grammardog

I can't stop watching this and laughing till I gag.



In some ways, I am pretty much 12 years old.

Here are two things that recently made me laugh until I cried:

For complicated reasons I wont get into, I searched Youtube to hear the noise that a goat makes. I did not expect to hear a goat that basically sounded like Louie Anderson.



The second thing is this article about atheists agreeing to look after the pets of evangelicals after the rapture comes, from the Telegraph. It's so funny I can't bear the thought of the link conking out in the future, so I'm ( going to paste it all under here for future reference. )

I'm trying to move and all, but I interrupt that process to bring you an important breaking news bulletin: FABIO RELEASED A SPOKEN WORD ALBUM IN THE EARLY 90'S. There are a bunch of little mini tracks available here, and I swear to you, you won't regret it. I recommend "Fabio on Surprises", if only to hear Fabio and his accent turn "surprise my lady" into "supress my lady".

I just can't believe this actually happened.

THE SUN CAME OUT. Here, Bea Arthur watches it rise with skepticism. It's been away too long. He's lost his ability to trust. His innocence is gone.



In other news, this story nearly killed me dead this morning. I especially like the "hi-hi-hi-hi" part, and the part about the tube top.

My dad obsesses over birds. He's built a hundred birdhouses and popped them up all over the yard to attract them. He loves all birds except for the lowly crow, which he sees as the schoolyard bully trying to maliciously steal food and territory from other birds. I have seen my father creep up to and suddenly burst out of the back door flapping his arms and hissing, as you would at a bad cat, to scare off crows. He doesn't just want them to GO - he genuinely wants to instill fear and doubt in their hearts. He also sneaks up to the venetian blind in the window and quickly whips it up and down to frighten them into never returning. So far, this hasn't really worked.

At brunch yesterday, my dad told me that he was playing wet nurse to four tiny baby birds that had been born in one of his birdhouses. He said he had been watching them for a couple of days (I have no doubt that he meant this almost literally), and didn't see the mother in and out at all to feed the babies. "I figured a crow must have got her", he said with the kind of disgust generally reserved for war criminals and pedophiles. So my father, seeing hungry children in need, went around the backyard looking for ants to feed the babies. He crushed a dozen ants gently with his finger, put them on a plate, and got on a stepladder to see if the babies would eat them. Alas, they showed no interest in the ants and continued to peep at him in such a way that caused him to go into the kitchen to find something more baby-bird appropriate. He decided on milk with some banana mashed up in it, spooned into the tiny bowl formed by the tip cut off of the banana, which apparently the baby birds gorged themselves on, to his paternal delight. When I asked him why he chose the milk, he replied matter-of-factly, "Everybody drinks milk". I really don't think he even considered that birds are not mammals...? I decided not to mention that no bird has ever produced milk, because he said mournfully that the day after he fed the birds milk and bananas, there was no sign of life from the nest, and worse, he had seen an adult bird flying in and out.

This is the e-mail he sent me this morning after I asked for an update:

Last night I found one, dead on the ground, probably flew the coop too early or just fell out. Although I didn't look in the house, it was very quiet, and no adult birds around, so I thought I may have done them in with the banana and milk. Looking up at the house late last night, it was kind of eerie, almost like a haunted house. I had trouble sleeping last night. However, This morning, I see the little ones sticking their beaks out and an adult bird (I'd say it's an aunt), coming and going, so things are looking up.

LIKE A HAUNTED HOUSE.

Sally and I have re-started going to the gym. Yesterday she was using an elliptical machine in front of me while I huffed and puffed away on some other equally torturous device. After four minutes, she turned around frowning with her mp3 player still on, dismounted, pointed at the offending elliptical and shouted, "This is BULLSHIT!" I love her.

Speaking of the gym, what are you guys listening to at the gym these days? I need something loud, fast, danceable, and motivating, no matter how awful, basically.

I was browsing on the internerd for upcoming Stevie Wonder tour dates (Note: this is the hardest thing to find on the internet. WHY?) and got this pop-up:

Most definitely. And notify me if he manages to untie himself, too, will you?

This is so frigging hilarious to me.

Dear readers, your wait is over. Bea Arthur is finally in the movies!



This guy makes me laugh every day. His toy got stuck on his TOENAIL, for heaven's sake!

If anyone needs to make an animated .gif out of this for me, go right ahead.

In other news, Bea Arthur has a new habit of digging all the plastic bags out from under the shelf in the kitchen and sitting in the middle of them.



Oh, the terrible twos!

Day 6 of Eight Days Happy:

Today my dad is having his last radiation treatment. We don't know anything yet about whether or not the chemo and radiation have helped, but whatever happens, I'm so glad this part is over for now. It's been a long and stressful six weeks, and it's such a gross experience that I would wish on hardly anybody (but let's face it, some people deserve it).

Edited to add this snippet of phone conversation I just had with my dad:

Me: Do you need me to return the vacuum today?
Dad: No, I think we can wait... Mom went over the floor with her sniffer this morning.
Me: (pause) You mean her Swiffer?
Dad: Oh yeah, right.

I have had this really, really ugly shade-less lamp for a few years which had a piece of very pretty green glass in it, but I never bothered to take the time to take the glass out. Today I took off all the ugly shiny brass and am now using the fun glass with the circle pattern as a hurricane lantern to keep Bea out of the candles.



