Also using the Internet, I was able to track down a store in the greater LA area (Follow Your Heart in Canoga Park) that carried dairy-free chocolate bunnies so I don’t have to order that crap from Portland with dry ice and such to give my allergic child a happy holiday. And yes, my kid DOES have to have a chocolate bunny at Easter; we’re not religious, but we feel very strongly about inexplicable people and animals who show up your house to bring you junk.

But here is where I had the most fun. If you have had the misfortune to be cornered by me on the subject of American Idol this season, you know I kind of like contestant Adam Lambert. Like, to the point where I wish all those other people would quit interrupting The Adam Lambert Show with their singing and whatnot. One of the reasons I like him is that he is a big ol’ record geek; not like I’m short on those people in my world, but I don’t know many who are 27. And what really surprised me was that we share a favorite completely obscure band, Mother’s Finest. Here, watch Adam talk about them with the fevered eyes of the true believer:

Yeah. I was happy to find out about the Germany thing, because I, who could technically be his mom, am too young to know about Mother’s Finest; I spent my youth hanging out with a bunch of musicians about 10 years my senior, some of them from the South. That’s my excuse. And I’d wondered what his was.

Say Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan and Led Zeppelin formed a supergroup. You’re kind of close to what they sound like. You cannot imagine how dynamic they were (I assume still are) live. I have been to approximately one gazillion concerts – most of them by people who are considered great performers – and nobody touches MF. You can’t squeeze that kind of power into the space of a YouTube video, but here’s a track from what I believe is the concert Adam described seeing:

So, back to my point about loving the Internet: People much younger than I, possibly younger than Adam, are seeing that first video on YouTube, looking up something very much like the second video, going, “Hey, this band is great! Why haven’t I heard of them?” I’ve been helping some people out with collections of MP3s available on Amazon that make a good $10 introduction.

So: Because a kid who is a frontrunner on American Idol in 2009 turned on a television in Germany in 2003 and mentioned it on a clip that was only available on iPhones and on YouTube, one of the most underrated bands of the early ’70s gets a new burst of life.

That’s just cool.

Well, three days ago I set a completely deluded deadline; I was going to have the new fringehead.com rebuilt using a totally new-to-me technology before the end of 2009.

After several days of manuals, forums and staring blankly with an attractively furrowed brow, I realized something. Just because I think that Joomla! might be a great solution for a site I’m planning later and that this will be good practice does not mean that, for this single-author blog project, I am not trying to beat a gnat to death with one of those huge clown-car hammers.

So, with hours to spare, I made a bold decision to switch horses in midstream and go with WordPress. I’ve used it, I like it, and – here’s the important part – it’s actually built for blogging. (Hey, it could be worse – I could’ve tried to build it in GarageBand.)

WP installation and configuration could not have been easier. Seriously. If you’re thinking of blogging, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

BUT.

Very, very late in the game, I realized that it had been so long since I used my old blog – from which I needed to copy all my old posts, links, etc. – that I hadn’t the first idea how to log in. I thought I remembered my username and password, I just didn’t know where to go with that information.

After an hour of searching through every suspicious file on my site from the admin side and hand-typing the URL that would theoretically lead to that file, I found it. So the problem is, in general, solved. But there’s no way I’m gonna have all this done by midnight.

So, um, welcome to the new fringehead.com. There’ll be words and stuff here soon. Pretty colors, don’t you think?

Happy New Year!

Edit: Well, look at that – once I figured out the MT stuff, this was crazy fast as well. I still have to reconstruct my blogroll though – I don’t really want you to go to Development Blog.

I got the new CD by Nerissa and Katryna Nields, Sister Holler the other day. I put it on in the car last night and – well, I should tell you I have a rule. On the first listen to a new album, I don’t allow myself to hit either the Repeat or the Skip buttons. With Repeat, on a good album, I usually have to restrain myself once or twice. On a great album, it can go as high as five or six. Sister Holler? ELEVEN. I am almost certain this has never happened before; well, probably on 69 Love Songs, but that’s hardly a reasonable comparison. (For the uninitiated: It actually contains 69 love songs.) Sister Holler consists of new songs based on existing songs, in the folk tradition – some gospel, some traditional, some pop, some classical, that sort of thing. I will almost certainly post more insightfully about the music later, but I need to completely geek out and research the original songs first. Oh yes, I’m going to full-on obsess about this album. For instance, the cover photo shows Nerissa with her face completely obscured by her hair; I may be able to find evidence that she died in 1964 and was replaced by Paul McCartney.

My, that would be geeky, wouldn’t it?

You may think you don’t want to read a blog entry about a lost teddy bear. You’d be wrong in this case; this is the single best piece of writing I’ve read in recent memory.

And finally, Julie from A Little Pregnant details a common medical procedure using props and Play-Doh. Inspired. Or maybe deranged.

It’s hard to believe I haven’t been doing this for ages, given my affinity for such things as bragging about my child, spending way too much time on the Internet, and writing in general; also, I generally hop on new tech-related trends well before the New York Times completely misunderstands them, and in the case of parenting blogs (some of my favorite people are “mommy bloggers,” but that doesn’t mean I’m required to use the term nonironically – does it?) I’m at least a year late. Hi. I had a baby. I may never be cutting-edge again. I’m OK with that.

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning what I’m planning to do here, the rest of this entry will explain.

Hi again! You’re intrepid.

So here’s the deal: We’ve recently moved back to Los Angeles, or as I like to call it, the Mother Country. (Well, to be honest, I’ve never called it that at all, largely because it is not a country- I went to public school in the United States and I still know that). But I have deep emotional ties to the place. And for those of you who question whether it’s possible to have deep emotional ties for a surface-heavy city: you clearly haven’t found the right parts of Los Angeles to base your impressions on. It took me a while, too.) We’ve spent the last few years in Small Town That Shall Remain Nameless, most of which I spent realizing the dozens and dozens of ways in which it is entirely inappropriate for me to live in a small town of any sort. It’s almost impossible to find words to convey the depth of my gratitude for being able to move back here. It may in fact be completely impossible; I didn’t try for that long, so I can’t say for certain.

Now that we’re back, I feel as if I actually have enough material to maintain a regular weblog. I’ve posted some irregular baby-update entries at MySpace, because it seemed like it’d be easy, but their blog display is so reader-unfriendly that I could never get too excited about it. Also, a lot of the people I specifically wanted to be able to keep up with the boy’s progress were not all that interested in joining MySpace to do so, which apparently you have to do. Or at the very least, people couldn’t figure out how to read the blog entries without joining, which is bad enough. Anyway, I’ll be reposting those here, appropriately backdated; if you’ve seen them already, this is the real starting place.

In addition to talking about my own personal child, I plan to write about things to do with kids locally, products we’ve loved or hated thus far in the baby-rearin’ process, and even Los Angeles-area entertainment for grownups (I am still a person. Hear me roar. Or something). Watch the bookmarks section as well for useful links covering those things – I have a goal of quasicomprehensiveness (and apparently another goal of inventing words).

So that’s my mission statement. If any part of it interests you, I hope you’ll come back, comment (or lurk – I don’t mind), subscribe, all that good Web 2.0 stuff. If not – what are you still doing here? Bored at the office? Thought so.

Future entries will actually be about stuff.