Ladies and gents, I present the Groening-ized family o' Liprap. I only wish I were that skinny in real life, but the avatar creator didn't supply a post-preggo gut, so this'll just have to suffice.

This whole Simpsonian universe thing has been spreading like a virus due to some of the blogpocheh foolin' around some on the Net. It doesn't hurt that most of us are Simpsons fans.

The other thing that seems to be spreading around is a certain amount of NOLA blogger slowdown (call it Slo-Blo, I guess...). Checking around all the different New Orleans blogs, there are only a few that are keeping up some kinda frenetic posting pace. The rest are in the throes of Slo-Blo.

Some possible reasons for this state of affairs:

- It's summer down here. It's hot. Damn hot. So hot you could cook in your shorts. A little crotch-pot cookin'. That's the truth, folks. A lotta heat and humidity make for a lotta lethargy and stupid stupors. I'm not sayin' the intelligence quotient has decreased among the bloggers - only that the need to use it has declined somewhat. Trying to come up with fresh material, opinions on current events, memes, fun and profound anecdotes, whatever, just isn't as pressing as finding a place to cool off and a nice cold alcoholic beverage to go with it. I personally vote for Liuzza's frosty globes o' beer...but that's just me.

- The news coming down the pike concerning the political messes and the recovery hijinks in these parts continues to be overwhelming. The brain is not only addled by the rising temperatures and the air you could cut with a knife, it is also under pressure from being under a constant state of siege. If it ain't the idiot politicians or the law enforcement failures, it's the stress of rebuilding your place of residence with or without (uhhh, increasingly without) the help of the Winding Goat Path Home or from less-than-reassuring insurance companies. Not to mention finding a good, trustworthy contractor to do the job and do it well without gouging you to within an inch of your retirement fund's jugular. It doesn't help that people who have no clue still persist in dissing the efforts to keep this city on the globe. Grrrr... It is truly akin to playing Whack-A-Mole armed with a teeny jeweler's hammer.

- People have been venturing out of town a tad more. Gotta take some time. Relax, take a load off, dive into a globe o' beer for a bit, come out, dry out, and return cleansed, bruised but not broken, and ready for more. If anyone wants to join me at my summer camp (hell, at any summer camp), take that time. If you just can't, though, I've got a few camp funnies for ya:

I did a towel shimmy by the pool this morning, part of the usual routine after getting out of the pool and preparing the kids to enter the industrial-grade blasting A/C indoors. "Guys, get your towel behind your back and start that towel shimmy! Pull it back and forth allll the way down your back. Now do your legs..." I stopped when I heard a new camper giggling and saying, "Gross!"

"What's gross, honey?" I asked.

"You were shaking your booty!"

"What??? It's part of the towel shimmy!"

"Gross!!!!!!!!"

"What's so gross about shaking your booty?" I asked.

Giggles. There was never a good answer that came from that child to that question.

Later on, at dismissal, my co-head teacher was outside the gym welcoming parents, then running into the gym to fetch their kids. She walked over to me with a big, slightly appalled grin on her face. "There's some guy out there, somebody's father, who's wearing this t-shirt that has a picture of a guy slapping his hand to his forehead. The caption underneath says, 'The condom broke!' "

After I quit laughing, I said, "Yeah, there are just some things you have to put away when you have kids, even though they might be fun and funny as all hell. Among those things are all the "Parental Advisory" albums that have cuss words in the songs, and rude, crude t-shirts. I have to put away my "Nads" college hockey t-shirt until I'm eighty, probably, because I can't wear that in front of my son or other impressionable youngsters." We laughed over that some more.

It also made me thankful I never bought that "F*ck Censorship" t-shirt some college kids were selling when I was in a pre-college program. How the heck would I have explained that one?

Another good shirt, worn by an older camper, "My Imaginary Friend Just Beat Up Your Imaginary Friend." Bullying has now entered some other dimension...