I blame it on my mother-in-law. She’s been in town for about a month and we’re trying to keep a goodly collection of TV shows recording on the ol’ DVR. So of course there’s a fair amount of “spectacle” being archived for posterity, and among those is American Idol. At first I simply said “it’s all fun and games and we get to see some truly scary deranged people who think they’re awesome who’ll flip out when they’re told that in truth they’re as talented at singing as a crushed wombat, but as soon as they get to the ‘finalists’ or whatever I am so done with this tripe.”

That didn’t last. I inadvertently found myself rooting for some of these folks. The rocker guy, the little guy who always wears hats, the 29-year-old girl keeping up with the teens. Then we see TRUE HUMAN DRAMA as their hopes and dreams are ruthlessly pounded by a smart-ass limey. I started critiquing them in my own head — “aww gawd a ballad, they frickin’ hate ballads, haven’t you learned anything by now?” — and agreeing or disagreeing (loudly) with the judges. I’ve picked my contenders and the ones that have no chance, I’ve called it right and wrong about equally. No, I haven’t stooped to actually calling… the enthusiasm stops at my wallet.

So, for those embroiled as I am, last night’s show tells me one thing: the guys are in a tight battle. I hate to say it but my little rocker guy, Constantine, had the worst performance of the night. As soon as I heard the intro to that Black Crowes song I slapped my hand over my mouth. You’ve got to be shitting me, Constantine! Not only is it not a “vocal showcase” kind of song, but if you’re going to try to sing a Chris Robinson song — a guy who does not own the greatest voice in the world but is passable for certain in the band’s context — you have to at least do as well as the guy you’re friggin’ covering. Constantine was missing notes, slurring delivery, and his (air quotes) “Enthusiastic Screams” were anemic. Contrast his rocker performance with the other rocker guy Bo Bice who belted out a walloping “Whipping Post” rendition and you’re left with a flat, dismal effort. I’m all about “being true to yourself” and all that, but be true to yourself well.

Now I’m going to head back into the corner and marvel at the fact that I just blogged about American Idol. Next week, The OC! Not on your life. But tonight DOES start the seventh season of The Amazing Race which is a hell of a lot of fun. Yes, I’m going to hell.

An important concept in any society is that of possession. Indeed, we could hardly function without this cornerstone theory which governs much of our behavior toward others. Were it not for this key concept, for instance, I would personally be driving a Ferrari 575 Maranello and living in far larger digs.

Julia has discovered the concept of possession. One could say she’s obsessed with possession if it weren’t such a silly linguistic construct. But it’s true. We noticed it about a week ago. I got her out of her crib and changed her into her daytime clothes which included socks, or bas in French. So, she’s playing with her bas and calling them bas which I’m steadfastly agreeing to, then she says “a bébé”. And I looked at her, blinked, and said “yes, those are your socks.” This pleased her little baby brain.

So, now Papa is getting ready for work and pulls out his socks and begins putting them on. Julia saunters over and taps them and says “un bas a Papa.” Not perfect French but there’s no denying her meaning. She’s since begun announcing ownership of everything in sight and is surprisingly astute at it. She’ll see my book sitting on the stairs and point at it and say “a Papa”, or she’ll see one of Cat’s shirts being folded and chime in with “a Mama.” In fact, I don’t think I’ve heard her get one wrong. It’s rather wonderful.

Of course, I eagerly await the day when every object in the universe is essentially “a bébé.” It’s coming. I feel it.

I’m a person that’s usually constantly tweaking my WordPress install. It’s a hobby. There are few things that provide as immediate of a sense of accomplishment as getting some sort of tweak or hack or plugin working and working well. It’s a far cry from my day job which has as its most exciting element the possibility of seeing a packet go from A to B in the appropriate manner. Woohoo. As such, I’ve come up with yet another plugin to enhance certain aspects of the WordPress experience.

WordPress 1.5 has some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. It’s surprisingly effective as long as you’re fairly proactive at keeping up with the blacklist. I was surprised one day to discover a slew of spam messages residing in the database. They weren’t displayed in my blog — though my customized asides plugin didn’t handle them perfectly and my comment counts were incorrect because they counted the spam comments which became my first clue that those comments were even in the database — and they weren’t visible in the admin interface. What the hell?

They’re there, you just can’t see them. They’ve been marked as spam by WordPress which is great. They probably are spam. But if you do happen to get a false-positive, you’ll never know about it unless you stumble across it like I did (yes, I had a couple of false positives and left some folks hanging). So, I came up with a plugin to let me see those comments if I choose, as well as provide some much-needed functionality to viewing comments in general.

Announcing the Paged Comment Editing plugin. No, doesn’t sound as fancy as the Image Headline plugin or even the Spell Checker plugin and your readers will reap no benefit, but it does have some merit for you, the WordPress author. This plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:

• Finally page through all of your comments in the comment administration interface. The stock interface is limited to displaying the 20 most-recent comments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll burn through 20 in 2 days tops. You’ll now be free to read and edit every comment on your installation with ease. This plugin supports paging through your comments, including arbitrary numbers of posts per page as well as paging of comment searching.
• See the comments that can’t be seen. WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn added some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. This is wonderful, but if a comment happens to be tagged as spam by WordPress you will never see it again unless you do it external to WordPress via phpMyAdmin or something like it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing if a comment was inappropriately marked as spam. This plugin makes those invisible comments visible again… but only when you want them. With appropriate blacklist in place, 99% of the things marked as spam will be spam and you certainly don’t want to sift through that all day. But it’s nice to be able to rescue that 1% that otherwise would have disappeared into the ether.

If you’re interested in including this functionality in your WordPress 1.5 installation, see this page for installation details.

Netflix New Releases This Week (from the actual feed).

• “Bellydance: The Art of the Drum Solo” - now that’s what I’m talking about.
• “Really Really Pimpin’ in Da South” - it ain’t pimpin’ unless it’s got “da” in it.
• “Mike and the Mechanics & Paul Carrack: Live at Shepherds Bush London” - kill me now.
• “Fat Spy” - Why mince words?
• “Old Skool Killaz: Secret of the Dragon” - Is it gangsta rap? Is it chopsocky kung fu? Is it shit?
• “Terror of the Bloodhunters / Liane Jungle Goddess: Double Feature” - twice the unutterable pile of dung.

Holy Mother. Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Remember when they were floating along in the boat on the chocolate river and Willy reached down and scooped up a mug of chocolate and handed it to Charlie? Remember when you screamed and clawed your eyes out and cursed loudly and colorfully because you wanted to BE CHARLIE RIGHT-THE-HELL NOW? Starbucks has decided to fulfill that wish with their new “Chantico” Drinking Chocolate. Yes, I agree, those two words should go together far more often.

I haven’t tried it yet, but damned if I’m not tempted. “Oompah loompah” my ass, just give me the chocolate and no one will get hurt. Anyone tried it?