Home » Blog Subscribe to RSS Feed

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And he’s sitting on my neighbor’s lawn in an inflatable helicopter. This is wrong.I get the inflatable lawn ornaments. There’s just something about having a huge Santa standing in the middle of your grass. Then, come January, he folds up to nearly nothing to store away until next year.

It gets even better if you put Santa on a timer. This way every morning Santa slowly rises, swaying one way then another like a drunken sailor on shore leave, until at last he is fully erect and waving to the passing cars. Every night just after dark, the timer clicks and Santa starts to bob and weave again, finally passing out in a puddle of his own vomit. OK, the vomit part is just my imagination at work, but if you’ve ever watched an inflatable Santa call it a day it doesn’t take that much imagination to see him as passed out drunk.

The problem with the inflatables is that no one seems to know when to stop. Down the block last year was an abominable snow woman. At least, I think this is what it was. I lacked the courage to knock on the front door and ask why their snowman had a clear set of breasts, but no bra.

Read more »

We are here! Dec 21st 2008 -
I hear you saying ‘so?’

But know this, 12-21-12 is the end of the world. The Mayan calendar predicts this. All great religions see the end of the world as coming in 2012. Well, all the good religions anyway. And why would you want to be a part of a creed that has no impending doomsday scenario? Where’s the fun in that, really?

So, you’ve got four years left before the poles switch, the ascension occurs, and the human race goes extinct. What are you going to do with your time?

That’s a big question. Do you stop going to work? Spend your days plying your family and friends with fond farewells and try to play as much golf as you possibly can?

Read more »

There are bigger and better ways to ‘go green’ than just by saving plastic bags. Cities are starting to catch up with recycling – which is in hot debate about whether or not it saves any money. Nashville (where I live) now recycles plastics up to #7! Lordy, almost no one recycles #7!There must be a caveat . . . Yup. They don’t take plastic bags. These have to be the easiest thing in the world to recycle. I swear I could melt a few down on my stovetop in an old pan and make something useful out of it. I’d do it, too, except for the poisonous vapors it would release. And right there on the bag it says ‘please recycle’ and ‘#2’. So why won’t Nashville take them??? We are left to recycle them by . . . (*gasp*) using them again! (Give me a moment, I have to shake that thought off!)

There are big ticket items that can be bought more wisely, too – you know, the next time you’re not in a recession – like fuel efficient cars, energy saver fridges, dishwashers, etc. Personally, I’m holding out for a hybrid mini-van and a fridge that I can open the doors and cool the whole house in the summer.

Read more »

Okay, actually it is fairly easy to be green these days. Or at least greener.There are a lot of things we can all do without much effort. And most of us aren’t doing them. Some things there are really no good excuse for: Like using plastic bags. Every grocery store and its’ brothers all sell those cloth re-usable bags for 99c.

Just think, Kroger gives you 4c credit every time you use one of your own bags! This means in a mere 27 trips you will have paid off your bag. (I’m counting the 9c of tax in there, too.) In that same 27 trips you will have discovered that your cloth bag holds twice as much as a single plastic bag, and never needs to be double bagged. Was this accounted for in that 4c? Or am I getting gypped?

Nevermind. I’m saving the environment. And I can sling my grocery bag over my shoulder, can you? As South Park so aptly put it, I am no longer creating ‘smog’ I have moved up to creating ‘smug’. Five more baby ducks will survive to adulthood because I brought my bags today. And I got 20c!

Read more »

It’s time to take a moment and fly your flag. No! Not your freak flag! Your American Flag. Wipe a tear from your eye, stand tall and proud. Everyone should live in a country so great.This is what Americans have long believed. It was okay to not be democratic. It was okay if your women had no rights. You were allowed to be not-as-good-as-us. We were simply holier than thou and proud of it.

It was also okay to be small, backward, have a monarchy or women who didn’t shave – anything! But now, it’s only okay to be those things if you aren’t after us. The Jihad came at us with a big bad strike and we went apeshit.

