My Dad is the Monolith
January 5th, 2007Dear reader,
While I assume you have seen 2001 and fully understood it’s clearly laid out plot, allow me to indulge myself with some needless recap:
The Monolith, in 2001, is an alien-created evolution booster. If you recall, the movie starts out with some simians frolicking near the Big Black Block, which gives the apes/monkeys (I can’t remember which) a bit of an evolutionary boost, resulting in one of the monkeys thinking, “Hey! A bone! I bet that a small amount of torque at one end of the bone will make the far end of the fulcrum move really fast, and that the resulting kinetic energy can be applied to Monkey Bob’s head, rendering him insensible!”, at which point he clobbers Monkey Bob with the bone.
While I always took 2001 to be science fiction (despite being set several years in the past, a stylistic quirk which has yet to be explained), I now realize that it was in fact a documentary, and that modern day monoliths apparently look and act exactly like my dad.
Which is a damn long introduction for an indulgent and silly post:
I visited the folks for Christmas, with my wife and son. My son is 9 and a half months old, and was doing pretty well for himself. He could:
- stand by supporting himself on a couch or table
- walk by using it for balance
- smile
- occasionally laugh
- crawl
- that’s it.
Then we left him with my dad while we went out (shopping, I believe, but then again I think the default condition for our trip to Houston was “shopping”), and when I came back, evolution had been given a boost. By the end of the two week trip, his reportoire grew from “crawling, propping himself up, walking with furniture support, and laughing” to:
- crawling
- propping himself up
- walking with furniture support
- laughing at all kinds of things
- recognizing his name
- recognizing the phrase “ceiling fan”
- standing without support
- clapping his hands
- waving
- playing peekaboo by hiding behind someone’s back and peeking around them
- climbing down off furniture without going head-first
- climbing the stairs
- dancing (in the most minimal, barely-qualifies-as-dancing fashion)
- picking up food in his hand and successfully putting it in his mouth (until then, he had generally tried to put his entire hand into his mouth, and found the “food goes in, hand stays out” rule of thumb incomprehensible)
- smiling at people he doesn’t know, instead of having paroxysms of fear and crying inconsolably
So, all in all, I’d like to thank the aliens who created my father, and make a little request: if you are capable of doing a monolith firmware update, could you add “prevent child from trying to gouge out eyeballs or stick fingernail into sensitive nasal septum”?
February 10th, 2007 at 2:31 am
The only thing I really remember about your Dad was his obsession with “tickling” to death his younger brothers… And to think I had to go thru his beedroom to get to mine .
Does he do that with the kid? If so, you have my permission to bend both of his fingers backwards…
Your uncle Joe
February 10th, 2007 at 10:04 am
No, he doesn’t do the tickle thing. He’s more into the “read nursery rhymes” thing, which is probably far less traumatic.