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“I’ve dabbled in penis.”
– Sporty

A word to the wise: the next time you go down to the Jersey Shore to visit a hunka hunka burnin’ family who recently pumped out a healthy, happy, gurgling 8+ lb. bundle of joy – henceforth to be known as Czar Nikolai, King of all the Russias and Emperor of New Jersey – and you think to yourself, “I’ll be clever and use this trip as an excuse to get a night by myself… I’ll tell MamaNikolai and PapaNikolai that I don’t want to add to their burden, so I’ll just stay in a nearby hotel” and so you call around to numerous large, comfortable and reasonably priced hotels only to discover that they’re all booked solid on the one Saturday night you hope to stay (and nobody seems to know why — cue “it’s a conspiracy!” theme music) so you make some more calls before finally settling on a relatively nearby B&B that appears to be a perfect solution?

The next time you do that… beware of the B&B (warning: linking page has obnoxious, loud ragtime music). Because last weekend I tragically discovered that what might appear to be a perfectly nice bed & breakfast setting may, in fact, be the place where country clutter goes to die.

After arriving Chez Nikolai late Saturday morning bearing frankincense and myrrh and blueberries and bourbon (the traditional gifts for a newborn king, from what I’ve been told) and paying a few hours of respectful homage, PapaNikolai and I hopped into my car for a quick trip to the B&B so that I could quickly check in and drop off my bag. After making our way through the beach town in question – a traditional Jersey Shore melange of seedy, tacky and quite nice – we parked in front of the Inn. Our first glance immediately raised concerns: hanging along its charming wrap-around porch were several signs declaring “This house is watched by angels” as well as a host of… uh… country clutter angels.

Whatever. We shrugged and walked inside. And almost instantly, our breath caught in our throats — every square inch of surface space and wall area was covered in country clutter hearts and dolls and flowers and teddy bears and angels and potpourri (good lord, there must have been three dozen potpourri sachets in that room alone, competing for attention and our instantly maxed-out sensory receptors). At the center of the room, a man perhaps three hundred years old sat on a plush chair staring at the fuzzy TV image of another man singing what appeared to be church songs, so enraptured by the spectacle in front of him that he didn’t even look up at us or – more likely – even notice that we were there.

I looked at my brother-in-law and said, “This seems promising.”

We stepped into the next room, which appeared to be a dining area with a business desk at one end. This room had also been overwhelmed by country clutter (at this point, I was picturing rampaging hordes of fluffy fuzzy cute cuddly and crappy creatures invading the room much like the Mongols overrunning China way back in the day) to the extent that even a 10-gallon fishtank had been abandoned to the tender mercies of the clutter – stuffed things sat on top of it and hung over the sides, while no actual fish seemed to be living within – before, at long last, a young woman stepped out a back room and welcomed us.

She handed me a key, told me that breakfast would be served at 8:30, and then led us up to my room.

Good lord. (deep breath)

The wallpaper featured large teddy bears. In cute outfits. Staring at me.

They… never… blinked…

As the young woman left and closed the door behind her, I sat down on the small bed. I was completely dumbfounded. My brother-in-law: “This is kind of fucked up.”

I stared at the room for a minute, and couldn’t come up with an opposing argument. So, we hightailed it out of there. “It’ll be fine,” I said as we sped away. “I’m sure it’s much less creepy at night.”

Fast-forward about 8 hours: I was wrong. After spending the afternoon with the Czar and his coterie, including a visit to scenic Red Bank (an interesting mix of high-end and spray cheese — pricey boutiques, lots of women with giant hair and outfits designed for maximum exposure/accentuation, guys with skin-tight t-shirts with colorful sayings from bars with phallic names, and stretch Hummer limos (white, of course) cruising down the main strip with streamers streaming and rawk music blasting) and a highly illegal bootleg DVD viewing of the new Hallowe’en (which was quite good, btw) I returned to my cozy, friendly B&B. As I walked in, the TV was still on – and still showing the 700 Club, from what I could see – but the Civil War veteran had moved on. No matter: I walked up to my room, opened the door and turned on the light. The bears stared at me, unblinking.

