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The public has spoken: More pix, less of that wordy stuff!
 Ian and Sushi circle each other, a la Michael Jackson's Beat It video, each looking for an opening, seeking dominance and Alpha status |
 Ian takes feeding matters into his own hands. He insists on working without a net. |
 The dance continues as Sushi and Ian finally reach a rapprochement: Ian will rule Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; Sushi Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Ice Cube rules Fridays |
 Ian emotes as he sings: "I'll SEEEEEE you a-GAYN...!" Damn your eyes, Pop-Pop Gardner! Lookit what ya've larnt the Boy! |
 "What's the dealio, Emilio?" asks the boy. "It's, like, 90 degrees out, dude! Let's 86 this Nanook suit!" |
Ian prepares to leap up and wrestle the monster plant to the ground! (Not shown: Ian's parents cowering in fear in the corner. Also not shown: Sushi the watchdog blithely licking herself in the other corner.) |
 OC's (the Other Couple) name revealed! It's Van Wagner, and that little bundle in Papa (right, blue jacket) VW's arms is little Marguerite. A real cutie, born 1 day before Ian. |
Little-known fact gleaned from Ian's CV: he was an extra in Fiona Apple's Criminal video. We've zoomed in here on the background of one of the frames in  which he can be seen playing one of the crashing party guests. Originally, he had a line (subsequently cut at the demand of a jealous Apple): "Dude, how much formula did I drink last night? Why didn't you stop me, dude?" (It killed. Critics said Ian has the talent of young Caelin Hoye (before he went Hollywood).) (Click HERE to see a still from the movie that made Hollywood Hoye a star, Planet of the Ape-Babies.) |
No, really, HERE are his first recorded words
If you have found your way to this update, bully for you! No notice was sent because no pix have been added, and the editor has received the distinct impression that people want LESS WORDS, MORE IAN. Ain't it great when someone listens to your feedback?
Anyroad, I just thought I'd quickly note that I suspect The Boy may be naturally attracted to magnetic north because when you put him down in his crib oriented in a certain way, you are likely to find, next time you check on him, that he has spun around and is pointed in an entirely different direction. We were not yet ready to accept that our baby has learned to spin himself around—please, Lord, let him stay a baby a little while longer!—but then we realized that we didn't have to: the most likely (and simplest) explanation is this built-in attraction to magnetic north which we had, heretofore, somehow overlooked. No he is not getiing older...no he is not about to learn to flip himself over and learn to crawl, then walk, then get a job and move out and never call.
He's just attracted to magnetic north, is all.
Q: What's black and white and red all over?
A: A nun who's accidentally wandered into a men's locker room!
Now, you may think that joke is stupid, but Ian LOVES that joke. Click here to hear his spontaneous and unrehearsed reaction.
*(Translated freely from the Babese. Actual Babese quote here.)
 Ian attends open mike night at the comedy club and laffs raucously at Daddy's material. He especially liked Daddy's original material on airline food. You know, how it tastes bad and all. We laff cos it's true... |
 "Um...dudes?" sez The Boy, "Could ya get this guy with the PSYCHO EYES away from me? Thanks." |
 Secret Agent Pubert: They've given you a number (O, let's say...4.2) and taken away your name. |
 Pop-pop and Ian get into it over who's got the bigger belly. Sumo, anyone? The kids at Ian's playgroup thought him a bit chunky, it seems... |
 Don't let the threats of the DPEC (Drool Producing and Exporting Children) foax scare you. Let them raise their prices! Ian produces enuff drool for us all domestically. God Bless America! (*snif snif*) |
 Ian sez, "All clean now. Time to make the drool. Drool waits for no man." |
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 Ian's first screen kiss...and it's his mother!! How lame is that? Someone's agent will be getting his walking papers.. |
 Way to go, Pop-pop: first ya teach him that "I'll seeeee you" song, and now...PSYCHO EYES!! |
 Mommy sez, "Hurry up and snap the picture while he's still drool-free!...Too late..." |
The Boy could have been a consultant on Waterworld...which... Not to go off on a tangent, here. But it's so uncharacteristic of me that perhaps you'll indulge me this one time. Waterworld was not such a bad film. No, really, I mean that. But there's a secret to enjoying it that I'm sure even the creators of the movie didn't understand: I think the key is not to watch it in sequence. Bear with me.
