New Smallville recap. Only two more to go this season! Woo!

It's a Wonderful Life (But Not Such a Wonderful Show) -- Clark learns what would happen if he had never made it all the way to Earth. It's the end of the world. Self-centered, much?

Playing with the new camcorder. I'm not Scorsese.

I had a story (and video) in today's paper about Austin Laser Art. They did some very cool free iPod/iPhone/Macbook Pro engraving at South by Southwest Interactive and I was able to catch up with Aaron Haley afterward.

Now the Statesman has a new, better video player, I can embed videos I do for work here, too. Here's the video that went with the story:

I also had a How I Met Your Mother weecap earlier in the week that I didn't get a chance to link to:

Bros Before Shows -- The Bro Code is invoked and shown to be violated as the gang deals with the aftermath of Barney + Robin (AKA Robney. Or Barbin, if you prefer).

Not much going on besides work, recapping and playing Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart Wii, both of which I'll be reviewing soon. I wrote some stuff about setting up an Apple Airport Express wireless bridge in the house and some thoughts on the recent iPhone 2.0 rumors over on Digital Savant.

In lieu of having had a Terribly Happy Mix CD this year, I'm experimenting with ways of doing something similar online. I was posting songs on MySpace, until MySpace became kind of a graveyard (they've really sapped all fun out of that place). Recently, I posted a set of 12 songs on Muxtape, which is neat, if bare-bones. You can find the Terribly Happy Muxtape here. Happy listening!

We also just bought an awesome little HD camcorder (the Canon HF100) so I might start posting some short videos on Flickr and embedding them here as soon as I figure out the minor speedbumps of dealing with AVHCD-format files.

Lilly just started taking her first little inchings toward crawling. It's happening so fast. But all these little things never stop being amazing.



(More pictures on Flickr.)

I've let some links pile up, so here they go, all at once.

I had a story in today's newspaper about Grand Theft Auto IV. We haven't gotten the game for review yet, but the early word is that it's some kind of gaming masterpiece. We shall see. The piece I wrote is more of an essay about the impact of the series and what people should expect.

Also today is a new Smallville recap:

Double-O-Lame-O -- Jimmy plays James Bond, or at least a watered-down-martini version. Lex finally gets to Zurich and Clark and Chloe try to wrap their heads around time travel. Can they go back in time and fix Season Seven?

I also forgot to link last week to a weecap I did of How I Met Your Mother:

Beek Man's World -- James Van Der Beek breaks Robin's heart, again, as a Canadian loser who isn't aging well. Then something amazing happens with Barney.

And lastly, GeekAustin did an interview with me about some tech stuff and my work blog. They used the photo from my blog, which looks like it was taken when I died and went to heaven, but was somehow sad and ambivalent about it.

Whew! I'll write something for reals around here this week. Summer is coming and I can already taste the recapping vacation.

A new Smallville recap is up today, in which we bid goodbye to Papa Luthor, played by one of my favorite actors, John Glover. It's bittersweet, but the death scene was handled awfully well:

Farewell, Sweet Bastard -- The Magnificent Bastard Papa Luthor goes to that great billionaire's mansion in the sky. Or maybe it's an overheated condo down below. We're still deciding.

We also have a new Space Monkeys! comic up, this one concerning the Twitter phenomenon. Topical? You'd better begrudge it!

I will be talking (albeit briefly) to Tommy Grand of Cheaters tonight at just after 8 p.m. central on this Web radio show. I know it's short notice, but if you're a fan of Cheaters, or at least my entry about Cheaters, check it out.

In parenthood, I like to think we're a lot more prepared than our fore- (or four- if you're lucky) fathers were. We have the Internet, we have tons of books on parenthood (mostly mom-focused, but still), we have lots of alterna-dads, hipping it up for the rest of us.

I think I keep it together pretty well for the most part.

But here is one of the three worst things I've done as a dad so far. I haven't dropped Lilly on her head (yet!) or fed her rat poison instead of Gerber's by accident (there's still time!), or taken her to a strip club (not till she's old enough to work there). But that doesn't mean I can't confess what it is to be a crap dad on occasion.

