Kreplach $1000

That's one of my favorite bits from Daffy Duck's "The Scarlet Pumpernickel." And a nice lead-in to an odd suburban evening with the moms of Lief's friends. Topics of conversation included:

--Sudden, permanent, yoga-induced hair loss
--Sweat lodges and smudging
--Is it worse to have pink hair or to dress like a slut--when you're 14?
--Premonitions of violent death expressed in inexplicable fainting in a mall near Great Slave Lake
--Hula hoop workouts vs. Pilates
--Best way to purge the body of red dye 14
--What happens to tummy tattoos after baby #3 (hint: ewwww)
--Desirability of French immersion kindergarten versus undesirability of driving kid every morning instead of watching them cross the park, meaning you don't have to get out of your pyjamas
--Probable ratio of teachers who will understand when a mom picks up her child from school at 3 still wearing pyjamas to those who will not; likelihood that the latter will be teaching at a French immersion school
--Is gin the new cranberry and soda?

RIP, Suzanne Pleshette, you cello-voiced beauty, you.

Bells and Whistles

I hate my phones. They all have the most horrible ways of communicating with me. Why can our machines not, for example, cough discreetly or whisper our names like a lover, or bang a gong so we can get it on and all that. My DVD welcomes me to DVD World and wishes me Bye! My microwave tells me to Enjoy My Meal. This is akin to that Microsoft Office paperclip, to which I would also like to take an enthusiastic hammer. I like my machines to be the strong silent type.

Or, alternatively, to make the following sounds:

Tra-la-la! (a la Captain Underpants)
Meadowlark trills
Steve Martin on banjo
Wind in a pine forest
Sneakers scaping in the gravel underneath a swing
Opening riff of "Need You Tonight"
Toast popping up
Icecubes cracking under cold gin
Lief yawning

Just for the record, I would also like for my next-door neighbor's stupid fracking motorcycle to be the strong silent AND LONG GONE type. Who tunes a motorcycle at 6.30 in the morning???

Gin

I talk a lot about gin, way more than I drink it, and way more than I know about it. Until just now.

And now that I know, thanks to Wikipedia (and it must be true if I read it on Wikipedia), that gin and tonic was originally devised as a preventative against malaria, I think I might just drink a little more of it. The mosquitos are bad this year, bad I tell you, and there's something desperate and brave about drinking gin so as to avoid a sweaty death.

But oh my, what have we here? 67 litres a day, wot?

And here it is, already 3 in the afternoon. I had better get a move on if I'm to remain alive.

Toodles.

Thinking about John the Baptist again

I wonder what kind of list you get on if you Google things like "dried human tongue nailed to Bible", "skull Damascus", "skull Yorkshire", "severed right arm Egypt" and "Montenegro"?

Cause I'm on that list.

I'm reading a book called "What Happy People Know" mostly because I like to make fun of happy people, and knowing what they know might make my taunting more targeted. The author claims that you should be able to summarize yourself in 25 words or less and that this summary should be something memorable and positive that you can use as an elevator pitch to yourself when times get tough.

"I'm a middle-European baroness in disguise as a suburban mother; my fabulousness twinkles in the gin, the candlelight gleaming on my tiara, and the azure directness of my blue blue eyes."

31 words -- I think (that would be the gin there). Maybe happy people would be even happier if they had more than 25 words to work with.