Thank You, Maker: Volume I

Dahlias


Hebrew National Hot Dogs (Sorry, couldn't help myself)

When Josephine comes running into the bathroom while I'm on the toilet and stands on my foot while I pet her.


Late afternoon sun

Chocolate covered frozen bananas

Those disgusting/compelling melty mints with the jelly center served in bowls at east coast diners.

How about you?

Free Professional Critic from the Shackles of Monopoly

Reader, saints be praised! The federal government is finally starting to get concerned over cell phone exclusivity. That's just fancy talk for the conundrum folks are in when they balance the lure of the iphone with the epic suck of AT+T coverage, to name a recent and high profile example.

The exclusivity doesn't make much sense when compared to other industries. PG&E will let the electricity flow no matter what kind of lighting I buy, even the cheapo Ikea lamps. The cable company will take your money no matter what brand of TV you have. You get the point.

I've had AT+T wireless for almost five years on the sadly misguided advice of someone who said the service was great! It is alas, terrible. I drop calls all the time, reliably, in the same places in San Francisco, which is a puny seven square miles. My work cell phone through Verizon never drops calls.

But then I went and bought an iphone which I love and continued my deal with the devil for two more years, dropping calls in these same places, but paying a lot more for the pleasure. What can I say? The iphone rulez.

You can check out known cell dead zones here.

And apropos of nothing, a video of polar bear Knut back when he was a stinkin' adorable little cub and his keeper, who has since died, sadly. That is redonkulous cute, reader.

Monday Miscellany

What it is, reader! Hope everyone had a safe 4th with all digits intact. Things were all good over here at Professional Critic. Though a minute ago one of my neighbors got hauled off by the popo as he was unable to stop screaming, "I'll kill you, motherfuckers," for the better part of a half hour in that slurred nearly incoherent way of the drug addled and/or deeply disturbed. It's a half way house of some kind so police visits are not at all unusual though not usually this dramatic.

In lighter news, I have started feeding my furry miscreants a raw diet. We started off with a chicken salmon formula, and since it is one of the more reasonably priced varieties, they wanted to have nothing to do with it. Now they eat THE BUNNY and everyone seems happier. It does take some getting used to, you know, seeing blood pool in their bowls but my main reason for doing this has been achieved: the poo no longer stinks. It almost doesn't smell at all. I don't understand why this is, but since the litterbox is in my kitchen, I'm happy. Oh yeah, the health benefits, yada yada, since the stupidly expensive kibble I was buying these fools wasn't good enough.

Here is the cute baby animal du jour, brought to you by our friends at Fuck You, Penguin, and it's a doozy:

I can haz bebeh otter?

Oh, Right, I Have a Blog

Hi, reader. It's been a while. And uh, stuff? Has happened. But some things have not changed at all.

Baby animals are still cute. Thank God for small mercies.

Tulsa Zoo's new lion cubs from on Vimeo.

Today I ordered an iphone and I am pretty excited about it.

That's about it.

TGIF and Music Monday

Reader, baby animals simply for the joy of it!

Is this not absurd? Please.



Check out the whole frolicking bebeh rhino series here.

Here's one I haven't seen before, a babe anteater.



It's cute in a weirdly squeaky, animatronic way.

On to the music. A friend sent me a mix CD last week and I want to share some of the especially groovy tunes with you. Here's The Guggenheim Grotto, Her Beautiful Ideas. I like this song very much, and the video basically rules.



Magnetic Fields, I Don't Want To Get Over You. This is not their video, just someone being creative on You Tube, but I like.



TGIF, reader.

Mournful Monday

Reader, weep. This weekend the pro-life movement demonstrated some contrary feelings about the value of human life by murdering abortion provider Dr. George Tiller while he attended church in Witchita, Kansas on Sunday. Dr. Tiller, who had survived another attempt on his life in 1993, had been a tireless advocate for abortion rights. As one of the few providers in the nation to provide third trimester abortions, he was a lightning rod for the anti choice movement.

Awful and powerless but the ladies at Feministing had some ideas about what people that care about woman having access to safe and legal abortion. Make a donation to Medical Students for Choice. I did so, in memory of Dr. Tiller. It doesn't really matter if abortion is legal if there are no trained doctors to perform them.

Onto a lighter note. The words I hear associated with laundry duties for families run along the lines of relentless, never ending, drudgery, etc. Ironic then, that ads for laundry products show laundering women in such orgiastic rapture. Sarah Haskins sets her laser focus on this particularly idiotic slice of woman-focused advertising:

Traffic School and Baby Animals, The End

Reader, I've finished traffic school and passed my "test." If you need to catch up on my foray into law breaking and my efforts to wipe the proverbial slate clean, and you really should, you can do so here, here, and here.

The online traffic school had seventeen separate modules and quizzes about all the aspects of driving safety you could never ever want to learn about. Peppered through each module were pieces of a story about some girl named Anna and the details of her day. For example, stuck right in the middle of the module on speed limits would be the line, "Anna had eggs for breakfast." Later, in the drugs and alcohol section, "Anna had diet soda with lunch." Etc.

At the time I didn't pay much attention/didn't quite understand what they were doing there, but when I logged onto the final exam, sixteen of the forty questions were about Anna. I spent more time combing through the modules trying to find out what kind of car Anna drove and her dream vacation destination than I did on driving safety.

If only I had known what a sham online traffic school was I never would have spent as much time as I did reading all the modules and taking all the quizzes. Perhaps embedding these questions is their way of forcing you to have some interaction with the content but boy it irritated the hell out of me. An irritation that can only be soothed by the balm of baby animals.

Here's a home grown one. Isn't she stinkin' adorable?



Some of you know Nellie. She's the formerly feral kitty of Potrero Hill. She looks innocent here but if you know Nellie, you know she grew up to be a murderess of the highest order. No bird or small or medium-sized mammal is safe when Nellie's around.

For example, this little creature would be dispatched in a trice, cute bunneh feet and all.


Agh, those feet! I die.

You must go look at this mama and baby orangutan montage. It is sweetness.

This concludes our series on traffic school, because really? Zzzzzzzzzzz. But this will not be the last you see of baby animals.