With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week.
Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote 'The Hokey Pokey' died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in. .. . . And then the trouble started.
Shut up. You know it's funny. Now send it on to someone else and make them smile.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Mutant Redneck Genes
My ex-husband sent me an e-mail with an item he wants for Christmas. Lord, please don't let my baby girl inherit the mutant redneck gene from her daddy.
I suppose this would help get his drunk ass from point A to point B at the NASCAR race.
I suppose this would help get his drunk ass from point A to point B at the NASCAR race.
The Cruzin Cooler
This is the ultimate accessory for tailgating, camping, the kids’ soccer game, or even just plain fun at home—the Cruzin Cooler. It combines two of life’s necessities: a large capacity cooler for keeping those drinks ice cold, and a drivetrain with a top speed up to 13 mph, and the power to easily go up ramps. Not just a novelty, the Cruzin Cooler can be a real help, and save your back on long days. It holds 24 beverage cans plus plenty of ice, and its powerful 500 watt electric motor can actually travel up to 15 miles on a charge (charger included). It measures 24”l x 17”w x 18”h, weighs 74 pounds and holds up to 280 lbs. Note - picture shown with optional seat cushion
Monday, November 26, 2007
Two Things
First - I was dumped recently even before I knew the guy. This was a first for me. I met Patti for lunch on Tuesday. When I got there she told me about a guy at her office that she had been thinking about playing matchmaker for me. She had told him oodles about me, but had failed to even mention her diabolical plan to me. Oh goody! However, when she told him that she was going to meet me for lunch and that he was welcome to join us. His response was, "I'm going to play airhockey with everyone else, so you are welcome to join us." Isn't that fabulous?
Second - I know it's wrong, but it made me giggle...
Second - I know it's wrong, but it made me giggle...
Saturday, November 24, 2007
You Gotta Love Odd News
Babe the Blue Ox's head falls off
Associated PressNov. 24, 2007 12:40 PM
KLAMATH, Calif. - Babe the Blue Ox has lost his head. Ax-wielding Paul Bunyan is not a suspect. (flim at eleven!)
The head fell off the 35-foot-tall statue of giant lumberjack Bunyan's mythical sidekick Tuesday, landing snout down on the pavement in the northern California town of Klamath. (See, now this is the kind of stuff I drive by. A big 'ol head in the middle of the street!)
Jeff LaForest, manager of the gift shop where the statue stands, says water was seeping inside the statue. That weakened the wood inside the structure and caused the collapse. (Are you sure? Maybe Babe had just needed a nap.)
LaForest said he will repair Babe as soon as possible. I n the meantime, he plans to use a diminutive stuffed animal head as a placeholder in time for the town's annual Christmas light show. (Ok, wait..*snork*...so what, you're going to put a teaddy bear head on a 35 foot statue of an ox? *snork*..to help with the Christmas festivites? *snork*)
"It's kind of sad isn't it?" LaForest said. (Girl, you have no idea...)
Associated PressNov. 24, 2007 12:40 PM
KLAMATH, Calif. - Babe the Blue Ox has lost his head. Ax-wielding Paul Bunyan is not a suspect. (flim at eleven!)
The head fell off the 35-foot-tall statue of giant lumberjack Bunyan's mythical sidekick Tuesday, landing snout down on the pavement in the northern California town of Klamath. (See, now this is the kind of stuff I drive by. A big 'ol head in the middle of the street!)
Jeff LaForest, manager of the gift shop where the statue stands, says water was seeping inside the statue. That weakened the wood inside the structure and caused the collapse. (Are you sure? Maybe Babe had just needed a nap.)
LaForest said he will repair Babe as soon as possible. I n the meantime, he plans to use a diminutive stuffed animal head as a placeholder in time for the town's annual Christmas light show. (Ok, wait..*snork*...so what, you're going to put a teaddy bear head on a 35 foot statue of an ox? *snork*..to help with the Christmas festivites? *snork*)
"It's kind of sad isn't it?" LaForest said. (Girl, you have no idea...)
