November 2011 – Trout Nation

Let me share with you my son’s newspaper, The Neighborhood Tattler (he isn’t above lifting inspiration from Diary of A Wimpy Kid, okay? Besides, plagiarism is en vogue right now):

My son is going to be nine in like, twenty-nine days. He likes to write comic books, which, as noted above, usually borrow a lot in style and concept from Diary of A Wimpy Kid and Calvin and Hobbs. He’s just written his seventh comic book, and he needed an avenue in which to publicize it. On the first page, pictured above, the text reads:

Opening

The new Bedroom Inc. comix book out!

Yes the Auther of the Bedroom Inc. has made his 7th comix book and is coming to you’r home Dec. 1st (if coming). “I just want to say that it take’s pride and work to make comix book’s” See comix, A3

Okay. So my kid? Is awesome. Not only has he written seven comic books, he’s also created his own publishing house, Bedroom Inc. It has a logo and everything. And his newspaper, that he created to publicize his comic book, has a comic section that begins on A3, and he knew that newspapers have an A3. That’s amazing.

The comic, “Captan Underpant’s and the atackk of the Evil mom from outer space,” is again, flavored with just a dash of borrowed work. The Evil Mom looks a bit like me, yells a bit like me, and was, I am certain, an original creation and not based on anyone, living or dead. There is a page with news about cub scouts and another about the school principal. Then, buried on the very back page, is what appears to be a book section:

The Neighborhood Tattler Daily New’s

Jeff Kinney’s 6th book is out oh I wonder if the 7th book is RIPPED PAGE’S hm. Well that’s the new’s for today! Tommaror’s diffrint.

I am impressed on so many levels here. Not only does he take great pains to point out that Jeff Kinney only has six books published, while on the front page he makes it clear that he has written and published seven (and let’s be honest, self-publishing is a booming market right now), he also relegates the story about Kinney’s book to the very last page of the newspaper and writes a pretty scathing review, even though I happen to know he enjoyed the book.

This is my son. This is why my son must be respected and feared. And this is why my son will one day have royalty checks bigger than Stephen Kings’.

Very rarely do I share photos of my spawn on my blog. Not because I think someone might find them and kill them, but because I think some kiddie fiddling pervert out there might look at those pictures and masturbate to them. But I have to share the unintentional White Power odyssey of our Halloween.

When the kid were all costumed-up and ready to trick-or-treat, I implored my husband to take the children out to the front stoop and get a picture of them. I was imagining something like this:

See that? That is the classic Halloween photo. Joyless. Hands at their sides like they’re in a police line up. The agony of being made to pose for a photo, while up and down the street children caper happily, collecting up all the treats. But not you, Chippy. You’re going to stand on that stoop until we get a photo of you with your eyes open.

Confession time: this is from a second set of pictures. The first set…

This requires set up, in order to not look like a hate crime. If you are unfamiliar with Super Mario Bros. (or Aspergers, since that’s a large component to blame for this), Mario is usually posed like so:

So, being an expert on all things Mario, and dedicated to realism in cosplay (see also: Aspergers), my son decided he should replicate this pose for the photos:

Perhaps if he’d not been standing so rigidly to attention… maybe, it’s just the mustache. But it looked a lot less like this:

And a lot more like this:

Then, things got worse. You see, my daughter, who turns three today, is always looking to her older brother, perhaps misguidedly, to learn how to behave in crippling social situations, such as getting your photo taken.

So now, I have two children heil-ing on my front stoop, as my entire small town filters by, skipping our house, I might add, despite the fact that we were clearly giving out treats.

When my husband, my lazy, lazy, husband, thought, “Ah, fuck it,” and brought them back inside, thank god I had the presence of mind to look at the pictures. There are eight of them. Eight photos in which, captured for posterity, my children are unintentionally giving a white power salute. Husband took the kids back outside and took pictures to my exact specifications: no hands in the air. No hands anywhere. Just keep your arms at your sides. Pretend you’re being booked for embezzlement.

Hope you all had a safe, happy, Halloween, totally unmarred by any reminder of the existence of Adolf Hitler.

Month: November 2011

Half My Genes, 1000 Times Nicholas Sparks’s Ego, The Mercenary Journalism Of W.R. Hearst

JIMMY! STOP PRETENDING TO BE ME.

Happy Heil-oween