Suck on this, fucktards!

Although the site says that 390% of the pages on the internet have swearing, so I'm not sure I trust the math whiz that cooked this one up.

On watching Last of the Mohicans for the millionth time

Daniel Day-Lewis is fucking SEXY.

You know this is true.

Tattoo

I may just have to get the picture of T-Rex in the last panel permanently etched onto my body.

Then I could give myself the giggles whenever I felt shitty.

Great Comic Today!

From Cat and Girl.

Because I can't really afford a vacation this summer....

So I just pore wistfully over maps.

Like this one:

I suppose I'll weigh in on this one as well...

I remember seeing an activity of this type in one of my education classes in college, and we actually just did an activity similar to this one at our school's staff development day last week, and it seems to be making the rounds, so here we go. Actually, the ones we did had a questionnaire for lower-class and upper-class demarcators as well. Maybe I'll dust them off tomorrow and we can do those together, too. From Chickpea via DBB, here are the results of my "are you privileged" survey. It seems as though the point is to have everybody line up on a sort of "starting line," then take steps forward for each of the things that apply to them. At the end, everybody can look around and see how their class status has helped them get "ahead." I think the reason we didn't do this in my college class was that there were all sorts of steps back, too, like your race, did your parents or grandparents only speak a language other than English, or (no kidding!) did you have a history of incest in your family. Things that apply to me are in yellow.

Your father went to college (at the time, a great way to avoid being drafted!)
Your father finished college
Your mother went to college
Your mother finished college
You have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
You were in the same or higher class than your high school teachers
You had a computer at home (and we finally got the internet about 18 months before I moved out!)
You had your own computer at home (no, but now we have one more computer than we have people in our house, just to make up for it!)
You had more than 50 books at home
You had more than 500 books at home
You were read children’s books by a parent
You ever had lessons of any kind
You had more than two kinds of lessons (two years of harp, 5 of cello, and serious swimming lessons as early as I can remember)
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
You had a credit card with your name on it in high school (no, but I did in college, and I have a great story about accidentally using it to rent porn)
You have less than $5000 in student loans
You have no student loans (oh, man, sometimes I have dreams like this. Then I wake up.)
You went to a private high school
You went to summer camp (a week of Girl Scout Camp every summer in elementary school counts, right?)
You had a private tutor
You have been to Europe (I was an exchange student in high school. I went to Italy for 6 months.)
Your family vacations involved staying at hotels (we only ever had 2 like this, usually "vacations" were trips to visit family)
All of your clothing has been new and bought at the mall (although, to be fair, I could probably have shopped at the mall, but wouldn't be caught dead in anything but ratty secondhand store clothes--it was the 90s)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (although they did co-sign on the most recent one to save me TEN PERCENTAGE POINTS off my interest rate)
There was original art in your house (but they did hang our drawings on the fridge)
You had a phone in your room
You lived in a single family house
Your parents own their own house or apartment (Some of the time)
You had your own room (some of the time)
You participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (didn't need one; thanks to my Texas public education, I am a standardized test-taking machine!)
You had your own cell phone in High School (we only had pagers, and they were only for drug dealers)
You had your own TV in your room in High School
You opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
You have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
You ever went on a cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (although I remember being distinctly aware it was bill-paying day: pretty much the only time I remember seeing my parents drink anything besides beer was when they spread the bills out on the dining room table.)

A second list, also from Chickpea, appears below. It seems to represent some more lower-class indicators than the above.

1. Has anyone close to you ever overdosed on drugs?
2. Did you grow up with married parents? So were everyone else's. There was one kid I hung around with in 6th grade with divorced parents, and it was just kind of sad.
3. Has anyone in your family’s social circle ever been in prison?
4. Has your family ever been foreclosed on?
5. Have your parents ever been bankrupt?
6. Was a family vehicle ever repossessed?
7. Have you seen a dentist in the past year?
8. Did your family have health insurance through an employer?
9. Did your parents use pay-day loans?
10. Did your parents ever get threatening calls from collectors?
11. Have you seen a doctor in the past year? Two years? Three years?
12. Has anyone in your immediate family ever delayed an important medical procedure because they didn’t have the money? (Tyson is just now able to get to a physical therapist for his shoulders that have been causing him to sleep poorly for, I don't know, 15 years now?)
13. Did you ever move in with relatives because of financial problems?
14. Were you ever on reduced or free school lunch?
15. Was one or both parents often unemployed and looking for work?
16. Was your family ever evicted?
17. Did your family often argue about money? (This question will bring in a lot of upper-middle class folk, but lack of conflict over money is a form of privilege, too.)
18. Did your family have to deal with social workers?
19. Are you in ROTC to pay for college? (I did take ROTC in high school to get out of a PE credit!)
20. Did you serve in the military to pay for college?
21. Did you transfer from a community college? (Community college was WAY too lowbrow for me.)
22. Do you have a child?
23. Do you work more than 10 hours a week? 20 hours a week? 30 hours a week?
24. Were your parents able to help you with your homework?