When Adrienne and I went on our first cruise, they were showing Waterworld repeatedly on the TV in the cabins. Ya'd go to take a nap, ya'd flick on the TV, there it'd be, on every channel—at least, on every channel that wasn't showing Carnival Hijinks, consisting of riveting interviews of your fellow passengers saying what a great time they were having getting their backs waxed and such. The Hijinx video changed every day but the hijinx themselves were strangely the same:
"Hi, I'm Spanky from Boston, this here where I'm resting my beer is my beer belly, lemme turn around here (and incidentally display my back hair) while I introduce you to my wife, Cellulita...we both are injoyin' ar Karnival Kruise! Woooooooo!!!"
[Camera hold...hold...hold for yet another 10 seconds while Spanky and Cellulita smile stupidly and get nervous thinking they're never gonna stop filming (cos ya don't wanna miss that point where even Spanky and Cellulita's eyes are silently screaming "Turn off the camera already!" which happens a minute or two after you've been screaming that very phrase aloud at the TV screen)...now...CUT! That's a wrap! Brilliant! Much better than the interview yesterday that was exactly the same just with different people!]
(Perhaps I'm just bitter: Matty and I were interviewed on that cruise but ended up on the cutting room floor because we bad-mouthed Kathy Lee and made rude suggestions concerning what we thought her friends ought to do to her if "they saw her now" or anytime in the future (most of which involved disembowelling)—all in good fun, of course; but this was back in the early '90s, before bad-mouthing KL became fashionable; Matty and I paid for being avant garde.)
So there was really not much else you could do during downtime on these cruises other than watch Waterworld. But it was impossible, for some reason, to catch it at the beginning, no matter what time you flipped on the TV.
I think I saw the whole thing, eventually, but wildly out of sequence—a bit near the end first; next time, 45 minutes from somewhere in the middle; then the 20 minute conclusion; caught a lot of parts more than once, which would have helped me pick up on the cinematic subtleties, if there'd been any—but I'm pretty sure I saw the essentially whole thing. Keep in mind, this was while trying to take naps, so I may have dreamed some scenes on my own, and that may be why my version held together better: I went back for re-shoots during my sleep. All this enabled me to edit it myself in my mind, forming it into the coherent whole that it evidently was not (if you can believe the critics) in its theatrical-release version.
And as my companions (in this context, I think they prefer to be called "my long-suffering companions", Adrienne, Sue & Matt) on that cruise will tell you, I became WW's greatest champion. Well, actually, the mentally re-edited Tom Gardner's Waterworld's greatest champion, since that's the version I was referring to. (There was not much competition for the honor of being champion for WW, really, and I kinda won by default.)
Anyroad, it was not a bad movie (at least, my director's cut was not), and I think (pay attention - here's where I tie this all in with Ian's drool output, which is where this whole digression started) Ian's input, given his experience in his own drool-created waterworld, might have helped even the original director's cut out. (Unlike Costner's other debacle, The Postman, which I paid to see on video and am convinced even an army of drooling babies could not have saved. The Postman is one of those films, like Ishtar (paid to see that crap-fest in the theatre—yeah, that's right...I was the one) that should just never have been released—the studios should have just eaten the loss. The makers of Ishtar could have taken a lesson from the makers of Caelin's Big Carnival Adventure, which, though pricey, is apparently sooooo bad that the producers are determined that it should never see the light of day. More power to them. (Though I hear some of the supporting actors did star-making turns. I guess those poor schlumps'll just have to wait till their second once-in-a-lifetime shot comes because the star, Caelin "Hollywood" Hoye, phoned his performance in and is so embarrassed by it he won't allow it to be released.))
