but I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that clone wars was an inevitable step down on a phenom ever-spiraling to dumbsville. but i cant help but feel like my 10 year old self whose life was transformed in 1977 just got a(nother) suckerpunch.
if (i hope not when) it goes…
so, people get together, they have relationships, and sometimes they break up.
and it’s sad when pals or family, people you care about, end a relationship that seemed to you, as an outsider, just great or sweet for them.
so it’s funny and predictable to me that part of me is so invested in Cherry and Matt staying together. it’s really odd, on some level i don’t really care all that much if a dear old friend gets back together with her ex, but i have some sort of fundamental need for Cherry and Matt to work out.
Cherry and Matt’s story, to me, is pretty much one of the sweetest i’ve ever seen, certainly on the net. so i find myself periodically checking in to see if these strangers are still together. there’s a certain purity and hopefulness about how they got together and stayed together, something undefinable that makes me smile.
I hope they aren’t skeeved out about people all over the world knowing their story and wondering about them. A and i, when we got together, were the first people to have met on nerve.com and get married. nerve put an ad about us with our picture in their print mag. since then nerve’s gotten kind of yuk for my taste, but at the time we enjoyed it and thought it was cute.
so here’s to you C&M. i hope you two stay together, but not for my sake, of course, for yours. [grin]
mostly unrelated: i love this best of craigslist post about the pdx dating scene.
not sure where to put this where i will remember, so here it is:
i thought i was pretty much certifiable nutso when it came to joss’ amazing creation, and i knew there were others out there who took it way more seriously, obsessed you might say. but i had no idea folks spent this kind of time and energy on these videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 - and i keeps going! woah.
and i don’t mean posting as in blogging, i mean the ones ya’ll love to hate in and around cubicaland. like this:
and all the other ones, equally funny can be found here.
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 PDTSo 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 boobiesâ€
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 footâ€, 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!
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)
among the many highly intelligent things Tori Borland — ubersmart 13-year-old sophomore at Towson University in Maryland — had to say in her recent public chat via the Washingtonian: “All this attention is a little odd…”
ride it out… you go grrl.
via merdith
not only because he wrote and self-publishes these cool books and dvds, not only cuz he did this amazingly inspiring and funny animation called time management for anarchists, not only cuz he organizes these roadshows with poets and performers, but because his video on the similarities between yoga and deathmatch is so funny and poingnant. and i’m not a gamer or a yogi. but i’m inspired. file this under d-i-freakin-y. yay.
or perhaps i shouldn’t say new since some folks have been doing mods, custom costuming to match sci-fi costumes, especially star wars, for years. but this one (and of course his original) tops them all in terms of attention to detail and dedication.
I made a template for the 14 ESB kill marks for my helmet. I did some research on the reference cd and I believe the stripe proportions and weathering marks are correct. I printed them out, cut out the black parts with an exacto knife, cut on dotted lines and taped to the helmet. I believe the bottom of the stripes should be 1/4″ above the red brow. (The second row of stripes are for optional use.) I had to touch it up a little because of a tiny bit of “underspray” leaking through the template. Make sure you tape it down tight.
wow. go chris! [some others can be found by googling but don't miss the star wars chick. zow.]
oh darn, we broke the earth. guess we better move somewhere else. and well, now have to wait til september anyhow for the movie.
oh i miss the bay area and i miss the list.
ok folks, for quite some time i’ve been trying to track down two pieces of music, and can find neither of them. i’m not quite yet in the realm of obsessed, but near enough…
so i’m offering a prize of a) a rather large quantity of sooper delicious vegan chocolate and b) a home-spun dance mix cd set to whomever can successfully lead me to the whereabouts of…
just post in the comments here, and if you get me the info, you get the goods.
but i am. given the truly interesting discussion of gender issues in video games initiated over at gamegirladvance, i’m wondering what she’s going to have to say about the new matrix game due out this week.
yep. saw it yesterday. if you just take it as eye candy, it’s still hot. but two interesting things struck me. one, the whole theme of how most of us are actually, in this life, just asleep, going through the roles, and not engaged in the actual world, got taken another step with this movie: it’s now about how we have a choice in that. we have agency and can decide to unplug and stop feeding the machine. of course it’s more complex than that, but that was driven home in a new way in this one. two: they (the filmmakers, not the characters) employed a staggering number of people. sheeit. so much talent over such a long period went into that couple of hours. we have such a bizarre economy.
oh. and we don’t have any sort of video game apparatus here so i’m either going to have to crash my nephew’s or just take your word for it.
in the Buffy-as-social-commentary-on-the-(so-called)-war-on-terror department:
Although Cordesman noted that Buffy deals with existential questions, his main point about the Buffy Paradigm is that the vampire slayer “lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one.”
At Dissent Magazine this month, Maxine Phillips has a piece analyzing the “Buffy Paradigm,” in which she argues that there may be more to it than the way intelligence wonk Anthony Cordesman is framing it.
i thought this especially interesting, given buffy’s recent ouster as grand jefe and the commentary on democracy and collective action therein. i must say, as much as folks have slammed these last few episodes, i think it’s up there with joss’ best writing. i mean you know your show is making cultural inroads when it’s central themes and characters are worked up in reports by the heavy-hitting DC think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
though i’ve never quite fit the lifestyle anarchism of some of the @ folx i know, i’ve long understood that as one who jibes with anarchist organizing princliples, the commies would sell us all out first. if you’re not sure what i’m blabbing about, then see the excellent flick Land and Freedom and read how other commies feel about the RCP. suffice to say that working alongside leninists and maoists, whenever my activism has necessitated it, has been either frustrating, boring, or rage-inducing, or all three. so i was struck with an oh-they’re-not-so-bad feeling when i saw this weeks ads. and these are just two among many great ones. the mercury has come unhinged, and it seems p-town is on fire this late winter. happy reading.
MC PUMA Tristan, I love you and miss you with all of my revolutionary heart. The Commie House yearns for your beautiful face. Please don’t run away forever.
SARAH W. IS HOT You are the eco-defender of my dreams. Us communists miss you over here on the other side of town. I send you a kiss and a revolutionary hug.
what? the missed connections ads posts have got you curious, and you’re writing a research paper on personals ads and dating sites? well, you should look at the dmoz personals and dating categories for sure. they include niche population sites like jewish vegans, dating simulation games, and speed dating (the last two of which i’d never heard of). kids these days.
ok, as always, feel free to keep commenting with gems from craigslist and elsewhere, but i don’t think i ever will need to read any others except those from the portland mercury, like this weeks wild ones to start it off:
Dan - you should bring your beautiful teeth back to JustinsYou: dressed well with perfect teeth. I may have slapped you. When you lifted up your shirt I was impressed; that polo shirt was great. We evaded gun fire and the exchange of phone numbers. I’m wishing there was more.
in a brilliantly silly sort of way. joel veitch is at it again and this time while the kittens are fully unhinged, the spongemonkeys tell us why they like the moon. go, cuz life is better at rathergood. note, you can now get professionally goofy with lunchboxes, apparel and more. yow.
     
