Yeah, me too.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Go Go Porno Rangers
You know how you fantasize about something for a REALLY long time, and then when it finally comes true, it's really just not as exciting as it was in your fantasies?
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, me too.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
My Second Meme
Thanks to Drew for the tag.
Here are the rules: Drew poses a question to me, and I answer it. Then I pose my own question and tag others; then they ask their own question and tag others, and so on... just like a seventies shampoo commercial!
Drew's question to me is “If you could go back in time and relive any moment in your life exactly as it originally happened, what would you choose to experience again? (Note: You cannot alter the out come; you'd just relive the experience).”
Okay, I thought and thought, and had a lot of trouble coming up with something that I wouldn't want to fiddle with and change a little, either the circumstances or my reaction to the circumstances...so I finally settled on this:
When I was sixteen, my great Uncle B____ passed on. He was the brother of my grandmother, Mrs. W____ (the one with the castle down the street - see below). An interesting character, he; never married, but was "engaged" to the same woman for over sixty years. His fiancée was the youngest child of the richest family in town, and years later found out that the woman she believed to be her mother was actually her grandmother - her real mother was her "sister", Princess. And yes, Princess was REALLY her name.
But I digress.
Uncle B___ lived on a farm, though WHAT exactly he farmed I never knew. He occasionally had sheep in his barn, though they weren't his as I recall. There was corn, I suppose, possibly other grain crops, but when I was growing up we were never there long enough for me to properly explore the fields - not like the heady days of Mother Rubble's youth, when all the cousins in the family would gather and spend the entire summer there.
The farmhouse was where Uncle B___, Mrs. W____, and all their siblings had been born and raised. The farm sat a little ways out of town, along a creek where Mother Rubble used to fish - though by my day, the creek was obscured by a highway and an abandoned Drive In.
The house was a standard late-19th Century design, with a ground-floor living area and a large, usable attic space. In my youth, when we would visit the farm, visitors entered through the back door, which led to the kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was the indoor bathroom (a later addition, naturally) and the "dining" room, which was piled high with papers and magazines and was where Uncle B___ slept. And until the day he died, those were the only three rooms of the house I had ever seen.
After his death, the contents of the house were to be sold at auction, so Mother Rubble and Big Ray and I went up one Saturday to clear out anything of value that the family might want to keep. While Big Ray and Mother Rubble were busy collecting little treasures like paper bags full of money that were hidden in the dining room, I had a chance to explore the parts of the house that I had never seen.
The upstairs room, once the children's sleeping quarters, had only an old rusty bed frame and a closet full of family photographs - the old-timety photographs where no one ever smiled, and had vacant, expressionless yet luminescent eyes, like Melissa Sue Anderson on Little House on the Prairie. Of particular interest was a photograph of Aunt O___, grandmother's oldest sister, who died of scarlet fever at age sixteen. In contrast to the other photos, hers depicted a bright, lively girl with thick ringlets of blond hair falling about her shoulders, as delicate as a china doll. I imagined that, had she lived, she would have become an international beauty and sailed back and forth to Europe with her financier husband.
The true treasure, though, was the front parlor. Its existence was completely unknown to me (remember, I had only ever entered from the back door - the front porch was overgrown with weeds, so I had never even crept up and looked into the front windows). The parlor probably hadn't seen a human being since about 1940, and looked as if it hadn't been altered for about thirty years before that. There were a few pictures on the walls, which were covered with a patterned Victorian-era wallpaper. There was a high-backed, red-upholstered settee of some sort, with low, round-topped table. Also an upright piano, with stacks and stacks of sheet music, primarily early 20th-Century popular songs. And a bookcase - the bookcase!
I pause here to inform the reader that I am obsessed with historic ephemera - obsessed - which is to be borne in mind as you read on.
I suppose it would be really swell to, say, be in such a situation and stumble upon a first edition Tom Sawyer, or Of Human Bondage, or something, but I infinitely preferred what I DID find - a collection of MacGuffey Readers, Farmer's Almanacs from the late 1800's, and lots and lots of popular fiction of the turn of the century, tales of hardscrabble orphan boys traveling the world on steamer ships, and rose-cheeked maidens suffering some sort of cruel existence until the day when they can be married to their true love.
