I guess my niece thought it would be fun to sit in the refrigerator

So she did. I like that kind of follow through, although it made for a lot of “Porkchop in the fridge” jokes.

Advice for young girls, or Ask a Disney Princess

Love it or hate it, the Disney Princesses hold a lot of sway with the younger set. If you don’t feel like sitting through 90+ minutes of some motherless waif ruthlessly changing herself in order to obtain true love, the princesses themselves have been kind enough to boil their life lessons into soundbite-length words of wisdom.

Belle:

Ariel:

Snow White:

You’re never too young to shill for your family

This is what Porkchop is wearing right now. I didn’t buy it, and it isn’t true, but I do appreciate that she’s already trying to help me protect my interests.

I need this in my life

I don’t care what you’re doing today, it’s probably not awesome as what these kids are doing. The Christian Science Monitor always has the best pictures (and stories, but I’m sleepy today, so I need something interesting to look at).

If you don’t love this, you have no soul

Futher evidence that the French are the luckiest people on the planet

Even though their retirement age has been raised to the beastly age of 62, the French really have it good. They strike all the time at the barest provocation, and they get approximately a million days of vacation per year. It turns out that their kiddos are rather lucky, too. An 18-month-old, who was somehow unattended by her parents (they must have been suffering from ennui or taking a siesta), fell from a sixth-story window, bounced on a business’s awning, and was then caught by a doctor. How much luck can one person have? It’s amazing enough that the awning broke her fall, and then she landed in the hands of a doctor? I want that kid to pick my lottery numbers.

Not the child in question.

I’m never going to be able to move and/or have children

I really love living in the New York metro area, but it’s so expensive here. I have lived in much cheaper places and loved it (Montreal, how I miss thee!), but this is always going to be my home. I would love to be able to live somewhere else for a while, not only to give my wallet a bit of a break, but also because I like to experience new people and places. The South seems like a worthwhile region to consider, since it’s cheap and I have a lot of relatives there, but it’s stories like this one that make me believe that maybe I’m better off staying here and paying the Northeast Premium.

Why would a middle school arrange the student elections so that only students of certain races can hold office? What student government positions are available to those children who are neither white nor black? How could anybody think that this would be okay? This is why people still find it okay to make jokes about Mississippi.

As somebody on Gawker pointed out, it’s good to see that the school practices what it preaches (scroll down)…

This is not what people mean when they talk about “family togetherness”

It’s not a good idea for parents to get arrested at the same police checkpoint that ensnared their teenaged child. I’m pretty sure that this will never be included in one of those “family fun times” brochure.

Who is breeding with these people?

For the last time, people (and by people, I mean men), put down the babies before you lunge for foul balls. Thanks.

Brooklyn, Baseball, and Bumper Cars

I decided not to stay home and brood on the day that my job was closed due to budget cuts. Instead, I took my nephews (Elder Satan, 14; and Satanski, 5) to Brooklyn. I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been to Brooklyn, but that’s more due to a lack of any specific reason to go, than to an opposition to the borough. The primary reason for our trip was to see the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ Short-Season Class A affiliate. I really enjoyed the minor league games I went to when I was going to school in Virginia (Single A Lynchburg Hillcats and Triple A Norfolk Tides), and thought that it would be a fun trip to see with the boys. I didn’t want the first baseball game I took them to to be a MLB game, especially since those tickets cost a lot, and I wasn’t sure if the kids were willing to stay for an entire game.

We arrived in Coney Island about two hours before we needed to get to the stadium, so we grabbed something to eat and then went to an arcade and played air hockey, skee ball, and that basketball game where you see how many baskets you can get in 30 seconds. Elder Satan and I had hoped to compete against each other, but the balls took forever to come back, and we agreed that it would be a waste of time to count the few baskets we were able to get before the time ran out. We did better competing at skee ball and air hockey, and I’m not mentioning them just because I won.

We played bumper cars, too, and it cracked the boys up to see me driving anything. I am awesome at bumper cars, though, and with Satanski by my side, managed to crash into Elder Satan a lot, while avoiding most of the weird strangers who kept trying to ram us. It was harder to find things for Satanski to do, since we learned the hard way that he didn’t have the height for the basketball game or the coordination for skee ball (his balls had the disturbing tendency to end up one or two lanes over from where they’d started). He had a great time on the motorcycle video game, although his brother had to help him steer, and on Dance Dance Revolution, where a helpful little kid stepped on whatever food pad caught his fancy, sometimes even making the correct combination. Although we were excited about seeing the Cyclones, we were all a little sad to leave the arcade when it was time to head over to the stadium.

We shouldn’t have been, because we had a great time at the game. One thing that I love about minor league stadiums (I know, I know: technically, stadia is more correct, but hardly anybody uses that word anymore) is that they try to get and keep your attention in a way that major league ballparks do not. As we walked to the game of MCU Park, people in Carvel shirts gave Carvel Flying Saucers to anybody who cared for one (Satanski declared that he was frightened of these, and did not take one), and after we had our tickets scanned, stadium employees handed out CUNY duffel bags to the first 2,500 fans, so we got some of those, too. It was Thomas the Tank Night last night, so kids who wore Thomas clothing got to take the field (I didn’t dress Satanski in anything related to Thomas, but he did enjoy the Thomas songs and trivia throughout the night). Did you know that Thomas & Co. are 65 years old? I didn’t either.

Satanski made friends with a similarly-aged boy in the row behind us, and they laughed for five innings straight at the beverage vendor in our section, whose call was, “Beer and a bottle of water!” He did have a thick accent (like New Yorkers often sound on tv and not as much in real life), and for some reason the boys just died every time he said that. I didn’t get it, and the joke did grow old with repetition. I didn’t mind it so much when that kid and his family left after the fifth.

Satanski was more into the game than I’d dared to hope he would be, and he got really excited when the Cyclones scored on a two-run double. “Touchdown,” he yelled. It was pretty cute. Even after I explained that there were no touchdowns in baseball (“or cheerleaders, either,” he added), he yelled the same thing the next time the Cyclones scored. Another thing that he enjoyed was when three people dressed as Ketchup, Mustard, and Relish had a race along the left field line. Satanski and I do not like mustard and relish, so we rooted for Ketchup, but he was vanquished the gooey, oddly-textured Relish. I listened to him talking on the phone with his dad, trying to explain how we booed Mustard and Relish, and took the line to explain to my very confused brother that his son and I had not randomly jeered condiments.

My older nephew, who is not as evil as his brother but is nevertheless known as Elder Satan, was not as chatty as his brother during the game. We did share a laugh over a 20-something hipster couple where the guy had an insane handlebar moustache and the woman had fuschia Lee Press On nails.  We spent two innings trying to get a picture of the guy, and I finally was able to get it not too long before we left at the top of the eighth.

It was a long trip back home (an hour on the subway and then a wait at Port Authority, and then traffic at 11 pm on 495), but we had a really great time yesterday.