So there you go, guys. Apparently Blogger is shutting down in about ten minutes, so I'll just have to leave it here for now.

On the radio today, the DJ, looking out for my best interest, I'm sure, pointed out that TOMORROW is the biggest day of the year: April 20th, better known as 420.

As far as I can tell, nobody actually knows where these numbers come from. Some people swear it's some famous stoner's birthday, or the day they died, or the first time they ever smoked pot, or something like that. Others will threaten to harsh your mellow if you don't concede that 420 is some city's drug-related ordinance number. However it came about, everybody on April 20th at precisely 4:20 (PM, although you know it would have to be AM to actually make sense, and don't get me started on how it's not really symbolic of anything when it happens 24 different times that day.) everybody smokes their brains out.

Like stoners need some kind of "holiday" or something to want to get high.

To celebrate that holy day, our local head shop/tattoo parlor is hosting a "bake sale." (Don't get me started on that either--it's basically the tattoo equivalent of McDonalds, and it's called--get this--Diversity. 'Cause that little heart with angel wings you want tattooed above your ass will really set you apart from everybody else.) There will be fun activities like bong-building contests, baked goods, a stringy-hair expo, and slouching on a sofa and saying "whoa."

Oh, and Great Harvest (Christian) Bread Company is the chief sponsor.

What the fuck?!

It's Movie Night!

Book Tag!

While I guess I could excuse myself, I won't because I need something to blog about today. By virtue of reading this blog, I've been tagged.

Here's how you do it:
1. Locate the nearest book that has a 123+ pages in it.
2. Go to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post that sentence and the 3 that follow.
5. Tag 5 people.

Here are mine:

Spider Jerusalem: "Surely my very presence fucks with their world anyway."
Technician Lady: "Nah. We've got a toggle on their memories. They'll accept you when they see you and forget about you and the city once you're gone."

(Book 2 of Transmetropolitan happens to be sitting at my elbow underneath a gray cat. )

Let's see.....I'll tag you, you, you, you, and you.

Weird Cat

As I write this, my cat Calamity is enthusiastically and single-mindedly licking a stick of deoderant (closed) Tyson left on my desk this morning.

A Return?

So I was really having trouble there for a while justifying why I was taking up your time and mine on what really seemed like, at the heart of it, a bunch of crap. Yes, this summer I got all post-ey because I literally had nothing to do for a month, and played Sims and surfed the internets for entire days, and in the course of all that digging around, sometimes stumbled across interesting things.
But that was really sort of pathetic, in a way, because it involved me not really thinking a whole lot except for "Man, that's neat" and going to my blog and typing up a little hyperlink so I could share it--almost as though stumbling across something is somehow in the same ballpark as creating something. And then school started, and I didn't have time anymore to convince myself it was not meaningless (that's litotes, not a double negative, by the way) because that takes time that I didn't have anymore to spend like that.
It's like what we're doing in AmLit right now: When real, important things (the Civil War) happened, nobody really gave a damn about all those writers (the Romantics) who were busy all having feelings and trying to intuit the essential nature of things. (For a great example of this, watch the first half of Gone with the Wind and compare the barbecue scene at Twin Oaks with the burned-out shell of Twin Oaks an hour or so later.) So when school started, there was like a micro-Realism/Naturalism movement going on at my house, except without the acres of dead bodies like in GWTW.
Anyways, I think I can deal with not "contributing to the blogosphere" or anything high-falootin' like that, but I also think I need to stop pretending that everything in my life needs to be authentic and original all the time. Sometimes recycling is OK.

What passes for entertainment around here

I got up at a reasonable hour this morning to make monkey bread, and while it's in the oven I decided to "clean" by pressing "power" on the Roomba our friends gave us. Okay, so it doesn't get the dog hair up all that great, preferring instead to drag it around for a while and drop it off somewhere, but it does pretty good on all the other crap that makes its way to the floor.