And then, the find of all finds, the very mention of which made Mother Rubble drop something breakable, make an inhuman sound, and rush into the parlor; behind the other books, obviously quite intentionally placed there so as to be concealed, was a huge, illustrated, wood-bound German Bible, the Bible of Wilhelm Forster (1749o-1815), an ancestor who was the first Lutheran missionary in the Ohio Territory. The Bible had been a point of some contention in the family for years and years - everyone wanting it, no one knowing who had it - and the person that DID have disavowing any knowledge of its whereabouts.
So that's it, that's what I would re-live, my day of uncovering hidden rooms, family secrets and commonplace reading material of a bygone era.
Now for my question, which is multi-part: You wake up tomorrow morning, and can have TWO super-powers of your choice. 1) What would they be; 2) How would you use them, and; 3) why would you use them that way?
I'm tagging LSBB, Doc Johnston, Li'l Erika, and Niece Ratched.
Here are the rules: Drew poses a question to me, and I answer it. Then I pose my own question and tag others; then they ask their own question and tag others, and so on... just like a seventies shampoo commercial!
Drew's question to me is “If you could go back in time and relive any moment in your life exactly as it originally happened, what would you choose to experience again? (Note: You cannot alter the out come; you'd just relive the experience).”
Okay, I thought and thought, and had a lot of trouble coming up with something that I wouldn't want to fiddle with and change a little, either the circumstances or my reaction to the circumstances...so I finally settled on this:
When I was sixteen, my great Uncle B____ passed on. He was the brother of my grandmother, Mrs. W____ (the one with the castle down the street - see below). An interesting character, he; never married, but was "engaged" to the same woman for over sixty years. His fiancée was the youngest child of the richest family in town, and years later found out that the woman she believed to be her mother was actually her grandmother - her real mother was her "sister", Princess. And yes, Princess was REALLY her name.
But I digress.
Uncle B___ lived on a farm, though WHAT exactly he farmed I never knew. He occasionally had sheep in his barn, though they weren't his as I recall. There was corn, I suppose, possibly other grain crops, but when I was growing up we were never there long enough for me to properly explore the fields - not like the heady days of Mother Rubble's youth, when all the cousins in the family would gather and spend the entire summer there.
The farmhouse was where Uncle B___, Mrs. W____, and all their siblings had been born and raised. The farm sat a little ways out of town, along a creek where Mother Rubble used to fish - though by my day, the creek was obscured by a highway and an abandoned Drive In.
The house was a standard late-19th Century design, with a ground-floor living area and a large, usable attic space. In my youth, when we would visit the farm, visitors entered through the back door, which led to the kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was the indoor bathroom (a later addition, naturally) and the "dining" room, which was piled high with papers and magazines and was where Uncle B___ slept. And until the day he died, those were the only three rooms of the house I had ever seen.
After his death, the contents of the house were to be sold at auction, so Mother Rubble and Big Ray and I went up one Saturday to clear out anything of value that the family might want to keep. While Big Ray and Mother Rubble were busy collecting little treasures like paper bags full of money that were hidden in the dining room, I had a chance to explore the parts of the house that I had never seen.
The upstairs room, once the children's sleeping quarters, had only an old rusty bed frame and a closet full of family photographs - the old-timety photographs where no one ever smiled, and had vacant, expressionless yet luminescent eyes, like Melissa Sue Anderson on Little House on the Prairie. Of particular interest was a photograph of Aunt O___, grandmother's oldest sister, who died of scarlet fever at age sixteen. In contrast to the other photos, hers depicted a bright, lively girl with thick ringlets of blond hair falling about her shoulders, as delicate as a china doll. I imagined that, had she lived, she would have become an international beauty and sailed back and forth to Europe with her financier husband.
The true treasure, though, was the front parlor. Its existence was completely unknown to me (remember, I had only ever entered from the back door - the front porch was overgrown with weeds, so I had never even crept up and looked into the front windows). The parlor probably hadn't seen a human being since about 1940, and looked as if it hadn't been altered for about thirty years before that. There were a few pictures on the walls, which were covered with a patterned Victorian-era wallpaper. There was a high-backed, red-upholstered settee of some sort, with low, round-topped table. Also an upright piano, with stacks and stacks of sheet music, primarily early 20th-Century popular songs. And a bookcase - the bookcase!
I pause here to inform the reader that I am obsessed with historic ephemera - obsessed - which is to be borne in mind as you read on.
