Small town life . . . enough to make a shy, bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder
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Ask Questions for God
at the Blue Pyramid.
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Annoying customer(s) of the day
1. I'll have a mocha (pronounced just as it's spelled) Did you just emerge from 40 years in a cave or something?
2. Gimme a hazelnut latte with breve milk in it. Breve milk? (He means half and half, about 14 ounces of that Atkins weight-loss miracle fluid.)
3. I want a white chocolate latte. (There is no such thing. That's when we just mix some stuff together, throw it in a cup and give it to them.)
4. Some idiotic pharmaceutical salesman who buys one coffee, then puts it on his AmEx. Oh, plus he pastes a little "Celebrex" sticker on the cup. A gift for a valued client, no doubt. No tip, of course. May he be reincarnated as a busboy.
No naps in class
What is it with the boxcutters? via Zero Intelligence.
Summertime and the livin' is easy
"The skirted swimmer has the Lycra® under garment for maximum flexibility, and is joined at the zipper to a looser fitting skirted outer garment."
Horrors! No matching headscarf! And where are the modest bathing suits for men?
Write a poem, read a poem
i hate you
i hate your worthless life,
id take it with a knife,
id kill you if i could,
but thats not something god would, like me too do
I'm not sure if they are Babymimi type badfic or for real. A taste of Babymimi for the uninitiated:
THE HESITATIONAL
"Rory you have such pretty." Peeped Rory’s boyfriend Dean. A pourus fissure of uncuous jest battered Rory’s grizzly bear boyfriend Dean (in resemblance). "Oh you are Nice dean." Rory spit. Rory’s cheeks prattled a red symitar of blush volcanos. Lorelei slithered to Rory and uncuously asked "Hello my daughter Rory."
Cho diet
I was reminded of the fucking Margaret fucking Cho fucking Fuck It Diet because someone at work brought in a fucking Star magazine with pics of herfuckingself.
British sensibility
Ooh la la. Controversy over bans on smoking in public places. For the British poor, apparently smoking's all that's left in life.
"Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and that smoking was not one of the worst problems facing poorer people."
Books
I read a fair number of books, but I always forget to write anything about them here. I just finished The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan, and it was a really good read. Priests, shamans, ghosts, Japanese balloon bombs in WWII, creepy bugs under the snow, and a few crazies. Great supporting characters throughout the book.
I've also been reading Diana Wynne Jones after my librarian recommended her. Fantastic stuff that more adults should try. I started with The Merlin Conspiracy, which is subversive in a Philip Pullman sort of way. Now I've started the Chrestomanci Chronicles. And I don't even really like fantasy!
A book I've been reading bits and pieces of is Not Even Wrong, Adventures in Autism by Paul Collins. Great writing about his own family, about autists of the past, and about what we define as normal.
Read Neil Gaiman
Read A Study in Emerald. You can find links to read other Hugo nominations here.
Believe it or not
I never thought Cool Whip could go bad. As of a few minutes ago, while on an exploration of my fridge, I found out I was wrong.
L. Ron
Stolen from Cup of Chicha. Images from 70's Scientology Volunteer Minister Handbook. My favorite: decaying civilization.
Madeleine L'Engle
". . . people underestimate children's capacity to understand big concepts. Mostly children can understand a lot of things their parents can't. The only difference in a children's book is the age of your protagonist. Why should you write less well for kids than you do for grown-ups? Whether it's going to be a child's book or an adult's book doesn't enter into my mind when I'm writing; I just try to write the best I can."
from an interview in Growing Without Schooling, Jan/Feb 1999
Read a book
It's got to be from Fark
Jungle fruit gives women bigger boobs, I guess. But 25 in a day?
'Model Paola Ruiz told Las Ultimas Noticias: “If I don’t eat the Aguaje I have to go to the gym. I could eat 25 in a day.”'
By the way, since when does going to the gym increase the size of your breasts?????
