The stand-up was good, but underappreciated by Harmon who, “blind drunk” (as he repeatedly described himself), kept up a running show of genuine or exaggerated pique at being kept waiting in the wings for three hours with nothing to do but drink. (He arrived two hours before showtime, at a Nerdist staffer’s request, he said.) He was funny, and we laughed along with him quite a lot as he aped doing stand-up bits, starting with premises like going to the post office, but returning again and again to a “this is how white people do this….this is how black people do this” joke about jokes. Delivered sober, I’d have appreciated this, but delivered drunk it didn’t work the eighth time in a row Harmon brought it out. He couldn’t keep it good-natured enough, allowing cynicism to lead him around by the nose. Chris Hardwick, sober for nine years now, tried to keep the interview moving along, but I couldn’t help wondering if he saw his former alcoholic self a little in Harmon’s spiraling performance. No doubt he wanted to keep everything light, so he never really tried to reign his guest in, but this meant Harmon ran roughshod over the panel. As I said, he was funny, so it wasn’t a waste of anyone’s time, but I’m sure it wasn’t how anyone had expected the interview with Very Special Guest Dan Harmon was going to go.

It wasn’t all Harmon being his own Drunk Hulk, though, since of course he was able to answer some questions about the business of writing pilots, putting on a show, why he would never go back to writing features (because in TV the writer is the king, while in features the writer is a cog), and about Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who parody that appears on Community on occasion and who has become a nerd icon in his own right. But while fielding questions about Community, Harmon’s inebriated honesty may have gotten the better of him: He seemed overwhelmingly cynical about the future of the show.

Is Community going to be cancelled?

Nobody asked that question. And Harmon never said anything specific. But his attitude about the likelihood of doing such-and-such with Abed, or casting Chris Hardwick as a regenerated Inspector Spacetime, was very negative, as though he had already written off Community’s future.

Admittedly, the conversation was loose and rambling. His addled brain may have been seeing the world much more darkly than realistically, and so that may have been infecting his attitude as he spoke about the show. Or, he may have been more honest about the show’s future than he would have been had he gone on stage completely sober.

Dan Harmon was embarrassed by what went on, and on Sunday morning he apologized to Chris, Matt, Jonah, San Francisco, America, Comedy and Erin McGathy.

I don’t want to give the impression that Dan Harmon spoiled the show in any way. In fact, I think much of the crowd enjoyed bearing witness to it. I know I laughed a lot, even if it was with increasing discomfort every time he pulled out his “white people/black people” meta-joke. I want Community to be on the air for years, but I’m afraid that I what I saw on Saturday night was a show creator already in mourning.

Hmm. I wonder where Adrian got to. It’s awfully quiet.

Oh, there you are. Say, watcha got there?

You. Yes you. Hey. You.

You’re so busted.

His defense? “But I, but I , but I wanted to eat ice cream!”

Sneaky, but honest. His sister would have blamed it on the fridge somehow.

(Yes, of course I grabbed my camera, immediately. Blog fodder like this doesn’t come along every day, you know.)

“No touching the salad dressing bottles.”

“No touching the pickle jars.”

“No squishing the bread.”

“No poking holes in the plastic wrapping on the chops.”

“No running down the aisles.”

“No eating apples straight from the bin.”

“No eating chicken straight from the bin.”

Because with two kids, and at a store other than Costco with its giant shopping carts, there is only room for one in the cart itself. The older child must be entrusted to walk alongside.

(Or, in Erin’s case, to hang off the side, the front, climb underneath, skip behind, and occasionally get run over a bit when she’s not paying attention.)

Not pictured: Adrian. Erin used to be a champion cart sitter, though.

I grabbed a cart from the cart area and walked it back to the car. I loaded Adrian in the seat and then I saw it. Every parent’s nightmare.

There was no seat belt in the shopping cart!

Now, you can never really know how you’ll handle this kind of emergency until you’re in it. I mean, sure, you can make contingency plans until you’re blue in the face and the cows have come home and the fat lady is all out of breath, but they don’t mean a damn thing when you’re right there, staring at the frayed ends of what used to be your child’s salvation.

