DOWN WITH PANTS!

It's been an unbelievable year here at the worldwide Down With Pants! headquarters. I don't know how to wrap it up other than to take a look back...

January

• The Boomer - "Whell......Ah don't go dere to find out that the man is an ass-HOLE. Ah go there... fortheCHICKEN!"
• Jawas invade Ventura? -

• My Last Non-Daddy DWP! Blog Post - "I'm really, really excited. I just cleaned the entire house not only because the parents are coming, but because I don't want our baby to come home to squalor. Since this is a little sudden and early, I had nothing ready. Yes, I began nesting at around noon today. The daddy hormones are off the charts."

February

• Welcome Home Addie! - And life as I knew it would never be the same, and I didn't care.

• Brooks. Best Meal Ever? - "Best restaurant between Los Angeles and San Francisco? Maybe. Best restaurant between Tijuana and Vancouver? But seriously, I don't want to over hype it."

March

• FU & THNX CS&TL RIF - I got RIF'd and it turned out that they did me a favor. Thanks again Coffee Bean!
• I Heart Daddy - So I poop all over him!
• The Easter Ham Story - "Jesus, as you can imagine, was not pleased. In his deepest, darkest, foulest voice, he bellowed, "silly Jews, I am back. And guess what? We're eating pork, bitches!" And Jesus started flying through the air shooting whole hams from his hands like lightning bolts at all of the Jews."

April

• Mr. Mom Day One Recap - I became a SAHD in April and Day One was pretty eventful.
• Jesus, Brandon and Joseph - The epic post in which I tie a knock-off Chocolate Lucky Charms to The Last Temptation of Christ.
• Drum Solo! - I miss this shrub...

• My Thighs! My Thighs! - Who knew that a post about Pauly Bleeker and thigh friction would become one of my most Googled posts?
• Dear Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA - Easily the highlight of my blogging year. Check out the last comment on this post. I have it on good authority that it's legit.

Tomorrow, May through August

The above picture by fuzzirella (stolen from Flickr) just about sums up my feelings on Snowmagedden 2008. It was pretty for a little bit and I'll admit that taking the body board and sledding down the hill in front of our house was pretty fun, but I haven't left downtown Edmonds since last Monday and it's starting to drive me crazy. Luckily we have a supermarket and restaurants and shopping within a couple blocks so I'm not completely cutoff from the outside world, although the stroller didn't make it out of the driveway today so going out with Addie didn't happen.

We've got seven inches on the ground, and though that doesn't sound like much to many people, you wouldn't believe how it shuts down an entire region when we aren't equipped for this kind of weather. Major roads are starting to get cleared off, but many of the side streets are still so bad that chains are required for anything less than 4WD. We're supposed to go to Olympia tomorrow night for Christmas but my parents have 18 inches on the ground and their driveway (it's up a hill and into the woods) was impassable for normal vehicles today. There was a bit of a melt today, but we're supposed to get more snow tomorrow night, possibly 1-3 inches right around 5:00 or 6:00 PM. Great!

Look, I love living in Seattle but I was going through my pictures on Flickr and found this one from Christmas Eve last year...


I'm not saying that I want to be back in California again and being with family at Christmas is wonderful, but it does look pretty good, doesn't it? On the beach with perfectly clear weather on Christmas Eve, what's not to like about that? Death?, pregnant as could be, even waded out into the ocean a little bit that day. It was an awesome day all around.

We're a long ways from that here in downtown Edmonds, though if this stuff melts off quickly, it might look like an ocean in my neighborhood.

I hate to admit that The Stranger turned me on to something, but after reading their article about the radio show Too Beautiful To Live on Seattle radio station KIRO 97.3FM, I was intrigued. Since then, I've listened to every show and dug into the archives a little bit and I can definitively say that it's my new favorite piece of radio to listen to. Yes, you can count me as one of the tens.

How can I not love a radio show that constantly quotes The Big Lebowski? If I were more talented and could do a radio show five days a week for three hours a night, this is the show that I'd do and I think it's the show that a lot of you would do as well. It's a bunch of pop culture and a bunch of bullshitting. It's perfect for all of us thirty-something blogger nerds.

