All right, a minute ago I was gonna approve this site. So what’s up?
Well, in the interest of keeping my approval safe for kids, I had to make an emergency retraction. Some of the costumes featured on this site are highly inappropriate and/or disturbing, so I didn’t feel comfortable posting it here. If you want to go ahead and check out the site, be my guest — you can find it through Google. Be warned, though, they have pictures of some of the most sick costumes ever invented. iBarfed.
Elections drive me batcrap. Seriously. Every four years, four nuts decide that they want to be President/VP of the United States, and they spend the remaining year bragging and complaining and arguing over which of them is more ambitious and saying things like “You betcha” and “The people of this great nation”, and getting their faces made into exponentially scarier Halloween masks.
It drives me crazy.
It’s not that I mind getting a new President; I don’t. It’s the process. All the dirtkicking and skullduggery and miscellaneous garbage that politicians dredge out in their efforts to win the public favor.
Worst of all, I hate the party system. Why? Because it encourages adversarial, juvenile behavior in candidates and their followers. It creates an unpenetrable atmosphere of “us vs. them” that no one can get over. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s butt whether a candidate is a Republican or a Democrat. What I do care about – what will influence my decision – is whether I believe your ideals are appropriate for the country, and whether I believe you are intelligent and competent enough to make those ideals a reality.
If you were around a few Christmases ago (and if not, welcome back from your extended coma) you probably remember a movie called “Christmas with the Kranks”. It featured a couple who, facing their first Christmas without their daughter at home, decided that they were going to skip their lavish annual Christmas party and do something entirely non-Christmas related. Unfortunately, shortly before Christmas, daughter calls and declares that she’s coming home after all. Whoops!
Cue pandemonium as parents try to scrape together a Christmas party in approximately a day and a half.
Well, before the story was a movie, it was a book: Skipping Christmas, by John Grisham. Not a very long read, but an entertaining one, Skipping Christmas tells the entire story of the Krank’s attempts to bail out on Christmas and go on cruise, only to be foiled by their daughter’s return, and with 100% less Botox than the movie.
I just had to say it. It all started this morning, when I was thinking of writing a novella set in England. Problem is, I know very little about England outside London. Well, I didn’t want London; I wanted English countryside. So I pulled up Google Maps.
I found a nice area – City of Carlisle – and set to researching everything I could about it. I started out with Wikipedia, and then whenever I hit a dead end I buzzed over to do a Google search. It neatly filled in any gaps I had.
While I’m still a long way from finishing my studies, I’d just like to point out that Google is a very, very handy tool for finding stuff. And their maps are awesome.
The other day, my little brother (of whom I heartily approve) was browsing on ThinkGeek (of which I also heartily approve), when he came across an interesting product: Indiana Jones capsule toys. Made in Japan, these tiny collectible figurines are absolutely adorable caricatures of various characters from the movies. Unfortunately, they’re out of stock, but you can still check out the adorable pictures.
I saw this picture in someone’s signature. And I lol’d, because it was so stinking cute.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a king and his three daughters. The eldest two were dutiful to their father, and would follow his wishes in everything they did, including marriage. But the youngest daughter was strong-hearted, a free spirit, and wished to do as she chose. She wanted to marry for love.
The eldest daughter married her cousin. She lived as a queen, and died a powerful and respected woman.
The middle daughter married a foreign lord. She lived a priveledged life, and died comfortably in bed.
The youngest daughter married a farmer’s son. She lived in poverty, and died giving birth to her eleventh child.
So, around eight-thirty this evening, I realized I hadn’t approved of anything yet today. But I was in a pillage, so there wasn’t really anything I could do about it.
Now, though, I have something I want to say. Specifically, about colored dishrags.
I don’t know what is wrong with manufacturers these days. Maybe they’re getting lazy, or maybe they’re just being cheap, but the dyes they’re using are TERRIBLE. Earlier today, I sprayed a counter lightly with Clorox bleach cleaner, then wiped it with a pastel pink dishcloth.
When I rinsed out the cloth, it was covered in bleached white streaks. It now resembles a strawberry-creme candy, which isn’t all that unattractive, but I find the whole thing irritating. Dishrags should not turn white when you use them to clean. If I’d WANTED white rags, I would BUY white rags. And don’t give me this “not to be used with chlorine” crap. Chlorine bleach is the only thing that will take stains out of the counter. And if you guys weren’t such a bunch of lazybutt cheapskates, your rags would stand up to it.
Thank you.
A few years ago, one uneventful summer’s day, I was standing in the office with my mother when she said to me, “I’m thinking about getting a guinea pig.” At the time, of course, we had a fairly limited impression of what all this entailed — think a pet-store rodent tank in front of the window with some hay and wood shavings, and you wouldn’t be far off from our guess.
Fortunately, Guinea Lynx was one of the sites that set us straight.
The site is an absolute gold mine of information for those thinking about raising guinea pigs. Thanks to it and others, we learned what kind of housing was best for guinea pigs, the dietary dangers that lurk in typical pet-store food and objects, and the risks involved with breeding. Now, two years later, we have a happy, healthy four-cavy herd in an open-air cage enclosure on soft, easy-to-clean fleece bedding and a high-quality, nutritionally balanced diet.
It’s things like this that make me really glad sites like this exist. Without this information, we’d probably have had a miserable and grouchy animal that we would have cluelessly stressed into an early grave. Instead, we have a group contented little critters, the oldest of which is six years old and still going strong. Thanks to this site, cavies around the globe are living happier, healthier lives, and their owners are happier for it. And with a pet, that’s really all they can ask for.
Well, who doesn’t? I mean, Wikipedia is awesome. You can look up just about anything there. And thanks to the magic of Wikis, you’re far more likely to find detailed information on stuff you’re actually interested in than all that stuffy “significant” content they like to tout themselves for. Check out, for example, the page on Gwen Stefani versus pages on more notable people such as Grandma Moses (Who? Exactly.)
Be careful, though, that you don’t abuse its powers — schoolteachers around the world have been forced to crack down on plagiarism-happy students who have lifted entire essays from the site. It’s a good place to learn, but it’s not a good place to take all your material from.