I suppose it would be really swell to, say, be in such a situation and stumble upon a first edition Tom Sawyer, or Of Human Bondage, or something, but I infinitely preferred what I DID find - a collection of MacGuffey Readers, Farmer's Almanacs from the late 1800's, and lots and lots of popular fiction of the turn of the century, tales of hardscrabble orphan boys traveling the world on steamer ships, and rose-cheeked maidens suffering some sort of cruel existence until the day when they can be married to their true love.
And then, the find of all finds, the very mention of which made Mother Rubble drop something breakable, make an inhuman sound, and rush into the parlor; behind the other books, obviously quite intentionally placed there so as to be concealed, was a huge, illustrated, wood-bound German Bible, the Bible of Wilhelm Forster (1749o-1815), an ancestor who was the first Lutheran missionary in the Ohio Territory. The Bible had been a point of some contention in the family for years and years - everyone wanting it, no one knowing who had it - and the person that DID have disavowing any knowledge of its whereabouts.
So that's it, that's what I would re-live, my day of uncovering hidden rooms, family secrets and commonplace reading material of a bygone era.
Now for my question, which is multi-part: You wake up tomorrow morning, and can have TWO super-powers of your choice. 1) What would they be; 2) How would you use them, and; 3) why would you use them that way?
I'm tagging LSBB, Doc Johnston, Li'l Erika, and Niece Ratched.
Friday, March 10, 2006
The Castle Down the Street
Six doors down from my mother’s childhood home was a castle, with a carriage house at the gate. As it was still the home of my grandmother during MY childhood, I had many occasions to pass by and daydream about what it might be like to live in a castle. The property was surrounded by a six or seven-foot high brick wall, and a clever and limber child (I remain clever, but not so limber) could shimmy up the wall and peer over into the property. If you walked around the corner, you could peer through the iron entrance gates, although the view of the house was blocked by the carriage house from this angle.
By my time the house had been long abandoned – and before I was quite an adult, it had been carved up and made part of a soulless condominium development. Occasionally, pre-development, there would be a car parked outside the house, and all the neighborhood children would become very excited at the prospect that someone was moving in, or even better, that the mysterious long-absent owners had returned from their years-long world travels and come home to live out the rest of their days.
Code Dependent snuck into the house once – I can’t recall all the details, but I’m going to go ahead and make up a story, and say she snuck in there to make out with a boy. If I recall her report correctly, there were still plenty of fine draperies and the like, even though the house was unlived in.
The entire neighborhood, including my grandmother’s house, was built along the crest of a hill that gently sloped down toward the Scioto River. The owner of the castle was Sylvio Casparis, who founded the Casparis Stone Company in 1892, which merged with three other companies to become the Marble Cliff Quarries in 1913. The quarries could be seen from the top floor of the castle, so he could keep tabs on any shiftless laborers to make sure they were earning their penny a week.
Barely a stone’s throw from the castle was the home of Samuel Prescott Bush, ( yes, THAT Bush – he was W’s great-grandpappy). He was president and general manager of Buckeye Steel Castings Company (Buckeye Steel) on Columbus' south side (external and internal views on the right).
The home, built in 1908, was sold in 1929 to Detroit socialite Anna Dodge Dillman, the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman (inset, lower left), the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman was one of the country's wealthiest women in the mid-1920s, and with Horace built the splendid Rose Terrace home in Grosse Pointe Michigan. Mrs. Dillman bought the Bush home for her husband's family to live in, and in the late 1940s sold it to the Carmelite nuns. By my day, the original house had been incorporated into St Raphael's Home for the Aged, but the home has since moved and the house is being developed for a dreaded condo development.
My grandmother’s house was built on property that had once belonged to the Aladdin Country Club, and the former site of the clubhouse was in the woods just behind her house. The indentation of the clubhouse’s foundation could still be seen, as well as the circular gravel drive seen in the picture below.
Of course, the woods, foundation, and circular drive are all gone now....condos. Not to mention, my junior high band teacher bought my grandmother's house and has built it up so that you couldn't even get to the woods if they WERE there.
If you’re waiting for this all to tie into some profound analogy to my life, stop holding your breath. I just found the pictures online and have nothing better to do.
By my time the house had been long abandoned – and before I was quite an adult, it had been carved up and made part of a soulless condominium development. Occasionally, pre-development, there would be a car parked outside the house, and all the neighborhood children would become very excited at the prospect that someone was moving in, or even better, that the mysterious long-absent owners had returned from their years-long world travels and come home to live out the rest of their days.