Overheard
In a waiting room today there was an old copy of Rolling Stone with Ozzy on the cover. A girl, maybe 5 or 6, saw it and it bothered her. The woman with her said, "That guy's a dummy and that's what happens to you if you don't do what your Dad tells you." What does that mean? That you end up looking scary? That you end up with a bad dye job and worse make-up? That you end up rich? Granted, maybe she had some insight into Ozzy's childhood that I don't, but why do people say just plain stupid things to kids? Things that will ultimately lead them to the conclusion that you're a liar.
A perfect answer
We sell donuts at the coffee window at work. We get them delivered every day from a bakery. People are always asking if the donuts are "today's" or "from today." I finally came up with a perfect answer" the donuts are today's donuts every day.
Please tell me I'm hallucinating
I was in a parking lot today and I saw a woman sitting in her car. Nothing unusual about that. Until I noticed she was tweezing her underarm hair, using her rearview mirror for guidance.
Cry me a river
I don't think Bill Clinton is an example of perfection. He's a politician. But when I heard a replay of a 2000 interview Amy Goodman did with him on Democracy Now today, it made me want to weep. Because the contrast between him and the bumbling lackwitted idiot who is our president right now is just so . . . I don't even know how to describe it.
Who knows where the time goes?
Summer Solstice? Already? The days are going to get shorter already?
Annoying customers
People who say "Gimme a (whatever)," then say "please" five to ten seconds later. Oh yeah, by the way, please.
Scary
Bush plans to screen every American for mental illness.
'The president's commission found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children. According to the commission, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviours and emotional disorders." Schools, wrote the commission, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.'
Annoying customer of the day
I guess your stomach itches, but do you have to lift up your shirt so you can scratch your hairy old gut?
A little bit of generativity
From Charles Hayes' essay, Real Education Begins in September.
Erickson characterized the negative side of generativity as despair. We are all familiar with people who stop learning, who set themselves against change of any kind, people who complain constantly that the world is falling apart because their ability to understand what is going on around them has atrophied. People on the negative side of generativity fear being swept away by the tides of change. Not only does their rigidity make them uninteresting to be around, but their unrelenting, self-absorbed, inward focus reduces the meaning of their lives to the drawn-out details of their last surgery. The more they dwell on themselves, the smaller their world becomes.
Coordination
It's great to have a kid who's more coordinated than you are. Especially when you've taken apart your fridge and cannot figure out how to get the shelves back in.
Tolstoy still sells
I was at a bookstore yesterday and saw that Anna Karenina is a selection for Oprah's Book Club. Oprah, by the way, hasn't read the book yet.
"It has been on my list for years, but I didn't (read) it because I was scared. It's a great read, I hear," she said on her show.
The book club has guides and a reading schedule, but you have to join to access them. Which I am too contrary to do.
Baptists are everywhere
First Southern Baptists are in the news because some of them want kids removed from Godless g-schools. Then some Baptists drown in a deep pool in a water park.
"All four were members of a Chicago church in town for a National Baptist Sunday School convention, authorities said."
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Books
We went to the county library, where they have a bookstore. Great finds today, including The Penguin Encyclopedia of Places, A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, a rock and mineral guide, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (which I've never read), One Year Off (about a family travelling around the world) and a couple of others I can't remember and am too lazy to get up and find.
I'm trying out a new browser. Foxfire.
Learning
"...we all have powers greater than we think; that whatever we want to learn or learn to do, we probably can learn; that our lives and our possibilities are not determined and fixed by what happened to us when we were little, or by what experts say we can or cannot do."
John Holt, Never Too Late
Annoying customer of the day
He said, "Do you know that God loves you so much?" Oh, that's great news! "When I'm around you I just feel that so much." Huh? "When I'm around you?" I have never seen this guy before in my life.
No tip, of course. The overbearingly religious never seem to tip. They know they're going to heaven, so that excuses them from tipping on earth, I guess. Oh wait, maybe their little messages from God are a "tip."
Plants
Went to a plant sale yesterday that was a fundraiser for the local museum. I got a regular old pineapple sage, and a new type called Hot Lips. I also got a mystery plant that the grower said people had tried to identify for years, but couldn't. So they just call it Nancy's Plant, because Nancy had the mother plant.
