Thingy Things

I bite my nails. I suspect that I left the womb biting them. My paternal grandma hated it. She used to tell me that no boy would ever hold my hand if I bit my nails. She was dead wrong about that. Boys are happy to hold anything you'll let them hold and they don't give a rap about your manicure. But I give her snaps for trying.

Now that I'm in my dotage I have a decent manicure more often than not. What I've figured out is that if I keep my nails polished and trimmed then I don't bite them. The urge is completely subconcious but if I've got lovely polish on I notice it before my fingers hit my teeth and I stop. But I have to maintain the manicure. If I take off raggy polish without having time for a fresh coat, if I go about for any length of time with unvarnished nails then I will bite them to the quick in next to no time. I established the habit of giving myself a proper manicure on Tuesday nights, while I'm watching "Gilmore girls". "Gilmore girls" has been in reruns for the last 412 weeks. I have no fingernails.

Last night The Spouse and I were watching an Eddie Izzard DVD. Eddie Izzard is the funniest man on the planet. He is also a transvestite, a straight one at that. Anyway, we were watching the show and laughing out loud frequently but I kept being distracted by his hands. He has lovely fingernails, polished up beautifully. And I thought, "Bloody hell. I'm not going to let some transvestite look better than I do". So I painted my short, stubby nails a nice red color. They'll look ridiculous for about a week but fortunately, they grow very quickly and hopefully by the time they are long again "Gilmore girls" will start running new episodes. I must come up with a manicure plan for the summer.

Back to Eddie Izzard. If you have never heard his comedy, and if you can handle "language", you must check him out. He's not horribly foul mouthed but he does use some of "those" words. Of course, they don't sound as offensive as the same words in the mouth of say, Chris Rock, because he's British and it's somehow easier to give a pass to naughty words intoned in a British accent. At least it is for me. Which I suppose means that I have no standards whatsoever but there you are. I also vote Democrat.

Eddie's humor is hard to describe. Oh,wait! Here's what it says on his website: "He takes ideas and situations and extrapolates them into bizarre, tangential, absurd and surreal comic narratives. He is the first to admit that he gets well paid for talking total bollocks. The good pay is because unlike the bollocks most of us talk, it's funny". That sums it up pretty well. He's random and intelligent and as likely to talk about the attitude of fruit as he is politics or anything "deep". But it ends up being deep. Last night he did a wonderful, very truthful, bit on the subject of pears. Not something you'd think would provide high comedy but it was great. Anyway, if you meet the language criteria you must check him out.

On another note, if you care about baseball you must go see Iwanski's predictions for the 2006 season.

In the good news department: The Child went to school today. She's still a bit itchy but I've decided that it must be hay fever and hopefully in a few days, once the season is firmly established and no longer wobbling between winter and spring, she'll be just fine.

Also, Charles Taylor was arrested in Nigeria and back in custody. Good thing too because he's a bloody, evil criminal and he deserves to be severly punished for the horrors he unleashed on Liberia. Poor Liberia. I'll never get over the irony 3 years ago: suffering under a brutal dictator, a nation of people begged the US to become involved and help them out but besides sending a few Marines to sit off shore while all hell kept breaking loose we couldn't be bothered. We had to go occupy Iraq. The lesson - and you Sudanese better take note - we can't really be compelled by doing the right thing. Unless you have some oil.

Here's another thing that keeps me from biting my nail. Typing.