In addition to the ongoing experiment mentioned below that is @ben_yes, I'm also co-tweeting the insane-ness of my almost-three-year-old, @littlekuma. (Spoiler: He has a lot to say about "bad guys.") And I just started my own twitter account for things I want to tweet that I can't convince my children to say: @best_ben.

I've started logging the output of my three-year-old daughter's awesome-crazy brain.

For quite a while I'd been meaning to do this -- just to document the interesting/beautiful/insane things she says, and I really couldn't get myself together with it until it was suggested that I try twitter. (Other than this, I don't entirely "get" twitter. But doing this with it makes sense to me.)

Some highlights so far:

• (Holding a handkerchief with the intent to put it on my head) "I'm going to hat you up!"
  
  
• "When my babies were taking a bath, I stood right here and peed standing up. While I was washing my babies."
  
  
• (out of the blue) "I'm strong enough. I'm STRONG! Because I can carry something that's heavy.... I'm strong. I'm so strong."
  
  
• "I want to watch music. Because I want to know what's in the music."
  
  
• "Here comes an apricot!"
  
  
• "Astronauts don't ride motorcycles. They fly in the sky. They come like Santa Claus and Easter Bunny and bats."
  
  
• (This musician's name is Stevie Wonder.) "His last name is Truck Banjos. I watched a TV about that."

Q: Why hasn't this site been updated in over 2 years?
A: To build anticipation for this:

After you finish watching it, watch it again please. Watching this video will be your project for today.

[update: Thanks a lot, YouTube. That was the best video on the internet. Now it's gone.]

Get well soon, sick foot
This poor, ailing foot has three feet in total, but he's so sick he needs crutches to use them. It's both sad and ironic.

I wonder if there are more faces on this foot's little feet. And if those feet have feet that have faces (that have feet that have faces that have feet...). And if so, how do those feet-faces feel? Fine, I hope.

Also, is the bright red big toe the malady itself, or merely a symptom? It's not clear to a layperson, which is why we need podiatrists.

When this foot feels better, will he be happier? He will be healthier, but presumably when all is as it should be, his sole-based face will be getting walked on. Would you rather be sick or have your face walked on, foot?

I want faces on my feet. Not fake drawn-on faces like I just did, but real faces Buy Modafinil who will talk to me. If the feet-faces don't mind being walked on, and we all get along pretty well, there's no good reason not to have faces on your feet.

You're never lonely if you have faces on your feet. That's an old saying. Hey, look, it's a pullquote.

I'm sorry I drew attention to the pullquote. it's pretentious already to even have a pullquote that you yourself wrote--like, "hey, check out these especially delicious bon mots of mine." Then to get self-referential on top that. Oh, man. It's embarrassing!

Anyway, that's not what I'm here to tell you. You got me all sidetracked.

What I wanted to tell you is that I made you some spaghetti, in the form of this weblog. And I put it up. And then a month ago, I moved it to a new, cheaper, better web hosting service. So I untangled the spaghetti, packed it back into it's cardboard box, and then moved it and tried to reconstitute it over here on the new server for you.

But it's not working yet. Well, I got most of the spaghetti back in place, but--MoveableType isn't working. (The spaghetti metaphor became cumbersome, so I dropped it. Just like that. I mean, would MoveableType be the sauce, the pot, the boiling water, or the stove? Who cares?) My point is that I haven't gotten MoveableType working yet, so any updates in the near future are being done by hand, like this one.

Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien, 1862
Scanned in for your enjoyment, beautiful radiolaria illustrations. pillow pal
This holster will prove useful, attached snugly to your mattress; whether its for your handgun, your stun gun, or your aerosol chemical agent.

Better yet: get 3 pillow pals--one for each. Werner Von Wallenrod's big page of novelty rap records
It's funny how interesting it is to read about these records which you would probably never ever want to listen to.

Wayne and Charlie (The Rapping Dummy), who released an album on Sugarhill Records in 1981, also won the Most Fascinating Novelty Rap Artist Award, which is an award that I made up just right now.

I don't spend a lot of time reading the 'help wanted' section, but I do know that there are very few opportunities out there for ventriloquist rappers, no matter how talented they are. So kudos to Wayne (and Charlie) for making a go of it.

And I love the idea of ventriloquists throwing down rhymes where they boast about their ventriloquism skills.