I shuddered, but then realized that might be because my windows were open. It was a chilly night for early September, probably only in the high 40s. (Hard to believe it had been 96 in Boston just a week earlier) I closed one window, then walked into the bathroom to close the other one… and it was stuck. 10 minutes of effort and leverage later… it slammed closed. Victory! I grabbed the shade to pull it down… and it was stuck. Fuck me. 10 minutes of effort and leverage later… it was still stuck. Coming to the conclusion that if I pulled any harder I was going to rip some hardware out of the wall, I decided to leave it be. So what if that meant that passers-by could see me doing whatever it was I’d be doing in the bathroom? Just one more attraction for the fabulous Jersey Shore.

I spent a few hours staring at the bears, and they spent a few hours staring at me, and then finally I turned off the light.

The temperature dropped.

There was no heat.

I spent the night shivering in cold.

By 5:30 the next morning, I was wide awake and shuddering almost uncontrollably. Fine, I thought: I’ll take a hot shower, hop back in my car, and bring the Czar and family some fresh bagels for breakfast. I walked into the bathroom, reached into the shower and turned on the hot water. It was freezing cold, so I figured I’d give it a couple of minutes to warm up. I brushed my teeth, threw in my contacts, blew my nose… and discovered the water was still freezing cold. Did I have the setting wrong? I swapped the h/c thing over 180 degrees and waited a few minutes… still ice-cold. By this point, not only was I shivering from the cold, but from the additional onslaught of frigid spray bouncing up at me from the bottom of the shower.

I gave it another 5 minutes, and after determining that the water temperature was not going to rise above “really fucking cold,” I decided to stick to just washing my hair, which proved to be somewhat difficult to accomplish without dousing my entire body in frigid water.

Whatever. 20 minutes later, shivering uncontrollably but dressed and packed, I walked downstairs. The young woman came out and I handed her my key. “The hot water wasn’t working,” I told her. Her eyes looked glazed, much like those of the dolls and stuffed animals lining the walls and sitting on top of the fish tank. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Thanks for coming.” Then she turned and walked away.

And I got the hell outta dodge.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

Since I’m too road-weary right now to do anything more creative or interesting (let’s just say that I’ve driven virtually the entire length of the state of Connecticut 4 times in the last 3 days), I’m swiping this from Mark who swiped it from Karen — a brief overview of Eternal Questions in Popular Music as defined by my iTunes.

• Would? – Alice in Chains
• Will You Find Me? and its more desperate twin Can You Help Me? – American Music Club
• Anyone Alive? – Chameleons
• When Will Your Friends All Disappear? – East River Pipe
• What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? – Echo and the Bunnymen
• What Are You Waiting For? – Kathleen Edwards (At last! A song that doesn’t sound like the love theme for clinical depression…)
• How Do You Say Goodbye? – Engineers (Aaaaaand we’re back in happyland)
• Was There Anything I Could Do? – Go-Betweens
• Will You Ever Love Yourself? – Hammock (Taking a quick look at these other songs, I’m going to guess… no.)
• Does That Make Sense? – The Jealous Sound
• Remember Me? – Kitchens of Distinction
• Do You Know How To Waltz? – Low (At 14:39, this is by far the longest song on this list. Just so you know.)
• Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• What If We Give It Away? – R.E.M.
• When A Person Splits In Two, Where Does The Old Half Go? – Soul Whirling Somewhere (Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a champion in our “Most Depressing Song Title Phrased As A Question” contest. Congratulations to our happy winner…)
• Why Are We Alive? – Swans
• Has He Got A Friend For Me? – Richard and Linda Thompson

Well. That was amusing. Any questions?

My one game at Fenway this season: RF roof deck seats, a turnaround from a depressing, early 8-1 deficit to a truly frenetic 16-10 comeback victory, and a coupla nice cups a chowda ta keep us wahm on a chilly evening.

Not a bad night at all.

