How to hug a baby

(Pulled from an email)

1. First, find a baby.

2. Second, be sure that the object you found was indeed a baby by employing classic sniffing techniques.

3. Next you will need to flatten the baby before actually beginning the hugging process.

4. The 'paw slide': Simply slide paw s around baby and prepare for possible close-up.

5. Finally, if a camera is present, you will need to execute the difficult and patented 'hug, smile, and lean' so as to achieve the best photo quality.

Which Star Trek character are you?

The premise of this is really cool, but unfortunately, most of the nifty ST characters aren't even on here. Before taking the text, Aaron said I'm most like Belana Torres -- and I like that much better than Will Riker!

Your results:
You are Will Riker

Will Riker 70% James T. Kirk (Captain) 60% Jean-Luc Picard 60% Chekov 55% Beverly Crusher 50% Deanna Troi 50% Geordi LaForge 40% Worf 40% Spock 35% Uhura 35% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 25% Mr. Scott 25% Data 25% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 25% Mr. Sulu 10%

At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Stephen Colbert and Breast Pumping

Having a newborn in the house creates a dangerously ripe opportunity for watching really bad television. About 90 percent of the time, I'm feeding her or holding her, both of which happen on the couch, and I'm too tired and too manually challenged to do anything other than watch lame TV programs that under normal circumstances, I would be too embarrassed to admit.

Maybe that's why that quote from The New Yorker posted in my last blog entry struck me as so gosh darn funny.

I've become a rabid devotee of Stacy London's and Clinton Kelly's antics on TLC's What Not To Wear. Who knew that watching other people's fashion foibles could be so much fun!?!

Catching up on Hugh Hefner's girl posse on The Girls Next Door provides endless amusement. I admit it, I'm hooked. Several times a week.

Thank god for Tevo, which is catching me up on all of the Chelsea Handler shows of the past year. Why would anyone spend time studying Hebrew verb patterns when you could be making fun of Jessica Simpson and Tom Cruise? Don't ask me!

Lastly, I've discovered the Colbert Report, which is actually slightly *less* embarrassing than my other TV fare these days. You can imagine just how funny this skit was then, as I was sitting at the dining room table milking myself to make a bottle for the baby and this came on the tube:

New Bush Coins (Change For the Better)

Happy chamucka!

Purportedly, this photo was taken at a Greenwich Village grocery: Balducci's on 8th Ave at 14th Street. What a hoot.

Reminds me of the time I found challah for sale on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma with the two braids colored bright yellow and bright orange. The sign said: "circus bread."

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

They're out! The winners of this year's bad fiction contest, where writers submit the worst one-sentence of fiction they can concoct! There are winners in multiple categories, which you can view on www.bulwer-lytton.com/. The "romance" category is always my favorite, so I'm posting the winners and runners-up in this category below.

Winner: Romance

Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
Dennis Barry
Dothan, AL

A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Guigli displayed appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006 Contest, including one that has been "honored" in the Historical Fiction Category. "My motivation for entering the contest," he confesses, "was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia."

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "pursuit of the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the Peanuts beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)


The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.

2006 Runner-Up

Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
Dan Winters
Los Altos Hills, CA

For winners in the other categories -- Sci Fi, Western, you name it -- as well as the runners up, check the website!