The Manda Considers the Food Chain at a Baby Shower

While I am happy for my friends and colleagues who are successfully managing to procreate, I find the process of purchasing gifts for these blessed events stressful. I haven't got the first clue, really, what people who are having babies need or want. I'm pretty sure a box of condoms would be met with disdain.

I kid! I kid!

The thing I don't fully appreciate about gifts for infants in the preponderance of apex predators as a design staple in this genre. There seem to be a lot of lions, tigers, and bears presenting themselves as cuddly, friendly images for baby's first viewing experiences.

I've never met a lion, tiger, or bear, and my viewing experiences with Animal Planet make me pretty certain that if I ever do encounter one of these creatures, I want it to be from the relative safety of a moving vehicle. I'm pretty happy with having all my limbs firmly attached to my torso as nature intended.

In toddler wear you also see the occasional friendly shark. In my limited experience with children, I've gleaned that it's not healthy to make them afraid of everything, but Mr. Shark is not smiling, kids. He will take a chunk out of you before he realizes that you're too bony to be a satisfying meal. Or, if you're small enough, he'll just swallow you whole. It's important to exercise caution.

It just makes me wonder if things might have gone differently for Timothy Treadwell, for example, if he'd never had a teddy bear as a child.

Monkeys seem to be a popular choice as well, and with good reason. Monkeys are funny. The monkey in a fez is a gold standard by which all other forms of humor may be accurately measured. But monkeys also have a dark side. A wallet-stealing, feces-throwing, playing-with-themselves-in-public dark side. That kind of example can only lead a kid to a career in politics.

Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?

Today's post contains material not suitable for younger readers. Or my mom.

I get updates and feeds from four different papers every day delivered to my email inbox. I watch CNN and MSNBC when I work out at home. TiVo makes sure I don't miss The Daily Show, ever. My Kindle subscribes me to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. So, I'm pretty well connected to whatever is going on in the world at large.

And it is because of this ongoing information addiction that I can now declare with confidence that in the last two weeks, I have seen and heard about Rep. Anthony Weiner's junk with greater consistency and frequency than I have seen and heard about any other individual man on the planet ever. I should note here that there are probably women at the Mustang Ranch who can say the same thing. This is more about the aforementioned news addiction and saturation of coverage than any sense of general prudery on my part.

I've been avoiding this topic because I think making jokes about politcal sex scandals in general, and this one in particular, is something like fishing with dynamite. But I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that there's some kind of strange competition going on among our collective leaders. It's like that scene in Jaws where Hooper and Quint earn one another's grudging respect by trading war stories and comparing scars or some weird variation on "I Never."

And they're in there trading stories:
"I got a blowjob in the Oval Office."
"I fathered a child with another woman while my wife was dying and I used campaign money to cover it up."
"I made a pro-abstinence video with the staffer I was nailing."
"I solicited a guy in an airport bathroom. Didn't even know him."
"I got that beat. I texted shirtless photos to women I met on Craigslist."
"Yeah, well I sent pictures of my c*** to random women on Twitter. Beat that!"

In my head, this all takes place in some kind of wood-paneled room filled with wingback chairs in the basement of the Capitol where all these dudes are enjoying their single malts and cigars and Brandy (she's on the stage). Or maybe it looks like the initiation chamber in Animal House.

At any rate, it ends with a big motivational speech from some wizened old dude, maybe Bill Clinton:
"Gentlemen, the competition is fierce out there. Gone are the days when a president could get by on taking advantage of emotionally vulnerable and legendarily beautiful film stars while his devoted wife looked after the kids and the legacy. Gone are the days when it was enough to make lewd remarks and grope and fondle female staffers. Even the Internet scandals are getting stale. In this day and age, we've got to raise the ante if we're going to shock constituents and delude ourselves about our own invincibility. We're going to have to get creative. We're going to have to think outside the box."