Code Dependent snuck into the house once – I can’t recall all the details, but I’m going to go ahead and make up a story, and say she snuck in there to make out with a boy. If I recall her report correctly, there were still plenty of fine draperies and the like, even though the house was unlived in.
The entire neighborhood, including my grandmother’s house, was built along the crest of a hill that gently sloped down toward the Scioto River. The owner of the castle was Sylvio Casparis, who founded the Casparis Stone Company in 1892, which merged with three other companies to become the Marble Cliff Quarries in 1913. The quarries could be seen from the top floor of the castle, so he could keep tabs on any shiftless laborers to make sure they were earning their penny a week.
Barely a stone’s throw from the castle was the home of Samuel Prescott Bush, ( yes, THAT Bush – he was W’s great-grandpappy). He was president and general manager of Buckeye Steel Castings Company (Buckeye Steel) on Columbus' south side (external and internal views on the right).
The home, built in 1908, was sold in 1929 to Detroit socialite Anna Dodge Dillman, the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman (inset, lower left), the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman was one of the country's wealthiest women in the mid-1920s, and with Horace built the splendid Rose Terrace home in Grosse Pointe Michigan. Mrs. Dillman bought the Bush home for her husband's family to live in, and in the late 1940s sold it to the Carmelite nuns. By my day, the original house had been incorporated into St Raphael's Home for the Aged, but the home has since moved and the house is being developed for a dreaded condo development.
My grandmother’s house was built on property that had once belonged to the Aladdin Country Club, and the former site of the clubhouse was in the woods just behind her house. The indentation of the clubhouse’s foundation could still be seen, as well as the circular gravel drive seen in the picture below.
Of course, the woods, foundation, and circular drive are all gone now....condos. Not to mention, my junior high band teacher bought my grandmother's house and has built it up so that you couldn't even get to the woods if they WERE there.
If you’re waiting for this all to tie into some profound analogy to my life, stop holding your breath. I just found the pictures online and have nothing better to do.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Are you a sissy?
Explained at last, the time-honored rite of passage for 2nd-grade boys everywhere....The Sissy Test!
Step 1: Rub a spot on the back of your hand with a pencil eraser 200 times.
Step 2: Immediately run your hand under ice-cold running water.
Step 3: If you flinch or yelp, you are a sissy.
Step 4: The next day, proudly show the scar on the back of your hand and assure any non-witnesses that you did not flinch or yelp.
ALTERNATE METHOD FOR ADULT MEN WHO ARE PUSHING MIDDLE AGE
Step 1: Get such dry skin in the winter that you absentmindedly scratch at the back of your hand all day.
Step 2: In the course of performing your morning toilet, run your hand under ice-cold running water.
Step 3: Flinch and yelp.
Step 1: Rub a spot on the back of your hand with a pencil eraser 200 times.
Step 2: Immediately run your hand under ice-cold running water.
Step 3: If you flinch or yelp, you are a sissy.
Step 4: The next day, proudly show the scar on the back of your hand and assure any non-witnesses that you did not flinch or yelp.
ALTERNATE METHOD FOR ADULT MEN WHO ARE PUSHING MIDDLE AGE
Step 1: Get such dry skin in the winter that you absentmindedly scratch at the back of your hand all day.
Step 2: In the course of performing your morning toilet, run your hand under ice-cold running water.
Step 3: Flinch and yelp.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Are YOU surrounded by Muppets?
I am, apparently. I scored as Farscape. And I never even watched the show.
Monday, March 06, 2006
My First Meme
I've been tagged by Drew, and am eternally grateful. And to think, before I started reading random blogs last week, I didn't even know what a meme was!
These are the rules.
1. Thank the person that tagged you. Thank you, Drew.
2. List 5 random/strange/weird things about you. See below.
3. Tag 5 other people. They will be random people, maybe, unless I try tagging Code Dependent. Or Plate-Of-Shrimp, both of whom could use a good kick in the ass to start blogging again.
So here are my five things:
1. Since Jet and I have been together (13 years as of Feb. 10, but don't feel obligated to send a gift) we have always lived within five miles of US Route 1. This is in two different states, four different cities and seven different domiciles. Now, facing an imminent move to a new city through which Route 1 runs, I am under the obsessive belief that we must continue to live within five miles of it. I'm also planning to drive the length of it one day and write a coffee table picture book about my travels.
