Things I thought about at 3:45 a.m. while Mr. Gleemonex snored like a stableful of cartoon horses

IOW, Potpourri Thursday

--The extremely sexually-excited way Megyn Kelly presented during her interview with "the Romney boys," aka the five asshole sons of Willard Romney. Seen (thankfully not heard) on the TV that's always tuned to Fox "News" at the gym. The girl's eyes were huge and flashing wanty looks, her nips practically sproinged little smoking holes through the front of her blouse, and she sort of squirmed in her seat the whole time -- christ that was disgusting.

--Wonder Woman's backstory is total bunkum. All that insanity about "Amazons" and invisible jets (does it also have invisible fuel? wouldn't you run into it on the tarmac? wtf) and talking to animals and Greek gods ... srsly what is the deal.

--I have a desperate desire to punch Paul Ryan in his stupid punchable face. It's a face that BEGS for punching. Hard punching and lots of it. Those stupid limpid eyes, that goddamn Munsters cowlick, that earnest idiot expression -- christ do I want to punch him so bad.

--It's possible our new dentist is a crazy person. She's great, don't get me wrong, but there's something a little nutburgery about her. Nobody but a crazy person wears pants like that. And what's with all the Barbies all over her office? Actual Barbie dolls. Krickety-krackety kray.

Rape is rape

“The views expressed were offensive,” President Obama said. “Rape is rape and the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and it certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

My President, and yours. Holy Shatner in a voting booth, do I love me some Barack Hussein Obama!

Get outta bed, there'll be no more nappin!

A Partial List of Things You Might Not Remember All That Clearly About Pee-Wee's Playhouse, If You Are An Old Like Me and Watched It In Middle School the First Time Around

--The reason it's not creepy, this adult man cavorting in a too-small suit with an array of puppets, kids, weirdos and animatronic household objects, is: You totally buy Pee-Wee as a kid. He sits too close to people, he bops around from one thing to another, he responds to things like a seven-year-old (very quick with the "I know you are but what am I" and "I dunno -- CAN ya?"), he's all ugh -- kissing!, etc. It's not like Michael Jackson -- it's really, genuinely childlike (and childish, which I think is an even bigger signifier). He earns your trust.

--Miss Yvonne gets some of the best lines. The Most Beautiful Woman in Puppetland can really knock 'em out -- playing stewardess, she intones into the PA system, "Please refrain from smoking while the Captain has turned on the no-smoking sign, and for the rest of your life." Getting dragged by the elbow into some game or other, she says -- laughing but utterly serious -- "You know I don't like to play any game that messes up my hair!" I love her, for reals.

--They go really light on the edumacational lessons. I mean, there are occasional facts and stuff, and Pee-Wee does learn about hurting people's feelings and how situations can get out of hand, etc., but this is not The More You Know.

--The old filmstrips are hilare! There's an ancient airplane safety video that contains the narration that if an emergency exit is necessary, "two male passengers" should open the hatches; a montage of dancing people from the '60s that is at once the grooviest and the squarest, whitest thing I have ever seen in my life; a Gamera short ... so awesome.

--The intro is really long -- like two minutes -- with two distinct movements; the first part is Pee-Wee riding his scooter through a Claymationed forest and into the alleged exterior of his playhouse, which features trippy atmospheric instrumental music, and the second is the song we all kind of remember. Both are fantastic, and I do believe Mothersbaugh was involved in this -- another link in the DNA that connects Pee-Wee's Playhouse to Yo Gabba Gabba!.

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This post brought to you by the fact that my kid is obsessed with the show, obviously. You should check it out -- it will awaken weird parts of your brain from back in the day. And it is enormous fun, even if the DVD transfer didn't get what you'd call a careful treatment in the transferring. 

It's like the milk truck scene in Three Kings.

I'm'a take a break from baggin on shit today and bring y'all:

A Few Wonderful Things From the Internets, Which Maybe You've Already Seen, But If Not, Here's Your Chance

So Ladies If the Butt Is Round, and You Want a Triple-X Hoedown
This rendered me HELPLESS with the awesome! Guy cuts together 295 movies to form "Baby Got Back" -- everybody from Cary Grant to Pee-Wee Herman and Marge Gunderson gets a word or two in. From the guy who did Don Draper Says What, so you know this is fucking gold medal shit, y'all. (Hat tip: the forever-winning List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago). 

Voguing Into Manhood
Perhaps the only thing that could have made me wheeze in agonized laughter this morning (I was up, I think, SIX times with the teething REM-sucking vampire, and once with the 4.5-year-old brat-phasing one): A kid doing a full-out, absolutely committed performance of Madonna's "Vogue" at his own bar mitzvah in 1992. There is a large Madonna poster involved, as well as a king-hell jacket-tearing-off which reveals a gigantic Madonna rendering on the back of the kid's dress shirt. It's -- it's kind of uplifting, honestly; as one commenter said, "he must have really supportive parents, bless him."