Friday, November 23, 2007
Happy Text-Giving!
I'm sick for Thanksgiving. I thought at first it was just something I ate, but no. I passed this stunningly attractive stomach ailment to my daughter and roommate. None of us felt right yesterday. I guess I was just so thankful I couldn't help but give.
Anyway, at 7:34 am I recieved a text message from my step-sister wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving. A little early, but okay. A short while later, I got a text from my friend Karri. Followed by one from Christine, Acquanetta, Patti, my baby sister, Nicole and last but not least from my boss. Always one to rebel, I threw caution to the wind and actually called my mom. Which totally blew the mind of my 14 year old. Yay me.
I was just sitting here thinking how interesting it was that I didn't receive any phone calls, just text messages. I started to get very philosophical about this and wondering how we as a society finally got to the point of non-personal communication. Why is it that we only communicate in short, abbreivated messages and not in actual conversations? Do we hate dealing with each other that much? How can you have a true conversation without there being a volley of thoughts, ideas and emotion? Why the hell am I wondeing about this?
How ironic is it that I'm getting silly with wondering about society's ills and non-verbal communication as I write a blog for strangers to read?
I kill me.
Anyway, at 7:34 am I recieved a text message from my step-sister wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving. A little early, but okay. A short while later, I got a text from my friend Karri. Followed by one from Christine, Acquanetta, Patti, my baby sister, Nicole and last but not least from my boss. Always one to rebel, I threw caution to the wind and actually called my mom. Which totally blew the mind of my 14 year old. Yay me.
I was just sitting here thinking how interesting it was that I didn't receive any phone calls, just text messages. I started to get very philosophical about this and wondering how we as a society finally got to the point of non-personal communication. Why is it that we only communicate in short, abbreivated messages and not in actual conversations? Do we hate dealing with each other that much? How can you have a true conversation without there being a volley of thoughts, ideas and emotion? Why the hell am I wondeing about this?
How ironic is it that I'm getting silly with wondering about society's ills and non-verbal communication as I write a blog for strangers to read?
I kill me.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Follow Me, I Know the Way to Sesame Street
PSA for all parents. Don't kill childhood by imparting your skewed, jaded view of the world. Childhood is over in the blink of an eye ~ let them enjoy it while they can.
New York Times
November 18, 2007
The Medium
Sweeping the Clouds Away
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.
The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.
Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”
In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.
The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.
People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.
Points of Entry
Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?
The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.
Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.
New York Times
November 18, 2007
The Medium
Sweeping the Clouds Away
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.
The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.
Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”
In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.
The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.
People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.
Points of Entry
Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?
The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.
Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Go into the Water
A recent article on AZ Central profiled some of the four and five star resorts in Tucson. This is the picture that accompanied the article. There’s a damn duck in the pool! Do you get an extra star in your rating if you provide water fowl as an amenity?
Thursday, November 15, 2007
We Wish You a Merry Grinch-Mas!
Okay, this is too much. Some holier-than-thou idiot actually thought that Santa's laugh might be offensive to women. They belived in this theory so much, they convinced a company that provides Santas to malls, etc. to make it a company policy to have their "Santa's" not say "ho, ho, ho." Seriously? What woman would think that when Old St. Nick was laughing he was actually calling her a "ho"? What' s Jolly Old St. Nick supposed to say? "Ha, Ha, Ha"? That's dumb as hell.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure that the phrase "ho, ho, ho" has been used to describe women during the holidays in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. But aren't kids going to wonder why Santa isn't laughing like he used to? Did the college educated dork that came up with this stop to consider that now parents will be put in the position of having to explain this to their children? I don't know about y'all but I would not have taken kindly to having to explain to my young child what a "ho" is and why Santa couldn't say it anymore.