The locking

It goes away after a the kid gets past six months, but before that, co-workers constantly want to lay their eyes on the new child. Every day, I'd get asked when I was going to bring her by the newsroom and let the people who were generous enough to throw us a baby shower see her and coo at her cuteness.

What makes it a lot easier is that I take her to daycare every day and I actually have to swing back in the direction of work on the way home. One evening, I was actually struggling to finish up something and Lilly was only four months old, still in her "Sleep or cry" phase and not needing tons of attention all the time. She could be counted on to conk out in her carrier for hours and she was already used to our commute.

So I bring her into the office and lay her down next to my desk in the carrier as I finish up some work. She's perfectly still, so only people staying late at work who happen to walk by even notice her.

But before I can wrap things up, Lilly wakes up and starts fidgeting. I take her out of the carrier and she starts full-on crying. I keep looking around, worried that I'm bothering the people around me who are trying to finish things up on deadline.

I figured she must be hungry or need a changing, so I grabbed her diaper bag and carrier and took her to a small conference room just past the elevators.

She was indeed poopified. I laid her on the conference room table on a plastic green changing pad we carry around and got all daddy with the poop. I would say that this particular poop, which wasn't too spread about, had no chance against me, an expert cleaner of poops. It was over quickly.

I set the rolled-up diaper aside and got her dressed. I managed to get her back in the carrier (also up on the table) before she could start crying again. The poop must have worn her out because Lilly was already starting to fall asleep almost as soon as I strapped her in.

I zipped up her bag and grabbed the diaper for tossing. I looked around the room, but couldn't find a trash can. So I took the diaper into the hallway and tossed it into a trash can outside a nearby bathroom.

Turned around. Walked back to the conference room.

The door: locked.

I looked in through the narrow window next to the door. Lilly lay there. Staring right back at me.

I tried the door handle again. Still locked.

All right. Calm. I could go to the security desk and find somebody to unlock the door. But it was after 6, so nobody would be downstairs in the lobby, so I'd have to go all the way to the production entrance to find somebody with master keys. How long would that take? Two, three minutes? Can you get busted for child abandonment in three minutes?

What if someone with a key happened by, walked into the room and was like, "Hey, free baby!" What the fuck was I gonna tell Rebecca if that happened? "She's in a better home, probably?" Naw. Would not fly.

So, I did something even stupider: I knocked on the door.

I don't know why. Maybe a ghost with real-world abilities could help a brother out? Maybe I believed that my child is such a genius that she could somehow unstrap herself, hop off the table and somehow push a chair to prop herself up and open the locked door. My imagination, sometimes it is too active.

When knocking didn't work, I just stood there and sighed. I did it again. It wasn't working, but at least it made me feel a little better.

Then I got very lucky. An editor I work with named Gary was walking by and noticed my obvious distress. He asked me if everything was all right.

"Uh, my baby kind of... I kind of locked her in the room. And now I can't get in. Because of the lock."

As if not believing that someone employed here could be so negligent, he peeked in through the window. Lilly was starting to fidget again. Gary went into a panic.

"Do you need me to go get the key from security?"

"Oh man, could you? That would be great!"

So Gary runs like a superhero to go get the key.

My child looked at me. I looked at her.

"I'm sorry," I mouthed.

She was unimpressed.

Gary came back with the key less than a minute later. I unlocked the door and walked in and Lilly started crying immediately. I thanked Gary profusely and he said, "Anytime," as if aware that this was destined to happen to me, and to Lilly, again and again, as if we'd pissed off a Greek God.

I gathered her things and took her home.

That night, I told Rebecca the story and after she'd cursed me out a few times, she asked, "Wait a minute. Her carrier wasn't sitting on top of the table, was it? She could have rolled herself off and flipped over!"

You have two choices here: you can argue on the ridiculousness of a four-month old being able to pull off that kind of physical maneuver.

Or you can say what I said: "Of course not. She was on the floor the whole time."

A "Masters of their Domains" feature on a Web site called Smartkidshealthyeating.com ran in the paper today and on the Web site is a video I shot and edited. That lady makes fantastic healthy scones.