Oh, and damn if it isn't the cutest thing you've ever seen. It just got itself stuck under the dining table, and you could almost see it all distraught about all the places that, being stuck under the table, it was never going to get to clean. Plus it chases the cats all over the house, and that's always lots of fun.

It's a lot like watching a zamboni on the ice rink--it doesn't do much, but for some reason you can't stop watching.

Anyways, my monkey bread is about to be ready.

Some Fun

Your Score: House Stark

36% Dominant, 45% Extroverted, 54% Trustworthy

Responsible. Respectable. Dour. That’s not shit coming out of your ass--it’s honor. You are clearly of House Stark.

You are a submissive personality, meaning that you are more than willing to relinquish control to someone more qualified; you will unflinchingly accept any responsibility that is thrust upon you, including servitude. Unfortunately for you, your unending patience and accommodating nature often make people look to you for a leader. In essence, you are the perfect leader: someone who has no desire to lead, yet is substantially well-qualified to do it.

You are also introverted, which means that people sometimes have difficulty understanding your thought process. Your dependable nature makes you predictable, but you’ve probably got all sorts of emotional dysfunctions when it comes to more intimate relationships. There are very few people whom you trust unwaveringly, and you’re not the type to confide in other people. So cold, so aloof--so Stark.

Finally, you are trustworthy--the very definition of the word. All secrets are safe with you. All of your vows are unbreakable. True to your name, you world is a stark place; there is black, and there is white. Your rigidity tends to undercut your overall value as a friend and ally. Honesty such as yours is hard to come by, which is easy to understand when you consider how easily manipulated you are by less decent individuals. Essentially, you’re the nice guy, and you’ll always finish last.

Representative characters include: Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Sansa Stark

Similar Houses: Frey, Lannister and Tully

Opposite House: Baratheon

When playing the game of thrones, you play it with one sword in your hand and another up your ass.

Link: The Song of Ice and Fire House Test written by Geeky_Stripper on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

"I thought it would boost my social status!"

Two researchers at the University of Texas have apparently spent a great deal of time and money in an attempt to figure out why people have sex. The results are interesting.

Out of the 237 reasons given by more than 1500 respondents (ages 17-52), the top answer was "I was attracted to the person." The bottom answer?

To give someone an STD.

And that's the only bottom answer I believe. The top 50 are pretty predictable: "It feels good", "I was horny", and "The opportunity presented itself" are all ones I would have guessed. Take a look at the bottom list, though, and let's try to figure out how many of these people were being honest, while the Top 50 people lied through their teeth:


Someone offered me money to do it
I wanted to get a raise
It was an initiation rite to a club or organization
I wanted to get a job/promotion
The person offered to give me drugs for doing it
I wanted to punish myself
I wanted to hurt/humiliate the person
I wanted to breakup my relationship
I wanted to breakup another’s relationship
I wanted to be used or degraded
I wanted to gain access to that person’s friend
I wanted to get a favor from someone
I wanted to enhance my reputation
It would get me gifts
I wanted to make money
I wanted to hurt an enemy
Because of a bet
It was a favor to someone
I wanted to end the relationship
I wanted to break up a rival’s relationship by having sex with his/
her partner
It would damage my reputation if I said ‘‘no’’
The person had a lot of money
Someone dared me
I wanted to have more sex than my friends
I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner
I thought it would boost my social status
I wanted to be popular
I wanted to get a special favor from someone
I was afraid to say ‘‘no’’ due to the possibility of physical harm
I wanted to relieve menstrual cramps
My friends pressured me into it
I felt sorry for the person
I felt jealous
My regular partner is boring, so I had sex with someone else
I wanted to get rid of a headache
I wanted to change the topic of conversation
The person had too much to drink and I was able to take
advantage of them
I wanted to impress friends
The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex
with him/her
I wanted to get out of doing something
I wanted to get even with someone (i.e., revenge)
I wanted to make someone else jealous
I was competing with someone else to ‘‘get the person’’
I thought it would help ‘‘trap’’ a new partner
I was slumming
I wanted to brag to friends about my conquests
The person demanded that I have sex with him/her
I wanted to stop my partner’s nagging
I felt guilty
The person bought me jewelry

There are several reasons I can think of for these surprising results:

1. People lie about why they have sex.
2. I am too jaded.
3. The only people I talk to about our sex lives are under 36.
4. Too many reasons were closely worded and bumped other, more frequently-occurring reasons down in the lists.
5. Soap operas, movies, and TV do not accurately present reality.

