And right now, the Kickstarter is counting down.

If they get five million dollars — and they’re close — they outreach to 7500 classrooms (up from 1500). That sounds like a worthy goal to me. They’ve got new rewards cooked up and under 48 hours left to get to the stretch goal.

So: consider pledging?

This is an actual conversation I had with the toddler the other day as we stood at the bottom of our driveway in his ride-on pick-up truck. He got out of his truck, went to the side of the driveway and into the woods, then decided he was going to pee in the weeds.

B-Dub: I’m peeing.

Me: I see that.

B-Dub: *walks back with his pants not entirely pulled up*

Me: You forgot something.

B-Dub:  *sees what he forgot* Oh ha ha ha.

Me: You need to put Mister Winky back in his house.

B-Dub: I need to put Mister Winky in my butt!

Me: That’s not how that works. Besides, your butt is in the back, your winky is in the front.

B-Dub: Mister Winky and the Butt are neighbors.

Me: Y… yes.

B-Dub: Does Mister Winky have a dog?

Me: Uh. What?

B-Dub: Mister Winky has a dog! And he keeps it in my butt. A BUTT DOG.

B-Dub: *cracks up for like, five minutes straight*

B-Dub: *laughing dies down*

B-Dub: …butt dog.

And, scene.

* * *

Your turn. If you have kids or have ever met one of these tiny little randos, feel free to share with us something completely hilarious / cuckoo bananapants / disturbing that this children has said, or some conversation you’ve had with them. I think every parent has these, so, y’know. SHARE.

I have detected an insidious plot.

Hollywood hates our cities.

Consider, if you will, that in the following films (and there may be more) over the last ten or so years, one or several cities are prominently and obviously destroyed, frequently in the third act, sometimes due to some kind of invasion:

Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, Transformers Dark of the Moon, Transformers Age of Extinction, the LEGO Movie, Godzilla, Pacific Rim, Cloverfield, Avengers, World War Z, War of the Worlds, 2012, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Wait, maybe not that last one.

Other films (Dark Knight Rises, Chronicle, the last Matrix movie) are city-destruction-adjacent.

I am left to conclude that Hollywood — acting as a self-aware hive-mind that has perhaps grown disgusted with our enjoyment of its leavings — is warning us that it will soon punch, kick and ‘asplode one or several major cities. It will headbutt holes in dark buildings. Because it angers.

IT ANGERS.

Okay, maybe not.

But I do find this interesting — I always love looking back over prior decades of film and trying to suss out, just what the fuck were people thinking? What fears and desires drove our entertainment needs? In 100 years we’ll look at the decade between 2030-2040 and ask, “What did all the orgies mean? Why all the robot goats? And all those shots of old men pooping in bowler hats. WEIRD.”

Seems that in the last decade, we’ve been afraid of the destruction of our cities.

Global warming? Maybe. Certainly some hints of that, whispered in any of the films that have nature at the heart of our metropolitan eradication, right?

Probably, though, this is the legacy of 9/11 — particularly since a lot of the films center around an invading force that fucks up our shit. Aliens, a lot of the time — even those we may not think of as aliens (Transformers, Kryptonians). And the new “Khan” is something of a terrorist, is he not? Makes sense, then, that this is the ghost of that day haunting our entertainment almost mindlessly at this point. We’re still a nation that remembers those buildings come down and, let’s be honest, it’s been a bit of a cultural splinter in the heel of our foot since then — stands to figure that it would bleed out all over our screen.

Or maybe we just get big boners when we watch buildings go boom.

Whatever the reason, for my mileage it’s growing increasingly boring.

Especially since they all look the same.

DARK SLATE-BLUE SKY

DARK ALIEN SHIPS THAT ARE JAGGED

CHUNKS TAKEN OUT OF DARK BUILDINGS

SOME GREY-BLUE LASER BEAM THING THAT’S ALSO SORTA DARK SOMEHOW

PYOOOOOOOOOO

BOOSH

DEBRIS

SCREAMING

DARKNESS

(And, if it’s a Michael Bay film, you can add in: SPACE SHUTTLE / ARMY GUYS / JETS OVERHEAD/ “JOKES” THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE “FUNNY” / MALE GAZE / GLISTENING SWEAT / EXPLOSIONS / MORE EXPLOSIONS / ASTRONAUTS.)

It all feels very cut and paste. You could take scenes from Man of Steel, intersperse them into Transformers, maybe grab one from the newest Thor, and nobody would know the difference. And jeez, maybe that’s what it is. Maybe once someone created these CGI assets, they’re just passing them around like a joint in a dorm room — “You want Chicago getting destroyed? I’ll just give you the thumb drive, Spielberg. It’s been in like, six other movies by now, so whatevs.”

