools are quite advanced now. WordPress, for example, is quite polished and fairly idiot-proof: once I became familiar with its semantics (unfamiliar to me only because I typically rolled my own and thus invented my own), things became quite easy. One feature in particular has stood out, though. A feature that, had I put it into place in my previous blogs, would’ve probably caused me to avoid endless amounts of self-inflicted grief. Heck, I’d made use of this tool back then, I might not even find myself divorced! (I kid because I care). What is this wondrous, mystical feature you ask? Why, it’s none other than the magic “Keep this post private” checkbox, right there on the post composition screen:

Look at that! Imagine, everything I type and say doesn’t have to be broadcast to the world wide interwebs, and can instead be just for little ol’ me (or possibly other users I allow) to look back upon with equal parts amusement, dismay, horror and regret! I must say that I feel like an absolute moron for not thinking of such a checkbox in my old software, and and even more of a dummy for having used WordPress now for a number of weeks and failed to notice the checkbox’s existence, right under my nose.

It’s a very cool (and in my case, exceedingly necessary!) piece of functionality that I’ve already made use of. I must admit, however, that I always start humming the soundtrack score from Doogie Howser M.D., from that point in the show where he’d be entering platitudes into his computerized diary-thingy.

• American Idol
• celebrity political endorsements
• videoconferencing technologies in the auto-lane at the bank
• bukakke
• the Brain Hemorrhage
• wearing adidas flip-flops with white socks
• Wisconsin divorce law
• k.d. lang
• constant Twittering and/or Tweeting
• Taco Bell’s “Cheesy Beefy Melt” (also, the fact that someone decided to call a product “Cheesy Beefy” anything and yet still has a job)
• gigantic chairs in movie theater restrooms
• the bag-boy at the local grocery who’s a spitting image of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, right down to the iron hair and the flat, menacing tone in his voice
• inter-mammary intercourse
• Microsoft Windows
• making a pilgrimage to see a Pope nobody actually likes give a speech at Yankee Stadium
• one-bedroom houses

Believe me, there’s a lot more to the list, but frankly those topics alone have made my brow furrow and my head hurt for the past week as it is.

When I was in grade school, middle school and high school, the words “retard”, “retarded” and “tard” were staples of my peers’ everyday conversations. (Come to think of it, the word “homo” was, too, but that – as my friend Eena would say is a whole other Oprah show). My lifelong recollection is those terms made me wince palpably when I heard them, and I always had misgivings about the words’ use. But while I never actually referred to people, situations or activities as “tards” or “retarded”, I also never worked up the moxie to challenge my classmates about it, either. Yeah yeah, it was school, and I spent most of my formative years trying to fly as far below the radar as possible, but still, I never said anything. I don’t mean to make it sound like I lost sleep over it, either: while there were people and kids with disabilities in my community and schools, my interaction with them was so infrequent and brief that I didn’t feel enough of a connection with any of them which might prompt me to pound my fist in righteous outrage. The bottom line was that the use of those terms was sort of like LSD: I knew some of my peers were into it, but I kept out of it and felt that was good enough to keep my nose clean.

Flash forward twenty years or so, and I find myself with an amazing and beautiful son who also happens to be cognitively and physically disabled. The tendency now – especially in the first weeks, months and years after his birth – is to be acutely aware of people using those words around me and my family. These days, I often do pipe up when friends, acquaintances or even complete strangers drop that kind of language, and sometimes such situations get kind of confrontational, especially when it happens in front of (or, even in some rare cases) directed at one of my kids. I’m always diplomatic about it at first, but I’ll press the point of the person (particularly if it’s an adult) is dismissive of my objection. Some of these instances have been so weird or utterly outrageous that they don’t seem to jibe with any sense of how the real world ought to be. Once, while shopping at a hardware store with my son, who at the time was about four months old, an elderly lady approached me and took it upon herself to ask me if he’d been baptized yet, since “even retards have original sin.” I was so stunned I almost lost the ability to tell her to go fuck herself. Almost. In any event, most times the person saying the word has no idea that they’re using it, and is mortified and apologetic when it’s been pointed out. My goal is not to shame anyone into the appropriate behavior. Rather, it’s to bring the terms’ use out of the abstract and make them understand how insulting and bone-headed it is on a personal level.

This morning, while attending a kids’ festival in downtown Madison (along with seemingly every other breeder family in the county), we took our seats in preparation for a rousing performance of Rock Star Gomeroke®. A few minutes later, a couple with an infant son came in and sat down beside us. I had no intention to eavesdrop, but they were loudly complaining to one another about what sounded like a home improvement project that had gone terribly awry. In a two minute span, both adults repeatedly used the word “retarded” to describe how fucked up the situation was, and the fella constantly referred to the subcontractors they had apparently employed as “total retards”. Still, this was supposed to be a fun morning, and I was prepared to just tune it out and let it go. But then my daughter, who has an incredibly talent for mimicry, began to stomp her foot in an imitation of the lady behind her, each time lisping out a variation on “that’s so retarded”. OK, so that’s not cool. I turned around and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but could you please stop saying ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ like that? They’re really, really offensive and it’s not something I’d like my kids to be exposed to.” I did my best to say this in a genial fashion, but I also was clearly a little pissed that these fools had unwittingly introduced my daughter to such ugly language. (For the record, hateful speech is pretty much the only stuff that’ll make me rise up and badger someone about it: they could be cursing like a sailor, but I figure at that stage if I don’t want my kids to learn how to drop F-bombs yet, I can get up and move to escape the swearing.) The couple looked mortified all right, but not at being called out for being so offensive: rather, they were pissed that we had been privy to their conversation. They loudly made a show of gathering up all their things in a huff and storming over to another part of the small ampitheater, but didn’t say word one to me, apology or otherwise.

Ultimately, things were fine after that. The dummies with the narrow minds were on the other side of the room (presumably filling their newborn son’s head with all sorts of new euphemisms for doughy Jewish guys), and my kids and I proceeded to rock the morning away, and hard. But part of me wanted to chase after them, to beat them over the head with some expansive rhetoric and reason, and if that didn’t work beat them over the head with my fists. Their reaction gnawed at me all morning, and clearly has continued to gnaw at me this afternoon. I worry that maybe I approached them in the wrong manner, or that maybe by being so curt I didn’t advocate well for my son. I was more intent, I guess, on demonstrating to both of my kids just how unacceptable that sort of blather is, and perhaps I didn’t take the opportunity to inform rather than embarrass. But another part of me wants to wring their little yuppie necks. They’re knocking about town somewhere right now, slowly teaching their own child that words don’t matter, that it’s all right to equate difference to being less-than, and I have to say it chaps my ass.

In the end, I’m reminding myself not to spend time fretting about those people, that the only people whose attitudes really matter in all this are the people and loved ones who have roles to play in my kids’ lives. But I will say that it’s hard to be Zen when someone attempts to invalidate a person you cherish, no matter what the setting.