Thirteen Things You Can Do With Google CHROME GOOGLE CHROME

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2. GOOGLE CHROME FINDS AND REPLACES THIRD NIPPLES!
3. GOOGLE CHROME DISTRACTS LIBERALS SO THE GOP CAN NUKE KANSAS!
4. GOOGLE CHROME WILL HELP YOU TRAVEL IN TIME!
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7. GOOGLE CHROME LOWERS GAS PRICES!
8. GOOGLE CHROME MAKES YOU TALK LIKE SEAN CONNERY!
9. GOOGLE CHROME PROTECTS TRAILERS FROM TORNADOES!
10. GOOGLE CHROME MAKES MS VISTA WORK!
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Too weird for words

Tooling around the internet, I Stumbled on this bizarre series of photographs. I have no idea if it's real or staged or hallucinated but I love it. Salud!

Soviet Space Pig.

Monday is Manday is a Madmen Marathon

Madmen Saved my Life

I'm easily obsessed. When I find something I like, something that really works for me, I don't just become a fan. I become a bleary eyed insomniac of uncontrollable lust for whatever new infatuation has crossed my path. When I was young and strong, this worked to my advantage, back when I was a man. A dude. A rock-n-rolla. Now that I'm an ancient old douchebag, it just makes me drooly. Case in point: my obsession with the hit T.V. series, Madmen.

Like every other red blooded man in America, I've given up Wide World of Wrestling and fantasizing about wearing tights and dropping a Dusty Rose off the ropes into some bleeding bastard's sagging solar plexus. No, we've put that behind us. We shaved, bought a crisp white shirt and a slim gray suit, and got a hat because we're all in agreement that we no longer want to be Dusty Rose. We want to be Don Draper.

Goodbye Do-Rag. Hello Stingy Brim Trilby.

Like most portly middle aged dads, I've been hurtling down the hirsute route to Harley Davidson ownership and too many tattoos. I wear do-rags in public without shame. And I don't mean the simple handkerchief over my bald head cause it's hot out demure yarmulkes, no I mean custom cut vividly rendered close-up prints of hot pepper do-rags. I'd wear this get-up with a Hawaiin shirt chosen specifically for the sheer lewd audacity with which it challenges even the loosest dictum of fashion, all while sporting an Amish bass-player's beard, which is just a mullet for your face. With sandals and white socks. To dinner.

But I'm giving it all up. I'm saved. I've found my T.V. Jesus and his name is Don Draper. He's everything all us old fat Dads have secretly been trying to rediscover in ourselves. We yearn, with remarkable clarity, the driven, ambitious, suave, reckless, hellion of our youth, that former self always dressed to kill, a single malt scotch in one hand, a leggy blond in the other. I say remarkable clarity because our 20-20 hindsight is capable not only of discerning objects in our past with stunning, self congratulatory accuracy, it's actually able to see stuff that wasn't there, brilliant hallucinations of our youth, like our suave Playboy life, so much like Don Draper's. Exactly like his. Since he's as much a hallucination as our gin soaked 007 pre-nuptial faux historie.

Don Draper is an Advertisement for the Lost American Manhood

Draper's as much a carefully constructed fake as the ads he designed for the Kodak Carousel. But I'm being harsh here. He's not really fake. He's a mash-up. An amalgam of all the leading men, heroes, crooners, and father figures from 1950 through 1962. He's a threeway DNA splice of Sam Spade, James Bond, and Jimmy Dean, and the people that grew him in a vat in some secret  underground T.V. show lab have hit the diamond crusted caves of the Gnomes of Zurich because Draper is just flat-out the coolest, most dispossessed, most casually cruel, driven, capable, highly paid, dapper, super creative, bastard that's ever been broadcast.

What, me? A guy crush?

Sorry, but I can barely spell homoerotica. No, it's not repression or latency that's driving so many of us newbie 40 somethings to adopt this most recent template of manliness. It's relief. All our life we've harbored a secret love of fedoras and gray Italian suits and longed for luscious high-haired broken blonds with evil grins and malice on their breath. But we've been force-fed hippy milquetoasted sugar-pop idiocy since Kennedy took off his hat. The Monkees? Eight is Enough? American Hero? Are you kidding me?

American television manliness lost it when they stopped running The Saint. After that, everything just faded out into a tie-dyed haze of hash-pipe hallelujah hack flattery by men who were overly conscientious and well-meaning, men who were as concerned for others as they were for themselves. And don't even try to resell me on the Rockford Files as the last bastion of manhood. Nice theme song, but Garner missed the girl as much as he kissed the girl. I'll give you Kirk, but shortly after Kronkite went off the air, the American man morphed into something that left us all wiping our eyes and asking what the hell just happened?

I'm not here to promote Draper's womanizing, I'm all grown up now and I know that kind of behavior leads to double-murder-suicide or, worse, therapy. And I don't mean to champion the haze of cancer wafting around the StirCoo office or the way they jack the women down the ladder. It's a period piece, people. I get that. But there's something compelling about Draper's no bullshit demeanor and even something about him having a demeanor at all. Draper is unfazed. He operates on a steely principle of get-it-done-give-me-a-drink-and-shut-the-hell-up. I love it.

I am, therefore, a Real Man.

So I'm spending Manday obsessing over this show's first season, filling in gaps int he story, looking up the original products and campaigns on Google (aside: I have sudden-kick-ass-office-envy disease and Draper's home office has a 1944 aluminum lamp that juts, dude it JUTS, out over his desk. I will make that lamp if I have to.) and grooving on the full-frontal fuck-you attitude displayed in the creative department of Sterling-Cooper and just digging it, the Kronkitian scorch of the 21st century man revealed through his 50 year post-pardoned ancestors' smokin' and pushin' lipstick on late-night black and white cop dramas, when I wonder randomly if Martha Stewart might have something on her website about folding towels and BAM there it is, my growing middle-aged re-manhood, swept away in a sea of warm, crisp, linen, because the whole time I've been watching Draper and fantasizing about snapping the brim on a Homberg or wearing thin ties or sweet-talking a husky high-haired blond, I've been folding towels.

Death Warmed Over

Yo peoples. This is the new Death By Children blog. I hope you like it. Please link up and tell everyone you know or have ever even heard of.

VOTE FOR PEDRO!

And by Pedro, I mean me. I got picked by this website who's subtitle is: for women, by women, about women. I mean, my name is Christopher, and though I know you can name your daughter Christopher in Massachusetts now, I still think most people assume someone named Christopher is a dude.

However, my post is up and I think I win something so pump the greed button, man. I'll probably win a lifetime supply of apron strings or cheese cloth. Stupid contests.