Sippy Cups Can Go to Hell
Holy shit, did this make me laugh yesterday -- could. not. stop. For like hours. I can't even stop finding stuff to quote -- but here's a taste:

One more thing about the whole BPA issue: I'd like to issue a big FUCK YOU to whoever found out BPAs in plastic are possibly harmful. I bet this was Kelly Preston's doing. Now I can't put the sippy cup in the dishwasher because the heat will cause the BPAs to leak out and give my kid triple AIDS or something. Any item that can't go into a dishwasher should be destroyed.

All that you can do is watch them play

Yesterday in San Francisco proper, following a divine massage at a spa (gift card I've had since January 2011) and a faaantastic non-chain-restaurant lunch, during which I sat blessedly alone and read two entire New Yorker magazines -- o heaven -- I was doing some wandering around, and on the way to the Powell St. station to begin the long journey back to the ass-end of the Silicon Valley, I found myself  taking a razzoo through Forever 21. 

Now, this is a store that I hate for a lot of reasons -- I haven't been in one in five years at least, because A) believe you me, I am a lot more than 21, B) the very idea of wanting to be Forever 21 is repugnant to me, C) "fast fashion" is cheap, wasteful and built via the bloodied and harassed fingers of the lowest-paid workers in the garment industry at the worst environmental offending factories of same, D) the founding family of the company is a bunch of evangelicals who print bible verses on their bags, and E) the things they sell are awful and the store is a mess. 

But I had like ten minutes to kill, so. 

And y'all ... it is all still true. Forever 21 is like a big, cheap, badly-organized costume shop targeted to your next 80s/90s party. They were playing Blur ("There's No Other Way"). I felt old, and strange, and like I'd taken a weird tumble in the fucked-up wayback machine, ending up in a combination Claire's/Express/Limited/Wet Seal/Slutty Laura Ashley mashup store from the mythical year 199119891994. It was ... disorienting. I did not last long. I am quits with that place, for all time. 

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On another note: San Francisco, goddamn you. You're super pretty and there is good stuff all around you, but you will always be a toy city, not a real city, and you want to know why? You made me (and six hundred other people) wait 27 minutes for a fucking N train, at a transit hub, on a Monday morning during rush hour, for NO REASON AT ALL. Your transit sucks NYC's smelly cocknballs with an extra lick to the taint, and the worst part of it is, you don't even realize that this is what's wrong with you. Plus also your restaurants close at 9:00 p.m. TOY CITY. 

And yes, I'd feel the same way (only probably even more gleeful) if this were about the Swimmin' Douchebag, Lochte. But he didn't pull bitchface on the medal stand, so.

So even though I think she's a Mean Girl, I at first defended McKayla Maroney on grounds of she's a child, and that must've been awful to know that she has only herself to blame for falling short of the gold (and on a vault she must've done one million times before, flawlessly), and she went cold instead of breaking up and being all blubbery and ending up on a thousand stupid damn websites weeping her eye makeup off all over the Internets and I could understand that ...

But then, she refused even to touch the Russian who won gold -- I mean, she left the girl hangin on the obligatory "good game" hug, y'all -- and even much later, on the medal stand, she couldn't draw on the discipline and focus it's taken her to get this far, pull it together enough to wipe that bitchface off her head for three minutes, uncross her arms, stand up straight, and show a little fucking class?

She deserves this -- also, it's funny as hell. I hope she grows up enough to realize that someday.

Vamonos Pest

A Partial List of Things That Could Drive a Person to Some Pretty Serious Day-Drinking If That Person Were Just a Little, Tiny Bit Less Responsible Than Your Old Pal Gleemonex

--Where are the god. DAMNED. immunization records for Kid Gleemonex? I KNOW we had them here, in the house, post-move. I know we did. I've looked in every mother-effing cranny of this entire mother-effing house, TWICE, and now the anger ... it flows ... to the tips of the fingers and the ends of the hair ... feel it burn ... the annnngerrrrr ...

--Fellow Elance contractors: You are not doing ANY OF US any good with these bullshit lowball bids. You're gonna write fifteen 500-word articles for that numbnuts for two dollars per? Are you converting to 1936 dollars or something? Fucking quit it! All you're doing is teaching these people we'll accept the worst most bullshit pay for their idiocy. If you need two dollars that bad, I'll fuckin mail it to you.

--The fat black spider re-spawn point on the wall of my bedroom. The wall of my bedroom. I would make the executive decision to have the entire house tented by exterminators, expense be damned, but Breaking Bad ruined that idea reaaalll good for me.

--Having your second cup of coffee cockblocked, one way or another, every single goddamned morning by the very people -- the two sub-five-year-old REM-sucking vampires -- who cause you to need a second cup of coffee in the goddamned first place.

My Olympics

In your FACE, Ryan Lochte.

Your FACE.