Top 5 Gifts for Pregnant Women

1. Native American Spirits. Nothing steadies those preggo jitters like a puff on a cigarette, and these are made from 100% organic tobacco.

2. Sushi. It's a little-known fact that gestating women don't get nearly enough mercury. And raw fish is way more nutritious -- cooking destroys vitamins!

3. Blue cheese. Moms-to-be need calcium for two! Best to buy fromage bleu from France or some other country where they don't pasteurize it -- again, heat destroys vitamins!

4. Bourbon. Face it, pregnancy is stressful. After a long, hard day struggling up flights of stairs and standing on the subway, what expectant woman doesn't appreciate a few shots of Maker's Mark?

5. Crack. Sure, the rest of the population has moved on to meth, but knocked-up ladies appreciate the classic pick-me-up. Now available with a special pipe for women only: "LadyCrack."

Help! I Need a Decoder Ring

OK, so I thought the email I got yesterday about belly buttons was batshit crazy unusual. Then today I got the following in my inbox (from a totally different person, btw):

Before this enlarged new assignment, I've already have a finance accounting deal with 30+ members need supervise with lots of operation initiatives, client interaction, cost and team management daily, it's my first time to work with local and global transition, solution team, and 7+ territory clients for a new 50+ team size finance accounting deal outsourcing in, I dedicated a lot and get involved from the initial plan stage ,contributed my finance accounting experience , seeking for expertise opinions globally to help transition team, clients get the new deal transitioned in , we've passed through a very hard time, for this client had never got any experice on outsourcing, they had unbeliverable high expectation and constraint project schedule requirement and changed their detail support module frequently, request for accelerated transition and go-live under technology, people and operation not ready circumstance, which made each of our project team stretched step by step to identify optinal solution to drive our way out for success with client satisfaction and our acceptable risk level, this is a great team work with resources leverage cross geography, functions.

Clearly, this person is stalking me. Trying to impress me with their tales of unbeliverable high expectation and operation not ready circumstance. Even worse, it's working! I'm succumbing to their experice and optinal solution. It's all because I used to read those bizarre ravings on bottles of Dr. Bronner's soap:

"Replace half-true Socialist-fluoride poison & tax-slavery with full-truth, work-speech-press & profitsharing Socialaction! All-One! So, help build 4 billion Hannibal wind-power plants, charging 96 billion battery-banks, powering every car-factory-farm-home-monorail & pump, watering Babylon-roof-gardens & 800 billion Israel-Milorganite fruit trees, guarded by Swiss 6000 year Universal Military Training."

At least Dr. Bronner actually wrote THREE sentences, not one.

Does Snookums Work Here?

I was editing a document the other day at work and came across the term "workstreams," which I didn't understand (I edit documents written for IT consultants, so this happens at least once a sentence).

"What are workstreams?" I asked my writer, who in turn asked the person he'd interviewed. Here's her reply:

"That means they give a belly button to any action or goal so that everyone knows what their goals are."

Can anyone explain what this means? It's at points like this that I want to put my daughter on the phone with these people, so she can shout, "Ha! Shoo! Geh beh deh beh deh beh baby boo!"

The Tie Gives the Lie

Seen on 6th Avenue in Chelsea the other day:

Short, middle-aged man on cell phone, talking earnestly to someone on the other end about his "credentials" and his "expertise."

Speech contradicted totally by his tie, which had giant Mickey Mice all over it, visible from 50 feet away.

Why I Haven't Been Here. Or Happy.

Due to an insane error honest mistake on the part of Zany Dad, I did not have Internet service for a week. Then my aunt died, so I was out of town for a couple of days attending the funeral.

But one good thing came out of all this: I learned that you don't have to be a kid to order a Happy Meal!

Seriously, I always assumed that Happy Meals were for children only -- kind of like New York City playgrounds (which have signs reading, "No adults unless accompanied by a child"). But apparently, there's no age limit.

How did I not know this before? Just dumb, I guess. (My sister asked how I cheer myself up when I'm down without Happy Meals.)

At least now I won't need to bring Snookums along the next time I go to McDonald's. Unless, of course, I want to eat in the playground.

Baby Model Catfight

Here, finally, is the issue of Babytalk that Snookums was photographed for.

That is not Snookums on the cover. It is an evil rival who copied Snookums' look -- ivory skin, reddish hair, almond-shaped blue eyes -- only she stuck her tongue out at the last second to win the editor's favor.

That tongue move was the baby model's equivalent of "Blue Steel."

Snookums may have no choice but to challenge little "Luna" (as the beyotch calls herself) to a "Toddle-Off."

Quotes of the Day

• "This drug is producing bloodless revolution in antithrombotic area." -- said by a Polish employee of the pharmaceutical company I write for. (I was told to ask him what he liked best about working for the company; I suppose it's all those bloodless revolutions the company foments, as opposed to the bloody ones that have wracked his homeland for centuries.)
• "She became a bona-fide media star, a working-class Paris Hilton." -- from a New York Times article on a reality-TV star who has cancer and plans to die on camera. But how can you be "a working-class Paris Hilton"? Isn't that kind of like being "Bill Gates, only on food stamps" or "Tiger Woods, but sucky at golf"?
  
• "Until you've eaten with a chimp and bathed with a chimp, you don't know a chimp." -- from a New York Post story on that nutjob in Connecticut whose pet chimp was shot after he ripped the face off her best friend -- whoops, the chimp was her best friend. The one who got her face ripped off was her best human friend.
  

If it weren't for Tuesday's vagina comment, I'd be calling this post "Quotes of the Week."