Happy Birthday, Violet!

And no, not Violet from Reclusive Leftist, I don't know her that well. Though if she wants a puppy collage, I'll gladly make her one too.

A different Violet.

Who wanted, for some reason, a Mikey collage.

Some people...

So here it is...

Wickett and his Legs

I love that the back leg is up, even in this odd, odd pose.

He was asleep, but the camera woke him up and pissed him off.

And no, I have no idea what that orange is by his mouth.

Pay It Forward

My sister is in a youth group at a pretty small church. There's 30 members, maybe, but only about 15 are active. Compare to the local mega-church, where the teen youth group has over 100 members.

Pay It Forward is a charity project that they had to sign up for, you could choose to do this or not.

The goal is to help a family, a person, pay forward kindness? I'm not quite sure.

Becky chose to help a family with a sick kid whose illness had caused financial difficulty, truly 'paying it forward', because that is what people have done for us.

Well, this involves money, so each person has to make a craft to sell to the congregation. I think Becky wanted to do birdhouses, yech.

Today, while I was asleep, mom and Beck decided on something different.

And here they are:





They bought these records for $1.50 each at a local antiques store today, and put them on metal bowls, then put them in the oven at 200 degrees for 5 minutes. Becky did a bit of shaping (with oven mitts on, people, she may be a teenage twit, but she knows "Fire hot!") and they froze immediately in their shapes.

More will be made, but they'll be made from cheaper records from goodwill and goodwill's bargain barn, where you can get them for 10 cents.

Aren't they awesome?

I love Stephen Colbert.

I love the Colbert Report.

It and the Daily Show make for a perfect hour of television, Monday through Thursday nights.

One of the things I adore about the Report is the "Better Know a District" segments. I know he uses them to make fun of the Democratic representatives, but it really is an interesting segment. And I love his enthusiasm about it - slowly filling in that map, I hope he stays on the air long enough to fill it entirely.

I saw in the paper today - Memphis representative Steve Cohen filmed one Friday. They don't know when it will air, and he will come off as a terrorist loving commie, but it will be funny.

And I know Memphis is a big city, but it doesn't seem to exist that much on tv, and I love mentions of it.

And I don't even live there, Cohen's not my representative, if you think I'm telling you who is, you're out of your mind.

But yay! Memphis! On the Colbert Report!

I'm so excited.

Tennessee doesn't get much mention either, though we got some attention last November. (Can't believe Corker won, grumble grumble.)

As for Cohen, there were claims, during the primaries, that there were phone polls of democratic voters in the district, asking if you'd want to be represented by someone who didn't accept Jesus Christ as his lord and savior. I don't remember if it was ever confirmed, but it's still disturbing.

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis's only daily paper) has a website, but to read articles, one must register - and not for free, so screw them.

Dixie and her Pillow

Actually, that's Mom's pillow, I made it for her for one Mother's Day.

But it's so soft, it recently migrated out to the living room.

I was going to use it, when Miss Thing got up there.

Conversations with God For Teens

I bought this book at Goodwill for my sister yesterday, along with Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen and a Fear Street book. All 99 cents, damn!

I went in to see if they had Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, because that's what Becky has to read now, and since the Memphis library branch system has splintered, she only has two libraries to use now - the school's and the town's. And you can bet they're just stocked with enough copies of JC for all the kids in the class.

We went to Goodwill Tuesday as well, and I saw a bunch of Shakespeare books there, so I assumed JC would be there as well. It wasn't.

So I got this book for her instead, because she's back into the church thing again, I thought she'd like it.

I think she does, but she's not big on most books, but it is about God.

Anyway, I was flipping through it just now, and a bit at the beginning (not Alanis's trippy foreword) that made no sense.

Page 4 starts with this sentence: "You called this book to you because..."

That's when I went "Huh?" and stopped reading.

She didn't "call this book" to her.

Goodwill didn't have a copy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, so her nice sister bought her a books about God because she thought she'd like it!

And I'm an agnostic, I could care less about religion, so the book wasn't calling to me because I wanted to talk to God.

Mikey and his Octopus

He loves to shake it at me.

I love to grab one tentacle and play a dangerous game of tug of war with him.

Or pull him around the house on a different kind of leash.

I bought this for him in Washington, it rode in my lap on the plane, because all my books filled my carry-on.

Dixie and her Becky 2

Notice the complete lack of interest in the plight of the idiot behind her.

That's my girl!

Super Bowl XLI

29-17, Colts.

And it only took four hours. That's pretty fast for a football game.

Prince! Prince! Prince!

He was singing there, and he did Purple Rain... in the rain... How awesome.