What does this say about us, as an audience?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing.

What does it say for filmmakers of Big Budget Plotstravaganzas?

Time to actually find some original content, methinks.

I mean, how about a giant space ape who arrives and builds cities where we don’t want them? Huh? Howzabout that? BOOM. This is why I should be allowed to write movies.

Or maybe “shouldn’t.”

Probably that, yeah.

When I was a kid, I loved reading D&D so much (I hadn’t yet played it yet) that when I heard the phrase, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I thought the saying literally meant like, an actual D&D Beholder monster — you know, the big floating one-eyed volleyball with all the phallic eye-stalks? For some reason, I assumed the Beholder was the arbiter of beauty, which I found somewhat ironic given that the Beholder was one ugly motherfucker. But maybe that, I thought, was the point. Maybe that said something about the subjective nature of beauty: if such a grotesque monster was the keeper of the ideal, maybe beauty was a wildly moving target?

And now, with a little perspective, I have come to believe that someone out there thinks the Beholder is pretty. I mean, even in its ugliness the creature is a marvel of monstrousness — beautiful in its horror, elegant in the calculations of its nightmare fuel. One assumes that other Beholders think Beholders are fucking hot. Right? A Beholder sees another Beholder across the room and licks its razor-fang teeth while rancid-smelling saliva patters at the ground beneath it. Its eye-stalks bulge and stiffen. Its crevices weep with excitement.

This is a post more about our idea of beauty than it is about the D&D Monster Manual, by the way.

Anyway, that weird preamble leads me to this blog post — “Not Everyone Is Beautiful” — which is one of those posts I’ve seen ping-ponging around Facebook. Facebook seems to be where I get my rage from these days (seriously, it’s like a neverending well of fresh, clean scowl juice).

So, here I am.

The title of that post makes its point clear.

Not everyone is beautiful.

Okay.

That idea, and the post that supports it, is at least half-bullshit.

I understand its point, somewhat, and at the core of its argument, I agree: beauty, physical beauty, is given way too much priority. In fact, let’s fast-forward to the end of the post:

I want to tell you something, whoever you are. I don’t know if you’re beautiful, funny, smart, friendly, musical, caring, diligent, athletic, or anything else about you. All I know is this:

You are valuable.

You are important.

You are interesting.

You are worth loving.

So forget about “beautiful”. It’s become an ugly word anyway.

That’s great! Well-done, sir! I agree.

That’s a killer end to that post, and is just, aww. It gives my tummy a tickle of warmth and possibility. Unfortunately, you have to slog through some less… erm, agreeable stuff to get there.

Everyone is not beautiful. Some people have tumors the size of a second head growing out of their ears. Some people have skin like the Michelin man. Some people lose fingers, legs, or eyes in horrific assembly-line machine accidents. People have warts and blemishes and hair loss and dead teeth and lazy eyes and cleft palates and third nipples and unibrows.

YES HA HA HA THE DEFORMED AND DISABLED CANNOT BE BEAUTIFUL

THEY ARE UGLY AND SHOULD JUST ACCEPT THAT

I MEAN JEEZ

whoa, wait, wut.

Holy crap, really?

A cleft palate takes you off the beauty list?

My father was missing a finger.

Hair loss? Hair loss? I’m going bald. Uh-oh.

(And a third nipple is just one more nipple to love, I’ll have you know.)

He goes onto say:

There are plenty of people that are not physically appealing to look at, the primary and most widely used meaning of the word “beautiful”. So why do we use the word as a catch-all for any sort of positive attribute?

Nobody says, “Everybody is a good listener.” Nobody says, “Everyone is athletic to somebody.” Nobody says, “You are an amazing writer, whether you know it or not.” I keep waiting, but they never say it.

But then later:

Last week’s challenge: “Doing The Subgenre Twist”

This week —

You’ve got 1000 words to write about bad parents.

Whatever that means to you? Write it down into a story.

Any genre will do.

Write the story at your blog, drop a link in the comments here so we can read it.

And that’s it.

Due by Friday, July 4th, at noon EST.

That is pretty much the grossest blog title I have ever written.

But it’s done. It’s too late. I can’t delete it now.

(I can totally delete it. And yet, I don’t. What’s that say about me?)

(HINT: IT SAYS I HAVE BEEN DRINKING.)

Anyway.

Let’s talk about store-bought salad dressings.

Most of them are shitty.

