San Francisco is at Burning Man. It’s like someone took the city, turned it upside down, and shook out all the bottled water, faux fur, and Cool Ranch Doritos.

Our friend Josh is in for the weekend. We’re having a quiet, excessively hung over breakfast at the Pork Store.

Me: Where are we going today?

Bryan: Well, Lori wants to meet up, and she’s babysitting her godchildren.

Me: Right. We were talking about going to the Exploratorium.

Josh: What’s that?

Me: It’s a kids’ science museum with all these exhibits you can touch. The kids can kind of run around.

Josh: We’re going to the museum of screaming?

Me: That’s one way to put it.

Bryan: They also have drums!

Me: And flashing lights!

Lamprey mouth (via rebecky)

Queasy Pops (via Mimi Smartypants)

I decide to watch a little TV, and realize there’s an “Oprah” on Tivo that I haven’t seen. I read the show description:

“Children sold into prostitution, children trained to kill, babies raped by men.”

Yeah. So, if I flip over to VH1 to watch “Behind the Music” with George Michael, I’m definitely going to hell.

A parenting lesson from Fussy:

“The more stringently you forbid something, the more attractive it becomes to the forbidee, correct? And shameful, because you still want to do it, but you also know you have to hide it, and the situation gets everso charged. And we want to drain all the charge out of things like . . . this! My neighbor’s five-year-old daughter, the other day, she walks in, cocks her hip, puts an imaginary Pall Mall to her lips, and whispers, We must smoke. And my neighbor was like, Wha-huh? Where the Bette Davis did she get that? We only ever watch Animal Planet. But, in alignment with the non-freaking-out philosophy, she replied in her best Marlene Dietrich, Yes, we must smoke, but we must also cough. So they started swanning around the room taking elegant drags off their imaginary cigarettes and then immediately pretending to hack up a lung. This, I thought, was educational roleplaying at its finest.”