Anyway...back to drool again; right, today's topic, drool.
Ian produces enough drool in any given 24-hour period to irrigate 40 acres of hard-scrabble land; his drool is so nutrient-laden that it can turn desert land into prime alluvial soil. It is an unworldly, angry, active drool—relentless in a way the Terminator only hoped it could be. There are tribes in the remotest rain forests of Papua New Guinea that worship a form of drool that isn't anywhere near as omnipotent as Ian's. (We know, because Adrienne and I went through a drool-worshiping stage back in the '90s...yeah, I know, just like everyone was doing then; what a couple of sheep we were!...and we actually thought of converting to this Papuan Drool-cult. We were disqualified from converting though when it was discovered that we had sealed the envelope containing our mailed-in application by licking it, which the Papuan Droolists considered sacrilege of the Highest Order against the Holy Drool. I maintain that was spit we used to seal the envelope and that spit is fundamentally different from drool in the same wise as gibberish is different from language. The one has meaning; the other is just noise. The Drool cultists split over this issue of the ontological status of spit as surely as the Church split over the filioque. It got ugly: the schism members who refused to see divinity in spit would taunt their foes by—that's right —spitting at them. It was not pleasant, and it got very slippery.)
But with Ian, the kicker is, he can produce drool in any quantity
and at varying levels of strength on demand —the way a
cow hopped up on Bovine Growth Hormone produces tainted milk. So you
got your weak Lite Drool, which tastes great but is less filling,
which you can have lots of because it has very little kick (Martha
Stewart sez: use it when serving fish or other light victuals). At
the other end of the scale, ya got yer Mad Dog Drool, which could
knock out a Marine. That's the drool ya use when you just wanna
forget...or when you wanna clean tough stains off of floors and
counter surfaces. "Drool, Madge?" "You're soaking in it!"
"Eeewwww!"
We called this little rascal "Scallion-Head" for reasons I believe are more transparent than why CIP cards are called CIP cards. (OK, OK —it's because his head is shaped like an onion.) There were many of these doodles during our Baker & Taylor years because B&T afforded us endless opportunities to be bored to tears. (B&T is the only company I know of whose company song includes lines like:
Kill me now
Lord, kill me now
Send your avenging angel
And put me out of my misery...
O, yeh, and increase our profit margin.
It actually rhymed in the original German, and used to be the Luftwaffe's fight song, but B&T changed the "them"s to "me"s and added the line about profit margins. A nice touch. The other nice touch is when the song refers to new hires as "dead men walking". (Changed to "dead people walking" in 1997, after Adrienne & I had left, because B&T was always on the bleeding edge of the (as they called it) "Broads' Rights Movement".))
Anyroad, it struck me just today, April 21, 2000, that Scallion-Head bears a remarkale resemblance to somone who's come into our lives roughly 10 years later...anyone wanna guess who?
No, no, not George Dubya! (Though I see what you mean....) I was talking about:
Adrienne has eery powers. Amazing as it seems, she appears to have channeled Ian from the other side a good 9 or 10 years before he was even born! The resemblance is uncanny, and can't be denied. Truth be told, Adrienne scares me sometimes, and I don't mean just those times when she sneaks up on me from behind and grabs me by my ankles and dangles me from 10 storey windows (I kinda like that). I mean when she displays these eery powers.
Now, some of the more cynical among you might say, "But Tom, how do you know Adrienne didn't summon George Dubya from the other side with that picture?" To which I must respond that Adrienne uses her powers only for the Good —she doesn't dabble in the infernal arts of Black Doodling. Talk to George H.Dubya and Bar and the Republican party if you wanna find those responsible for the blight upon our world that is George Dubya.
Tom Moore has constructed a gizmo that lets you see the uncanny
resemblance between Ian & Scallion-Head that is guaranteed to
work even for those of you who lack the abilty to construct and edit
movies in your heads. Here it is
(it's worth the wait).
The Easter Bunny's not the only fuzzy thing in this picture...(taken by a "professional')