I love bikers
They are usually happy people. And tip really well. I'll find out today.
Ronnie
I'm not sure if that damned funeral is over yet, but maybe this would work on the re-runs.
She speaks again
I know why they invented energy drinks and energy bars. So they can keep old people moving.
My daughter speaks
The good thing about Britney Spears is she's someone you can feel superior to.
They're no
Violent Femmes. But they are from Wisconsin. The Homeschoolers actually includes some homeschoolers.
"Although The Homeschoolers' tunes include reflective ballads and a sendup of 1950s teen-love-gone-wrong songs, a listen to the band's disc brings to mind pop-punk band Green Day if it's (sic) members had met in confirmation class instead of a punk rock bar."
Bet none of them runs around in a bathrobe, though.
Reagan said
It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?
All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.
Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources.
It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.
Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal.
Small town life
Just back from the nursery. The woman in line in front of me asked the clerk if they had any "chlamydias." After a brief coughing fit, the clerk told her that they did have some clematis and someone would be happy to show them to her.
There just might be a God
It's Sunday, and Creed is no more.
Sad
The death of a weightlifter who was found with a 135-pound barbell across his neck ruled a suicide.
"An obituary in Thursday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer said Moore was a promising classical pianist who entered the University of Washington at age 14 and graduated magna cum laude in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry."
Out and about
Yesterday we all went to the beach at Centerville and had a good time. The waves were crashing, the sun was out, and for some strange reason there wasn't too much wind. Usually it just blows like crazy. We spotted a phoca vitulina bobbing around in the water. Later I saw it surfing the waves. I got a really clear view of its body suspended at the top of a curl.
My older daughter and I went on a fantastic bike ride today. She found a piece of obsidian near an old gravel quarry we passed. It has black, red, and green bands, "a consequence of oxidation on a flow surface being folded into the lava as it continues to move."
She also spotted a pair of men's boxers on the side of the road, but we didn't pick those up. Much speculation about how they got there ensued.
Learning happens where there's passion
Read about what Dr. Adele Scheele says about school systems and lifelong learning.
'"What they are really learning is a kind of system dependence," Dr. Scheele said in an interview this week from her office in California. In her book, she adds: "[The lessons] boiled down to this hard-and-fast rule: If we do our work well enough, we will be taken care of."
And if grade-school children don't learn how to shake that off, they carry the same passivity to college and then to the work force. Inevitably, they fall into a holding pattern instead of taking an idea, running with it and being successful.'
Of course if we ditch school altogether, there's a great chance for doing some of the neat projects suggested in the article all the time.
Oh, please!
School Committee screws kids out of birthday cupcakes.
"Frequent classmate parties once had students consuming numerous unplanned cupcakes each school year."
Numerous unplanned cupcakes? Dear God, don't those people have anything better to do? Via Zero Intelligence.
Here's your sign
Seen at McDonald's:
NOW HERE
VEGGIE BURGERS
ADD SOUP
Bombs away
or something. I heard about these World War II vets earlier this month and I have to say I pictured them in wheelchairs with parachutes attached. But they sure aren't giving up.
" Three World War II veterans, including a Las Vegas man, each performed two parachute jumps to qualify to jump next month over Normandy, France, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion."
Small town life
I had to smile when this old guy I know was telling me about his friend's health problems. He has some kind of problem with his digestive system, specifically his "intesticles."
At the gym
My workout sucked yesterday. But I did have a good time riding my bike.
South Carolina, be aware
A theocracy is coming your way.
'Calling the approval of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts "the straw that broke the camel's back," a group of Christian activists is in the beginning stages of an effort to have one state secede from the United States to become its own sovereign nation.'
via Daryl Cobranchi.
Danish chicks
Overgrown and overdeveloped.
'She quotes Susanne Stuhr, director of the lingerie firm Femilet as follows: "We can clearly see a development. Where the standard size earlier was 75B, these days we sell at least as many C- and D-cups. It's my impression that young women today generally have much larger breasts. Many are slim and even use up to an E- or F-cup."'
