Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Every bad word from every episode of The Sopranos, ever.

Click here.

There are nearly 30 straight minutes of four letter words spliced together into one seamless video. After a while it just sounds like a bunch of hoarse chickens. Plus, you can watch James Gandolfini lose his hair and gain his gut. He’s still cute, though.

I heart Cash Cab, and I especially heart its host, Ben Bailey. That look is straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

(If you don’t already know what it is, please don’t go looking up hentai on an image search unless you want nightmares… just know that it’s explicit, twisted animation. Like, tentacle rape and stuff.)

A post on MetaFilter noting the death of jazz singer Blossom Dearie took me to the excellent Schoolhouse Rock video she sang – Figure Eight.

My daughter came down while I was watching it and wondered at me for a while. She’d seen Schoolhouse Rock stuff, of course, but I explained to her that when I was a kid there were just four television stations, and only one chance a week to watch cartoons, so you’d better be there bright and early with your bowl of cereal on Saturday morning if you wanted to get in your good TV veg time. And how Schoolhouse Rock ended up teaching up stuff in spite of ourselves. And she thought I meant we didn’t have to go to school and just had to sit and watch cartoons instead.

The words. I have a way with them.

Clapotis on the fence

Originally uploaded by addlepated

I completed my Clapotis this afternoon. I cast on Christmas day with Ornaghi Filati Bamboo yarn in crimson. It only ended up taking about 4.75 skeins, a far cry from the 9 skeins I bought. I even did three extra straight section repeats for length, so it’s taller than I am – probably about 75″. I will probably end up blocking it, but for now I’m content to gaze adoringly at it and wonder where I’ll wear it first.

More pictures here and beyond.

This is a slide from my third grader’s Powerpoint presentation about what the pioneers ate.

Do you see anything a little weird about it? I mean, just slightly off?
Apparently my daughter is laboring under the misconception that the pioneers ate their own.  And she claims she read about it in a book and that her teacher told her it was true.

Now perhaps there was a small blurb in there about the Donner Party, sure.  And I imagine that it was probably a little more educational than the way I learned about it, which was from The Shining:

Wendy Torrance: Hey. Wasn’t it around here that the Donner Party got snowbound?
Jack Torrance: I think that was farther west in the Sierras.
Wendy Torrance: Oh.
Danny Torrance: What was the Donner Party?
Jack Torrance: They were a party of settlers in covered-wagon times. They got snowbound one winter in the mountains. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
Danny Torrance: You mean they ate each other up?
Jack Torrance: They had to, in order to survive.
Wendy Torrance: Jack…
Danny Torrance: Don’t worry, Mom. I know all about cannibalism. I saw it on TV.
Jack Torrance: See, it’s OK. He saw it on the television.

But to list “dead friends” as a regular source of food set me into near-hysterical gales of sputtering laughter for so long that my younger daughter brought me paper towels and a drink of water out of concern. Then, of course, the family joke for the evening became cannibalism.

We are not a normal family.

At dinner, the little one decided she was too full for dessert(!). Hub and I proceeded to bicker over who would get her Worms in Dirt and pretend to be Bear Grylls. Just as the fight started to get heated, Jo said, “Wait, I know! Mommy can have the Worms in Dirt, and Daddy can have a Dead Friend!”

Daddy said, “Hmm. I don’t have a dead friend.”

Caroline said, “That’s okay! We can kill Mr. Baconator!”

Pretty sure my squawk of laughter upset the other dining patrons.

Today I got tested for the National Marrow Donor Program.  Other than fill out a lot of paperwork, all I had to do was swab the insides of my cheeks with some Q-Tips.  Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. I recommend you all do it.  

I also gave blood for the first time.  Not half bad.  It was sort of like a reverse IV.  I may have to do that again sometime.

It was one of those flip clocks that made the tiny little “click” when the minutes changed. It was white. I got it for Christmas, I think.

The alarm would go off.  

He would stand in the door and softly call me to the kitchen.  

Every morning he would make me a cup of cocoa and a small something.  Usually an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly; sometimes cinnamon toast.  

I’d scowl at the fluorescent light and bury my head in my arms and pine for the warm covers.  The hot water heater would pound out a rhythm from its home in the hallway behind the kitchen door.  

He was always patient.  He always had English Breakfast tea and WOAI on the radio.  In February and March we would always listen to “Thirteen Days of Glory” and I would always be proud to be Texan.  

On cold mornings he would go run the car in the driveway for 15 or 20 minutes before it was time to leave, and when he came back inside, his fingers would be blue.

He would tell me “I lub you” when it was time to go.

I still eat English muffins with peanut butter and jelly.

Haven’t been sleeping well for the past couple of nights. Too much to fret about.

Sunday night: Dreamt that my cat was barfing little Mardi Gras-colored piles all over the house. Purple, gold, and green. Every day is like survival?

Monday night: Probably shouldn’t watch Space Cowboys before bed. Bizarre plot-driven tale about having to fly into space to eliminate a Threat. We were in a swanky bordello-decorated house in Los Angeles and somebody used their connections to hire Metallica to play us a couple of songs in the couple of hours before we had to take off. They played “Blackened,” which I felt was in poor taste for someone about to take off in a rocket because I thought it started off with “Blackened in the air.” (Hubby has since set me straight on the lyrics.)

The lead singer for M/A/R/R/S was there and kept talking to me like I should know him. I didn’t. But he did look like Toby from The Office.

 The dream ended when someone gave me a going away present of a Minnie Mouse doll, decked out in a satin, powder blue party dress with “Ku Klux Klan” embroidered in the Laverne font down the side.

I’ve been waking up uneasy. Wonder why.