AiAA: Kia Soul Hamsters

It was "date night" for me and Mrs. Bootleg last Saturday. My mother was in town for Jalen's kindergarten graduation ceremony, so the two of them spent the evening together while the wife and I saw Get Him to the Greek. Here are the night's highlights in chronological order:

5:30 PM - After a long, long day, Jalen "got sick" in our living room. For the past two or three years -- once or twice a year -- Jalen has dropped an uncontrollable, out-of-nowhere hurl after looking and sounding perfectly fine immediately leading up to it. A year ago, we were at Petco Park watching our A's play the Padres when it happened. He's an intermittent vomit time bomb. Mrs. Bootleg and I were upstairs when it happened, so my mother called upon her assortment of hasty cleaning skills in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up Jalen's assault on our upholstery. As my mom explained, "I didn't want you to worry and decide not to go out." As my wife replied, "Oh, we still going out." (That's not a typo, y'all.)

6:00 PM - The last time my mother babysat Jalen; I had to go back into the house for something after I'd already walked to the garage and started the car. Mrs. Bootleg and I hadn't been gone for 30 seconds when I returned to find my mom standing on one of Jalen's old kiddie stepstools reaching towards the open cupboard above the pantry for my Patròn. As we pulled out of the garage this time, I'm just going to assume...

6:30 PM - At some point, my mom made dinner for Jalen. When I asked my son -- the following morning -- what his grandma had cooked, he excitedly replied, "Cookies!" You had cookies for dinner, J? "Yep!" As my mother later explained, "When I asked him what he wanted for dinner, he said, 'cookies'." OK, then.

9:00 PM - I think I liked Get Him to the Greek a little bit more than Mrs. Bootleg. It was a bit uneven and several scenes seemed to run 30 seconds too long, but there were a few uproarious moments and Sean "Diddy" Combs seemed to be having a blast skewering himself as a sleazeball music promoter. I never saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, so I missed whatever continuity there was with Russell Brand's "Aldous Snow" character. And, embarrassingly, a LOT of the current pop culture gags went right over my receding hairline. Sigh.

Before the movie began, a 60-second spot for the Kia Soul aired:





Most of you probably aren't old enough to share my kinda-sorta outrage. (Hell, Mrs. Bootleg IS old enough and she LIKED the ad.) Black Sheep was like a lot of early 1990s rap acts that toed the line between "commercial" and "alternative". They weren't media-labeled militants like Public Enemy and they weren't 3rd Bass-labeled minstrels like Vanilla Ice. But, Black Sheep made solidly progressive (for the time) music that deserved better than an Alvin and the Chipmunks homage.