The clincher for me came last night when host Luke Burbank (an occasional guest on my other favorite radio show, Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me) proclaimed his hatred of the movie Crash. Oh god, don't even get me started on that steaming pile of shit that somehow won Best Picture in 2006, I couldn't hate that movie any more than I already do. So to hear somebody finally say it out loud on the radio, it was actually kind of thrilling. I still hear people fawn all over that pathetic waste of celluloid and I lose almost all respect for them.

Anyway, if you want to check it out, and I suggest that you do, head on over to their website and listen to a handful of episodes. I think you'll like it.

I have one word to describe this episode....Titacular.

Good god Natasha Richardson! Tuck those things in. And with all of her tans lines, she looked like an 70's or 80's era Playboy model (NSFW). I once read somewhere that strippers used to do the tan line thing so that when they got naked and you saw the difference between their normal bits and their naughty bits, it made it even more exciting because guys really thought they were seeing something they shouldn't be seeing. That's kind of how I felt about Natasha Richardson tonight, though I just found it distracting and a little strange as opposed to exciting. Not that she's not attractive, but it was just out of place...


My other word for tonight is...suckfest.

What a disaster some of that food was. Deviled eggs? I love deviled eggs, but even I can make deviled eggs and I'm sure I could spice them up with some little fancy ingredients in a few minutes. The only way she could've won me over with that dish is if one of her secret ingredients was Baconnaise and she made it with that.

And miss bangs - whatever her name is - how is she still there? I'm starting to think that she's the first episode fall guy (I have a theory that they throw out a sacrificial lamb for the first episode just to go down in flames and spare one of the good chefs the indignity) that got lucky even though she has no taste and can't cook.

I want to think that Gene is just going through a rough patch and he'll turn it around pretty soon, but I'm starting to think his restaurant learnin' is going to kill him. On Top Chef, you can't do some of the restaurant tricks that easily slide by novice eaters like cornstarch in a stew or salvaging shitty rice. Those are the kind of things that make restaurant owners love you but makes Martha Stewart cringe.

I'm glad they didn't kick anybody off and I'm really looking forward to the next episode where they are all let loose in the kitchen to do whatever they want. That should be interesting.

And can I tell you how happy I am that Martha Stewart was only on for a few minutes? Thank god.

Screencap of Natasha Richardson's boobies stolen from Adoring Natasha

Is anybody else really offended by this this Arby's commercial?



Seriously, I'm totally offended. Why would I go to Arby's for a fucking chicken sandwich? Umm...hello...you're all about weird Boooooiiiinnnngggg worthy roast beef.

I only had a couple of pages left in the book that I was reading late last night, so despite being awfully tired, I decided to head into the office and our big overstuffed chair to wrap it up.

On the very last page of the book, I nodded off. I dreamt of two things: First, the last page taunting me, belittling me, begging me to read it and I, petrified, couldn't do it. Then, I dreamt of unbelievable pain, a pain that just wouldn't stop no matter how hard I tried. Again I was petrified, completely unable to do anything about anything in my dream.

I awoke hours later - 3:00 AM to be exact - balled up in the chair, the last page of the book inches from my face, and my teeth clamped down almost as hard as they could on my tongue.

So the big news today in the Down With Pants! household is that we have cable and not a day too soon. I got to watch the Gonzaga Bulldogs lay the hammer down on Washington State in basketball tonight and then we sat down to enjoy Top Chef, in real time for once. We bought the season series from iTunes before we decided to get cable so we were watching it a day later and I had to avoid all the blogs the next day that talked about it. Now I wish I could get a refund for that iTunes purchase, oh well.

Anyway, to this point I can't say that I have a favorite. Death? is kind of pulling for Eugene, mainly because he's Hawaiian. Fabio is growing on me despite the fact that I didn't want to like him because I kind of know him from the interwebs already. About a year ago, he joined Yelp and rubbed a lot of the Ventura County Yelpers, including myself, the wrong way with some of his reviews and weird promoting of his restaurant and whatnot. Whatever, I think it was all a misunderstanding anyway and gradually he's winning me over.

And I can't really say I dislike anybody either. Stefan seems like a dick and Carla is strange. That whole "Hootie, Hoo" thing tonight was too much. You know those couples that people can't stand to be around because they share their personal language and inside jokes too freely with you or they don't know they are doing it? Yeah, that's Carla with her "Hootie, Hoo." But even those two I don't dislike necessarily. Stefan fulfills the arrogant almost villain role nicely and Carla seems to be genuinely nice and pleasant.