I know others out there have recognized the sublime irony in our strike – a fervent, almost religious, lash out at those who didn’t harm us because they were in some small way associated with those who did. Yes, we went Jihad right back on them. Of course, this is to prove what a bad idea Jihad is. Gotta love it.

Read more »

First it was Michael Crichton. The man who wrote Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain – and may or may not have hired ghost writers to churn out some more recent pieces like Next – has passed on. (Don’t get mad at me about the ghost writers comment. I’m just repeating gossip. The fact that a lot of people didn’t think his latest works were his best only makes it jucier.)Now Forrest Ackerman is gone, too. He is credited with having coined the term ‘sci-fi’ and finding such literary sci-fi greats as Ray Bradbury. He had a huge collection of, shall we say, paraphernalia and opened his home to the public, like a museum, every Saturday.

I have to assume the man believed in forces beyond this world in order to throw open his doors once a week and believe that the visitors wouldn’t do his things any harm. And that his wife wouldn’t do him any harm, either. And, no, it wasn’t his wife that killed him. I think.

I have to admit that all this has me nervous. Something is after sci-fi writers. So I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Crichton, Ackerman . . . (It’s sci-fi, three shoes is appropriate.)

Read more »

All right, I saw the movie Wall*E and it was cute. At some time in the far future, people have become fat blobs who are no longer able to stand up because their bones have become weak and useless. Everything is done for them: they no longer even speak to each other.As I said, it was a cute movie, until I realized the day is fast approaching where we wake up and realize that Wall*E was wrong. We will become a species with huge thumbs, weak legs and teeny tiny little shrunken heads.

No! You protest. We are becoming a species with a useless pinky finger and big heads. Like the aliens. But, alas, this is not going to be the case.

Read more »

I have been told that I am lucky I am ‘merely weird’. Because, with all the things I have done or lived through I should be ‘totally f***ed up’. And this was from someone who loves me.It was the movie Amityville Horror that sparked this. I first got into trouble by saying I wanted to see the movie. My aficionado friend was horrified. It was a remake! I tried to get myself out of such a terrible gaffe by saying I had read the book, but it was a long time ago and I wanted to see what I remembered. I mean, the book had really scared the crap out of me. It got worse when I explained that I had been seven when I read it. Hence the comment about my mental stability.

In the book, the little girl has a rocking chair that rocks by itself. I had a child-size rocker in my room, too, at the time. I swore I saw it rocking one night. As we had no pets, there was no way it had been an animal. Even though I no longer wanted to have my own room, and I huddled under the covers in fear every night, there was no way to stop me from reading.

Read more »

Fallout from the Obama electionFirst, Hollywood has to deal with the Obama election. Gone are the days where the movie is clearly fictionalized (i.e. non-offensive to any past or present president) because there is a black man or a woman in the office. Now we’ll have to go to the next step – not only will the First Lady be a man, but the president will be, too.

Hollywood has a way of predicting these things. If you dig up old episodes of ‘Laugh In’ there’s a shot of Goldie Hawn listing a handful of things that eventually came true, one of which was that in twenty years there would be an actor in the White House. Yes, Goldie is that old. And there was Reagan, right on time.

The West Wing has recently been cited as being prescient about the Obama/Hilary issue in the Democratic party. Frankly, I’m just wondering if Stallone will be the next one proved right. There’s a conversation in Demolition Man, where Sandra Bullock explains that Schwartzenegger was first elected governor of California (check!) and then an amendment was added allowing foreign born citizens to become president (in the works!) Hence the ‘President Schwartzenegger Memorial Library’ she and Stallone were zooming past.

Read more »

My family recently went organic. Or at least, as organic as we could without becoming total granola freaks. What this means is that we pay twice market value for standard items like milk and bananas. And they go bad faster. The upside is that we get the warm fuzzy feeling that we are doing good things for the planet and our kids.The first issue with organics is finding good stuff. This is still America and we do still have to make it to soccer in the evenings, so we aren’t going to spend our weekends grinding our own graham flour. And, while I read that this is the idyllic life they live in Spain, I do not take a leisurely bike ride home and pick up fresh bread, tomatoes and vegetables on the way home from work. We have to buy some things ready to go.

Read more »