I know - this slow-down was as easily predictable as the economic one we’re currently mired in. Kids take work. Television takes work. But more-or-less regular blogging activities will resume shortly.

You’re skeptical. That’s good. Skepticism’s healthy. But so is Baz, and Jeanne, and - to an extent - yours truly. So I’ll be back soon.

Meanwhile, I’d like to thank the world at large for giving me an incredibly slow news week so that I could adjust to having a child. Thanks, planet, that was cool. Basra… well, there’s always one bad apple…*

[*Hopefully my li’l television show will be offering some pretty good commentary on Basra tomorrow. Stay tuned…]

I’ve been enjoying all your speculating (and your well-wishes. Thanks!) so much that I almost don’t want to explain my beamish boy’s middle name just yet. But that wouldn’t be fair, especially because there’s no way any of you could guess…

He’s named after my father, Norbert Q Felber. Who wasn’t, at birth, named Norbert Q Felber. I’ll explain.

Dad was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1931. In the late 30’s the family was forced to move, due to soaring housing costs and incipient genocide. I don’t mean to be glib about this - I lost both my grandparents and quite a lot of the extended family in Europe’s last and greatest epileptic fit. But my father and his sister made it to these shores in 1941, learned the language, and lived with a distant relative in Cleveland. By the 50’s my Dad had put himself through college and medical school. I know - an entirely impressive man he was, with giant shoes to fill. I don’t quite fill them. This is not a metaphor. Dad was a size 15. I’m a mere 14.

Anyway, when he joined the army, Dad was confronted with a problem. He had no middle name (I guess they were too expensive in depression-era Germany ), and the US Army apparently wanted him to sign “N.M.N.” or “N.M.I.” in the middle of his name every time he signed a document. My efficiency-minded father rebelled at this concept, said so, and when he found out he could choose an initial, he jumped at the chance.

Norbert Q Felber was born. He liked that he could tell people that no, it didn’t stand for anything. He liked the peculiarity of the letter. It made him laugh. And so, even years after the army, he hung onto it. I remember seeing it on various plaques and knick-knacks around his office, and my mother often affectionately called him by his “full” name.

Norbert Q Felber passed away almost a decade ago, and I still think of him every day. Hugo, Sebastian’s cousin, already has his grand-dad’s first name as his own middle name. Baz, like his grampa, and like Harry Truman, gets a simple, flexible letter as his middle name. A name that will also serve him should he choose to become an immortal, omnipotent being inhabiting an exotic continuum, manifest himself as a wrathful, winged, Aztec serpent-god, or just design GPS fountain pens that shoot poison darts for a living.

I think it suits him.

I’ve gotta run back to the hospital, but all is well. Only a week “early.” It was quite an experience, what with the screaming and the crying and the vomiting and the moaning. But after a while they calmed me down.

No, it went beautifully, and Baz is here. He and his former landlady are doing great.

I’ll explain the “Q” later, but until then you’re welcome to guess.

Barring labor, I’ll be in Santa Barbara on Thursday night, for a rare local “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!”

Of course, there is no barring labor. Our “official” due date is Monday, the 31st. So while it’s likely that I’ll be looking at Paula Poundstone, Paul Provenza, and Peter* on Thursday night, it’s also possible that I’ll be looking at Fonzie’s first public appearance.

So, I’ll see some of you there! [Unless I don’t!]

[* Carl too. I just had to move his name down to here on the grounds of insufficient alliteration. Alliterative, yes, but not in a team player kind of way. I’ll have to talk to him about that…]

So it’s Friday afternoon, we’re winding towards a fun “Real Time,” as far as I can tell, and spring is officially here. What better time to tell you about one or two things that perhaps you haven’t heard of that are Good.

1) Mike Doughty, “Golden Delicious”

The ex-lead singer of Soul Coughing has released his best solo album since “Haughty Melodic.” Which was his previous solo album. They’re both great - melodic, clever, kind of folky rock that’s kind of rapped too. Hard to explain. [The previous album, for instance, featured the lyric, “”You snooze, you lose/Well I have snost and lost.” IF you’re me, that’s all you need to know.] Click the picture to go to Mike’s blog.

Here’s the first video, “27 Jennifers.” Not my absolute favorite from the album, but the hook is immediate and undeniable.

2) Portal

Okay, you’ve either never heard of this or I’m wayyy late with it. That’s how I like it. Portal, a small video game that came with “The Orange Box,” is nothing at all like the handful of blow-up-the-mutants games that came with it (which I enjoyed as well. Damn those inter-dimensional mutants, always gettin’ all up in our business n’ stuff…). It’s almost completely non-violent, fascinating, hysterically funny, puzzle-based, and incredibly well-written without seeming to be written at all. It looks to me like what game designers have been searching for - a way of telling a story that doesn’t simulate a novel or a movie (through cut-scenes and text and whatnot), but rather unfolds organically with the game itself.

Mainly, it’s just fun. If you have a machine that would allow you to play this game… then do that.

And beating the game unlocks a great song by Jonathan Coulton. I’ll post it here, but - WARNING: The song contains some spoilers. Sort of.

Enjoy.

I can’t think of anything better to post today than this.

I have one thought about this, really.

“President.”

We’re spending our weekend doing things that one does before a baby lands - moving furniture (cribs! gliders!), replacing bulbs (bizarrely shaped incandescents! Esoteric halogens! If I ever meet this joint’s designer, he will receive compliments and repeated face punches!), and acquiring a safe, efficient vehicle (a Prius!).

