Colm' Keegan's Music Theory Class

The title isn't really the topic of this post. I just didn't want to bury Colm's publicity in this post. I'll add another picture just to keep the publicity current.  I want this guy to suceed in his project. It's innovative, and music theory is a topic about which not enough people are sufficiently educated. Hell, I have two degrees in music performance and I'm taking the class. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what the professor looks like. I merely want to become more musically erudite.

He even LOOKS professorial.

Uncle Scott moved Jillian to the couch so he can sleep and the two of us can behave as  fools without disturbing anyone. Baby Andrew is sleeping peacefully. He had a bottle at midnight, so he should be good to go at least until 6:00 a.m. when the nanny arrives.

Anyhow, I cannot sleep and my Aunt Jillian is trying to turn her days and nights around because she believes her in utero baby, who will probably be born in the next two weeks, though that's still quite early, will sleep better at night if Jillian is awake more at night now. It would work better if Jillian could walk around more, but she can only walk to the bathroom and shower and back. Once she hits 33 weeks of gestation if she makes it that long, the doctor is going to give her carte blanche to walk around the house. He doesn't want her hiking to the summit of Mt. Whitney ***  or anything that strenuous, but around the house and yard will be fine.

There's a limit to how much longer Jillian can go without her first string cystic fibrosis drugs, which are not all that compatible with pregnancy, and labor will probably start on its own anyway, although the OBGYN thinks the amniotic sac is still far too strong for the baby to rupture at her current size. Labor often starts without water breaking first, though. I've predicted July 8 as the baby's birthdate. That would have her born at just about 33.5 weeks of gestation. I am not, however gifted I may think I am in many other areas, a clairvoyant.  Chances are that this kid will show up whenever the hell she pleases.

I've seen the 3-D ultrasound of this child. She's not going to win any early baby beauty contests. Babies often get cuter though. I'm told by everyone by my dad, who insists he always thought I was beautiful, that I was uglier than sin itself when I was born. I weighed, at 2.2, even less than Jillian's baby will weigh.  Most people who knew me then say I was at least not butt-ugly by the time I was maybe four months old. 

Just because a baby is born ugly doesn't mean she's doomed to a life of repugnance. Some relatives say I still haven't recovered from my repugnant phase, but they're the same people who believe douching with Coca-cola shortly after doing the wild thing prevents pregnancy, and that's even after the pregnancy that Coca-cola failed to prevent that they hold to this belief. I don't take their insults  exceedingly personally. If they think I'm homely, it probably means that I'm practically Miss America. (I'm being facetious. I do not consider myself necessarily even conventionally pretty, much less beauty pageant material. Thigh gaps are popular now, but I don't think they're supposed to be almost as wide as the Grand Canyon.)

We're expecting that Jillian's new little one will be pulchritude-challenged (vocabulary word for the day, for which context alone should help you define if you didn't happen to have memorized the word in high school SAT preparation). The baby WILL,  however, eventually be pretty. Two people who look as pretty and handsome as her parents do would have a tough time producing a child with sub-average looks, though I've heard it has happened before.  

You know how the tabloids at the checkout counter -- the cheap-looking magazines with outrageous stories on the covers that most of us never buy [though someone must or they wouldn't be there taking up all that space]  but do occasionally thumb through --sometimes have stupid contests-like features, like husbands and wives who resemble amazingly, or people who look startlingly like their dogs or cats? One of those tabloids should offer contest-like features with the ugliest parents who have the best-looking children, and vice versa. They'd have to have the Jerry-Springer-like feature of  paternity tests, the revealing of such,  and the resulting breakups when daddy is not who he is supposed to be, but that could add to the drama. Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Steve Wilcos, and the producers of Paternity Court might try to sue for some sort of copyright infringement, but what is new in a tabloid being sued? 

Regarding Paternity Court if it is even still on the air on one of the 666,666 channels offered through some cable, satellite, community access, or other system, exactly what is or was the point of that program? Paternity tests were supposedly taken early enough for the results to be ready by the  time the show was filmed. Then the parents would come onto the stage and caterwaul obscenities, most of which were bleeped out, at one another for twenty-one of the twenty-two minutes of actual air time of the show, minus commercial time. All anyone really heard, anyway, was the bleeping out of obscenities. The program might just have well have been one of the weekly tests of the Emergency Broadcast System with all the bleeping sounds that were aired. At some point there would be an obligatory shot of the adorable baby cooing (it almost always seemed to be a boy) in his infant seat in the green room. Then, in the final fifteen seconds of air time, the envelope revealing the results would be opened. Depending upon the results, one parent or the other non-parent would physically attack the other. Then the show would end. Why not just read the damned results in the firsrt place and get it over with?

My thought was, "They took Judge Alex off the air and left this &$%#@*!  on?" Where was the thought process in that, and what studio executive would like to stand up and take responsibility for the decision?

Speaking again of tabloids , I just looked at  one a few days ago that said that Jeb Bush is a former drug dealer. I don't know tons about the background of Jeb Bush. Perhaps he was a pharmacist before entering politics. It would be just like a tabloid to spin that one around and refer to a pharmacist as a drug dealer. Though I'm not afraid of an administration with Jeb Bush at the helm and wouldn't feel as though I needed either to slit my wrists or to move to Canada or Australia if he were elected, he's not my first-choice candidate, and I'm far from his number one fan. Still, Jeb Bush as a former drug dealer? Doesn't that seem to be just a bit of a stretch?

Segueing now to both tabloids and to Judge Alex (the person as opposed to Judge Alex the show), has Judge Alex ever been featured in a tabloid? I would think one of my acquaintances would have mentioned it to me if they had seen an article or headline featuring him. If not, why not? He's important enough to be in a tabloid.  Janice Dickinson has been on the cover of tabloids. That despicable teacher in Dance Moms has been there. Carrot Top, too, has been there. The entire Honey Boo Boo family has been on the covers of numerous tabloids. So why not Judge Alex? What is so inferior about him that the tabloids haven't fabricated stories about him? I'm not saying the judge, his wife, his mother, or even I would be happy with the stories these veritable chronicles of untruth would spin about him. I'm merely wondering why he is not every bit as worthy of the attention as is the next celebrity. Jaci, you're in the media, though not the tabloid media. Surely you could do something to right this wrong!

*** I reached the summit of Mt. Whitney, though by the skin of my teeth. I don't think I've covered the topic before in my blog.  It was a shining example of stellar parenthood on the part of my father [sarcasm font], which is all the more reason to share the story. I'll get to it soon.