Really, is there a better feeling on a 96-degree early September afternoon when your wife has taken off for New York to visit her sister for the weekend – leaving you alone with three cranky kids to sweat and watch endless episodes of The Backyardigans – and you finally get them sedated for a moment with a mix of Pirate’s Booty, 1% milk and dancing hippos/penguins/ladybugs, and you steal away for a long-awaited… uh… pause that refreshes… and as you flush, and watch the water rise and rise and swirl and continue to rise, you flash back to three hours before – when your son was taking a potty break of his own and you suddenly heard the alarming words, “toy’s in the potty!” which offered you the unanticipated pleasure of having to reach deep into the toilet to fish out a deep-set 3″ tall grinning plastic king (and boil your arm immediately thereafter) – and suddenly realize that the price to grammatical misunderstandings is high indeed, as what you heard to be a contraction (toy’s) was, in fact, a tragic plural (toys), and that the king had a queen… and you watch the water continue to rise, and rise, and rise…

There are no words to describe how happy I am right now.

For whatever reason, my kids have decided they love sunglasses. Love, love, love them. Butterfly wears them almost every day, usually perched atop her head in a state of constant readiness, fully prepared to leap into action with situational coolness wherever and whenever the need may arise. She even goes to bed with them. It’s an obsession.

The other creatures kids are similarly smitten — which is why this morning, as I made a quick run into CVS to pick up some shampoo, I decided to grab three new pairs of cheap drugstore sunglasses for them… just a nice little welcome home gift for when they’d get back from school later in the day.

So. Fast forward to about 6pm tonight. The kids came home, discovered their new shades, and immediately went crazy — running around hollering while flipping them from the bridges of their noses back up onto their heads in classic movie star fashion, then back down onto their faces again. Butterfly had her pink plastic sunglasses with pink lenses, TheHurricane had his purple sunglasses with violet lenses, and Rabbit had crazy-quilt sunglasses with mirrored lenses… all looking far too cool for school. After about 10 minutes of sprinting around screaming, they joined TheWife and I in our living room — Rabbit and TheHurricane descending on TheWife while Butterfly hopped up on me.

Butterfly took off her sunglasses and poked them into my face. “You put them on,” she ordered. Dutifully, I did just that — and for a moment, the entire world was tinted pink and silly, and without thinking I started laughing. Just as quickly, she pulled them off my face. “Those not for you,” she clarified.

I looked over at TheWife and said, “That was probably the first time in my life I ever looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, and you know what? I think I liked it.” TheWife’s response: laughter, then “No wonder they didn’t take.”

I turned back to Butterfly and said, “Mommy’s being mean.” Butterfly responded by jamming her sunglasses back onto my face. I slipped them on again and looked at her for a moment, grinning and pink and overflowing with 2-year-old-girl-joy through my thin plastic filter, and said, “But at least you still love me, right?”

Butterfly reached up and removed the sunglasses. Then she looked at me very seriously and said, “You not beautiful any more.”

(dropping head to chest, sighing heavily)

I’m not entirely sure what William Makepeace Thackary had in mind when he first produced that quote back in 1848, but it may have been something along the lines of a conversation TheWife and I had while wandering through Great Meadows yesterday.

Me: (following a moment of relative quiet, listening to the Canadian Geese honk at each other while the wind blows through the tall willows, as the five of us walk along path back to our car) “You look happy. What are you thinking?”

TheWife: (brief pause) “Honestly, I was wondering if we left the kids here… how long would they last?”

Me: “What?”

TheWife: “I mean, look at the girls in their little pink blouses. They wouldn’t last two minutes out here.”

Me: (a rare moment of silence)

TheWife: (laughing) “This is awful, isn’t it?”

Me: (long pause) “You are so the best mother ever.”

Thank you, Chag, for providing me with an excuse to talk about music. Again.

What’s your ringtone?
I don’t actually have one, per se. I generally keep my phone on vibrate, and I like to keep it in my front pocket. (You’re jumping to some filthy conclusions right now, aren’t you? Sick bastards.) My friend Demoncrat somehow got the theme from Hallowe’en as his ringtone, which is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever heard… I’m deeply jealous, but too lazy/cheap to actually try to do anything equally interesting for myself.

What’s the most incongruous song on your MP3 player?
Easy — Hey Ya! by Outkast. Let’s just say I’m pretty comfortable in my status as a white suburban indie music kid, which makes this joyous burst of urban contemporary sunshine a real exception to my musical library.