I hope that at least one time it happened in our world that there was a ventriloquist dummy rap battle. I don't hope that that rap battle ended in a dummy versus dummy knife fight, but I do find it to be an engaging mental image.

By the way, I should warn you that when you visit that web page, it plays the sped-up loop of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop" (made famous by The Hamster Dance). I guess it's an appropriate enough background to a page about novelty rap. Because it's irritating. TV Party: Holmes & Yo-Yo
Short-lived comedic crime fighting robotic buddy cop TV show from 1976.

Watching this show helped prepare young Americans for the future in ways that learning the metric system did not.

another fun thing for big foot to be holding: kittens
Except he's not carrying them.

Bigfoot is lying on top of overstuffed fluffy pink comforter on a heart-shaped bed. The room he's in is outfitted in mostly pink and white, with unicorn posters and rainbows and glittery stars and things, like it's maybe an elementary school girl's room.

And bigfoot's on the bed, covered with a dozen frollicking kittens. The kittens are rolling all over and bumping into each other and bigfoot can't stop laughing.

[Thanks Tracy!]

Defamer: Tom Cruise watch
With nothing to promote at the moment, Tom Cruise is presumably back to just being insane in private. But wasn't that fun, a little while ago, watching him implode and explode at the same time?

I'll bet if you read his e-meter, it's probably always pegged at 'super crazy.'

(That joke is too easy. I'll bet over 1000 people have already made the Tom Cruise e-meter = crazy joke. I promise that someday I will spend an entire afternoon working on a better Tom Cruise e-meter joke.)*

*Actually I won't.

The whole thing was like watching a train wreck and then watching that train back up and wreck again. And then again. And again.

And the bad acting Scientological fakey-love part was just fantastic.

Anyway, to get my TC fix a while back, I was checking out this page on the Defamer almost daily. I'm hoping it will get fun again either when "Mission: Impossible 3" comes out or when his career is declared dead and he has to attempt a resuscitory press tour. Ghillie suits
Ghillie suits make you look sort of like a bigfoot. With a gun.

Also Bigfoot with a Gun would be a great album title. Or comic. Or humorous horror movie.

"Oh my God, it's bigfoot. And he's got a gun!"

That makes me wonder: what is the funniest thing that bigfoot could carry? An oversized lollipop? An 80s jambox? How about a deflated Bozo the Clown punching bag--and bigfoot is crying? Maybe a Starbucks grande latte and a copy of the Wall Street Journal--and he's got reading glasses on but is otherwise naked. (Well, you know, fur-covered.)

I can't decide. Thinking of bigfoot with that lollipop makes me laugh out loud, though. Wonderful.

[Thanks, Joel.] Time Traveler Convention
If you can invent a time machine, then you didn't miss the Time Traveler Convention.

[Thanks, Zobrax] regrettheerror.com
Fascinating retraction blog:

Regret The Error reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media.

[Thanks, Chisato.]

I seriously did have a baby
Seriously.

A few people have written to say something like, "if you really did have a baby, then congratulations." I did actually have a baby. Not me, myself, because I am a boy, but you understand how these things work.

My baby is a little girl named Mika. She is two months old and awesome. Of course. She already knows a great deal about bigfoot.

Please join me in celebrating the glorious return of bigfoot pants cam.
Just a few of you are old enough to remember the original pants cam from the early 1970s. It was the first webcam on first computer ever built on the original test interent. It's true. This new one isn't breaking nearly so many records, but is certain to win your heart.

bullet list of other news from the past 2-months...

Lots of bigfoot happenings, lately. It's wonderful. And thank you, everyone, who has taken a moment to inform me of these things.

I still don't have cable television, but am downloading and watching The Daily Show pretty much every day, which is great, plus lots of awesome British TV that is too good for America.

I ate some homemade blueberry waffles topped with Nutella, which that has to be the #1 best ever food combination ever.

Had a baby. In order to tell you this, I'm breaking this site's editorial guideline of not delivering very much personal information to the peoples of the internets. Luckily, the other editorial policy of usually not being sincere makes the news somewhat less credible and therefore a less flagrant violation of rule number one. As does the ongoing self-critique as the information is being delivered, like when I point out that the baby news was presented as the fourth item in a bulleted list which also includes bigfoot, television and waffles? Well, see, that's exactly the sort of thing I have to do to get around the stringent editorial rules.

Expect sporadic updates for the next 18 to 25 years.