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2007

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Parenting feature on Reuters

Reuters just picked up my feature story on parents’ willingness to come clean about their most humiliating acts of stupidity. Read the whole uncut piece here. The piece grew out of a recent essay involving my five year old daughter, a bad case of the hiccups and a gorilla head, a story that friends and I are turning into a short web video. Stay tuned…

Paperback drops

Rejuvenile is out in paperback from Three Rivers Press. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, cheaper than a Wii. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod? 

On the radio

I’m set to appear tomorrow on “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” the radio show hosted by ex-Sex Pistols codger-freak Steve Jones. I’ll be one of three “guest jurors” on a two-hour segment in which he’ll play songs and we decide if said songs are “pants” (bad) or “mustard” (good). Not sure what’s up with the pants or the mustard or why I was asked to appear—must be my gig as music consultant on the Showtime series “Weeds.” Show airs on Indie 103.1 FM from 12-2 pm with a rebroadcast from 6-8 pm.

A Dating Column? Wha?

The L.A. Times just published my column on dating and how my own rather pathetic record with the ladies relates to the self-help juggernaut “The Secret.” The Times website has the abbreviated, family-friendly version; read the full uncensored version here, in the CLIPS section. 

Book review in LA Times

I just reviewed Neal Pollack’s new book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

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