I have loved the musical choices for the half time shows since 2004. Paul McCartney in '05, the Stones in '06, and Prince this year.

They've gone with more 'conservative' artists since the nipslip, but jeez, Prince is to blame for parental warning labels! (Knew a girl named Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend) And he's safer than Janet Jackson now. Who knew?

He looks just as good as he did in the '80s, but all I have to go on is videos and movies and pictures. He may be completely nuts, but what talent. That guitar screams, you know it's him. He started with "Let's Go Crazy", then "Baby I'm A Star", "All Along The Watchtower", and ended with Purple Rain.

That was all I cared about.

After the commercial break, he was, like, gone. Huh? Where'd he go? There's no skinny black guy on the field, football sucks.

I watched part of Puppy Bowl III today, if Prince wasn't doing the halftime in the human game, I'd have watched all of it. (The halftime show at the Puppy Bowl was kitties playing.)

Our dogs got so jealous! During the human game, Mikey and Dixie staged their own Puppy Bowl - he attacked her ears, and she slapped him around. He thought he won because she walked off, but then she came flying back in and flipped him over. She always wins, she's Dixie.

The commercials sucked this year. The only one I liked was a Budweiser one where a white mutt is watching a parade, and the dalmatian on the fire truck is like, "Ha ha, I'm better than you." Then the poor mutt gets hit by a puddle, and he's all muddy. So he walks away from the parade, and sees his reflection. He looks like a dalmatian! Now he's in the parade.

(I'm a sucker for puppies.)


Onto another issue with this year's super bowl - the first time two black coaches were in the Super Bowl. My sister doesn't understand why it's big deal, saying, "They don't talk about the first two red headed coaches."

First of all, that will never happen, as most of those coaches are old men who have no hair unless it's white or gray. Ha!

Mom wouldn't let me tell her that the ratio of black players to black coaches is so disproportionate, not to mention the ratio of players to owners. It was unheard of to have a black coach, and look, the biggest game of the year, 4 days into Black History Month, has two black coaches squaring off. How cool is that?

It's the same with the black caucus in Congress or women's groups. "Why isn't there a white caucus?" "Why can't men have a group like that?"

Because, dammit, white men have controlled western society for hundreds of years. We've made a lot of steps towards equality, but we're not there yet.

And like they said on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report (forgot, sorry). They do have a white caucus - it's called Congress.

Wickett and his Window

Everybody loves this picture - he looks so cute!

So I'll leave it at that - cute dog, not a dust mop, not a clump of hair from a drain, not a shadow, but a cute puppy dog.

Homer the Heretic

The Simpsons is/was a great show.

Today, Homer the Heretic aired.

It's funny, to be sure, but it's not too subversive, now is it?

For those who don't know, Homer wants to stay home from church one Sunday in the nice, warm bed and watch football and have fun, rather than freeze his butt off to a boring sermon for hours in church. And who can blame him? One reason many teens and kids loathe religion is the whole 'waking up early on my day off to be bored - that's what school's for' thing.

Marge pressures him to go back to church, but he refuses. She doesn't want to choose between her man and her God - God wins. She even tells the kids her father is wicked for refusing to go to church! That is messed up on too many levels, okay?

To his credit, he tries to tell of another 'wicked' dude who had long hair and wild ideas, didn't always do what was popular, you know, the guy who drove that blue car?

So he falls asleep with a cigar, lights the house on fire, and is rescued by people who he'd recently mocked for their religious beliefs. So he goes back to church, because God worked through "the hearts of your friends and neighbors when they came to your aid, be they Christian, Jew, or ... miscellaneous." God didn't set the house on fire, but he sent people to help.

So he goes back and falls asleep in church, naturally - wish I could get away with that - and has another dream where he talks to God.

I know it was in 1992, Bush Senior was president, but Christ! One of the most subversive cartoons of our time ends with him going right back to church? Ugh.

However, the beginning was hilarious - the opening scene, prenatal Homer in the warm womb, not going nowhere, yanked out into the cold reality of early Sunday morning. We've all been there, every single day we have to get up for work or school or anything that requires not staying warm in bed all day.

And I do love some of the quotes from the episode...

Homer: And what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're just making God madder and madder! I've always wondered that, then I figured that any god that cared that much about how you worshipped, where you worshipped, and not what was in your heart and soul wasn't that great a god in the first place.


Ned: Homer, God didn't set your house on fire.
Rev. Lovejoy: No, but He working in the hearts of your friends and
neighbors when they came to your aid,
be they [points to Ned] Christian, [Krusty] Jew, or [Apu] ... miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu! There 700 million of us.
Rev. Lovejoy: Aw, that's super.




I just don't get how not going to church means forsaking your faith, but then I don't get much of it.