Category: humor

Quiz: How compulsive are you? (Halloween costume edition)

Halloween is coming, and you want to get costumes for your 2 kids. How do you go about getting their costumes?

    A: Don’t stress about it. You’ll figure something out from things you have around the house.

    B: Pick up something at the store that will fit. There are plenty of inexpensive new or used costumes, and your kids are so young that they probably could be talked into liking just about any of them. If you wait till a day or two before Halloween, you can find something really cheap.

    C: Find out what your kids want to be several weeks in advance, and order something online.

    D: Decide on a theme for your kids’ costumes months before Halloween based on some accessory you’d gotten on sale a couple of years before, and plant the seed of the idea in your kids’ heads so that they think they want to be those things. Decide that you want to make as much of their costumes as you can. Less than a week before Halloween, buy a sewing machine, even though you haven’t used one since junior high. Figure out how to use it, including doing types of things that you’d never even done in home ec. classes. Spend a bit of time each night working out the design of a costume. The night before you plan to use the costumes, stay up past 2 in the morning. Work for a couple more hours the next day getting ready for your afternoon departure to a place where the kids will be in costume, including stitching on some proper straps to the accessory you’d bought a couple years ago because the glue is coming apart and one of the cheap plastic straps has already come loose. Continue to work on the other costume in the passenger seat on your way to the Halloween event, sewing on embellishments until your fingers are so sore and tired that you drop a needle in your lap while trying to thread it just one more time, and then spend the rest of the ride trying to find the damn needle, and convincing yourself that you will either be sitting on it, or poking a small child with it in the near future. Spend even more time finishing up the costume the next day, and then make a costume for yourself while your youngest child is napping. In the end, you are still vaguely unsatisfied, because there are a few details you never found time for, and getting kids to cooperate for photos is really tricky, so none of it looks quite how you imagined it anyhow.

How did you answer? Please match your answers to the evaluations below.

    A: While some may call you lazy, others envy your ability to keep things in perspective, be laid back, and not spend crazy amounts of time on something that will only be worn for a couple of hours.

    B: You are both sane and prepared. You probably get all of your work done on time, and still have time to relax in the evenings. Others probably resent you for this.

    C: You are moderately compulsive, but as long as you don’t spend countless hours or insane amounts of money to find “just the right thing,” you are not certifiable.

    D: You are freakin’ insane. Don’t you know you have an abstract due in just a few weeks? Put down the needle and thread and get back to your research.


The beautiful butterfly.


Caterpillar and butterfly. (Photo by John.)


Caterpillar and plant. (Photo by John.)


So over it.

John has posted a few more photos on Flickr, too, if you want to see more. (See, for example this, this, this, this and this.)

The Unbearable Tightness of Pants

Conflict.
Betrayal.
Angst.

Pants.

The Pants Institute proudly presents the Pants Cinema Film Festival: Masterpieces of Pants Drama.

Here are some of the films on the schedule:

    The Unbearable Tightness of Pants: A young woman feels increasingly uncomfortable in her pants, while her husband seems unable to keep his own pants on.

    What’s Eating Gilbert’s Pants: A young man is disturbed to realize that clothes moths have gradually overtaken his family’s closets.

    My Own Private Pants: Two misfit young men in misfitting pants embark on a journey to find pants that fit them more comfortably.

    The Last Pants of Disco: A pair of young women struggle to adapt to the changing pants fashions at the start of the 80s, and must bid their bellbottoms goodbye.

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Pants: When a man picks up his clothing from the drycleaners, he finds the pants that are returned to him to be hauntingly familiar, yet he can’t remember ever wearing them.

    The Remains of the Pants: An aging butler reflects on his life of service, and notices how threadbare his trousers have become.

    Pants in Translation: A young American woman visits Tokyo, and is unhappy to find that she can’t find the Japanese word for “pants” in her phrase book.

    The Pants Hereafter: A town struggles to cope with the gap left by the closing of a prominent pants retailer.

    Pants Labyrinth: A young girl tries on magic pants to escape the dark realities of her family life.

    Pants of a Lesser God: Not all pants are made the same. See label for care instructions.

    Pretty in Pants: A teenage girl runs into conflict when she announces that she wants to wear tuxedo pants to her high school prom.

    Edward Scissorpants: I can’t even go there. Ouch.

——-
I’ve been keeping these pants packed up for ages, and it seems a fine time to air them out.

