Thin Mints and the peanut butter sandwich cookies are my Kryptonite.

I've been known to down a sleeve of Thin Mints in 15 minutes or less. Without milk.

Late to party... but many of us who order, say, high-performance auto parts from various distant retailers refer to UPS as "Brown Santa".

Because they are.

Joel, I think you might need some more coffee. You're not at the "I'M TASTING COLORS! THIS GREEN IS DELICIOUS!" stage yet today. Also, I can't hear your heart pounding from down here in Houston yet. :)

Joel Watson: Troll Slayer.

Good call. Me being me, I've used a Speedhunters DVD on the old Audi R8 endurace racer at Le Mans. The scream of the car panning through the channels as it goes down the Mulsanne? Oh, yeah.

I need to see what Rush (the recent movie, not the Canadian music icons) does for it. In the theater, the surround was awesome. 1976 F1 cars mic'd & mixed with 2013 technology? YES PLEASE!

According to Kim, it's "The Fifth Element" and/or "The Chronicles of Riddick" and the crunch of Triscuits.

Vonnegut included in his intro to "Welcome to the Monkey House" a quote from a letter his brother had sent him, shortly after said brother and brother's wife had welcomed twins: "Here I am, cleaning shit off of practically everything."

This is sort of the geek equivalent of the jock-dad pushing his kid into sports, or the pageant-mom pushing the kid into pageants, but (usually) without the undertone of "parent who never made the big time living vicariously though their child".

Yeah, it's tough to do. My dad, thankfully, never was one of those dads -- he supported us in our youthful sporting endeavors, but when we were done, we were done. He asked us only to give it our best shot, and when we chose to stop playing, he asked only if we were sure.

He also is a voracious reader, so it didn't take much to encourage me to read. He reads spy thrillers and hard SF with rivets mostly, but not exclusively, and my tastes are different (though I gave him a signed copy of Scalzi's "Redshirts" for his birthday, and though he's not a Trekker, he's sufficiently genre-savvy that he was howling with laughter by the second page and called me to tell me about it. Score one for eldest son).

While I won't characterize them necessarily as "the worst little league parents", I'd have to give the "most ridiculous little league parents" title to the people who get their kids involved in junior karting and/or quarter-midget racing and use that as an excuse to buy astonishingly large RVs, equally-large enclosed trailers, and/or "toterhomes" to support a racing vehicle that would fit in the back of my pickup truck. I guess they think their kid is the next Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and are "investing for the future" as they grow into bigger cars, but.... sheesh. I race (amateur) full-size cars and while I've got a pickup and an enclosed trailer, it's not a 45', $200k diesel pusher motorhome with a 33' , $30k stacker trailer behind it...

You'd fit in well in my family. I come from a long line of harmless bullshitters. Pretty much every household in the extended family on my dad's side had the Calvin & Hobbes strip where he asks his dad how they determine the weight limit on bridges, and the dad deadpans that they drive heavier and heavier trucks over until it collapses, weigh the last truck to make it over, rebuild the bridge, and that's the weight limit (and the mom explodes "THAT'S NOT HOW THEY DO IT!" in the last panel). Because that's totally something our fathers/grandfather would say.

I'm fortunate to have multiple tribes:

- my immediate and extended family. We're big, more than a little silly, but mostly we all get on well. I'm fortunate here, I know. So many of my friends in other areas don't have that.

- The racers & race marshals I mentioned in the previous comic's comments. This is a family-of-choice.

- My real-world friends from early life. Thanks to the magic of technology, I'm in touch with a lot of folks that otherwise were lost to me (and I to them).

- And certainly not least: the nerds, a generic term for those folks I first got to know on the other side of the computer screen, but includes the many I've since met at cons, at concerts/shows, on JCCC, at the game store, etc. Bound by our common love of loving something as much as we can (thanks, Wil), and appreciation for others who share that, even if their something is different than our something. That's how I found you, Joel, and HE, and JCCC, and Marian Call, and the DoubleClicks, and Joseph Scrimshaw, and Zoe Keating, and so much more that's made life a lot more enjoyable even when I'm not able to be with my tribemates in meatspace.