Almost a week of not posting. I'm a Blogslacker.

Life. Oy.

The wife and I did the registry thing at Babies 'R' Us. It was over three hours of the infant arcane, fascinating but exhausting. Newborns, I learned, need stuff like tiny T-shirts with snaps all the way 'round because they hate having shirts pulled over their proportionally large, uncontrollable heads. They need little bulbs to irrigate boogers from their noses because they don't know how to blow. They have to wear little mittens so as not to scratch themselves when their little hands flail around spastically. There are -- thankfully -- thermometers that read body temp from the ear, so you don't have to from the little dude's nether region.

How do women know this crap? It's their network of friends, of course. Every first-time expectant mother is barraged with information from every woman she knows who's squeezed out a yard ape. I'm deeply thankful the same is not true of men. My friends with children only look at me occasionally with a cocked eyebrow and knowing smirk. I can handle that.

I'm most pleased that I found a product called Buttpaste. It doesn't sound like the sort of thing you'd want to have to use on your kid, but there was a certain appeal to the discovery after hours of fleece blankies, pacifiers, and micro-sized booties.

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I bought the Revenge of the Sith soundtrack yesterday, basically for the accompanying DVD. The 16 "music videos" present an awesome ride through the entire saga. They're best enjoyed without Ian McDiarmid's narrative interludes (despite the fact he's been the highlight of the prequels).

After watching the DVD, I sampled a few tracks from the soundtrack and I have to say, hearing Leia's theme, then Luke's theme on the final track, "A New Hope and End Credits," raised gooseflesh.

I've ordered our tickets for the evening of the 19th. Can't wait.

Question for Billie Joe Armstrong: Can there be a street on a boulevard? That word picture makes no sense to me. But I guess making sense doesn't much matter when you're a thirtysomething multi-millionaire bubblegum punker writing lyrics about teen angst you don't actually feel. Dead metaphors and bad cliche make the payments on the new Jag just as well as words that require thought or honest introspection.

Also, am I the only one who thinks "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" sounds an awful lot like an Avril Lavigne song?

According to Dame Judy Dench, Pierce Brosnan will not be replaced in the next Bond flick, Casino Royale.

Ho-hum. I loved Brosnan's Bond (even in the clunkier entries), but he's long in the tooth at this point. One of the many reasons I resent Roger Moore's tenure is that he cemented the superspy as perpetually middle-aged in many people's minds. Bond's mostly in his 30s in the books. Can't we once again have an actor who reflects that? Getting a younger actor won't solve all the series' many problems, or automatically make it hip or relevant again, but it'd be a step in the right direction.

I hope Casino Royale doesn't end up being Brosnan's A View to a Kill. When I saw the latter in the theater, I spent most of the time thinking, Wow! Look at grandpa go!

Topping the absurdity of the recent whispers of a Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay reimaging of Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund's City of God is the new rumor of a Peter Guber/Michael Bay remake of Hitchcock's The Birds.

If true, it begs the question, why can't Bay be happy in his own little world of mega-budget hackery? Must he taint the work of others? This sort of crosses the fine line between ignorance-driven bad taste and pure evil, no?

As noted on the WGN Sports Baseball Blog, today is a birthday of sorts for the Chicago Cubs. 129 years ago, they played their first game.

No more Nomar.

I'm showless. I am without TV show. Entirely uncommitted.

I've broken up with Gilmore Girls. I'm through. Bored silly. It's become too cute for its own good. I've made a clean break from Smallville, too. The story's going nowhere. It's going in circles, actually. As I noted in a previous post, I like stories to conclude. It's why I'm a notorious philanderer when it comes to hour-long dramedies and such. I have a wandering eye. A competing program need only dangle the possibility of closure in front of me, and I cheat. Unrepentently.

Television shows only get in the way during baseball season, anyway. Who needs 'em?

Maybe Battlestar Galactica will woo me back when the second season kicks off in July. Maybe not.

Last night, in lieu of Clark Kent and his mystery-solving cronies, I watched the Hercules Against the Moon Men episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 from the Volume 7 DVD collection released this week. BEST. SHOW. EVER. I awoke this morning singing the praises of pants.

If the Cubs would break .500, that's what.

NO!

Judge P seems to want to compare the lowest common denominator of canines to the kitty ideal. Hardly fair. The question is, is it even possible for a trained cat to, say, fetch the phone for his paraplegic owner in need of an ambulance? Or sniff out a buried landmine so some poor sap doesn't find it the hard way? Or enable a woman to jog at night without fear of being attacked by some pervert? I submit the answer is no. I further submit that, even if the answer were yes, the cat in question would choose not to do any of that stuff. Just to be a jerk. Then he'd demand tuna as a reward for not doing what he was trained to do.

Judge P's right about the smell of wet dog, though. A doused pooch is about the worst smelling thing in the world...except for cat piss.

And, for the record, dogs don't have the market cornered on spreading joy to children. There's ice cream, too. And sunshine. And trees. And boogers and farts (boys only).

Oh, I almost forgot: cats kill babies.