Meet the Wiggles
Back from the Germanic olde stylings of bountiful Milwaukee. Exhausting. The little kids that plied for my attention all weekend wore me right the hell out. So many wandering and fragmentary innings of baseball played. Huge castles and kingdoms were erected and then surreptitiously connected by loose wooden railway systems. The older kid, thankfully the only one of the two that can actually walk and talk, proved to be a formidable task master. He worked us at a brutal clip – gave the finger to our Union, and worked us right through our lunch breaks. Mostly, the kid was really into gearing up for a specific activity then he was in actually doing the activity. Baseball demanded the right and proper way to wear a batting glove, to don a helmet, to tap the base with the end of ones bat. Pitchers were not allowed to pitch unless they went through the entire wind-up process. I don’t know where this three year old learned to micro-manage like that. The kid is already extremely detailed oriented. His dad hasn’t been able to find him a pint sized catchers mask yet, so the kid employes a nifty trick. He wears two gloves. One he uses as a standard catchers mitt and the other he uses as a face protector. Here is a visual aid. The best part of this formula is that once the ball is hit, and before he runs after it, he slides the glove off his face and onto the top of his mellon – just like a pro catcher would do in a foul tip situation. Witnessing this maneuver is so hilarious that most of the time I would get tagged out because I was paralyzed with laughter.

There isn’t much else to do when locked away in a subdivision twenty minutes outside of Milwaukee, so when not engaged in toys, there was ample cartoon gazing. And to that I’d just like to say Fuck the Wiggles! That show is straight up dumb diddly dumb dumb dumb. People want to know what happened to the American education system? It got infiltrated by a wiggely fab five from down-under and they made our kids dumber than a box of rocks. Listen up parents, don’t do this to your kid.

The Wiggles made me need alcohol in a big big way. I escaped the subdivision Saturday and drove into Milwaukee proper. I found my good friend Brian and immediately set out on a very fine pub crawl that included pool, pabst, and tator-tot po’ boys. Milwaukee is my kinda town; down-to-earth and beer friendly. And since they haven’t passed any kind of arcane smoking ban up there, I’ll have to put it on my list of ‘places to move to’ come next April when Minneapolis becomes uninhabitably smoke-free.