Well, duh. The less you post, Hugh, the fewer times that people (even those who read the blog regularly) will come and visit. And your stats will go down. And you’ll get colds more often. And every day you don’t post, another two or three (almost-)endangered polar bears will fall lifeless into the melting arctic ice. All because of you, you, you.

I admit that much of the preceding paragraph is true.

“But there let us leave the art critic to strangle his wife, and move on to pastures new.”

Saw Eddie Izzard on Saturday at the Murat. I was wondering how full the house was going to be, since I had seen absolutely no advertising for it. The Murat seats about 2,500 and the house seemed full to capacity. And it was then I knew I was not “in the demo[graphic]” for this concert. Izzard was himself, though not dressed in drag: blue jeans, black shoes, chartreuse-striped oxford shirt and a jacket with tails. The only reason that I could see his eyeliner is because we were in the second row. He opened the show with “Indianapolis — The GREATEST CITY IN THE INDIANAPOLIS AREA!” Very funny, and very worth it. But the second-funniest part of the night was on the marquee:

Murat Theatre Welcomes
EDDIE IZZARD
PIKE HIGH SCHOOL

Apparently, Pike was having their prom that night — it was a Spinal Tap moment.

It rained the day the Wife graduated from college, which forced the school to put the commencement ceremony in the school gym instead of out on the beautiful lawns surrounded by singing birds and early-morning mist and sunlight. She has never forgiven the college for this. Though, as a Kenyon grad, this might be just as annoying:

Dear Members of the Graduating Class of 2008,

It is with profound sadness that I must convey to you that Peirce Hall will be unavailable to you for any of the festivities that occur during Senior Week and Commencement.

For those of you unfamiliar with Peirce Hall (and, yes, that is the correct spelling) it is the historic dining room at Kenyon. Think Harry Potter’s dining hall and you’ll get the idea. They are presently in a major renovation of the space, including a “new” Dempsey Hall, and even hard hats won’t allow students eating room. Too bad. Though for female matriculants of the College, the freedom from having to walk “the gauntlet” might be refreshing.

Since I had some time this morning before plunging into my day, I took the Girls voting with me. I explained to them the difference between a primary and a general election. I heard that Daughter #1 and her friends had been discussing politics. All of her friends would vote for John McCain, apparently because Obama and Clinton “hate Lilly”. This isn’t odd because a plurality of the parents at their school work at Eli Lilly & Co. It’s so much a part of the fabric of Indianapolis that people say that they work at “Lilly’s”, as if it’s the corner drug store. And, in a sense, it is. Daughter #2 says, “Billy met Obama, Joanie met Clinton, and Mary met McCain.” So, they’re being politicized from an early age.

The big loss is that of the big Ka-CHUNK style voting machines. Yes, we’ve forsaken the hanging chad, but there was nothing in the world like the old-school things. Now, it’s a computer screen, which the girls can see anywhere — just another video game. Bring back the automat!

A random thought that’s been floating around my head for months. The media has been flinging the “Obama’s middle name” thing around like it’s a bad thing. But isn’t it the greatest F-U to those who would seek to destroy us that we can have a President sporting one of “their” names, and still be a pluralistic society, and still kick their asses? It’s like ripping someone’s arm off and beating them with it.

Wait, I’m going to do a second one of these, because I obviously didn’t get it the first time.

1. I love eating artichokes, even though I haven’t had one in years.
2. While flipping channels, I am constitutionally unable to flip past the last 10 minutes of the original “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”.
3. Growing up, I liked keeping score when going bowling more than I liked actually bowling. I very much miss the old scoresheets they used to give you.
4. My first act as President would be to establish a uniform price for all blue jeans: $25.00 a pair.
5. I’ve just recently hit on my favorite mixed drink: a Seven and Seven. Up until then, it was a gin and tonic. Rare enough to be cool, common enough that the bartender doesn’t bat an eyelash.
6. My favorite Multiplication Rock is “Figure Eight”, my favorite Grammar Rock is “Verb: That’s What’s Happenin’”, and my favorite History Rock is “Sufferin’ ‘Til Suffrage”. Wait, is that three?

From Jeanne comes the “6 unknown things about me” meme, which is quite difficult, because I am constantly scouring my brain for interesting parts of my past to use for blog posts. In fact, I just used one of them, and got a lot of comments. Not as many as dooce gets, but what the hey. So, let’s see. . . I reserve the right to post on these things separately without having the feeling that I’m repeating myself.

