"I Have Called Upon Your Goodwill and Patience Frequently In the Past, But Never Moreso Than Now, When I Have a New Toy"

I woke up on my birthday last week and was gifted with a digital video camera, already loaded with this message:



Don't worry. Groom knows he is the whitest boy on the planet when it comes to carrying a tune and/or dancing. Since he excels at all else, it is only fair that he be fallible. Note, however, how well he plays up his deficiency, hammering out and sustaining even the sharpest note. That, in itself, is a talent (kind of like how Rush Limbaugh pretends, through sheer bravado, that he has a brain).

Later that day, Niblet began establishing his relationship with the camera and asked to film me:



There's a strange light from the window behind in this clip, but let's pretend it's the angel what lives inside me, coming out for a wink. And aren't we all wondering, based on this rendition, what kind of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" I could coo out for Obama, thus tapping into the subtext of our years-long torrid affair? (not that such a thing would ever happen because His Nibs is much too smart and genuine to ever take for granted the peach that is Michelle, and if he did, I would have to gauge out my eyes with a flagpole, what with every last belief having been rattled).

Shortly thereafter, PacoTacoHaco/Niblet wanted to try out the song himself, standing next to one of his creature creations, a guy named "Eye-o":




Even better, in the intervening days, Niblet has taken over the camera and started staging stop-motion Lego films:



Sure, he's six, so he has little patience for the multiple incremental movements a longer film would require, but it's still a really cool start to his future career, when he will join the Wallace & Gromit production team. Until then, he'll live in our basement and have seriously pasty skin.

During the years of pasty skin and basement dwelling, I'll take him a platter of pancakes every night--to keep his cinematic energies from flagging--and once a year, on his birthday, I'll put a candle in the stack of pancakes and sing him that damn song.

Rolling his eyes, he'll mentally storyboard a stop-action video in which his mother is decapitated by a light saber.