What a dilemma I have this day. I am not sure if I want to write about the fact that my daughter's only male Barbie doll (honestly named "Allen"... Ken must have been out sick the day she bought him) has lost his arm.... or the fact that this arm has become part of a devious game of "Hide and Seek" with my wife... a game that I sufficiently squashed the other day.

I guess a little bit of both. Allen (who I swear looks just like Rob Lowe) seemed to have a hairline fracture in his medial epicondyle that spread quickly to his lateral epicondyle causing the radius and ulma to separate from the humerus. The more common medical term for this is "cheap foreign plastic crap." Allie, being the clever girl that she is, fabricated a story that Allen lost his limb in a house building accident.

So this arm just sat on our counter top... until that is I picked it up and placed it on my wife's pillow just before bedtime like some sick and twisted "Barbie fucks with the Godfather and Allen pays for it" scenario. This led to her hiding it in the medicine cabinet. The hiding challenge was on, and since the start Allen's arm has appeared sticking out of boxes, in the coffee pot, in my vitamins... until I killed the game for good.

Wait. That's not entirely correct.

The high price of tweezers killed the game. After my last placement, we realized that we needed tweezers to retrieve the arm (No worries, the cat is fine.). We also realized that we didn't have any tweezers. So going to the store to fetch some new pincers for all hair-ingrown, I was stunned at the cost. Who the hell pays $34 for tweezers? They tweeze right? (And where the hell did that word come from? Tweeze? I can't see the forest for the tweeze?) Do you get more hairs plucked per inch at the higher cost? I don't think so. I even stood my moral ground on the $3.99 version. Tweezers should cost no more that 79 cents! I am tempted to write a scathing letter of disapproval to the Tweezer Lobby!

So because of these ruthless tweezer-producing bastards, Allen's arm now floats in my wife's shower gel like some preserved science experiment. We sit and play our game no more and Allen always asks Barbie for help putting on his pants.

*brianlewandowski did this little ditty today at www.brianlewandowski.com. Has he mentioned that he has a new book out yet?