Meme-ories

Copying Edgy and Samantha...

How to Play

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember.
   
2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. If you leave a memory about me, I'll check your blog to see if you are playing, too. If you are I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.

Don't have any memories with me? Come make some tonight at our blog party at Kiwanis Park in Provo at 5:30. Bring food--all the best memories involve food.

A Brief Lesson on Internet Etiquette (LOL)

Good idea:

Lolling at someone else's funny.

Joe: Your mom went to college.

Jane: LOL!

Bad idea:

Lolling at your own funny.

Joe. Your mom went to college. LOL!

You may well be lolling at your own lame joke, but telling us so only makes you seem like a self-absorbed nitwit.

Happy Cataclysmas!

-A public service announcement from the Society for the Spiritual Attunement of the Friends of G.C. Benefield-

According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 21, 2012 AD. At least they got the year right.

We Friends of Ben know the truth. On July 25, 0 pC (2012 AD on your Christian calendar), there will be a great Cataclysm. Our world will be reunited with Earth Alpha, and only those who are prepared, who have attuned themselves spiritually to their Earth Alpha counterparts, will survive.

For those of us who are ready, today is a day of celebration, when we look forward to the day we return to that utopian world whence we came.

Are you ready?

Contact a representative of the Friends of Ben for more information. We are here to help every soul survive the Cataclysm.

The Dark Fob (Blog Party in the Park)

I've been slow on announcing this here, but the other day FoxyJ announced* a blog party we'll be having this coming Monday at Kiwanis Park in Provo. It'll be at 5:30pm and if you're reading this you are invited. Feel free to comment and let us know what kind of food you want to contribute to our potluck, or just surprise us if you're into that sort of thing.



*DISCLAIMER: The blog post I linked to above contains a continuity error. It has not in fact been two years since our last blog party. Last summer's party at Brozy and Bawb's house has not been retroactively removed from Fob continuity. Yet. Watch for next summer's crossover extravaganza, Crisis on Infinite Fobs.

Dear USPS,

If you're going to totally ignore the dates I enter in the date field of the change of address form, how about you just don't put those fields on the form in the first place? Then maybe we wouldn't have problems like FoxyJ's final paycheck being sent to California a month before we get there.

Thanks,

Mr. Fob

Fishnets and Feminism

So apparently some Christian group is making a hullabaloo about the new Barbie version of the superhero Black Canary. Likely not even aware that this is a character that has been around for some sixty years, they see a Barbie in fishnets and shiny black leather and start crying, "S&M!" (Because, you know, all decent Christians know that the only reason anyone wears leather is to participate in kinky fetish orgies.)

I'm somewhat ambivalent about sexy superheroine costumes. My conservative upbringing lends itself easily to a brand of feminism that distrusts a primarily male-driven comic book industry where female characters on average wear half the clothes of their male counterparts, but at the same time I recognize other feminisms that consider a woman's ability to look sexy a valid expression of her power and independence (perhaps Chanson can correct me if I'm misrepresenting that view). And I also distrust conservative interest groups who protest when Barbie puts on fishnets but have no problem with the fact that the entire children's toy and entertainment industry--from Barbie to Disney to Tonka--does nothing but reinforce outdated gender roles that harm little girls far more than a doll in shiny leather could possibly do.

I like the perspective of Amanda Conner, the (female) artist who designed this particular version of Black Canary's costume, as represented in this interview. And I also know that if I were ever to buy my daughter a Barbie, I'd much rather get her a Black Canary or a Supergirl or Batgirl or Wonder Woman than any other Barbie who's just as unrealistically sexy but doesn't also have the ability to kick Ken's butt going for her--at least not quite so obviously.

My guess, though, is that we can all rest assured that the majority of people who buy these superheroine Barbies will not be seven-year-old girls. Rather, it will be the thirty-something fanboys who quickly realize the advantage of these over more traditional superhero action figures: with the Barbie version you can take Wonder Woman's clothes off.

