There are a couple of toys we've fallen for in the course of my son's childhood, the first being a small duck that quacked conversationally when you squeezed its belly, but then the quacking mechanism started to die, giving way to some prolonged BLEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHs emanating from the poor thing, which we thought was hilarious. The only one still in our house that we regularly replace the batteries on is the goofy giggly hippo flashlight. Believe me, we'll squeeze the handle on that thing and giggle along with it if you ask us nicely...but Lord knows when we'll stop. You've been warned.

Today I found another one - a genus of toy that I've always thought was annoying as all hell and really did a disservice to books in general. I give you...


That green thing on the lower right corner? Push those buttons and you get some great zombie language sounds to accompany the pictures of zombies in traffic, zombies at the dog park, zombies at the coffee shop... you get the idea. Nothing like seeing a zombified version of the idiotic Thomas the Tank Engine books that have you push buttons for sounds at least three to four times in the middle of every sentence. I can make my own sounds, thanks, but it's even funnier to hear a zombie calling for its undead dog.

Sometimes, you just need the stupid.

I laughed my head off at this yesterday.

I giggled even harder at the city of New Orleans' website going kaput on the same day that the Walking Id's official portrait was revealed.

I would have had a great guffaw at this if it weren't at our expense.

Through Michael Lewis' latest, I learned that Steve Eisman, the man who was one of the few to blow a whistle on the subprime mortgage lenders' Ponzi-like accounting structure, studied the Talmud to find the mistakes in it. Ooo-kay, starting to sober up now.

I read this round-up of Maitri's and started to get bone tired. The earth is getting damn exhausted on this Earth Day, and all fundamentalists want to talk about is how immodestly dressed women might be contributing? Oh, please. Makes me want to give to this organization that Eisman contributes to, 'cause this is where the stupid burns like hell.

Consider me all giggled out. For the time being, anyhow.

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My sincerest condolences at this time also to Troy Gilbert of GulfSails and to his family on the loss of his uncle in the recent explosion of an offshore drilling rig near Venice, Louisiana. May your uncle's memory be for a blessing.