MushMom

As I have mentioned previously, Nikki lives her life in a state of perpetual hypothermia, her blood is always chilled to a thick gelatinous viscosity that sluggishly seeps through her veins.  No warmth is radiated from her core to her extremities.  They are freezing cold and are brittle and stiff all day long.  Even in the hot summer months her hands and feet only barely rise to non-cadaver temperatures.

It’s too easy to tease her about this of course, which I do mercilessly.  All joking aside however, we were talking about this last night while she gave my shins frostbite with her toes.  I suggested that perhaps she wasn’t dressing warmly enough to be comfortable during the day.  She countered that she wears multiple layers all day long, and that isn’t enough to make her feet and hands comfortably warm.  I then suggested that she could wear a toque during the day since even though the head is not a significant source of heat loss, maybe it would help to keep her body temperature up.  I suggested that if she did that, we could start calling her MushMom, you know, like Mushmouth from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

It turns out that I was actually thinking of Dumb Donald, who wore a toque that covered his whole head down to his mouth, with eye holes.

Dumb Donald

In my defense, Mushmouth also wore a toque, but a regular sized one.  However, Mushmouth did have the excellent speech impediment that makes the joke funny.

Mushmouth

So, if that seems like a long way to go just for a joke about Nikki wearing a toque all day, you are correct.  But then we wouldn’t have been able to reflect back on Fat Albert, which would have been a shame.  A little Cosby bonus for those of you who remember, I can still sing the Picture Pages song.  Anybody else?

UPDATE:  You know what is kind of wonderful?  The Internet has decided, as a whole, that this blog post is the definitive place to find any and all information about Mushmouth.  I know this because my stats say so.  I think that’s awesome, but with this great responsibility comes great responsibility.  You all need to realize that Mushmouth is the guy above with the RED toque, not the dude with the eye holes cut into his toque, that’s Dumb Donald. I, too made this mistake before conducting exhaustive research for this post.  PLEASE PEOPLE, when you dress up like that for Halloween, you are actually dressing as Dumb Donald, not Mushmouth, ok?  Thanks for reading, carry on.

Happy New Years

The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.

Flight of the Conchords, Season 2

Well it took a while, but season 2 of Flight of the Conchords is starting January 18th!  In the true spirit of the Internet they are asking for fan-made videos of people lip-synching to Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous.  The best will be shown on one of the new shows…  Pretty cool stuff.  That is one of their best songs.  If we didn’t have Christmas in the way, I might even be tempted to pimp my kids out and get them to do this for me.  It’s a good parental move since my whole retirement plan is for one of them to become a famous child actor who I will then shamelessly exploit into a Disney product.  Think Hanna Montana, only for the Ottawa Valley.  

Anyway, back to the return of our favourite show, it’s long overdue, and Nikki and I will be watching for sure.

Trailer Park Boys Ending

A sad note today, The Trailer Park Boys will air the last episode of the series on December 7th, 10pm on Showcase.  This show has been so consistently funny (although the earliest stuff is the best) Nikki and I have been fans since day one, and have bugged most of our other friends enough to at least pretend they like it too.  I think I will be asking Santa for some of them on DVD because they are just too good to not have.

The lads will be missed, for sure.  They are at least going out on top of their game.

Link

Presidential Webcast

Remember how I worried that in order to lead today you should really be able to embrace technology?  I also worried that the old guy was actually a clue-less dinosaur?  Anyway, it seems that my worry was needless, since McCain really should have given that old Internet thing a closer look.

There is a lot of proof that Obama’s use of the Internet has not only been a crucial piece of his victory, but has forever changed American politics.  Didn’t hurt that he recruited one of the co-founders of Facebook to help, I suppose.

It’s going to be fun and awesome and probably very rocky for a while until everybody figures this stuff out.

“There will be a lot of collateral damage coming to grips with the fact that we’re in a reality TV series, ‘Politics 24/7,’” Mr. Newsom said.

That’s a good thing, Mr. Trippi said. “This medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians haven’t been used to.”

Even something as simple as a weekly radio address is (somehow just now) being taped for YouTube and Internet consumption.  Brilliant.  If he can really pull off this kind of connectedness and grass-roots organization it just might be the start of something better than I expected.

Now we just need to get Stephen Harper to wake up and smell the coffee.