The Dark Knight

Intense. Very intense. Heath Ledger as the Joker is a force of nature. A very scary force of nature. Worth seeing in IMAX if you can--but make sure you get there on time because it's 2 hours and 40 minutes long so if your theater is like Jordan Commons in Sandy and trying to cram as many showings into the day as possible, they'll skip the previews and go straight to the show. They even announced over the credits that there would be no bonus material at the end, so as to get us out of there faster. At least the first five minutes will be totally new to me the next time I see the movie. And believe me, I'll be seeing it again.

Awkward Question of the Day

"Daddy, do you like boys more or girls more?"

$50 OBO - Two children, less than five years old

This morning at 5:30 after Little Dude climbed out of his playpen for the twenty-fourth time of the night, I got back in bed and mentally composed a bitterly humorous (if not very original) post about how I wanted to sell my children.

At 7:30 I gave up on the idea of going back to sleep and sat down at my computer to work. One of the first web pages I came across in the course of my work was a news article about a woman who was being tried for the murder of her daughter. Among the evidence against her were journal entries she'd written complaining about how parenting is stressful and sometimes she wished she could be free of her children. Now granted in this case there was also DNA evidence pinning her to the horrible crime, but I decided not to write that post I'd been planning anyway.

I will admit, though, that my children have been causing me a lot of stress over the past few days. For several months I've been looking forward to this month-long vacation, but now a week into it I'm ready to be in my own home. I'm enjoying spending the time with family and friends in Utah, and even last week I was thinking about how so long as I have my computer I feel like I'm at home (and I'm taking my computer everywhere I go because I need it for my job), but the problem is that the kids aren't so easily adaptable. They're stressed out by all this moving around and the interruption of their routine, and I don't deal well with stressed out children. I get grumpy and yell at them to stop screaming.

We spent last week with my sister, which was nice except for her Stairs of Death, and now we'll be at my mom's for three weeks. There's not quite as much space here, but I'm hoping we'll be able to get into some kind of routine and some sense of normalcy, before we rip them back out of that routine and take them to Grandma and Grandpa's in Vegas for a week and then our new home in Davis.

I'd like to have happy, calm children, but I'll settle for a good night's sleep and Little Dude staying in his bed.

An hour and ten escapes into tonight, I don't have much hope of that happening.

A Nietschean Moment with LD Fob

Little Dude pointing to the wall where a Minerva Teichert painting was until yesterday:

"Jesus all gone."

Changing Plans

According to the original plan, we would have been in Utah by now. We were supposed to be out of student family housing by the end of June so we made plans to load up our moving cubes on June 28th, then drive to Utah while all our stuff got shipped to Sacramento, where it'll be stored until we get there in August. The only problem is that we neglected to inform the moving cube people of this plan early enough, and as it turns out a lot of people move at the end of June. In a college town--imagine that.

So the earliest they could get us a moving cube was the first weekend of July, but sorry, they don't do deliveries on Saturdays, so nothing till Monday the 7th. So I begged and pleaded with the student family housing people, and they reluctantly agreed to let me pay rent for an extra week. Meanwhile, I've been stressing about moving on a Monday because it's hard to get people to help during the middle of a weekday and my job requires me to work four hours a day Monday thru Friday, which is kind of hard to do when I'm driving across Idaho.

Then today the moving cube people called and said Hey guess what we can deliver your cubes on Saturday how do you feel about that? So with two days' notice we're moving our moving day up by two days and, as it turns out, both Foxy and I are happy about it. We were at the point where we couldn't do much more packing until it was closer to zero hour anyway, and as much as we'll miss Seattle and our friends here, we're ready to get this move--at least the first part of it--out of the way.

Incidentally, if you live in the Seattle area and are looking for something to do Saturday afternoon, say between 3:30 and 6:30, shoot me an email and I'll see if I can find something for you.

Bas(k)e(t)ball

I am about as sports-ignorant as they come, but even I know that this is not what a baseball uniform looks like...
...and that's not how you spell "basketball."