Come to think of it...the people playing the part of Santa during the holidays are, in a retail sort of way, paying homage to a saint. So, if this company is trying to censor what the Santa's say, aren't they indirectly trying to censor a saint? Should the Catholic church get involved in this heated social issue? What is to become of our society if we *gasp* keep our heads firmly planted up our collective asses?
This was a stupid thing for this company to bring up as a policy or even a suggestion. I truly hope the CEO grows a brain and rescinds the Grinch Policy. And for the record, chicks with brains won't be offended by the seasonal "ho, ho, ho" because we know that we are, in fact, not one. We also don't get offended by the occassional name calling...being comfortable in our own skin and all.
And lastly, this ho loves her some Santa. Can't wait to sit on your lap Santa Baby and tell you just how naughty I've been. ;-)
Santas warned 'ho ho ho' offensive to women
Wed Nov 14, 11:04 PM ET
SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia's largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas's traditional "ho ho ho" greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.
Sydney's Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say "ha ha ha" instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute.
"Gimme a break," said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.
"We are talking about little kids who do not understand that "ho, ho, ho" has any other connotation and nor should they," she told the Telegraph.
"Leave Santa alone."
A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was "misleading" to say the company had banned Santa's traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure that the phrase "ho, ho, ho" has been used to describe women during the holidays in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. But aren't kids going to wonder why Santa isn't laughing like he used to? Did the college educated dork that came up with this stop to consider that now parents will be put in the position of having to explain this to their children? I don't know about y'all but I would not have taken kindly to having to explain to my young child what a "ho" is and why Santa couldn't say it anymore.
Come to think of it...the people playing the part of Santa during the holidays are, in a retail sort of way, paying homage to a saint. So, if this company is trying to censor what the Santa's say, aren't they indirectly trying to censor a saint? Should the Catholic church get involved in this heated social issue? What is to become of our society if we *gasp* keep our heads firmly planted up our collective asses?
This was a stupid thing for this company to bring up as a policy or even a suggestion. I truly hope the CEO grows a brain and rescinds the Grinch Policy. And for the record, chicks with brains won't be offended by the seasonal "ho, ho, ho" because we know that we are, in fact, not one. We also don't get offended by the occassional name calling...being comfortable in our own skin and all.
And lastly, this ho loves her some Santa. Can't wait to sit on your lap Santa Baby and tell you just how naughty I've been. ;-)
Santas warned 'ho ho ho' offensive to women
Wed Nov 14, 11:04 PM ET
SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia's largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas's traditional "ho ho ho" greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.
Sydney's Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say "ha ha ha" instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute.
"Gimme a break," said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.
"We are talking about little kids who do not understand that "ho, ho, ho" has any other connotation and nor should they," she told the Telegraph.
"Leave Santa alone."
A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was "misleading" to say the company had banned Santa's traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Great News Day!
Teacher dispatches raccoon with nail gun
Tue Nov 13, 11:22 PM ET
Huntsville, AR - A high school teacher killed a raccoon with a nail gun after discovering the planned subject of a skinning demonstration was alive. (O.K., wait. This didn’t take place in Shop class? What was this? Critter Skinnin’ 101?)
Superintendent Alvin Lievsay said a student's parent promised to bring in a raccoon for the exercise (Shooot…all I ever brought in were cupcakes), but surprised teacher Jerick Hutchinson by bringing the animal in a live trap (‘cause they had enough in the other traps for dinner, I’m sure).
Lievsay said Hutchinson, "who used to work in a slaughter house," took the animal outside to the back of his truck Friday and shot it with the nail gun (This fool worked in a slaughter house and this was the only way he could come up with to kill this animal?).
Lievsay said no students witnessed the raccoon's death (because we don’t want you to see how you should kill an animal, just how to skin it ~ insert eye roll here.).
"He used the nail gun to, as they say, to dispatch the animal," Lievsay said. "It wasn't like he held a nail gun against the head of a cute little animal in front of the class." (I can just see the After School Special now…)
Hutchinson used the dead raccoon to demonstrate how to skin the animal and to examine the contents of its stomach (Oh, my bad. This demonstration isn’t Critter Skinnin’ 101 this is for The Forensic Files on Animal Planet).