Do you have any theories?

An Odd Synchronicity

Tyson and I have been obsessively watching Heroes for the last week, usually finding time for an episode or two at least a couple times a day.

So it was odd to see this Cat and Girl today, right after watching Episode 20. (Click on the comic to see a bigger version.)

Want to be in on this obscure pop-culture connection? Watch. Return. Understand. You can download episodes or stream them until August 3rd.

Jesus and Mo

For more Jesus and Mo, click here.

Even I can't stop narcissism!

Ok, admit it. You've made yourself into a Lego person, a construction-paper person, and now you can't wait to be a Simpson.

Go ahead.

In a cheap ploy to drum up even more hype about the upcoming movie, you can now make a yellow cartoon version of yourself, just in case you're one of those people who doesn't photograph well.

If you make one you like, but don't have a website to put it on, just mail it to me and I can put it up here.

Have fun!

Nothing is any good if other people like it.

Elitism is great. Unless, of course, you agree. Then it sucks.

Try some of the most inaccurate web-quizzes ever!

When you have nothing to do all day but stay inside, safely away from the 115-degree heat, there is a lot of crap to find on the internet. Hell, you knew that--you're here, aren't you?

Over at Blue Pyramid, there are several quizzes to take that yield the weirdest, least accurate results I have ever seen, and I have taken my share of what-animal-would-you-be quizzes.

I'm New Mexico. What the fuck? It's obvious that I'm way more Montana than New Mexico. I'm probably more Utah, even.

You're New Mexico!

A fan of spelunking and cliff-dwelling, you're the adventurous,
enchanting type. It seems like you can never avoid the sun, but that's what built your
house in the first place so you'll manage. You probably speak Spanish, and maybe even a
long-lost language in addition. And after much careful consideration, you now sometimes
agree that drive-through liquor stores are not the safest idea. Even though people think
of you as yellow, your favorite question is "red or green?"


Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

While I am flattered by being likened to a tiger, it barely counts, since it's for all the wrong reasons.

You're a Tiger!

You've really earned your stripes. People like to sing about your
eyes, which some find to be thrilling. You're rather fond of Detroit, as well as
half the universities and high schools all across America. When people want to calm
you down a bit, they use the word "easy". Overall, you're grrrrreat!


Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

This just plain doesn't make any sense at all. If I were a goat?!

You're Sudan!

Every time you get a headache, you reach for some aspirin, only to
realize that someone destroyed it. That's just how things are going for you right
now... it's hard to eat, hard to sleep, hard to not have a headache. You try to
relax, but people always jump on you about something that doesn't make sense. If
you were a goat, you'd be a Nubian.


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

This is obviously total crap. I can tell you without even taking a quiz that I would be a fantasy novel: long-winded, fanciful, and a little too nerdy to be seen with in many public places. But definitely more enjoyable the smarter and dorkier you are.

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I have to admit, I've never really tried to imagine what it would be like to be a podcast. I could maybe get on board with my own cult, though.

You're Anime Pulse!

While you run in a pretty fast crowd, everyone agrees that you
are more animated than those around you. Everything about you indicates the
patterns of a cult, but you prefer to focus on the loyalty and popularity that
a cult indicates, rather than the scary stuff. You really like sunrises. While
it seems little is in your way, you are prone to concentrating on a
boulder.


I can't even begin to explain this one:

You're Davidson College!

You love your mama, Jesus, and America too. But rather than
finding yourself in free-fall, you've been on the rise lately, as people
have flocked to see you. Of all the wars that have been fought, you felt
the Revolutionary War was most justified. Cherish is a word you use to
describe all the feelings you have deep inside. If you were a book, it
would be Charlotte's Web.


Take the University Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

You know, I should totally be writing these things. I could do so much better. I understand that they are all completely made-up, but seriously...if I were a goat? I'm a tiger, so I like Detroit? Ugh. If somebody wanted to, say, write me some code and send me the template, I would totally make up some quizzes for you. They would be way better than this stuff.

Funnier because I haven't had a proper shower in a while, either

After two nights of sleeping in a car, about 12 miles on the trail, 4 hours on the lake, and a soap- and shampoo-less motel shower, this gets even funnier. Particularly as it helps pass the time until I can shower again.