Yes, after some test drives, we leased Jeanne a shiny mint-green Prius. It seemed more prudent than her continuing on with the perma-borrowed ‘95 Saturn, which runs great but always seems on the verge of a spectacular collapse.

I can’t tell you if we got a good deal. As a couple, our bargaining skills are less than sub-par. We spent our trip to the dealership rehearsing our various strategies. [”I’m going to write a number on a piece of paper and slide it across the table to you. I want you to cross it out, write a much bigger number, and that’s what I’ll pay!”]

We had some good laughs all the way there, and armed with a little research, we did actually manage to negotiate the price down a bit. Still, my final attempt at hard bargaining ended up somewhat subverted.

DEALER: So, are we agreed on this lease?

ADAM: Knock another ten dollars off the monthly price and you’ve got a deal.

[Dealer pauses, thinking.]

JEANNE (concerned about the dealer’s feelings): It’s okay - he’s kidding.

DEALER: Great!

This was good for some big laughs afterwards, too. And honestly, if Jeanne hadn’t found some way to do this, I definitely would have. [For those of you who think this might be an exaggeration, Jeanne just walked in, read this over my shoulder, and confirmed, “Yup, embarrassingly enough, that’s pretty much exactly how it happened.”]

Still, we now have an environmentally-friendly, 45 MPG, cute-as-hell vehicle, and at least a couple of days left to figure out how to get Fonzie’s car seat into it. My current plan for that is “duct tape.”

[I’d vowed I was going to take this “Real Time” hiatus week off of politics. Well, at least I’ll skip “funny” for now…]

I was telling some friends today that I’d heard some suddenly-disenchanted 20-somethings muttering about voting for McCain if Hillary Clinton won the nomination by what they consider dirty tactics. One response: “Actually, I’m almost 37.”

To that, you can add this, an interesting screed from my Republican friend from New York, Robert George, who has some fascinating (if ragged) thoughts about the race and the races. I don’t think this points to a strategy for Obama so much as a warning for all Democrats: Record turnouts in the primary will not necessarily be there for you in November.

I think this all really points to a need for a moratorium on the “Hey, the general election’s gonna be even tougher!” argument that is favored by Hillary’s surrogates these days (I’ve heard some Obama fans making similar arguments, and they really, really should hope nobody’s listening). It is a startlingly similar excuse to the classic one that you hear coming out of violent, abusive families.

And yes, such families DO toughen people up (parents, children, and pets alike), but they do not prepare its members to do anything positive in the world. And the family itself is destroyed by it. So if the Democratic party means anything, the “Hey, it’s rough out there!” excuse has got to go away right now.*

[*This is all explained in the seminal parenting manual, “You Think This (whack!) is Bad? (whack!) You Think This is Bad? (whack!) Just Wait ’til You Get Out There in the Real World! (whackitty whackitty whack!!),” University of Trenton Press, 1954. Thank you all for your parenting book advice, but I’m sticking with the classics.]

—

I recently re-read David Foster Wallace’s account of John McCain’s 2000 campaign, “Up, Simba!” (which you can find in “Consider the Lobster“). What jumps out at you is how similar that race was to this year’s Democratic race; the “movement,” insurgent candidate vs. the hand-picked party machine candidate. Bush, the machine candidate had of course been a prohibitive frontrunner, but in name only. Once the voting got underway, he found himself behind in delegates and momentum…

Bush’s tactic, back in 2000, was to drag McCain into a muddy political gutter-fight. Not so much because it tarred McCain, but because the fight itself dampened enthusiasm in general, and dampened enthusiasm favors the choice of the (usually older) party faithful. It worked, of course. And of course that sort of thing can work for Republicans in the general election as well. For Democrats… not so much.

The old, tired, “Hell, slapping ‘em around only makes ‘em stronger!” argument might be true, but in politics it’s not about “‘em.” It’s about “us.” And “we” are coming apart.

More later today, I hope.  Early tomorrow at the latest [I’m preparing a nursery and a few other exciting things - stay tuned].

But b’god, y’all need a new sheet of paper!  88 comments!  You’d think some kind of big… ongoing… important… thing was happening.

Last marked a big change in the campaign: It was the first election night since Super Tuesday that a Democrat congratulated another candidate on a victory. It is also the first election night since Super Tuesday that Hillary Clinton mentioned that anyone had voted, or that there’d been some sort of… result.

These facts are related.

Before I go in and write jokes about it, I’ll explain. When my horse didn’t win Super Tuesday (not here, anyway), it wasn’t tragic. And last night’s result wasn’t either. But having to watch these last two weeks of the campaign as closely as I have (watching and reading and writing about it approximately eight hours a day)… has been a little discouraging. It’s not just the curious ungraciousness alluded to above. This thing has turned in an ugly direction, and we’d might as well batten down the hatches for worse. More “leaked” memos and “over-enthusiastic” surrogates and winking apologies and guilts-by-associations. Hillary will continue to “whitewater” Obama, which is not to her an irony, it’s the school of politics she was raised in. Or the schoolyard at least.

And I hold only the faintest hope that Obama and his supporters won’t respond in kind. I just don’t see a Kerry-esque “high road” as being the strategy, and if it’s not, well, it’s a small, mean road ahead for both candidates.  They will probalbly both arrive in Scotland at the same time, and possibly in the same vehicle.

But it’ll be a long low road. And that’s a bit of a reprieve for us here in the joke business, so we’ve got that going’ for us! Whee?