Like, I don’t mean that they contain actual feces, I just mean — they’re kinda weak. They may in fact be where the phrase “weak sauce” comes from. A lot of store-bought things are weak, honestly, but the ability to buy them is so much easier than actually making them. That said, salad dressings do not fall into this category, because salad dressings are hella dopey easy to make. You could literally, while concussed from a cantankerous mule kick, while high on benzodiazepine, while blinded in one eye by a misting of cat urine, make salad dressing. It’s so easy, you’ll feel like an asshole for ever having procured salad dressing from the store.

Anyway, I wanted to make my own Russian dressing. Or Thousand Island dressing. I dunno why it shares those two names, and really, I’m too lazy to Google it, so I’m gonna go ahead and assume it’s similar to the “French Fries became ‘Freedom Fries'” thing — maybe we were mad at Russia because of the Cold War, and so we stopped marketing Russian dressing because who would ever buy Communist Red Sauce to put on their Fresh American Lettuce. Could be we called it “Thousand Island” because that’s what we were going to do to Mother Russia with our nuclear bombs — turn the big-ass country into a thousand little islands with big kaboom.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

You can call this what you want. Hot Wendig Dressing. Gulag Gravy. Putin Coulis. Zesty Vegetable Fluid Blanket. I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments below.

Point is, you want to make a dressing for your salad.

I’m going to tell you how to do that.

Take mayonnaise.

One cup of it.

No, not Miracle Whip. Don’t bring that nonsense up in my house. You know what Miracle Whip is? It’s emulsified diabetes. With sadness oil stirred in for extra sadness. It’s gross. Don’t use it. If you use Miracle Whip, then Flavor Jesus will come down from his restaurant in Heaven and burn your soul in the castigating fires of a George Foreman grill.

Miracle Whip. What is wrong with you?

Mayonnaise.

You can make your own mayonnaise, but that really is one of those things I think it’s maybe easier to buy than make. Whatever. I like Duke’s. Your mileage may vary. (And now I fully expect you homemade mayo types to freak out in the comments about how easy it is — so, please do, I accept any and all mayo recipes you care to share, food nerds.)

One cup goes into a blender. Or into a receptacle where you can use one of those cool stick blenders. Note that I did not say “dick blender.” That is a whole different thing.

Did I mention I’ve been drinking?

WHATEVER NO YOU SHUT UP

*throws a jar of pickles at your head*

Wait, gimme those pickles back, we’re gonna need ’em.

Okay, so, like I said: one cup of mayo.

Then, four tablespoons of ketchup.

Then, one tablespoon of hot sauce. Your choice of hot sauce is your own — obviously, these days, Sriracha is quite popular on pretty much everything. I eat it on rice, hot dogs, hamburgers, pandas, street urchins. (Hey, jerk, don’t judge; street urchin is my favorite sushi.) Here, though, I might casually suggest Frank’s Hot Sauce. Because Frank’s.

One tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce (which is pronounced WOOSHTERSHURESHEER SHASS). Also, if you did not realize this as apparently many do not, Worcestershire sauce is actually just fish sauce. Seriously. People blanch at using fish sauce in their Thai dishes but then liberally dose something else with this stuff? It’s fermented anchovies, people. At least it’s not fermented people, people. Because, really, people are gross.

Three peeled shallots.

You could do onion or garlic but just suck it up and go buy some shallots. Shallots are awesome because they’re what happens when onion and garlic have a baby.

Then 1/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika (sweet or hot).

The smoke is key because I said so.

Two tablespoons of sweet pickle relish. (Or, if you don’t have relish, but do have bread-and-butter sweet pickles, toss a rough equivalent into the mix.)

Pinch of salt.

Pinch of pepper.

Blend until… well, blended. What else would you do? Blend until the world ends? Blend until your house catches fire? BLEND UNTIL YOU STARVE TO DEATH, STANDING BY THE BLENDER LIKE A SAD HOUND WHOSE MASTER DIED AT WAR AND WILL NEVER RETURN HOME.

Just blend it up, for Chrissakes.

Then put it on your salad and eat it. Or just drink it if you’re one of those weirdo adults who are averse to vegetables. Though, point of fact, if you’re one of those weirdo adults who are averse to vegetables, you’re a dumb person. And probably unhealthy. Enjoy your scurvy and your rickets, your weak bones and your tumbling teeth. Vegetables are amazing when they’re cooked right and you need to grow up right now and learn to eat a fucking carrot once in a while.

Meat is awesome, too, but vegetables are just meat that grew in the ground.

Whatever. Enjoy the Hot Wendig Sauce.

Goes good on salads, burgers, pandas, and street urchins.