What is the one genre of music you cannot stand?
Klezmer and club/dance music (tie). Both make me violently unhappy.

What’s your desert island disc?
I only get one? That’s not even close to fair. Damn you! (shaking fist)

Fine. So… at this point, given that I’ve basically listened to it nonstop for more than a year, I guess I’d have to go with The Brother Kite’s Waiting For The Time To Be Right. But it’s not an easy call by any stretch of the imagination.

What’s your musical weakness?
A Flock of Seagulls. I can’t help it. Their cleverly titled debut album – A Flock of Seagulls – was the third album I ever purchased, and I’ve never stopped loving their sense of melody. (No, not the haircuts. Even I can’t justify that.) I’d say they’re a guilty pleasure, but honestly… I feel no guilt. Close second: Blue Oyster Cult.

Do you play a music instrument?
Nope. For a few years in elementary and middle school, I waxed saxaphonic, but at a certain point the appeal of walking around school with a big brown case holding a skronky woodwind grew thin. And thus, the world was forevermore robbed of my musical genius.

Best makeout song ever
Back in the day, I was all about using movie soundtracks as makeout music — so instead of a single song, I’d have to go with Peter Gabriel’s Passion (because nothing makes a girl hotter than a 350lb Qawwali singer wailing about The Last Temptation of Christ) or The Mission.

Best driving song
Hmm. You wouldn’t go wrong with The Brother Kite’s “Get On, Me” or, if you’re feeling a bit more old school, Swervedriver’s “Duel/Blowin’ Cool” combo would move you swiftly down the highway. Of course, nothing beats Bad Brains‘ “Pay To Cum,” but unless you’re driving some kind of 600hp supercar, you’re not going to be able to do it proper justice on the road.

One song that you think everyone should read the lyrics of
Honestly, you could pick almost anything out of the Joe Pernice songbook and find an appropriate answer. If you’re not paying attention, it’s much too easy to miss the nuance, sarcasm and hearbreak that he weaves through his songs and instead focus only on the gorgeous melodies. Hell, Spinner.com went to the trouble of naming his “Chicken Wire” the #1 Most Exquisitely Sad Song in the Whole World. If that doesn’t merit deeper review… I don’t know what does.

Is downloading music for free a sin?
I don’t know about it being a sin… but it certainly seems like stealing to me. Sorry.

Do you karaoke?
That would be a no, due to a mix of crippling self-consciousness and having-three-kids-means-I’m-never-in-a-karaoke-environment.

One musician you would happily whore yourself to
I’m far too deeply enamoured of TheWife (who may someday read this and eviscerate me if I answer differently) to ever consider whoring myself out to a musician. That being said… Janet Jackson back in the day… damn.

First album you ever bought
We went over this already.

Most recent album you bought
I actually bought 4 CDs recently with a single credit card swipe: Lisa Germano’s In The Maybe World, which is predictably haunted and gorgeous; Silversun Pickup’s Carnavas, which has some very cool post-shoegaze stuff going on; Straylight Run’s The Needles The Space, which sucks monkey ass; and Early Day Miners’ All Harm Ends Here, which is lovely, lovely, lovely.

Favorite Beatles song
The Beatles have never really been a big part of my life. That being said, I’ll go with “Eleanor Rigby” for reasons already explained (about halfway down).

One song that represents your teenage years
I’ll go with Hammock’s “You May Emerge From This More Dead Than Alive,” which is pretty much how I found myself as I entered decade #3. Goooood times.

One song that represents your 20s
“Even The Odd” by the Trashcan Sinatras works just fine — a cheerful song with a bittersweet undercurrent, which summarizes pretty neatly what turned out to be a pretty decent decade for me.

One song that represents where you are right now
Let’s stick with “You’ll Never Get To Me” by Killing Joke — angry, defiant, curiously upbeat. “Survival is my victory” is as good a rallying cry as any I know.

One song that represents your blog
“Is There Anybody Out There” by Pink Floyd. Obvious answer, but there you go.

Tag. You’re it.