So, there I was. I was finally in it, you know? Like in it for real? Everything had hit the fan and I had to choose: Leave Adrian in the death trap, or lift him out of his seat and walk all the way over to the cart return to get a new cart.

I froze. I admit it. There seemed to be no good answer. Because even if I did manage to somehow get Adrian out of the cart he was in, there was no guarantee that there would even be a cart with a working tiny buckle and thin strap waiting for me at the other end of what I knew would be an epic journey. On the other hand, sitting in a cart with no seat belt is the shopping equivalent of loading a revolver with 5 bullets and handing it to your drunk friend.

I won’t tell you what I chose. I think this is one of the truly divisive issues in parenting today and I don’t want to get blogged at.

(P.S. The cart return was at least eight feet away. One does not simply walk into the Safeway cart return area.)

My baby sister just had a baby of her very own. Babies having babies. I know she’s 31, but she’ll always be 6, chasing me around, trying to get me to play with her.

Now I get to chase her around and try to get her to give me that baby for a minute.

This is my nephew, and I love him.

Thoughts from the backseat on a drive into school: “Daddy,” she begins, “maybe this is all just a play.”

Shakespearean supposing. Then, later: “I know, I know! Maybe we are all in somebody’s dream!”

Cartesian consideration.

I ask, importantly, “What do you think it would mean if we were all in a dream? Would mommy and daddy still love you?”

“Yep,” she replied, certain despite Descartes.

Yep.

…I now teach music to 7-12 year olds.

It’s the details that make or break a good lie.

Anyway, Kenmore is having a video contest: Submit your most creative, but practical, use of an appliance for a chance to win prizes from Kenmore (I think it’s Sears gift cards in varying amounts, like $100, $50, or $25).

To enter:

1. Be in America. Sorry, un-America.
2. Record a video of unusual, but practical, appliance use. Cover up any non-Kenmore branding (you can use whatever appliance you want, but they can’t use videos that show another company’s brand. Just stick some tape over the name). If the videos are large, uncompressed Quicktime videos 1920 x 1080, 16:9 those are best, but not necessary. Mine won’t be. But the larger video size the better, they say. I say just shoot it on your phone and send it right away. THIS SHOULD NOT BE STRESSFUL.
3. Submit a video TO ME, by e-mail: backpackingdad at backpackingdad dot com.
4. I pick up to 5 good videos, and send them in to Kenmore, but I’m on a deadline, so I need your video sent to me by Wednesday, January 18th, at 5pm PST (Pacific).
5. Wait, and wait and wait and wait and wait. I actually don’t know how long it will take for them to pick a winner.
6. That’s it.

How much effort should this take? I don’t know. I pulled out my phone and shot a video in 24 seconds. Don’t think too hard about it. Just send a video in.

Here’s mine.

Again, you have to have a U.S. address to win a prize, so sorry un-America.

Now.

Happy Anniversary, beautiful.

But…it’s not really a great picture, as pictures go. It’s probably about as good as I could have made it, naturally, in the conditions I was in and with the camera I was using (my smartphone camera, because that’s all I use now). Seeing it, and knowing it could have been so much better if I was better at this, or if I had a better camera (and knew how to use it), or if I had some fancy post-production software (and knew how to use it), bummed me out.

But Adobe just released a beta version of Lightroom 4, and it’s free to use for people with Adobe accounts (I have one because I use Acrobat) until the end of March. I downloaded it (it took a long time, because the file is huge), and imported my library to get to work.

The controls were easy enough for someone like me, who doesn’t know jack about jack, to just go in and start messing with sliders and buttons until after about ten minutes I ended up with this:

I like this picture a lot better. It looks more like the image in my mind, even if it isn’t as faithful a reproduction of the actual light in the actual world at that actual moment.

I don’t know if I’ll buy Lightroom 4 when the beta license runs out in March, but I already like it more than the native Picasa editor I’ve been playing around with. And I tried GIMP once but it scared the crap out of me. I’m going to play with Lightroom for a bit.

(Editor’s Note: This is not a sponsored post. Lotus linked to the release on Google+ and I checked it out. I trust her about photography things.)

I have nothing else to add.