Borrowed Pants: Selected Texts from the Pants Archives

From my place in the seat of the Pants Institute, I am on occasion privileged to receive interesting pockets of Pants Knowledge from fellow Pants Scholars from the wider Pants World.

PoetTraveler of Reaching for my pen… recently left the following gem of Pants Lore in the comments of my about page, an article which surely deserves your clothes attention.¹

The quest for perfect Pants is a longstanding one. Many have searched for the ideal symbol of this emblematic icon. There has been much coverage on the subject. Some academics argue that perfection is impossible. Others say not so, it’s all down to genes.

Indeed, the great pants-philosopher, Levy of Denim, produced a schematic that took Plato’s theory of Forms further . For Levy, Pants was all about form. His addendum to Plato’s idea was not a re-butt-al, figuratively speaking. He postulated that Form clings to genes and to this day one of most widely used expressions in the field contains both a noun and an adjective incorporated in the effusive expression “I’m panting for more”.

– Excerpt from “Pantalonia – The Path of Bottomless Knowledge” –

After a brief discussion of the Text, he also shared the following:

Some dissidents – notably Diogenes of Sinope were critical of Levy of Denim’s association with Plato’s ideas. He accused Levy of being inelastic in his coverage, of dressing part of the Form concept in such a way so that it became an inelastic pro-position. Levy of Denim was noted for labeling his ideas carefully and when Diogene’s criticisms reached him he was said to have sighed and murmured “That Diogenes is not exactly a barrel of laughs” The ancient greek translation is inaccurate because of ambiguity in this context and another meaning could be “He’s not getting me over a barrel”, but there is no collective agreement on this possible alternative meaning and in any case Denim of Levy was, at that time, apparently happily married to Levytica, a seamstressed lady from Syracuse.

I expect you will agree that briefs of this fashion are a tight fit for the body of Pants Knowledge assembled in the Pants Institute, and should be stored in the venerable drawers of the Pants Bureau Archives.

This message was approved by the Ministry of Pants.

———
¹This pun was also borrowed from PoetTraveler.²
²Even more Pants material can be sewn, or um, seen here, as well as more of our off the cuff³ exchange.
³…or on the fly, as it were.

Today’s forecast

Hour-by-hour forecast for Thursday, January 21

2:00 a.m. 95% chance of baby wakefulness
3:00 a.m. continued baby wakefulness with intermittent parental snoozes
4:00 a.m. continued baby wakefulness with intermittent parental outbursts
5:00 a.m. 85% chance of fitful slumber, punctuated by dreams of wakefulness
6:00 a.m. 99% chance of beeping alarm clock, chance of snooze button 100%
7:00 a.m. Blustery tempers and high-speed chases, chance of toddler eye precipitation 98%
8:00 a.m. Frosty windshield combined with hot tempers lead to isolated storms
9:00 a.m. 80% chance of showers skipped
10:00 a.m. 75% chance of feeling snowed over

Mood likely will continue to be partly cloudy throughout the day, with scattered thoughts and intermittent storms of crankiness.

Image from wpclipart.

a totally private email to WordPress about “post by email”

Dear WordPress,

I really like your “post by email” feature. It’s so cool, in that it lets me compose emails offline in my favorite mail application. I love the ease of formatting. I’ve found that including images in a post is actually much easier. It’s really great. I use it all the time now.

And I really like that you can send a post to the drafts folder rather than publishing it right away. I often like to do a bit of editing to a post and see a preview of it before I publish. You’ve made this so easy–I just need to include a bit of shortcode. That is teh awesomeness.

But you know what would be even awesomer? Even more full of teh awesomeness? Having the default be to send emailed posts to the drafts folder. Because you know what I discovered? You can accidentally post an email as a blog post. Especially if you are up late at night sending out lots of emails, and not paying quite enough attention to the autofill function of the address bar of your mail application. I’m speaking totally hypothetically, of course.

No, wait. I’m not.

Because even though it’s swell that you can easily type the “status draft” shortcode into any post that you email, people may not consider including that text in every freakin’ email they ever compose on the off chance it might accidentally get published on the freakin’ web.