I also begged some crab apples from the neighbours and bottled 14 jars of jelly tonight. Such sweaty, labour intensive work, and I must have accidentally put my thumb into the boiling water five times while moving the jars. I can't imagine having to do it with a hundred times the produce to actually feed your family, like my grandmother did.

I'm feeling mentally inspired by some of the recent works of Olga on Craftster. I find furniture refinishing to be so intimidating. Also, if anyone had ever told me they had refinished a beautiful buffet in black, white, and yellow, I would have thought they were out of their tree, but look how pretty that first project is! I wish I had the vision to see a project like that in my mind before it was done, but I feel I'm destined to mimic rather than truly create.

Since we're on a crafty theme, here is the shirt I stencilled for brantastic for her birthday. For reasons which I feel will be impossible to describe, we invented a fake band called Girl and the Orbisons, so I made a fake band t-shirt. It took forever to cut that stencil, but I was super happy with the way it turned out.



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My dad today, gesturing at a new building going up near Penhorn Mall:

"We should sell the house and buy one of those condos right there... look how close it is to Sears."

(Pause)

"We could WALK TO SEARS!"

In other My Dad news, he spent an hour and a half on the phone the other night voting for his favourite Canadian Idol. When I found this utterly hilarious, his only comment was, "It's the finals! Where's your spirit?" He cajoled my visiting aunt into calling with her cell phone and voting for Mitch, as well. At 9:59, he shouted agitatedly at my mother and aunt, who were busy chatting and laughing. "Get READY! The lines are almost open!" The clock turned to 10:00, and Dad frantically dialed the phone number and listened for a ring tone.

"I don't hear anything." (Shakes, then peers at the device in his hand.)

"THIS ISN'T THE PHONE!" (Throws down remote control, grabs actual phone and starts dialing.)

Seriously, that happened. My dad dialed the remote control.

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Halifax Harbour at Dusk, August 2008

Saturday night, Sally, Dodie and I went down to the waterfront to watch Empire of the Ants at the AlFresco Film Festo:



It was AMAZING. Seeing bitchy Joan Collins get possessed by a giant radioactive ant was the best thing in my life so far. Also, the line "My GOD - they're herding us like cattle!" is the comedic equivalent of a squirrel storing nuts away for the long winter, as I expect it will keep me sated, snort-wise, for months to come.

Otherwise I have done nothing this weekend except sleep, eat, and IT. Much needed.

Oh, and I DID go down to the market and make a small amount of DELICIOUS crabapple jelly. And I picked up these pretty dahlias for only $3!

My favourite totally brain-free television (uh, besides Melrose Place) is Judge Judy. I qualify that statement with the following:



Poll #1246660
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

Is this as funny as I think it is?

This woman needs her own comic strip.

Looking through my journal for an old entry, I found this foreshadowing snippet from before I moved out of my parents' place:

Aaaaanyway, long story short, I am looking for a place that's as close to work as possible, and as cheap as possible. I'm hoping to live alone or with Bea Arthur.

I MADE IT HAPPEN!

This was the sunrise outside my bedroom window when I woke up this morning:



It made getting up to another totally WINTER DAY not SO terrible. I GUESS.

Sally's birthday is today! Happy birthday, pretty-pretty. I made this chocolate and GUINNESS(!) cake on javamaven1's recommendation, and it was SO UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS. I made 3/4 of the recipe which was ample, borrowed pans (I don't have cake pans, apparently) from nonethewiser and the downstairses, and topped it with a buttercream frosting instead of the ganache in the recipe, and it was just lovely. Here is Sally about to make a wish, and I'm pretty sure she wished for me to stop taking pictures of the cake so she could eat it.



Bea Arthur tested the buttercream before I put it on the cake. You know, to make sure it was alright.



On Easter morning, a bunch of folks were invited to brunch at my parents' house. A discussion was started about religion and the relevancy of it in our personal lives (I didn't start it, I swear), and my dad got frustrated and went outside to do yard work. That night, we were invited to dinner at one of the people's houses who had attended the brunch (AWKWARD SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION AWARD!) and when we sat down at the table, my dad had posted this sign in the center:



Laugh or cry, right? I love my dad.

So I was in this training session a couple of weeks ago, led by two women at my workplace. There were about a dozen participants, and everyone in the room was female except for one. We did a classic icebreaking activity called "Two Truths and A Lie", wherein all participants have to tell two truths about themselves and one lie, and everyone has to try to guess what the lie is. Throughout play, we discovered some interesting facts about some women in the group: one was a maniacal baseball junkie, another had been a competitive downhill skier for years and trained for the Olympics, and another was a coach for her kid's soccer team. The man talked about places he had travelled. Not five minutes after the activity ended, one of the moderators used the term "out in left field", then yukked, "There's a sport analogy to appease the one man in the group."

It was frustrating! I wish people would think more carefully about the messages they send out, not that any of us aren't guilty of pushing antiquated stereotypes at times. Especially if you have kids, or spend any time with kids, would you please give that one some thought?

I'm ready to move on and talk about the kind of sexist exhibition that makes me happy, and that's CODCO. Here is a clip from one of the best comedy sketch groups ever on the telly. Ooh, boy, there's some sweet Newf in there. "She SEEN me!" Jesus. I don't know if you have to be a Canadian to truly enjoy this or not... possible. GOD, I love Youtube.



I'm not sure if anyone else has realized this yet, but Ernest Hemingway is a very talented writer. Next week: I discover Led Zeppelin.