Lievsay said only one student asked not to attend the skinning. (This was a requirement? I’ve dissected a frog in my time, but c’mon.)
Lievsay said officials at Huntsville High School later talked with Hutchinson and told him not to kill animals on school grounds (or the teenagers for that matter).
The superintendent said Hutchinson, one of two agriculture teachers at the school about 30 miles east of Fayetteville, also would provide more detailed lesson plans in the future (like which type of nail gun to use ~ Craftsman or Black & Decker).
"He does a great job. The kids love him," Lievsay said. (of course they do! He's batshit crazy!)
Tue Nov 13, 11:22 PM ET
Huntsville, AR - A high school teacher killed a raccoon with a nail gun after discovering the planned subject of a skinning demonstration was alive. (O.K., wait. This didn’t take place in Shop class? What was this? Critter Skinnin’ 101?)
Superintendent Alvin Lievsay said a student's parent promised to bring in a raccoon for the exercise (Shooot…all I ever brought in were cupcakes), but surprised teacher Jerick Hutchinson by bringing the animal in a live trap (‘cause they had enough in the other traps for dinner, I’m sure).
Lievsay said Hutchinson, "who used to work in a slaughter house," took the animal outside to the back of his truck Friday and shot it with the nail gun (This fool worked in a slaughter house and this was the only way he could come up with to kill this animal?).
Lievsay said no students witnessed the raccoon's death (because we don’t want you to see how you should kill an animal, just how to skin it ~ insert eye roll here.).
"He used the nail gun to, as they say, to dispatch the animal," Lievsay said. "It wasn't like he held a nail gun against the head of a cute little animal in front of the class." (I can just see the After School Special now…)
Hutchinson used the dead raccoon to demonstrate how to skin the animal and to examine the contents of its stomach (Oh, my bad. This demonstration isn’t Critter Skinnin’ 101 this is for The Forensic Files on Animal Planet).
Lievsay said only one student asked not to attend the skinning. (This was a requirement? I’ve dissected a frog in my time, but c’mon.)
Lievsay said officials at Huntsville High School later talked with Hutchinson and told him not to kill animals on school grounds (or the teenagers for that matter).
The superintendent said Hutchinson, one of two agriculture teachers at the school about 30 miles east of Fayetteville, also would provide more detailed lesson plans in the future (like which type of nail gun to use ~ Craftsman or Black & Decker).
"He does a great job. The kids love him," Lievsay said. (of course they do! He's batshit crazy!)
You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up
Cows flee after seeing McDonald's
Tue Nov 13, 7:43 PM ET
West Haven, Utah - McDonald's? The burger joint? Stampede! Eight cows escaped from a trailer when the rear gate opened as the driver pulled into a McDonald's. It took about two hours to round them up Monday. (I can see how it took this long to round up eight head of cattle. Cows being wylie creatures and all. Hey - aren’t they supposed to have cowboys in Utah?)
"Maybe they were going to ... hop in the freezer, save the middleman," Weber County sheriff's Sgt. Dave Creager said. (Is the middleman he’s referring to the McButcher?)
Lt. Kevin Burns had another theory: "They didn't like their future." (Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun…)
The roundup was called "Operation Hamburger Helper." A nearby resident even hopped on his horse. (Okay, that’s right up there with ‘Operation Thong’.)
"I thought my eyes were lying," said Wayne Sanders, who was at a truck stop next door. "I don't know where they came from, but I'd say they'd have to weigh 800 pounds apiece and they were on a pretty good trot." (Cows trot?)
Tue Nov 13, 7:43 PM ET
West Haven, Utah - McDonald's? The burger joint? Stampede! Eight cows escaped from a trailer when the rear gate opened as the driver pulled into a McDonald's. It took about two hours to round them up Monday. (I can see how it took this long to round up eight head of cattle. Cows being wylie creatures and all. Hey - aren’t they supposed to have cowboys in Utah?)
