You made it to one, Ruby. Nice Job.

My very small knowledge of developmental psychology seems to taper off after one year old, unfortunately.  I need to remedy this situation in a hurry.  As predicted though, you have just about all of your cerebral cortex online, in one capacity or another, right now, and there is always a little person there...thoughts, opinions, expectations...strategies.  Dear viewer, if you think it was crazy of us to let a one year old eat this much refined sugar, you are absolutely right...she spent much of her birthday wired like a coke fiend in Miami, waiting for the 1980's to end.  Now, she is trying to walk, in short intervals, and with careful planning, so as not to fall and look foolish.  She demands to be bounced around to music, as always, but nowadays it is almost always her idea.  The little Nile-esque cookie monster growl has come back, for summoning metal to the cd player, or to indicate any situation where the baby is being watonly brutal, such as hurling stuffed toys onto the floor.  She seems much more concerned with having us name every object she can point to than she does with saying the words herself, as if to satify her curisity that previous humans have named everything first.  Sorry..we have, or we can invent them fast.  "That block is a donut shape...a torus....it is red...."  "Donut, umm, that one is octagonal, there are no donuts that shape.  I know, you are finding all the toruses....and stacking them, by round vs. not round..."  Note to self, "Is there such a thing as an octagonal torus?"

Happy birthday, Ruby.

A letter from Federal Prison from Psycho Butcher, our Restaurant Critic

Dear Readers,

I have been incarcerated, unjustly, for the last few months, pending charges of arson. I should not comment on an investigation in progress, but the act was real, performed by yours truly, for very good reasons I am sure you can guess. But that is not why I am posting today. I write to once again comment on the loveliness of brunch.

Brunch is a magnificent ritual. Perhaps just as mighty as the feeling of setting torch one's enemies is the process of, having woken up from sparse hours of slumber, drunken hours after the act spent in a sonambulic playground of hard drugs and illegal sex acts, is the loveliness of stumbling into seat and ordering flapjacks the next day. This I write from prison, of course, not an omlet in sight.

So, lacking in actual pleasures, let me share my fantasies about the red velvet pancakes at the Bongo Room. They are lovely; just the right consistency, exceeding any reasonable person's idea of the appropriate portion size (this is mandatory for pancakes, because let face it dear readers, no matter how much red food coloring they felt fit to enrich the lovely mixture with, pancake fixings are inexpensive and it is appropriate to overserve guests at brunch, a nod to the begotten days of a hearty breakfast before getting behind a plow or other such rustic instrument), and topped with appropriate creaminess. The ancient bullwark of brunch in this town had not lost its heavenly status on the day prior to my incarceration, and since it was a weekday morning, I was able to walk in and sit down at a table without having to wait outside on Milwaukee Avenue, corpse paint running from an evening of smoke and sin.

Nightwood, in Pilsen, serves a fine brunch as well. Disappointing was the Eggs Benedict, actually, but impressive was the hamburger, not a brunch item at all, but ordered nonetheless by the drummer from a rival Black Metal band, a Phillistine, who had the sense to smell cooking meat from the street outside and follow his animal instincts. Both places have appropriately exquisite coffee, which is mandatory for such occasions as well.

Now that I am reporting to you, dear readers, the breakfast biscuit, or whatever it is they call the McMuffin. sendup at Hot Chocolate, has slid a bit, not from lack of love but from rushed execution, but their Hot Chocolate is something to dream about. Alone, in this dark cell, I ruminate on the Cthonian world of their Black and Tan, counting the bricks and lamenting the likelihood of lunchmeat on white bread, meal after meal, until my motives are understood and i am vindicated.

Die, Corky, Die

Corky the Gnome,
I am not saying I put my goblin friends up to causing that workplace accident in Whole Foods that nearly took your life, but if I did, it would have been justified. All those cases of wine falling on a helpless little gnome, as he reclines on a wheel of cheese, smoking a pipe, in the back room. Poor, cute little gnome.
Goblins do things like that Corky, they hate gnomes. If I put them up to it, it would have been justified by all the times you came by my house, sprinkling gnome dust everywhere to give my living room that "enchanted" feeling, and starting shit between me and my wife. Everyone hates it when a little shit-disturber comes around his house and starts talking crap to his wife about how the presence of hobgoblins living in the basement might be "dangerous" to the baby, or how the man of the house might be "gnomist" for having a -no pointy hats- rule. Truth of the matter is that I hate pointy red hats, and I hate gnome antics.
I noticed, for instance, that you secretly inspected, and organized all the closets. I messed them up again. I noticed that you and your buddies made liberal use of the garden all summer, standin perfectly still, like ornaments. Invisible to everybody but me.
If Blodgett and Hookie the goblins abducted you after the workplace fall and drug you off to a secret goblin "maze of torment", maybe they were trying to help you somehow. Too bad you had to chew your own leg off to escape and all. The peg leg looks nice.
I have two hobgoblins guarding the house now. Stay the hell away.
Stupid gnome.