Practice Makes Adorable

SPECIAL FATHER'S DAY WORLD EXCLUSIVE: First footage from the upcoming documentary, "Cleo and Dad: Journey Beyond Schnuzzling."

The struggle:



And the ecstacy of success (spoiler alert):



Basically every day is Father's Day, now. Hats off to two of my two favorite mammals.

Dawg Blawging: Fetch Lives

More excellence from The Lady Miss Cleo, here, and her radically transgressive understanding of how "Fetch" is played.



Really, Kate is kind of the star of this one, just in terms of hustle and scrappiness and max-effort persistence. She's like David Eckstein, but all foxy:



Yes, I have noticed that my father is wearing an apron in basically every photograph I have of him. But thanks for pointing that out.

Dawg Blawging For The True (Tennis Ball String) Heads

I know these videos are annoyingly small, but that's how it's going to have to be, since I'm not going to be putting them on YouTube. This is because I don't want the monsters that live in YouTube's comments sections to call my dad (or my dad's dog?) a "fag" or whatever. Not that Cleo couldn't handle her biz on some Ginger Kid response-vid shit, but... yeah, let's just keep the giggling dad and the frantic puppy away from the subhumans for now.

Oh, Hello

Relax, everyone.

I am listening. I have heard the people of the Internet -- the entire Internet, even YouTube commenters, who are not actually people, strictly speaking -- crying out for a one-stop venue for all things related to words that I type about stuff. These words are currently scattered all over the Internet, a blanket of self-indulgent parentheticals and mildly unexpected adjectives coating the information superhighway like so many cast-off, mushed-up cigarette butts. There are blog posts and features and blog posts the length of longish features. There's a lot.

There are anguished musings about Gary Matthews Jr. (at Can't Stop The Bleeding) and there are less-anguished musings about, like, Friendster (at Slate). And there's also me on New Hampshire Public Radio talking about Friendster. No one has ever asked me how I feel about Gary Matthews Jr., blessedly, but you're getting the idea: there are several years of my professional life that are just out there, diffuse and dispersed and lurking down in The Google Search beneath results about Diamond Dave and David Roth the Coin Magician Who Compulsively Says 'Thank You' After Everything and David Roth the Folk Singer and so on. It's a lot of ground to cover, what with all the anguish and the musings and the aforementioned parentheticals and adjectives and such.

I'm going to try to do some of that covering, here. I'm under no illusions about there being a legion of Roth Completists demanding access to the blog I set up for my old Athlon football previews -- although -- or the scab-picking but sadly prescient fake Obamacare satire blog I briefly attempted. But that stuff does exist, and it's silly if I don't do my best to put it all together. Over coming days I'm going to try to round up most of my clips and get them all in line. At which point I will have a sort of living, breathing resume for all to read! Or something.

Also, I'll finally have a place to host videos of my father playing with his new puppy. You basically can't be barefoot in my parents' kitchen anymore because it's so full of things the dog likes. Whenever I go home to visit I'm constantly stepping on giant dinosaurian pork-roast bones and sticks the dog brought in from outside. As if the dog remembers that stick, and would be upset if that stick wasn't right there on the floor, causing me to turn my ankle.



In future posts, I will perhaps go into my jealousy of the dog, because it is cuter than me and allowed to bring sticks into the house.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Watch this space, I'm going to do more soon/eventually.