The Tragic Tale of Carlos and Mari

(there is a video here, RSS subscribers)

I used to have two Siberian dwarf hamsters just like these when I was in college. My boyfriend and I bought them together. It was his idea and when we broke up, not long after we bought them, I retained custody of them. They were named Carlos and Mari. They were both very cute but they met bad ends.

Carlos died during winter break while being watched by my sister, and is buried behind the dorm I lived in at the time. I paid my friend to clean out the cage and bury him for me, because he had been dead a while apparently, before I had been made aware of his demise. We used a spork to mark his grave.

Mari had a stroke sometime the next semester, I think (though I am not veterinarian), and I released her into the wild to enjoy her freedom as an act of kindness, and also because seeing her dragging herself around her cage in circles made me sad. My family likes to tell me that she was probably promptly eaten by a hawk the moment I set her free.

This is part and parcel to why I don't own pets anymore and why I don't think having children is a good idea for me either.

How to Ensure a Prosperous New Year.

Everyone in my family is pretty damned funny.  My sister likes to start traditions in our family, and 14 years ago, shortly before she had our First Annual Christmas Weenie Roast (I don't know that we had more than one), she created the tradition of The Christmas Snake.

It goes thusly:
If you wake up Christmas morning with a bed full of snakes, you will have a prosperous and happy New Year... if you don't die of fright, from waking up with a bed full of (rubber) snakes.

And this is probably why non-Christian funny people shouldn't be trusted to come up with Christmas traditions.

Ken Lee

Continuing with my theme of helpful posts, you know what is NOT helpful?  Correcting people's lyrics while they are gleefully singing the wrong words at the top of their lungs.

There are two things in play here... either the person REALIZES they just sang the wrong words and doesn't need to be embarrassed further to realize that they are wrong or they seriously don't give a shit and are just enjoying themselves.

But then a lyric Nazi comes along and is all "IT'S 'SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE,' NOT 'SHE'S OUT OF MY REACH'" and then I am all, "that doesn't even make sense, if she's like the wind, how is the wind out of his league? He must think really poorly of himself if blowing air is too good for him. Man, those lyrics are dumb!"


So, unless you are tasked with training someone for a singing competition, or a lyric game show, seriously, just let them sing shit wrong.

And then make fun of them on the internet by making a comic that points out they sang Jessie's Girl wrong when they were a kid.



p.s. Don't forget... birthday party, on the internet, this Sunday! No need to RSVP if you are specifically avoiding the internet that day to spite me, really... it is cruel.

VIRUS WARNING! QUICK! GIVE ME MONEY!

While I am entirely against violence and revenge, people who create those viruses that pretend to be virus warnings that try to trick computards, like my sister and her husband, who don't have anti-virus programs on their family's laptop (because WHO NEEDS ANTI-VIRUS!? YAY! THE INTERNETS! OOH WHAT'S THAT!? CLICK CLICK CLICK!

)

into paying said virus makers to remove the virus on their site that pretends to be "Window's Helpful Security Tool"... those people, they should have acupuncture needles inserted into their peeholes. I'm just saying. I don't condone violence*, but they kinda deserve it.

*This statement, the result of 11 hours of wrestling with a fake security warning virus out of the goodness of my heart, which kept me up until 6am, running and rerunning two different malware removers and spybot s&d, to try to get my sister's computer usable for her work trip (which she told me about last night at 7pm), only to find that the virus keeps me from being able to finish the last step to remove it (installing an actual anti-virus program) so that the whole hard drive needs to be wiped, though the backup OS disk has been lost of course, is not representative of my usual feelings or intentions towards hackers, who really should DIAF until I get more than 4 hours of sleep. Really, die.

<3, JRose

OMG! 100th POST!

HEY! HEY GUISE!!! This is my 100th post! OMG!!! I started this blarg in November because I wanted to bitch about my computer's touchpad. It is still a jerk, for the record. I think it would work better if I only had one finger. Damn my other fingers for being within THREE INCHES of the touch pad, DAMN THEM!


So, I'd like to tell you about one of the most frightening experiences of my teen years.  I grew up in a house in Miami Beach in a kinda middle class neighborhood.  My sister and I were both lucky enough to have our own rooms but we shared a bathroom.  Each night, there was an ongoing battle (that my sister probably didn't know was happening... can't recall ever bringing it up to her).

See, I am taller than my sister, and I'm also neurotic, as I have mentioned, and I was much more reserved than she was back then. So, every night when I went to take a shower, I would carefully stick together the pink plastic curtain that covered the big window in the shower (who the hell puts a giant window in a shower?!?) so that none of our neighbors would accidentally catch of glimpse of me while I was naked in the shower, that had a giant window in it... at my chest level, for some damned reason.  Of course, this meant I had to blindly fish for the shampoo and conditioners that were on the window sill behind the curtain, but it seemed worth it, because I am neurotic. Every single night, I would go in there and the curtain would be wide open and I would stick it back together, and every time my sister used it, being NOT neurotic, she would open it with wild abandon to get to the shampoo like a normal person.

And so it happened that I got up in the middle of the night, one night, to use the bathroom.  I sat down, half asleep, and started to pee.  And then I noticed movement to my left, towards the shower where my sister had left the curtain open.  'Ah,' I thought to myself plainly, 'It's just the shrub under the window.' And then it dawned on me, in slow motion. 'The shrub... is under my bedroom window.... not the bathroom...." at which point I turned my head ever so slowly to the left and saw the following:

Okay, he may not have had a Jason mask on, but I swear to weasels, that is what my brain interpreted in the split second I saw it. And then he was treated to the lovely view of me scrambling off the toilet (thankfully, I had finished peeing), pulling up my pants as I crawled, on all fours, out of the room.

Once I got out in the the hallway and shut the door, I tore through the house towards my parent's room and woke them up shouting that someone was looking in the window. This resulted in my dad pulling on his running shorts, backwards apparently, busting through the front door and chasing the Peeping Tom down our street holding up his shorts (that were threatening to fall off)  with one hand and waving, what I remember as a machete (but could have been either an ax handle or a Louisville Slugger), in his other hand, barefoot. He might have been yelling too.

I can't remember if that stopped the battle of the open curtain, but probably not.  It did give me a sort of kinship with Rockwell though.

Kids, it will grow back!

Yup, I have no reason for painting this.  I just really like the movie "Dragnet" and thought it would be enjoyed. Though I do have a sneaking suspicion that my sister, who classifies herself as a pagan on facebook, may actually be referring to P.A.G.A.N. instead of the actual established Pagan religion.

Oh Tannenbaum!

Hope you have had a Merry Christmas/Non-Denominational Winter Holiday/Saturday. 

 Just wanted to stop by and share the tree I made.  I needed a tree because I had to have something under which to put the presents, and a tree seemed appropriate.  It is much nicer than the tree my sister and I crafted many years ago out of a green plastic tablecloth, poster board, and  various found materials that looked almost exactly like this:

I've come a long way, baby!  Or maybe it is just because I did it myself and my musically-inclined but decidedly funny sister wasn't involved in the creative process.