Over the past year or so, I’ve found myself hassling more and more of my friends over the slow rise of salt and pepper in their hair or beards. As just one of many examples, while touring the Washington Zoo last month with my friends the FamilyAngus, at one point I picked up BabyAngus, pointed him at his father (with whom I went to high school) and asked him, “Do you want to go hug your grandpa? The old guy with all that grey hair?” (At which point MrsAngus punched me. And rightfully so.)

But I’ve done all this with relative impunity, as my own hair has remained pure and dark (TheWife says it’s black… I prefer to think of it as “filthy blonde”) across the vast expanse of my skull and jaw, my grip on eternal youth as tight as the Red Sox’ grip on first place in the AL East. (fingers crossed)

And then. This morning. I fucking found a fucking 2-inch long fucking white hair on my fucking chest.

SMACK!!!

Thank you, time, for that much-needed bitch slap. Time to go put together my will.

SUCK: Letters from Iwo Jima — seriously, how did this garner so much serious Oscar talk? I just don’t get it. Yes, I was intrigued by the idea of Eastwood doing a large-scale WWII movie, and all the reviews I read said that this one blew Flags of Our Fathers out of the water. Plus, Ken Watanabe is a terrific actor, so I was excited to see how this whole thing would come together.

Excited was a bad anticipatory reaction. The movie, as it turns out, is dull. How do you combine one of the industry’s best directors with a top actor in the creation of a WWII epic… and come out with something dull? Well, you start with a 1:3 ratio of action to boring back-story vignettes of characters who honestly aren’t all that interesting (these vignettes serve as the “Letters” of the title). Then you make sure that your lead actor – who is by far the most compelling character in the film – is only on-screen for a relatively small proportion of your 16-hour running time. (Note: This estimated 16-hour running time is based on how long my body clock told me I was sitting on my couch being bored.) Then… well, by then, you’ve already blown it. What a disappointment.

NO SUCK: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — which we actually saw on an IMAX screen, with the added bonus of 20ish minutes of 3D action. I’ve never actually seen a feature film in the IMAX format before, and it was a pretty remarkable experience… things seem a lot more impressive when they appear on a screen three times the size of your house. An 12,000+ watt sound system doesn’t hurt much, either.

The movie itself was definitely on the dark side, with a much heavier emphasis on Harry’s growing anger/teen angst and the whole good vs. evil thing than on the subplots and character development stuff that fleshed out the original 1,400 page (est.) novel. Which means that while the film might not have necessarily had the emotional depth or breadth of tone you might’ve hoped for… it was a pretty action-packed and exciting 2+ hours.

SUCK: The Bourne Ultimatum — not to repeat myself, but this was a big disappointment for me. I’m a huge fan of the first two Bourne movies, which successfully reworked the spy/thriller genre to the point that the Bond franchise felt compelled to reinvent itself (also successfully) in its image. But in Bourne 3.0, the now-obligatory jump-cuts and handheld camera filming style went careening over the edge of the cliff — creating something that, in all honestly, I found visually incomprehensible. Combined with the fact that the movie is light on plot and heavy on coincidence, you end up with a couple of good fight scenes floating in the middle of a 2+ hour mess.

NO SUCK: The Host — a very strange movie that is also, apparently, the most domestically and internationally successful South Korean film ever produced. It’s a monster movie with elements of comedy and elements of drama that sometimes successfully (and sometimes not) blend together to create something that ends up being much more memorable and effective than either The Bourne Ultimatum or Letters from Iwo Jima. Yes, I do have a well-documented love for movies where people get eaten by giant bloodthirsty creatures… but that observation notwithstanding, this is still a very good movie.

The plot, in a nutshell: Stupid Americans are responsible for the release of baaaaad chemicals into Seoul’s Han River, where unnatural things happen and, some time later, a giant reptilian fish-thing shows up and starts grabbing (and sometimes eating) lots of people. Among these people is a bright and resourceful schoolgirl whose deeply (if somewhat amusingly) dysfunctional family decides to circumvent the clueless military in mounting a rescue effort. If it sounds like a fairly generic monster movie… well, you’re only half-right. The trappings may be formulaic, but there is a real intelligence at work here, and when people get hurt (or eaten) it’s not necessarily a fun thing. You feel sad.

Which is substantially more than you feel from Bourne or Iwo Jima. Which really isn’t what I’d expected at all.