So, please consider having some sort of “publish immediately” shortcode instead of the “status draft” shortcode, and make the default status for posts by email be “draft.” And save bleary-eyed people like me from the potential embarrassment of accidentally publishing personal emails like this one on the web.

xoxox,

alejna

p.s. You looked totally HAWT the other night in that skimpy thing you were wearing.

p.p.s. Don’t tell my husband I said that, because he’d be sooo jealous.

The 00s: The Decade of the Butt Crack

After my last post, in which I declare that I barely noticed an entire decade, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the decade. Because I’m pretty sure I was there.

One thing that stands out in my memory is that I had to change my underwear.

And by that, I mean that I found that styles of underwear that I had been wearing previously no longer worked with new styles of pants.

You know what I’m talking about.

Low rise.

In the early years of the last decade, more and more people were dropping their pants. As the decade progressed, waistlines kept moving lower and lower, such that many feared what depths might be exposed before the trend reached its bottom. Hanging low on the waist, the jeans of this brave new world exposed a large swath of midriff in the front.

And from behind, they showed a lot more behind.

Before you knew it, you couldn’t walk down a city street without seeing hip young things showing off their coin slots.

This was a new dawn rising in the fashion world. Or perhaps a new moon. This was the dawning of the age of butt cleavage.

(Who knew that plumbers would start a fashion trend?)

We may not have seen much progress in many social trends in the last decade. We may not have seen great strides in the arts. What we did see was a lot more ass.

The 50s presented the poodle skirt. The 80s offered legwarmers.

The 00s had the butt crack.

bumper stickers for word nerds

This week’s Monday Mission was to compose a license plate or a bumper sticker. I felt like doing several. Because I’m like that. (I’m also late getting this posted. Because I’m like that.)

For more license plates and bumper stickers, drive over to Painted Maypole’s and honk.

Let it mold.

Oh the veggies in there are frightful,
And takeout’s so delightful
And since the leftover soup’s too old
Let it mold, let it mold, let it mold.

Since the fridge door last was closing
The food’s been decomposing.
That old tuna salad’s growing bold
Let it mold, let it mold, let it mold.

When we finally face the blight
How I’ll try very hard not to gag
But if we hold our noses night
We can load up a hazmat bag.

The eggs have all gone rotten
And the tofu’s best forgotten
But as long takeout’s still sold
Let it mold, let it mold, let it mold.

This was a Monday Mission, which called for re-written holiday songs. For potentially less toxic songs, pay a visit to Painted Maypole.

12 reasons why I won’t be giving Mark Rayner’s new novel to my mother-in-law for Christmas

The cover of a book I will not be giving to my mother-in-law.
Mark Rayner’s new novel, Marvellous Hairy, has gotten some great reviews, and some marvellously entertaining press. It’s been published just in time for the major gift-giving holidays. The paperback comes in an attractive compact format, and it also comes in an economical ebook version. You would think this would make it an excellent gift.

In spite of this, I will most definitely NOT be giving a copy of this book to my mother-in-law. Here are the main reasons why:

The 12 Main Reasons I won’t be giving Marvellous Hairy to my mother-in-law:

  1. The novel contains “adult” language.
  2. The book uses colorful descriptive language, and I mean beyond describing a room as having been painted “belligerently pink.”
  3. I’m talking about sentences like the following:

    He had long greasy black hair that clung to his head like an octopus humping his skull, and then fell onto his his shoulders in oily post-coital exhaustion.

  4. The book has sex in it.
  5. The book has sex and monkeys in it.
  6. My mother-in-law would be fairly scandalized by something that induced me to compose a sentence including both the words “sex” and “monkeys.”
  7. My mother-in-law has probably never spent any significant amount of time contemplating what it would be like to grow a tail.
  8. It is extremely unlikely that the phrase “Release the monkeys!” would make her giggle.
  9. She wouldn’t know what to make of a playful romp of a novel that is described as “part literary fun-ride, part fabulist satire, and part slapstick comedy.”
  10. Especially one that has been called “deeply, unsettlingly weird.”
  11. She certainly would not take well to the suggestion that she get in touch with her “inner monkey.”
  12. She would probably much prefer some lavender-scented hand soap.


Disclosure: Since I’m a big fan of The Skwib, Mark Rayner’s humor blog, I was all set to buy a copy of this book. (Though not for my mother-in-law.) It was already in my Amazon shopping cart and everything. But then Mark offered to send me a copy. (For FREE! Sucker!) How could I resist? (The monkeys made me do it.)


(Monkey images from wpclipart.)