1. I’ve taken one transoceanic trip on the Concorde, and two on the QE2. Granted, I was a pre-teen, but I do remember them. My family was moving to England (corporate relocation) and my father convinced the company that the cost of going steerage class on the QE2 would cost less than putting the family in a London hotel for a week. So, it was a win-win. The Concorde was underwhelming, mostly because I was 12 and any trip over an hour seemed like forever; the difference between 3.5 hours and 7 hours was marginal. I also remember the digital readout in the cabin which gave the plane speed in Mach incremements.
2. I’ve never broken a limb, spent a night in hospital (where I was the patient), had braces, or had chicken pox. So, if I don’t post for a while, you’ll know that I had it coming to me. Really badly. I have had my wisdom teeth removed as an out-patient procedure, and the summer before I went off to college, my dentist’s assistant suggested that I have plastic surgery to make my chin less prominent. I decided not to, because I didn’t want to start freshman year with a huge bandage on my face.
3. I’ve performed in Alice Tully Hall. Granted, it was a high school choir trip. The coolest thing was that we also sang the Rutter Gloria in St. Bart’s Church in New York, under the direction of Sir David Willcocks. For those of you hip to the English Choral Tradition, that’s like having a private audience with God. I had brought along a book of Christmas carols that he had edited for him to sign, which he very graciously did, but not before drawing a musical staff, a treble clef, and the words and music of “We wish you a merry Christmas”. A wonderful man.
4. I was a ferociously underperforming high school student, probably best summed up by an event that happened freshman year in my English/History class (yes, two classes as one and team-taught.) I was re-enacting something or other from the Greek period. I meant to say either, “I came to this meeting with an open mind” or “I came to this meeting with a clear head.” What came out was, “I came to this meeting with an open head.” Jocularity ensues, and I hang my head in shame for the next three-and-a-half years. In fact, at my recent 20th high school reunion, no fewer than three people came up to me, separately, and apologized for their behavior towards me during that time. 
5. I ate vulture feces as a toddler. In Jamaica. On a related note, I am famous in my family for eating horrendously. The phrase is something like “Hugh’s having Pez and Fanta for dinner.” most of this dates from a time the Wife was away. I was lazy and didn’t want to cook, so I ended up having Scotch and white Pillsbury frosting for dinner.
6. My most famous ancestor was a woman named Mary Grossman, who was the first female municipal court judge in the United States. From the online Encyclopedia of Cleveland History: As a judge, Grossman earned a reputation as, according to her obituary, “a severe, rigidly honest jurist, sometimes irreverently referred to as Hardboiled Mary.” When she took a day off to observe a Jewish holiday in 1927, 39 bail jumpers reportedly turned themselves in so they would not have to face her.

Um, anyone who wants can consider themselves tagged. I’ve many fewer blogging friends than I used to.

For those of you who are non-WordPressians, WordPress has implemented a new feature called “Possibly Related Posts” which may now appear at the end of every archived post. The nice thing is that those links may take you to a site far more interesting than this one. The bad thing is that the operative word is “possibly”. Some of these sites may be NSFW, NSFChildren, or simply not safe.

I only choose the links in the body of my post. I do not suppress the new feature simply because I’d like to see what turns up. But you have been warned.

Light to moderate posting this week. It makes me feel guilty when I see that post calendar over to the right, and there are a string of unhighlighted days. It’s been quite a crazy week for reasons I can’t go into now, but will possibly post about sometime in the mid-to-long future. Everything’s OK, it’s just been an unhinged sort of week for a number of reasons.

I must say that I had the only RBI (RKI?) in our company team’s kickball league game last Saturday. It was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise disappointing 6-1 loss. Among the mitigating circumstances was the average age of the teams. Ours was around 35, theirs was around 25. To their credit, however, they had been drinking, and we, unfortunately, had not. Game #2 is tomorrow, just in time for a 20-degree drop in the daytime high. What doesn’t kill me makes me slightly more uncomfortable.

Luckily, I neither embarrassed myself nor injured myself. One of our number ran over his own toe, which then filled with blood. He eventually used a drill bit to release the pressure in his extremity. I was not around to witness the operation.

I have been reading The Jungle Books to Daughter #1, and have been surprised at how much I have been enjoying them (making the tenses work in that sentence was really annoying.) When we started, I was having a real problem with the neo-Victorian syntax that the characters use (to say nothing of the patronzing colonialist attitude, sexism, etc.) But now I’ve, thankfully, gotten past that and am now really enjoying them, as is she. I think that my favorite so far is “The King’s Ankus”, and I find the stories in the second book to be more compelling than those of the first.

With Daughter #2, we are still making our way through the Narnia series, and have just begun The Horse and His Boy. I don’t know how much of it she is getting, since they, like Kipling’s characters, tend to talk to each other in what kids today would consider a highfalutin style. The goal at this age is not to notice all the nuance, but to impart a love of storytelling.

Last weekend was the girls’ big dance recital. Luckily, both girls were scheduled on the same night, so that we only had to go to one dress rehearsal and one performance. Two years ago was the year of the Pole Dance, last year it was High School Musical, and this year is the year of the ass-shake. Everyone from the toddlers to the eighteen-year-olds was shakin’ it like a Polaroid pic-chaaa, with varying degrees of success. For the third year in a row, Daddy forgot to bring the correct equipment to take non-blurry photgraphs of the event, so we’ll just have to wait for the DVD.

The lawn calls this weekend, lots of cleanup, raking, and grass seed. Enjoy yourselves, everybody.