Gossip Baby

This morning, Joseph was watching a re-run of Gossip Girl and learned that a character once performed sex work in Prague.

"Frosty the prosty!" exclaimed Joseph to Herman, who has never seen the TV series but was nonetheless amused by the expression.

When asked to explain the nickname, he said,"She provided love in a cold climate."

Joseph: The Prudent Five-Year-Old

Baby, with ghosts.

While unpacking Halloween decorations, Herman was surprised to learn that his favorite ornaments -- two ceramic ghosts -- were originally purchased by a five-year-old Joseph.

At an age when many children were thinking about candy and playtime, young Joseph was earning an inflation-adjusted $5/month  in allowance. This news was surprising enough, as Herman is not aware of many toddlers with bank accounts.

Even more surprising, young Joseph saved two months' allowance to buy these two Halloween decorations for his bedroom. Doing the math, this means he identified the purchase in August in order to have the darlings by October. One imagines the midget Joseph flipping through a catalog at the kitchen table while his pre-school peers played outside, earning no money whatsoever.

The ghosts are cute, for sure, but more appropriate for a suburban housewife to perch on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. In classic Joseph style, the small phantoms were nurtured, cleaned, carefully stored and proudly displayed for 33 years -- long after the clumsy housewife would have broken them in the sink.

This Halloween, our Joseph deserves praise for his youthful prudence.

Pane in the Czech

During their vacation of 2011, Baby and Herman were delighted by the male statues of Prague - called telamons - which uphold many of the doorways, ledges and windows in the city's Old Town.

Today the Prague telamons are upholding another heavy object - Baby's good taste - on the east wall of his San Francisco apartment.

"I arranged black-and-white photographs of the statues like a window pane," he said, "evoking a sense of pathos and balance."

Always one for surprises, he broke form on the upper right-hand corner of the wall display with an image of demons in hell.

"After all," he asked, "What is an Eastern European city without images of suffering?"

Baby speaks most fondly, however, of the violent scene taking place in the upper left-hand corner, which he thoughtfully calls "the beat-down."