"Maybe they were going to ... hop in the freezer, save the middleman," Weber County sheriff's Sgt. Dave Creager said. (Is the middleman he’s referring to the McButcher?)
Lt. Kevin Burns had another theory: "They didn't like their future." (Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun…)
The roundup was called "Operation Hamburger Helper." A nearby resident even hopped on his horse. (Okay, that’s right up there with ‘Operation Thong’.)
"I thought my eyes were lying," said Wayne Sanders, who was at a truck stop next door. "I don't know where they came from, but I'd say they'd have to weigh 800 pounds apiece and they were on a pretty good trot." (Cows trot?)
Monday, November 12, 2007
Saturday, November 3, 2007
All Things Southern
I was not lucky enough to be born in the South. Which is a cryin' shame. I love all things Southern. I was lucky enough to live in southeast Georgia for a couple of years. It's where I gave birth to my daughter and where I felt the most at home and where I will return to live out my days.
I asked my friend Christine (you may remember her from the Paula Deen deep fried butter ball chapter of your heroine's life) if she could make me Southern by, I don't know, baptizing me in Sweet Tea or something. She said, "No. It's just there. You're as Southern as they get, you were just born in the wrong state, that's all." Bless her heart. Being that she's from Newnan and all, I'm going to take her word for it.
I had to tell you that part so you would understand this part. I was driving around near my mom's house in Mesa when I passed soemthing I hadn't seen in about a minute. Lawd Jesus, I had to turn myself around just to make sure I wasn't dreaming.
But yes. There it was...in all it's disgusting fried glory. The only Captain D's in the state of Arizona. I immediately called Patti and we made plans to meet there for lunch someday.
That day finally arrived today. I'm certain I'll be paying for this fine fried meal (fish, okra, fries and hush puppies!). I'm on a health kick and have not allowed myself to have anything fried in a very long time. Until today. I knew with every bite of that fried fishy goodness that I was going to be ill for the rest of the day.
So, once my system has recovered from the crap I just ingested, I'll be heading to the gym to work it all off and hopefully regain some of my self respect....Whatever, it was so worth it!
Now, if I could only find a Popeye's...
I asked my friend Christine (you may remember her from the Paula Deen deep fried butter ball chapter of your heroine's life) if she could make me Southern by, I don't know, baptizing me in Sweet Tea or something. She said, "No. It's just there. You're as Southern as they get, you were just born in the wrong state, that's all." Bless her heart. Being that she's from Newnan and all, I'm going to take her word for it.
I had to tell you that part so you would understand this part. I was driving around near my mom's house in Mesa when I passed soemthing I hadn't seen in about a minute. Lawd Jesus, I had to turn myself around just to make sure I wasn't dreaming.
But yes. There it was...in all it's disgusting fried glory. The only Captain D's in the state of Arizona. I immediately called Patti and we made plans to meet there for lunch someday.
That day finally arrived today. I'm certain I'll be paying for this fine fried meal (fish, okra, fries and hush puppies!). I'm on a health kick and have not allowed myself to have anything fried in a very long time. Until today. I knew with every bite of that fried fishy goodness that I was going to be ill for the rest of the day.
So, once my system has recovered from the crap I just ingested, I'll be heading to the gym to work it all off and hopefully regain some of my self respect....Whatever, it was so worth it!
Now, if I could only find a Popeye's...
Friday, November 2, 2007
This Was Super-Fun!!
I moved last weekend. I funking hate moving. Luckily, I have some really great friends who I was able to bribe into helping with promises of pizza and cold beers. So, now I'm living out of boxes and tripping more than usual (mostly due to all the crap I haven't put away yet). All will be well once I have my kitchen set up and I cook for the first time in my new place. Once I unwravel myself from all the packing tape and finish playing with all the bubble wrap, I'll start writing again on a more consistent basis. Prroooooommmmisssssse.
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