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A lazy day at home – well, for the kid, anyway. After all the hurly-burly and excitement of the big trip to Chicago, a day spent with Play-Doh and Spongebob is just the ticket. I love to hear her laugh – not just the babbling laugh of a kid delighting in something infantile, but that short single-syllable Ha! that sounds very adult, and suggests she gets the joke on a higher level. (Of course, she devotes innumerable syllables to the Nickelodeon fake PSA on flatulence. Thanks, Nick. Nice work. “Even your teacher farts.” Hey, here’s a list of figures I’d like my child to respect; could you do something where they all throw up on each other? On Easter? In church? Great!) Not a day for errands, since it’s about two above outside. We returned to a snowless Minnesota blown flat by astonishing winds – tree limbs all over the yard, two bags full of empty Christmas lights boxes emptied and strewn up and down the fields of Jasperwood. Today’s less windy, but it's just plain mean out there. So home we stay.

Anyway, it lets me work – which is good, since Monday is the Dreaded Three Column day. So now we continue with wartime wiener ads. Again from Skinless, of course; they were the Wiener of the Future. Note the brainy Bill Kristol Jr. archetype. Whether such kids existed outside of ads or movies I don’t know, but he has the classic expression of the red-headed (and hence possessed of straaaange powers) know-it-all quiz kid who might have gotten his face shoved in and his glasses knocked off by a mid-level bully, but eventually won the respect of the top bully by teaching him something that came in handy. After which he had Do Not Moiderize glow about him.

The other kid wears the Jughead cap – jagged edges, presumably felt, studded with pins. (Note the V pin, which asserts the need for Victory over the skin-eating Hun.) How Bill asserts the rationale for double wiener consumption while keeping his smug little yap shut I don't know; what medal the other kid is wearing is also a mystery. I can understand why they wrote "lets" - all available extra apostrophes were diverted to wartime use, after all. And such were the privations of wartime that mere catsup was redefined as "catsup sauce," so it seemed like a luxurious condiment.

Banded! Boxed! Branded! Buy bonds! Buy bacon-wrapped bonds!