2. I don't have any desire to be the boss of anything, ever. I used to really beat myself up about it, but after taking a Meyers-Briggs test (I'm solidly INF, usually followed by J but sometimes P, depending on the day) I realized that that's just the way I am, and it's okay to be that way. Besides, quite selfishly, after accepting myself for being that way I realized that being second in command is often a much more powerful position than being in charge. All the power, none of the blame.
Not that I couldn't be an effective leader if I HAD to be, mind you.
3. On a similar note, I am obsessed with secondary characters in television, movies, comic books, etc. The more of a cipher they are, the more I like them. I am compelled to learn every bit of minutiae there is about them, and sometimes, to create an imaginary background for them out of whole cloth. I suppose this proves to myself that even though I don't want to be the boss of anything ever, I'm still an interesting person. You can read my top ten list of secondary characters here and here, though in re-reading it I'm reminded that I forgot to add Ann Curry to the list.
4. When I'm alone in the car, or sometimes the shower, I practice my half of important conversations that I anticipate having. I have a scenario for every possible reaction from the other person, and in my practice I am always calm, cool, and have an unlimited vocabulary.
And yet, with all my practice, I am still awkward and fumble for words when having the conversation in real life.
Practicing conversations sounds like a good idea when I read it in print, but it doesn't feel like such a good idea when, say, you accidentally dial your home phone while you're in the car having a practice conversation, and your home answering machine picks up and records you talking to yourself for a good long time, and someone, say Jet, listens to the message, and then you have to explain to Jet that you often hold practice conversations with yourself.
5. Billy Baldwin stole a cab from me once.
These are the rules.
1. Thank the person that tagged you. Thank you, Drew.
2. List 5 random/strange/weird things about you. See below.
3. Tag 5 other people. They will be random people, maybe, unless I try tagging Code Dependent. Or Plate-Of-Shrimp, both of whom could use a good kick in the ass to start blogging again.
So here are my five things:
1. Since Jet and I have been together (13 years as of Feb. 10, but don't feel obligated to send a gift) we have always lived within five miles of US Route 1. This is in two different states, four different cities and seven different domiciles. Now, facing an imminent move to a new city through which Route 1 runs, I am under the obsessive belief that we must continue to live within five miles of it. I'm also planning to drive the length of it one day and write a coffee table picture book about my travels.
2. I don't have any desire to be the boss of anything, ever. I used to really beat myself up about it, but after taking a Meyers-Briggs test (I'm solidly INF, usually followed by J but sometimes P, depending on the day) I realized that that's just the way I am, and it's okay to be that way. Besides, quite selfishly, after accepting myself for being that way I realized that being second in command is often a much more powerful position than being in charge. All the power, none of the blame.
Not that I couldn't be an effective leader if I HAD to be, mind you.
3. On a similar note, I am obsessed with secondary characters in television, movies, comic books, etc. The more of a cipher they are, the more I like them. I am compelled to learn every bit of minutiae there is about them, and sometimes, to create an imaginary background for them out of whole cloth. I suppose this proves to myself that even though I don't want to be the boss of anything ever, I'm still an interesting person. You can read my top ten list of secondary characters here and here, though in re-reading it I'm reminded that I forgot to add Ann Curry to the list.
4. When I'm alone in the car, or sometimes the shower, I practice my half of important conversations that I anticipate having. I have a scenario for every possible reaction from the other person, and in my practice I am always calm, cool, and have an unlimited vocabulary.
And yet, with all my practice, I am still awkward and fumble for words when having the conversation in real life.
Practicing conversations sounds like a good idea when I read it in print, but it doesn't feel like such a good idea when, say, you accidentally dial your home phone while you're in the car having a practice conversation, and your home answering machine picks up and records you talking to yourself for a good long time, and someone, say Jet, listens to the message, and then you have to explain to Jet that you often hold practice conversations with yourself.
5. Billy Baldwin stole a cab from me once.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Senator Speedo
My dreamboat State Senator, whom Jet and I used to frequently spot tooling around in his convertible roadster, did the right thing yesterday by saving the life of his fiercest political opponent.
I guess he's not entirely a dick, then. Good to know.
I guess he's not entirely a dick, then. Good to know.
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