$#*! My Dad Says

My dad has a rant for everything. And often the rants are polished bits of comedy that are quite amusing. His latest has to do with the sentimental and self-righteous attitude about "free-range" farm products, especially chickens and eggs. My dad grew up on a farm, back when all animals were free-range. The chickens on his farm spent most of the day pecking at the manure pile, he says. Occasionally he'd go out and sprinkle some dried corn for them for variety. So much for the purity of free-range poultry, he sniffs.

Since my parents haven't got a lot of mobility these days, and they live in San Francisco and I live in New York, I order their groceries online at Safeway.com. For a mere $6.99—no tipping allowed!—Safeway handpicks frozen, canned, baked, bottled and fresh food according to the specifications on the list I submit and delivers it to my parents, often within 12 hours. It's a wonderful service from a company that's often reviled. But I digress. I wince sometimes when I check off the house brand (as my parents request) rather than an organic brand. But after hearing about the manure-eating organic chickens of yore, I think I'll feel a bit better.

Sunday morning wakeup

Because I cannot watch ordinary movies featuring ordinary sadness because they make me inordinately sad, I have been cribbing from my son's Netflix recommendations. Thus it happens that I found myself watching Jackass the Movie this morning at 6:30 after my cat Iggy woke me up by attacking the backboard of my bed (is there a mouse inside the wall?). This is not the best way to start a Sunday.

Enough already

So some friends and I were discussing the annual 9/11 commemorations, which seem to be building rather than tapering off as the 10-year anniversary approaches, and some of us were saying how moving they are, and some of us were saying, Enough already!

I was in the enough-already camp. It's not that I feel people should stop grieving. Or that I don't share the horror. Or that I'm against celebrating the heroism of the "bravest" and "finest." But let's face it: most of those who died on 9/11 were not heroes. They were victims—ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were the victims of a crime. It's true that the poignancy of the reading of the names comes from the sheer diversity they represent. But while it may make us feel proud that our nation hosts such diversity, we should also feel shame about the raft of racist hogwash that erupts over 9/11: the Koran burning, the nastiness about the Muslim cultural center, the self-righteous demands by victims' families for the future of the site. Indeed, the backlash that has followed the 9/11 attacks has killed far more minding-their-own-business Muslims—here and in Iraq—than the 3,000 Americans killed at the World Trade Center.

Next door to my building is an Irish pub. And every 9/11 since 2001, cops and fire fighters have gathered there to get wasted—falling-down, wretching drunk. There must be a better way to commemorate their dead comrades, who truly were heroes, than making themselves sick.

Maybe they're getting drunk about something else now, the emptiness of their post-heroic lives, the lack of gratitude of the people they protect, the day-to-day dreariness that makes us all crave oblivion.

Noho never sleeps

In case you had an image of Noho as a glamorous downtown scene, here is my stoop.

And in case you thought it was a quiet little backwater, think again. There's partying in the streets till 3. Then the drilling begins at 6 or 7.

Home alone

So, what do parents do when they've deposited their children at college? Well, it's 8 in the morning, and I'm watching Animal House. That's what I'm doing.

The good ol' days, a rant

When I first started using e-mail, back when AOL was not uncool (there really was such a time, briefly), opening my mailbox was exciting. There was actual mail in it from actual human beings. I might get a message only every other day, but it was real. Why does commerce have to ruin everything? These days I get scores of messages every day, and sometimes not one of them is worth opening. It's just like the U.S. mail now. Only the USPS has improved its real-mail-to-junk quotient. I have yet to receive a paper-and-ink ad from that company in Canada with the name in symbols that wants to sell me Viagra. I might actually read it if I got one. At least the snail-mail version wouldn't f*** up my whole computer.

Bedbugs and lice and pinworms: how do they do it?

There's a question that has been tickling the back of my brain lo these many years of parasite infestations: How do bedbugs and lice annex a new location and proliferate so rapidly? After all, it takes not one but two to procreate. So two individual lice, one male and one female, must jump to a new head simultaneously and find each other in a forest of hair in order to begin an infestation. Or a single pregnant female must make the leap—but for proliferation to ensue in that scenario, brothers and sisters would have to mate. And isn't there a law of nature against that?

Ditto with bedbugs. There's rampant fear that a friend with an infestation will contaminate your home by transporting them in on shoes or clothing and shedding them on your carpet. But ... what are the odds someone would track in a male and female simultaneously, or a pregnant female?

I don't even want to think about pinworms long enough to formulate a question to express my confusion about them.