12 Years Ago Today

It was a beautiful Saturday, perfect temperatures, changing leaves... Just what you want of autumn in Northeast PA. That quiet day, in a little church in Lemon, John surrendered to a life of nagging.

He regrets it to this day. Poor sap.

I'm two dress sizes smaller(!), he still wears the same suit to church. We have more grey than I would have thought for 30 somethings, but that's probably more to do with Stinky and the Moth than our crazy lifestyle. We have our little boxes in our little suburb. And we are happy.

Happy anniversary, dirty bird. Here's to another couple of dozen!

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New Television Addiction

I can't believe this has been on for years and I've never seen it before.

Robot Chicken is the irreverent claymation/action figure show produced by Oz from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Their most famous parody is probably the Star Wars phone call, but I think this one sums it up better: (WARNING: not work or kid safe. Trust me.)

UPDATE: daggone it, I can't get the embed code to work. Well, here's Scooby Doo Meets Jason.

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The Worst Mary Sue EVER

The Highlander.

If this title brought an image to your mind, read on. If not, skip.

The Highlander, the TV Series.

If you know this is different than the movies, and you really liked that show, read on. If not, skip.

A few years ago, there was a major movie releaseof a Highlander movie. It was horrific. They messed with the mythos. They made it like a bad fanfic with bad camera work.

Last weekend, Sci Fi premiered a movie, Highlnder: the Source, which made that Endgame movie look like an oscar winner.

The positives of this movie: Adrian Paul. Peter Wingfield. (sigh. sigh again.)

(These pictures are obviously liberated off the internet. I didn't want to waste someone else's bandwidth.)

The negatives of this movie: everything else. I am not kidding.

They had crazy light filters that made you guess as to time of day constantly. There was almost no script. The plot was so bad and convoluted that it had to be re-capped in the last five minutes

They had crazy light filters that made you guess as to time of day constantly. There was almost no script. The plot was so bad and convoluted that it had to be re-capped in the last five minutes

There weren't even any sword fights or montages.

What a gyp.

There are some good screen captures (involving the positives, above. Man, those boys are beautiful). But otherwise, it's worse than the worst fanfiction out there. It has bad (really bad) science. Stupid, cliched characters with silly hair and bad leather. And this is the worlds biggest (and worst) Mary Sue: there's a chick with super powers who is duncan's newest love. The plot - what there is - centers around her. And resolves with her.

They didn't even use Queen's song.

I need to brush my brain after thinking about this...

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A Day of Non-Family Blogging

The other day, I read this article (well, actually, only the first paragraph or so – hey, why should I try to go against the newspaper’s preconceived notions of me?) about corn. Corn. CORN!

Corn is a big deal these days, and not just because it can make it intact through your digestive track, thus enabling you to time your gastro-intestinal-processing! No, it’s fermented corn that’s the big deal. In the last year, the EPA made it so the additive of the day in gasoline is Ethanol (never mind that ethanol is way more corrosive than MTBE), the major source of which is CORN!

The article, though, is a wailing and lamentation piece about farmers. You see, though the corn farmers are laughing all the way to the bank, the hog farmers are crying. People are willing to ante up big bucks for beef, but not so for pork. And because demand for corn is very high, those who control the supply are jacking up the price. (capitalist pigs!)

Now, you might think that a price control on corn is the answer. But I don’t think ADM (the big lobbying group that makes lots of money on corn) would be happy with that. Instead, why don’t we try a new track? How about CANCELLING controls on SUGAR IMPORTS?

See, another huge use of corn is high-fructose corn SYRUP, which we’ve been forced to substitute for sugar in many of our sweeties (like soft drinks). Seems sugar, which grows like a weed in the tropics, is too expensive to use. It’s expense, though, is due to government meddling.

This meddling was done in the name of American sugar farmers – they couldn’t compete with the sugar farmers in the tropical areas of the world – so we put a fake price equalizer in place. The result is not that more US sugar is purchased. It’s that less sugar is used.

New studies show (or, at least that’s what the informercial told me) that high-fructose corn syrup is like, super bad, waaaay worse than sugar (sucrose) for a human. Also, corn is super bad to grow – it leeches all the good stuff out of soil! Note that the Indians planted fish under the corn so as not to harm mother Gaia.

So, let’s help the pig farmer, help the third-world sugar growers, help my Coke taste better, and help mother Earth: Repeal the sugar import tariffs and rate quotas!

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What Ever Happened to Acid Rain?

All the hoopla about Global Warming, and how it’s to blame for hot summers, cold winters, and the socks missing from the laundry, has made me look back to a more innocent time in my life. The catastrophes weren’t global, they were local, and I totally believed them.

So, in the interest of seeing if I’ve become more savvy or just more jaded, I decided to look up some stuff on Acid Rain. I remember how concerned I was about acid rain back in high school. The science made sense to me, and they had REAL EXAMPLES. I mean, there were lakes where fish could no longer live. There were forests that died completely!

Turns out the forest (in Vermont) died in 1952, or thereabouts, due to extreme weather. Had it been acid rain, the effect would have been more widespread and repeatable. It wasn’t.

Turns out the lake was returning to its natural acid state after the human activity which resulted in pH elevation was curtailed.

Turns out that a lot of the whole Acid Rain thing is farce and hype and outright fraud. It does exist, and there are negative effects. And let’s face it, why would we want to dirty our home any more than necessary? But it’s not an environmental serial killer – it’s not nearly so sexy. Maybe that’s why we don’t hear a lot about it any more.

Meanwhile, about 30 people died while I was writing this, because we won’t let other countries use DDT. And I’ve never seen any outrage over that in the media.

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101 Uses for Nerf Darts

My kids were playing with their dart guns, and they decided to decorate the Moth thusly:

This, of course, reminded me of Pinhead from the movie Hellraiser. I heard they’re doing a remake of that movie, and here’s a candid shot of Pinhead from the shooting:


I can hear his maniacal laughter now, and something about pigeons?

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Stinky is learning so quickly these days. Part of that is that he, too, has started back to school. See?

He's already jaded about it - the only thing he says he likes is recess. But we'll see. The son of two geeks can't very well be completely antipathetic to school, can he?

Well, that's two updates. Back to the job hunt!

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John's Latest Obsession

Every once in a while, John goes through what I used to call "food of the month" - some food/beverage that he obsesses about and makes quite often. Right now, we're going through our redneck phase and eating quite a bit of something called "beer can chicken". For those who don't know what this is, it's quite yummy, juicy chicken that is done on a BBQ grill. But there's something else that makes it stand out for me:




You got it. That's a coke can shoved up this bird's keister. Of course, with that potato sticking out where the neck should be, it's quite close to a halloween bird: the terrifying Headless Chickenman. But she's missing a key feature to that classic: (wait for it) she doesn't have a capeon.

Thanks Folks! Drive Safe! I'll be here til Thursday!

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In Hag news, I've gone back to school and am now completely a bundle of nerves. Long, drawn out change STINKS. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone to school again... this movie, sent to me by my husband, certainly underscores that:

It makes me want to change from flightless hag to venemous harridan. More ring to it you know.

I made it to the movies last week to see Stardust. I LOVED it. There is a De Niro scene which is particularly... disturbing. But I think this is going to be a classic along the lines of The Princess Bride. I'll buy it on DVD when it comes out, for sure.




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