The worst, unmentioned, thing about this story is that the driver in the commercial was originally supposed to be Michael Vick.

If you're not watching the show, I CURSE YOU! CURSE! HEX!

Eh, OK. It's all right. Come back, now. I wasn't serious. But hey, the DVD set of Season One comes out in August. You'll have no excuse then. I'll lend you my copy if I have to.

Anyway, they started shooting Season Two yesterday. I wrote some entries with photos and interviews.

I also shot a short video with some of the cast members. They're so nice! And not like all TV Star Fake Nice. Genuinely cool. In the middle of interviewing Taylor Kitsch, he asked, "So what's new with you?" and I was completely taken aback.

Me? I'm... uh... you know, having a baby. He got all excited and asked me all these questions about it. And Zach Gilford (boy crush Matt Saracen) -- the sweetest guy. I've had to break off interviews twice with him because he's so friendly he could just talk all day and they'd never get any work done.

I like to think one of the reasons some of us love the show so much is that the inherent sweetness and good in a lot of the people involved is clearly evident on screen. Every time I get a chance to visit with them, it gets easier and easier to believe that's the case.

OK. Enough gushing. Just pick up that DVD set $20!?! Cheap! or rent it or whatever. You won't be disappointed.


"Baby!? Tell me more!"

I'm still doing weecaps of Last Comic Standing for Television Without Pity, even though I neglected to mention it last week. Last night's episode weecap is posted and you can see that previous ones here.

It sure is making me all kinds of cynical about stand-up comedy. Thank goodness I didn't try to make that a career.

I went to breastfeeding class on Saturday (yes, with my wife). I can't tell you how disappointed I was to learn that I don't lactate quite enough to actually participate.

Nonetheless, there was lots to discover. Though the child is only weeks away from entering our world mewling, wanting, I've let my wife do most of the reading. Not because I'm not interested (I'm not a 24-year-old pothead from Knocked Up, I swear), but because I don't want to over-prepare. I've sat in a parenting class with people who have a look of terror in their eye that I know comes from reading too much on These Internets and from poring over the horror show that is What to Expect When You're Expecting. These people ask questions like, "What happens if the baby rolls over, gets his arm caught in the crib, turns over the other way, and rips his arm out of its tiny socket? That happens a lot, right?"

These people are going to be miserable. Happy and euphoric, and then absolutely miserable, waiting always for the other shoe to drop. With a severed babyfoot in it.

So, I do ask my wife a lot of questions and I have been going to classes the hospital provides, which is how I found myself early one Saturday morning looking at crude chalkboard drawings of titty ducts. That was crude. Excuse me. I meant boob tubes.

If these drawings are to be believed, the life nourishment of my baby will be dependent on a network of bulbous glands right out of The Matrix, that compress more varieties of viscous fluid than, say, Snapple.

What follows, a survivor's guide, if you will, is what I now know about breastfeeding that I did not know before. Or at least what I remember. It was really early in the morning:

• While it's called "Breastmilk" it is anything but. You don't want to mix this up with Nestlé Quik. Because what comes out initially is more like buttermilk. It's a thick, yellow, gooey substance called... Chuck Closterman, I think. Cloestomy. Clostermilk. Something like that. Apparently, babies LOVE them some Chuck Closterman because it has all the nutrients they need. It's Centrum Performance Liquid for Infants. And if you think, "Awesome, I need nutrients, too," and try to drink it, you will die a horrible death. Not from poison, but from me killing you for stealing my baby's precious meal.
  
  
• Nipples darken as the baby time approaches, so that the wee ones can see them clearly as their tiny orby eyes seek out food. The breast is a lighthouse. The nipple is a big, dark light shining out. This is probably a terrible analogy.
  
  
• I'm not sure what happens if your skin is darker than the nipple. I would imagine your baby has to develop some sort of Nipple Night Vision to survive. Or perish. Or maybe the nipple turns completely white. No idea here and the instructor would not take this question seriously.
  
  
• The baby opens its mouth wide, like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, and seeks to clamp onto the entire nipple, not just the tip, but also the aerostareolas. If the baby clamps onto the nipple tip only, it will bite the thing off, or leave the breast-barer very sore and angry and bleedy. A good "Latch" is the only thing separating the baby from a tiny milky blood vampire.
  
  
• Breast milk is specially formulated for the needs of that particular baby. No swapping breast milk for jollies. Mom.
  
  
• If you have a preemie, you produce special preemie milk. If your baby is born fat, it's 2%.
  
  
• Breastfeeding, we were told, is so beneficial to a baby in so many ways, that not breastfeeding is akin to throwing your baby in a pit of alligators after slathering it in fajita-flavored marinade.
  
  
• If for some reason you can't breastfeed, it's cool... there are formulas, they just don't work as well as getting your baby out of the alligator pit.
  
  
• Breastfeeding is like the Tour de France. You have to do it 43,000 times a day, with one short break if you're lucky. Breastfeeding takes about six hours every time you do it. In the first three weeks of life, a baby ingests 21,000 gallons of breastmilk for a total of 66,300 hours. By the fourth week, the mother is drained of all moisture, like a dead moth.
  
  
• If you don't alternate breasts for feeding, you will be lopsided for the rest of your life. This means you, too, men.
  
  
• What goes in must come out. The breastfeeding class took special glee in showing us graphic photos of baby bowel movements. You almost feel sorry for the baby expert charged with being the visual documentarian of newborn shit. The first one, they told us, will look like black tar. The picture showed what appeared to be burned off coal mixed with the black oil from X-Files. That, we were told, is the evil that babies must shed from the tiny ass to make their sleeping, tender livers awaken.
  
  
• Poop goes from black ore to greenish yellow. It is perfectly healthy for a baby to expel Slimer from Ghostbusters. This is a sign that the milk is good, and not that the baby's colon is a waystation for ectoplasm-leaving spirits.
  
  
• If you, say, try to sleep through the night like a normal human instead of feeding the baby every five minutes, the milk in the breasts will harden into concrete and they have to send a guy in there with road signs and a jackhammer.

I'm sure there's more, but those were the vital things that must be remembered.

Might I suggest the name, "IHOPplebee's?"

A follow-up to my iPhone news stories ran in yesterday's paper and didn't make it online until today; it's very stealthy -- you can't find it anywhere on the site at the moment, but I link to it here directly for my peeps.

I haven't been sleeping well for weeks and then my wife made me realize that it coincided with when I started doubling the amount of grounds I use in my coffee. I always thought it was two cups of water per tablespoon, and had been brewing that way for years, until I bothered to read the coffee packaging one day and saw that I've been making what Glark calls "Weak sauce" all this time. I set forth to make the "Perfect cup of coffee" and ended up wiping out my REM cycles, I guess. I drink about 3 or 4 cups in the morning on my way to work, so multiply that by a tablespoon or more per cup (my compromise against a completely insane coffee experience) and you've got some sleepless nights. I'm trying to cut back to a happy brewed medium.

We have an LCP show coming up early next month (among other arrivals) and even though I'm not in the stage production, I'm doing lots of work on some videos and it's taking up tons of my time. Trying not to be stressed, but it feels like my deadlines are coming up fast and I'm still behind.

Other than that, things are good in Omieland.