Watch it and weep. What our current President does not understand is perfectly distilled into the song Mr. Rogers sings at the end of this video.
And, of course, part of the reason Trump wants to cut funding for the NEA and the NEH is because, as Stephen Colbert recently said, Trump hates anything that’s well-endowed.
I regularly write movie reviews on a Facebook page I created a few years ago. When I feel like it, I’ll post them here as well. Both of the movies mentioned below are currently on Netflix.
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist
The common cycling saga one hears about in the US is all about Lance 
Armstrong’s rise and fall, but this doc focuses on a cyclist who I’m embarrassed to mention I did not even know. Pantani raced in an age where every single team in the Tour and the Giro doped.
Had he been able to continue cycling, there does not seem to be doubt in people’s minds that he would have far exceeded Armstrong as the most successful doping cyclist to ever live.
The guy was a machine, seemed like he was made to ride a bike in a way that Armstrong never was. As soon as he hopped on his mom’s bike for his first training ride it was clear to his parents and his first coach that he was a prodigy. They were correct. But going pro turned out far more challenging than Pantani expected. The length of the rides were not a problem. The climbs were not a problem. The major challenge came when Pantani was introduced to the seedy underbelly of the cycling world at that time. This documentary follows Pantani’s arc as a professional, from his meteoric rise to the sudden, sad denouement.
This is a zany documentary about a zany kid who got his MA in IR from 
Georgetown and then decided he hadn’t done anything cool, wasn’t a man, didn’t know crap, so he rode his motorcycle across the Middle East, came home, and then went back to fight alongside friends he made in Libya against Gaddafi and his army. Oh, and he was also imprisoned for five months during Libya’s civil war.
The guy is unique and he knows it. His moderate to severe OCD also plays a prominent role in his journey as would be expected. It’s a fascinating tale and it makes for one wild ride.
On Thursday, Jon Stewart will host The Daily Show for one last time.
I started watching Stewart long before I agreed with him on anything. I watched because the show was funny. I watched because Stewart’s show can actually be informative. I watched because his Bush impersonation was both horrible, but also so accurate, like Bush if he was in South Park. I watched because some of what Stewart or his correspondents were joking about challenged my beliefs.
And I watched because of the interviews. As much as Stewart denies it in discussion after discussion, his show is sort of a news show at times, not necessarily because it is striving to be, but because all the rest of the “news” shows on TV do a poor job for the most part. One of the best examples of Stewart posing questions that everyone else on TV is afraid to ask was his relatively recent interview with Judith Miller, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, formerly with the New York Times. If you’re not aware, Miller played a pivotal role in reporting on the Bush administration’s justification for going to war in Iraq. The interview was one of the most awkward moments I have ever watched on the Daily Show, but it was also one of the best. Click here to watch it in full. Below is a CNN mashup of the interview, not nearly as good as the uncut version, but you get a feel for the atmosphere and Stewart’s persistent questioning and Miller’s persistent shirking of any responsibility.
No one on TV interviews like this. Not one person on the big three networks, nor on any of the cable news channels. This, among other reasons, of course, is why anyone who watches TV loses something great this week.
#JonVoyage
1. When you’re hanging out with other couples who have kids you start identifying with what the moms in the group are talking about. You’ve chimed in before and then you’ve immediately felt sort of awkward. Just keep doing it, because sometimes, mom really doesn’t know what is best. Dad does.
2. You’re intimately aware of just how much Netflix’s selection of streaming movies sucks. Knowing this, you’ve delved into several binges on documentaries available on Netflix. When you’ve exhausted the current outstanding selection of these films you once again are disappointed to find that the popular selections on Netflix consist of the remake of Robocop, Homefront, Redemption, and every other Jason Statham movie in which he plays a hardscrabble character who has run up against some guys who threaten his life leading to Statham coming out of quasi-retirement to blow shit up and kill people. Thank God for HBO.
3. You’ve caught yourself looking at a stay-at-home mom. No, no, no, not in that way. You were just staring at her because you were thinking how hard it would be to carry a kid around and all the kid stuff with arms like that.
4. Your to-read pile of books and magazines looks like you’re in grad school again. That is, you have bookcases full of to-read books and your nightstand to-read selection has grown off of the nightstand and is now growing in all directions on the floor and up opposing walls like kudzu. (This particular sign is in no way exclusive to SAHDs.)
5. You’ve watched the entirety of HBO’s The Wire while playing on the floor with your baby, while changing diapers, while washing Dr. Brown’s bottles, while feeding baby, while dressing her, and while reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
6. You’ve taken your baby for a walk through the park, a rather large park, and you’ve been the only dad in site. It’s just you and your baby and a hundred other moms with their charges.
7. Once or twice you’ve noticed a dad looking at you. You look back and the dad quickly turns away. He was looking out of curiosity and amazement because of the ease with which you’re doing everything, well not quite everything, baby-related that only the mom in his young family does.
8. Conversation with other dads is always going to be a little different for you. The odds are they are not SAHDs themselves, but make an effort. You’ll soon find something to talk about. Dads who aren’t SAHDs still get a chance to watch the shows or movies you’ve recently seen. You just watch them at totally different times and with different distractions.
9. You relish opportunities not afforded to you in a typical job: you don’t shave for months, you wear a t-shirt and pants every day, you drink a beer with lunch in your office (aka house), you drink another one when the afternoon is getting really long, you don’t have to worry about what day of the week it is, and maybe somedays you just neglect showering…not because you forgot to, because you can.
10. You can carry a ridiculous amount of goods while holding your baby. Example: When you get home from a Costco trip you grab baby first and hold her with left arm, sling diaper bag over right shoulder, carry two gallons of milk with arm that is holding baby, carry 48 rolls of toilet paper with right arm, and with the limited real estate available pinch a bag of avocados in between a couple of fingers (doesn’t matter which hand).
Windy and Rachel on their last night shift with London before she leaves the NICU.
When I was much younger I watched the show Rescue 911. Hosted by William Shatner, the show reenacted real-life emergencies and spliced in interviews from people who were present when the aforementioned emergencies occurred. At the end of the reenactments, the rescuers who saved the individual/s in need of help, were reunited with the people they saved.
The reenactments are so bad they are painful to watch. It was easy to find some old episodes of the show on YouTube. There is even a story about a baby being born “nearly three months early” while on a flight. He weighed in at 4 lbs, 6 oz. (I have to interject here, if the baby was really almost three months early, that’s a huge kid for that gestational age). Here’s the link to the story about the premature birth on the flight. As you might guess, the reenactment is hilariously bad.
What got me thinking about Rescue 911 was seeing some of London’s nurses the other week. I got home and two of her primaries were visiting Kate and London, eating pizza Kate made, and sipping wine. I got a chance to visit with the nurses a little bit before they left and during that time I thought of the reunions at the end of Rescue 911. I always enjoyed these scenes, loving the idea of being able to see and possibly become friends with the people responsible for saving my life or, in this case, my daughter’s life. And now, that was happening right there in my kitchen.
I would never wish what Kate and I went through with London upon anyone. But if it is to happen, this is the happiest ending one could possibly hope for. We were incredibly blessed to have such caring NICU nurses. And now those nurses have become friends. I hope that as long as we are in Denver and as long as they are working nearby, the reunions continue because, for us, they are heroines.
the FoCo dad 