This week's show was probably one of the most predictable episodes of Top Chef that I've seen, until the very end. Eugene had barely been mentioned in any of the other episodes - last week he was on screen for maybe 20 seconds - so you knew right away when he was getting a lot of airtime, he was bound to either win big or be on the bottom. And then Daniel, Carla and him started making their food and it was pretty obvious which team would lose.

But what I didn't see coming was Daniel getting kicked off because he opened his big fat New York mouth and said too much. By all rights, Eugene should've been the one gone because it was his idea and he messed up the most, but Daniel stood up for the dish when nobody in their right mind would, and at that point, they had to show him the door. If he would've said, "I didn't think it was good" or nothing at all, he'd still be there.

I take it back, I did see that coming. All the New Yawka guys on the show eventually get the boot because they said something stupid. It's basically become a Top Chef tradition.

Thanks to Jonathan, Suebob, Dave and Becky for their responses. I think I touched a nerve with this one - sorry Dave!

Now it's your turn. Please feel free to leave your answers in the comments...

And as always, if you'd like to participate, leave me a comment and let me know.

UPDATE - I just realized that my answer to the CEO's question doesn't make any sense. I'm too tired to fix it, so it'll just have to go on making me sound stupid.

You know one thing I miss about California? Sure, the weather, but also this...


Fucking Ponch selling hellholes! (click here, here, here and here for old Estrada posts)

So the question is, when the cable gets turned on at my house, will Erik Estrada come with it? Do they show these infomercials in Washington? Do they even show them in California anymore?

I certainly hope so, because I can't get enough of this guy's taught neck waddle.

Um...I did not sign up for heartwarming, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The trailers made me expect raunchy, stupid, silly and probably just plain wrong. Too bad every single part of the movie that was all of these things I had seen before...in the trailers. Seriously, I've never been so disappointed by being happy for characters and not being grossed out as I was watching Baby Mama.

Four months of living without cable is coming to an end next week. Yes, we finally gave in and decided to hook up the old boob tube despite trying to talk a big game about how evil television is. Who are we kidding? We like TV and even though the majority of it is mind numbing crap, there are some good things to watch.

Example - one of the biggest reasons we broke down is because we get really bad reception on our rabbit ears here and we don't get a PBS station right now. So, no Sesame Street for Addie in the morning. Addie loves puppets. In particular, the puppets on one of her Baby Einstein videos and almost any of the puppets on The Muppet show, which I'm more than happy to show her. I think Sesame Street and Big Bird and Cookie Monster and...oh boy...El-frigging-mo are going to be right up her alley.

By the way, I caught one episode of Sesame Street recently and I was amazed at how much Elmo has taken over that show. I haven't seen Sesame Street since Elmo became popular so I had no idea. I think the Elmo's World segment lasted a good 20 minutes. For anybody that watches Sesame Street with any regularity: is that normal? Does Elmo own Sesame Street now? If so, I'm not looking forward to it at all.

Anyway, we also miss shows like Top Chef and Project Runway and Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs and I miss watching Sportscenter every morning. The Soup will once again become regular viewing and I'll watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report in real time instead of days later on the computer. These are all good things. But what I need to do to, and it's been one of the hardest things for me to do with TV, is to just turn it off when there is nothing on that I want to watch instead of flipping around and just watching something.

I think these four months have taught me how to do that. I used to leave the TV on all the time as background noise even if I wasn't really watching it. Now, especially with Addie, it's a distraction and there are better things to have on as background noise than the TV. I've got an iPod full of music just begging to be listened to.

So wish me luck as we venture back into television. Is there anything that I've missed over the last four months that I need to check out?

Hey, I created my first t-shirt on Zazzle! More to come later...


make custom gifts at Zazzle

UPDATE: Zazzle is acting stupid as I post this, so if it comes up blank, I'll fix it in the morning. If not, enjoy!

Recently, I've started reading at an unusual (for me) pace. The lack of cable and frequent trips to the library with Addie are making it happen. Here are just a couple things I was thinking about tonight as I read...

FYI - No Blog Culture Box this week. Since I took a few days off from blogging, I don't want my blog to become nothing but Blog Culture Boxes, so we'll space it out a bit this week. Plus, I have put no thought into it at all and I usually get it done on Tuesday.