supererogatorarily yours

I took a great many photos of our trip to Alaska, but only one of them can be the best. I know without looking: it's this one.

In case you were wondering what to do this Memorial Day, here's the niblet's to-do list.

Big Sunday is the largest regional community service event in the country. Participating for the L.A. Derby Dolls, the kid and I went to the South Los Angeles Animal Care Center to write biographies and draw signs to make the dogs and cats awaiting adoption even harder for visitors to resist. After a tour of the kennels, we got down to business. Click through to the gallery for the rest.

Now soliciting nominations for the best movie closing lines ever. We will accept extremely limited dialogue on a case-by-case basis, but it has to be a spoken line, not a graphic. Inclusion in the bracket will be arbitrary and at my high-handed discretion. Comments are screened so as not to get anyone het up about favorites too early in the game.

Ready? GO!

Left the bout early the night before in order to finish knitting the fluffy-cuffed Fight Crew shrug. How about that: sometimes hard work pays off.

Somebody come live here and do my hair like this every day.

Today as we ate lunch with Michael Chiklis [well, ate lunch next to, at any rate], the kid favored me with the following filk:

This lunch is your lunch
This lunch is my lunch
I eat it over there
And I eat it over there
I dooooon't like
Spiii-iii-nach
This lunch was made for you and me

I related the story to dogofthefuture tonight and the kid tacked on a coda:

This lunch is your lunch
This lunch is my lunch
From California
To the mac & cheese place
That's what I wanted
To have for diii-iiiin-ner
But Daddy decided tacos

There were a couple more verses in-between, but I was trying too hard not to interrupt him by crying with laughter to note them down. When someday they write the book, those verses will be lost to history.

When people talk about the death of civility and ascendancy of snark, I just watch the audtion episodes of 'American Idol.' If these people weren't surrounded by folks who are too polite to laugh in their collective face, we wouldn't be seeing them today. And maybe that's a better sign than any of us thought.

"'Nobody living can ever stop me.' I gotta give Pete Seeger infinity weepy LOLs, because does he kill that lyric very hard? LOL, the man is eighty-nine years old and he makes Ghostface Killah sound like Pee-wee Herman. Eighty-nine years old . . . still keeping EVERYONE on notice."

-- quote and image by David Rees

[Update: Back on YouTube. thanks to Hodgman for the link.]

As the man says.

On our first day on the 'Kath & Kim' set, I overheard an actor shooting a scene and thought, "God damn if that man doesn't sound just like Ron White." It turned out there was a good reason for that.

Photo courtesy of Gori Spelling. Note thoroughly covered black eye. People like to talk about craft services, but by me the best thing about working on a set is free makeup. I would have wrapped up every one of those artists and taken them home.

The niblet and the husband hit their respective beds early tonight, so I applied myself to clearing up part of the disaster that the holiday left in our house. And it struck me that the best gifts we had this Christmas weren't -- wonderful as they were -- the ones under the tree. On our dinner table alone, we'd had:

• The Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired decanter Travis and Susie gave us for our wedding
  
• Waterford crystal galore, mostly from my folks, also from the wedding
  
• The serving platter I haven't returned to leopardfur [not technically a gift, since I really am going to give it back, but it still counts]
  
• Coffee from Great-Grammy's second-hand machine
  
• My paternal grandmother's silver
  
• Mom's Yorkshire pudding
  
• Dad's advice on the roast
  
• Homemade butter and rillettes, which wouldn't be there without the kind of upbringing that makes a person believe making such things is not only possible but is also a good idea

And on my person were:

• Knotwork earrings from my parents
  
• A spectacular necklace and earring that once belonged to Dad's mother
  
• Niblet's Grammy's bracelet, which her husband gave me after her death this year
  
• And always, always my engagement ring, the one Grandma Walsh wore from 1929 'til the day she died

The great thing about all this stuff isn't that it's great stuff -- although it is, it is all fantastically good stuff. But as I looked at, put on, ate or ate with each of these, I got to think about the people who'd given them [however unintentionally; I swear I'm returning that platter], even though, for one reason and another, the givers couldn't be here.

I'd been dreading this dinner all month, knowing that last year's Christmas will always be the Last Good Memory of Eric's mom. She and Pat and her mother and step-dad all came by, and we ate pate and lamb and drank the world's finest egg nog and finished the evening with an ill-advised but heartfelt attempt at a buche de noel. It was an idyllic holiday. And it wasn't two weeks before we got the call, on our drive to El Centro to see Nibby's other set of Californian grandfolken, that something with Sally had gone seriously wrong. And it was a day short of a month from that dinner that she died.

We didn't talk about her tonight, though I know that her absence was on everybody's minds -- everybody but the niblet, I suppose, who could think of nothing but his new Mario Kart game. But it was something good for me to be able to look down at my wrist, and think of his Grammy, and remember.

One last thing I forgot in the "on my person" list: Every Christmas, Sally would wear red nail polish with gold sparkles in. Is it weird to memorialize someone on your toes? I guess you take your honors where they come.

<gar> Do you have a rice cooker?

<byrne> You're looking at her.

<Irish-> New from Ronco! The rice cooker that can swear at you, shoot a gun and and leave shoes around the house!

Shortbread

Milk Chocolate Espresso Balls

Mexican Wedding Cookies

Chocolate-Almond Buttercrunch Toffee

And of course Shirley Corriher's candied pecans from Cookwise, which I don't have a link but you spray a skillet with Pam, melt 3T butter in it, roast a pound of pecan or walnut halves in it over low heat for 4 minutes, sprinkle with 1/2t table salt and 1/4 packed cup brown sugar, keep stirring until sugar melts, dump the whole mess out onto sprayed foil and let it cool. Takes no time or work to speak of, and they're very good for filling in the blank spots on your cookie plates.

But first I gotta clean the kitchen.

The 63-degree thermostat is getting on everybody's nerves.

Though the middle of December, it's spring time in my laundry room.

Spider Jerusalem's got nothing on Royko.

22 November 2008: Kammi Kazi's butt is checked out by a four-year-old.

Oh, how I miss this man. Give it some time to get through the talk-talk to get to the game film. I only wish I'd been old enough during his prime to truly appreciate him.

[via TNC]