I'm in love. She's five years old, has red hair, and likes being carried everywhere.

Yup I'm pretty much on board with saying that every household needs a Gracie. I was at Matthew and Leah's cottage yesterday for the annual barbecue (which, by the way - bacon and cheese, in the patties themselves) and as I quipped early on, I didn't know if I was supposed to be the oldest kid or the youngest grownup but for whatever reason, the kids just swarmed me. Good swarm, though, not running-from-the-bees swarm. And I don't think I knew how badly I needed that until it was happening. I needed to spend a day on the beach with a pack of juniors. Playing volleyball, arguing about comic books, brushing hair with driftwood, telling really really really bad jokes, making sand castles, and smashing those self-same sand castles. Sure, when they decide to take you down en masse Mumakil style, it's a bit scary. But otherwise, excellent. This has solved many problems. Oh kids. Gotta get me some of those.

Moving on to matters more serious: Spike: Shadow Puppets #3 is the best Buffy-related anything since the series finale of Angel. Yeah, it's better than the Season 8 comic book. It's better than any other Angelverse comic by far, and it's up there with the better episodes of Season 5 of the show. In fact, that's one of its charms: it feels like the dumbassed sequel they woulda made to "Smile Time" in Season 6 if they'd been renewed. Brian Lynch has, more than any other writer thus far, fully captured the anarchic absurdity of the Whedonverse (genetically altered helper monkey! puppet leprosy!), and is also far and away the leader for aping Whedon's linguistic pop cultural mishmash ("Grimace is coming, and he's McPissed," "We got a damn duck to save"). So what this all leads to, is that I was literally shrieking with laughter on every single page of this comic. I'm also ready to back Lynch on not just Angel: After the Fall, but on any ongoing or recurring Spike series he ever chooses to do. Seriously: the spirit of the Buffyverse is alive, and it's in Brian Lynch's head. He's made the fundamental connection between champion Spike and William the Bloody - it's always about the girl - and used it to actually go places with the character that weren't achievable in the last three years of the television series. And he's even put together what I would call a flawlessly compelling Fang Gang for ol' William: if a puppetized Lorne, a telepathic fish, and two powered-up turbo-hotties (one of whom speaks awkward personal truths in halting Engrish) doesn't make for good group dynamic, I simply do not know what. There should be action figures.

I'm going to do something I never do: talk about music. Guns n' Roses was on the cover of Rolling Stone this week because it's the 20th anniversary of Appetite for Destruction, which in my youth I would have listed as one of the Three Best Albums of All Time. In fact, there's a nice little quote in the magazine from Slash, where he lists off the great albums, the ones that literally changed lives, and then says that no matter what else happened, he got to be a part of one of those... and that means the world to him. This is me validating: he really did, it really was, and goddamn that really musta been something. So I've been listening to Appetite a lot this week. I don't think I'd been into it in at least three or four years and listening to it now was the first time that parts of it actually sounded dated to me - like I could put them in a specific time and place, instead of their being just the ephemeral sounds of my childhood and therefore unassailable as actual cultural output. Still, as has been the case every time I've left that CD alone for a while only to go back to it, my appreciation for it has grown immensely. Tracks I have literally heard a bajillion times - like, say, "You're Crazy," which we used for the prologue of Stanley's Life and is therefore permanently tattooed on my sound mixin' brain - got a bit of a reno in my musical headspace and came at me a bit fresh. That was sweet. And you know what? "Sweet Child o' Mine," for all its flaws, is still the single sweetest (and most accurate) song a man ever wrote about what it's like to be a man in love with a woman, and all the inherent shades and conflicts contained therein. I doubt that was intentional, but then the best shit never is.