I'm in Indianapolis this week. I have no column due, and no other pressing deadlines at the moment. I have time on my hands.

Time to watch some Betty Boop cartoons:



My folks were just visiting last weekend, and they brought a couple of $1 DVDs (thank you, public domain). One of them had a slew of Betty Boops on it, all of them surreal as Hell, and and most of them offensive in some way, shape or form. The one above was not on the disc, but this one was:



Whoof. It's always so hard to watch this stuff. How do you think Satchmo felt when he saw the ooga-booga native's floating head turn into his and then back again? Or, was he just happy to have the gig?

At about 9:30 tonight, my son told me he got a call from a friend who told him that he had lice and would I take a look at his head to see if he did? Oh, did he ever. The smaller ones were building condos at the nape of his neck, while the larger ones were over by his ear complaining about how the scalp was losing all its charm.

So now I have a new Web hosting service (i.e., one for which I am paying, and am not receiving by virtue of some work I did at the turn of the century). This entry is really more of a test to be sure it's all working correctly.

Besides, very few people come to this site, it seems. It makes the unlimited bandwidth option seem pretty silly, but on the other hand, that is one less obstacle to podcasting. Plus, for another thirty bucks a year, I don't have to worry about it. It's worth it.

So now I have a Twitter account, which seems to be designed to fill in all those little nooks and crannies of potential productivity left between Myspace, Facebook, LiveJournal, etc. It's a way to de-frag your slacking! Come! Follow me into the abyss of microblogging!

Were I more adept at such things, I’d figure out how to put a Twitter feed directly to this blog, my LiveJournal, my Myspace, my Facebook page...Hell, I’d figure out how to get my CD on iTunes. I’d figure out a lot of things.

By the way, I just googled the word, "twitteratti," hoping against hope that I’d coined the term (naturally, I had not), but a small handful of results down came this gem of a first line:

@twitteratti Flickr is in the DP group now thanks to @mroth .

Welcome to the future. We may not be wearing jumpsuits, but our language is.

Two More things about Celebrity Rehab

1. When the bespectacled guy in the hat mentions that people stop him at the bank and ask him if Jeff is going to survive the show, Brigitte Nielsen says to Jeff Conaway, "if only you knew how much people out there love you..." No, Brigitte. It's not love. When people slow down by the car wreck, it's not because they love the people involved.

2. There's nothing better than watching this show when you're on your third cocktail.

I know I should minimize the "cute things my kids do" stories, if for no other reason than to appease the joyless husks who find such things annoying, but I can't resist this one.

My just-turned four year-old walked into the bathroom tonight as I was filling the tub for her bath. She pulled a toy cell phone out of her pocket, put it to her ear and started an imaginary conversation with her cousin. Below is her opening line (names changed, naturally).

Bama? Peanut.

[very brief pause]

Yeah -- still four...

Okay, so I just found out that the guy who played Sully in Commando, David Patrick Kelly, also played President Truman in Flags of Our Fathers.

He also was the villain in Dreamscape, not to mention Jerry Horne in Twin Peaks.

I suppose it's appropriate that he'd wind up in the role of the guy who gave the "go" order to incinerate two entire cities.

Too harsh? Yeah. You're right.

Actual Reuters headline: Dolly Parton postpones tour, blames breasts.

The article quotes her as saying, "Hey, you try wagging these puppies around a while and see if you don't have back problems."

The best thing about this is that I saw the headline in a side menu while reading a story about the economy.

This fellow is former South Dakota state Rep. Ted Klaudt, who was just sentenced to 44 years for doing terrible things* to his foster daughters. The story is here.

Here's the scene as he's led in to prison with the other new cons:

[gates rumble open; the new cons file in]

INMATES: FISH! FRESH FISH! HERE FISHY FISHY!

[Klaudt enters]

INMATES: ...WHALE! FRESH WHALE! HERE WHALEY WHALEY!

*I phrased this euphemistically purely to avoid the wrong type of people coming to my blog from Google, not to minimize what this scumbag did.

There have been some stories in the news lately about how the U.S economy is headed for recession.

Headed for recession? What the Hell are we in now?