action figures sold separately

i used to have a regular feature here on action figures featuring my favorite missed connection ad of the week. haven’t done that in a long while, but today there was one that was pretty funny. i was just going to link to it, but then realized that it will be gone from craigslist soon. so here tis:

To my naked hot tub party neighbors
Reply to: anon-86310316@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-07-22, 5:44PM PDT

So I have no idea if it is on again this weekend, but if it is can I make some suggestions?

1) You guys are freaking hilarious, at the very least please record the audio from your night. Last weekends favorite quote “I want your boobies to kiss my boobies”
2) Please hand out a lyrics sheet to all members of the hot tub. I would love to help pick the songs, if I am going to have to listen to them. Although the sentiment was sweet your song (Islands in the stream) of choice last week, really blew. My requests: Down Under (Men at Work), She Goes Down (Motley Crue)
3) Lets make it an official rule, every time a guy stands up you ladies must yell at the top of your lungs “Cocktail” and then drink. Also for every time someone says boobies, the group drinks.
4) Plastic only – lesson learned
5) Just say, turn off your porch light rather then unscrewing it. I will hop right up and do it. I didn’t realize when you were having one of you unscrew a light it was mine.
6) In the event you are playing “guess who’s foot”, please be clear with your rules. There seemed to be some confusion in the past.
7) I didn’t quite catch all the shapes that had been shaved in the ladies whoonie nananas. Please redo that conversation and a little louder.
Bring back Willie, everyone loves Willie. Or even better just get Jack Black. My favorite part was hearing him talk about how much he loves being a soccer coach to these little kids while he was sitting buck ass naked in a hot tub. Somehow naked hot tubs and talks of children don’t seem to mix.
9) Start and finish times; 3:30 am to 5:30 throws my schedule completely off. Can we shoot for 1 – 3 am?
10) Thanks for describing the cup sizes, lets make that a habit. Really feel free to be as descriptive as possible. When I compared notes with the other neighbors we weren’t exactly sure who had what. Maybe repeat your name after the description.
11) After this weekend we will have two more neighbors. They will be living upstairs and I am guessing will have a pretty unobstructed view. I do not know if they will find you as funny as I do. Maybe an invite for them?
12) Bathroom use, kudos to all of you who got out of the hot tub! The couple of you who didn’t…….shame!
13) The ass smacking, although it sounded solid I think needs some work. Don’t be shy really get after it! After all, your drunk and you’ll need something to remember it by.
14) If you find yourself in a lull, feel free to just yell boobies or cocktail for no apparent reason.
15) Last rule, please only very attractive naked hot tub party attendees. Unless you follow strict rules of bringing them home after I have gone to bead. Which will allow me to imagine it is Halle Berry, Jessica Alba and Pam Anderson in your hot tub.

Last weekend rather then get mad and try and sleep, I thought screw it, I’ll just listen to the show. 20 feet away just isn’t far enough to stop sound. Thanks for the entertainment.

Your neighbor who knows better then to be a hypocrite

[update - in oct 03 blacktable.com did a piece on this, and now both the site in question and the others linked from the original post are gone. was a law passed? comment if you know?]

i know for most of you this is old news but one angry girl designs pointed me (through the “latest outrage” section) to this bizarre and insidious phenomenon of preteen softcore. it got me wondering. what if your daughter wanted to do this? as a feminist, i think that of course i would stress how fucked up and exploitative it is. but also, as a parent i think i would have to let her find that out herself. most likely - i would hope - she wouldn’t really be exposed to it much or have really an inkling of it, or would know about it but would find it as repulsive as we did.

but i remember a set of parents i knew in the bay area force a kid to come to every demonstration, wear only certain clothes, eat only certain foods, and basically constantly barrage him with propaganda and rhetoric about the latest cause. yes, that kid is now in the army, an arch-conservative activist republican who reviles the flat, ineffective, boring world his folks pushed him toward.

and so it’s a tough call in some ways. what are the those kids’ parents like? i mean beyond the steretypes you no doubt had, as i did, of florida and southern california and small midwestern towns and gobs of disney and letting the grandparents buy too many barbies and abusive men in the family and safeway picnics etc etc. No. statistically at least some of them have to be working and have interesting lives and think critically and had issues with what their daughter wanted to do and grappled with it. some of them read sisterhood is powerful and are still calling out or even fighting sexism in their workplaces and some of them work to help women have a real meaningful role in their churches and synagogues and don’t let their kids drink coke and hate their (p)resident etc etc.

it makes me thankful for the writings and insights of ariel gore and pals. especially now that we’re expecting. most of you who read this know, but maybe some of you don’t. so there ya go. mid-december! whooooooo hooo!

i seem to remember that dangerousideas had some rad content. anyone know if they are coming back someday? a kerry presidency is not in the cards, friends. but we hope maybe you are?

update: it’s back! (but mostly with Jenny’s blog). check it.

entering geekdom, skip if you think it’s silly to care about syntax and suchlike…

what i would say to the grammar guy if i could find the site where i first found his musings:

first off, it’s not waiter, waitress, or waitperson. never a need to use any of that claptrap ever again. just say server! a server is not waiting on you, as in every need, but serving your food & bev!

grammar guy says

It’s common enough in speech: “A friend of mine called me.” “What did they say?” But, although many writers have used it (see examples from Jane Austen), it often sets off alarm bells among the fussier readers of formal writing today.

who need to get over themselves - language changes and this is a reasonable adaptation that is not in any way diluting or dumbing-down the language as those fussyfolk might fear.

on pronouns dude notes:

when saying “Bob gave Terry a memo Bob wrote, and Terry read the memo,” we’d use the nouns Bob, Terry, and memo only once, and let pronouns do the rest: “Bob gave Terry a memo he wrote, and she read it.”

and i say that it’s all context (in the first place what if terry is a he). but what about where we say:
“Bob gave Tom a memo he’d written and Tom read it.” This is fine while it’s the memo bob had written, unless tom forgot writing it and bob was showing it to tom as a reminder. aha? aha!

i’d also needle out of him an opinion on correct use of the em dash and i’d lay into him about my personal pet peeve which i know is kind of dumb, but “exploitive?” no! exploitative. it (and all those like it) just sounds better. you know they do. admit it. (cane pulls me by the neck stage left)

adandelion2

Originally uploaded by fogboy.

my nephew’s bar mitzvah, the cascadia collectives conference, the fp graduation, and more. on our photo page. for the graduation, i made a cool slideshow and duy and john made an amazing video. now i’m trying to catch up on old emails and letters while recovering from knee surgery.