Don’t ask why

You would think with such excellent SEO ranking my site would be swimming with traffic, but that’s not the case, although spammers do seem to find me to comment on a regular basis.  So I headed on over to Alexa to check out what google searches are driving people to my site, and this is what i found:

That’s right, boys and girls, Ragnarok Raccoon.  The raccoon of the apocalypse.   Heck yeah.

Never mind that I’m on page 26 of that particular google search behind a bunch of sites about a video game and some cosplay stuff I don’t really want to know about, the fact that anyone would search for that at all, and then find me, is super cool.

Of course, now I have to write the Legend of the Ragnarok Raccoon.  What do you think Raccoons would be doing at the Norse apocalypse?

It was a dark winter indeed for folks in Norway, thanks to the Great Norwegian Butter Crisis of 2011.  It seems a low carb, high fat diet craze saw the country eating a whopping 1000 lbs more butter this year than last.  That, coupled with a rainy summer leading to poor milk production, and Norway’s outrageous duty tax on butter imports, created a perfect butter storm just in time for Christmas when the condiment disappeared from grocery shelves.  Norwegians were in a panic, left wondering how they could survive a Christmas without the 47 million varieties of traditional Norwegian Christmas goodies that rely heavily on butter.

Wanna buy some buttah?

A couple of altruistic (and entrepreneurial) Swedes decided to help out their fellow Scandinavians- for a price.  They were caught with a truckload of the creamy gold they intended to sell for about $40 an 18 0z packet.  With a profit margin like that, I’d be tempted to load up a suitcase of the stuff and fly to Norway myself.  I’d sell it all at a premium, more than cover the cost of my airfare, then head over to Sweden for a relaxing and buttery Christmas vacation.  I’d be worried about customs though… what if they have butter-sniffing dogs at the airport?  I’d spend my days in a Norwegian prison, being fed lutefisk and biscuits with no butter.

All-in-all, if your country’s largest concern is a shortage of butter, then I’d say things are going pretty well for you.  And anyway, can we truly feel superior, when we ourselves are facing such a crippling syrup shortage?  Will we face stacks of dry pancakes, and Canadian smugglers looking to profit from our sweet, sweet misfortunes?  Will Waffle House and IHOP look for a government bailout, and will everyone Leggo our Eggo?  Will we be forced to diet, and eat a sensible breakfast containing a whole grain product, and some sort of fresh fruit?

The horrors that are to come we have yet to know.  For now, I’m just glad my Christmas was filled with laughter, light, and lots and lots of butter.

MTSU’s band was right near us, too – as a side note, MTSU is supposed to stand for Middle  Tennessee State University, but I’m pretty sure the real name is Middle Tuba State University.  Seriously, they had, like, at least a thousand tubas.   What’s with that?

When Mike went to get us petros from the concession stand (yummiest fast food in the world) he saw this:

What, precisely, constitutes a multi-purpose spoon?   How many uses are there?  Who came up with this anyway?

According to some stuff I just made up, The multi-purpose spoon was invented in 1678 by the 17th Earl of Sandwich, who grew tired of single-use items cluttering up the place.  He had drawers and drawers full of random utensils, some of which would only be used once every seven years, and so he created the marvelous Multi-Purpose Spoon… and that is one of The Lesser Known Achievements of the Earl of Sandwich

Without further ado, I present to you, the…

Top Ten Uses of the Multi-purpose Spoon

1. Nose-Balancing
2. Digging very shallow graves
3. Fashioning a make-shift knife, or “shiv”
4. Hand-held eye patch
5. Life-raft for ants
6. Spoon puppet theater
7. Back scratcher
8. Carving out the hearts of your enemies in place of an axe – because it’s dull, and it will hurt more.
9. Catching water from very tiny leaks
10. Flossing your toes

How many uses can you come up with?

Said in my house this week:

• “I want to find out who does the advertising for Old Navy.  I want to go to their house, and shoot them in the calf with a BB gun for making me watch this commercial.  I think the calf would be the second most painful place to be shot.”
• “He kicked him in the dugongs!”
• “Son of a biscuit-eating horse!”
• “Hey Punkin.”  ”I not Punkin, I am Ezzy!”

You so have to try this out!   It’s short, but loads of fun being creative.

Also, I’ve been pondering the questionable nature of “adulthood”:

• My favorite comic ever.  Let your mouse hover over the comic to read the alt text.
• Also relevant, my favorite commercial ever: “The fact that I’m responsible for the upbringing of another human being is utterly ridiculous.”

Sorry about that.   My laptop has had issues for a while with charging, and it finally gave up on me.  It was out of commission until my talented hubby could get the right part and solder a new pluggy-in-thingy (that’s the technical term) to the motherboard.

But happily, all is well again, and I’m back now.  I’ll be writing something brilliant and insightful for you in a bit (that is a terrible lie; I’ll write something silly and inconsequential, but hilariously funny – or at least mildly amusing), but in the meantime, here’s a corny IM conversation I had with my husband to hold you over:

ME:   dib just threw up corn husk – i bet that’s what’s making him sick.

so, i read this “There are no reported toxicities associated with Corn Husk ingestion in cats. It is very unlikely that the husk itself causes a problem, but there are certain molds that can affect corn that may be an issue.”

MIKE:   ahh

ME:    this corn is wormy and a bit moly at the tips of the ears.

moldy

moly corn is another issue entirely.

‘specially if it has holes.

MIKE:   throw it out

ME:   then its holy moly corn.

i did

MIKE: nice

are you making sounds for it as you throw it away?

 it’s foley’d holy moly corn

ME:   lol

hey, it keeps moving across the table when i try to pick it up…

it’s roly poley foley’d holy moley corn.

MIKE:   is there only one ear left?

it’s soley roly poley foley’d holy moley corn

wow a conversation worthy of the blogess

ME:   oddly enough, there’s a shallow body of water on the table, and the corn got stuck in it…

it’s shoaly soley roly poley foley’d holy moley corn.

and it likes to go for walks.

it’s strolly shoaly soley roly poley foley’d holy moley corn

MIKE:   this

I win all of the things. 

This post may end up being slightly spoiler-ish, so be forewarned.

Priest is a vampire film, but no sparkly vamp-lovers here.  Priest sends vampires back where they came from: the dark, monster-filled realm of nightmare fodder.  The vampires here are creatures entirely separate from humanity.  The war between humanity and vampires wreaks havoc on the land, and sends humanity cowering inside walled cities controlled by the church.

A warrior-caste arises: the Priests, people of unique gifts who are trained to fight and destroy vampires.  They fight back the vampire menace, until what is left of the vampire clans are confined to reservations.  With the war over, the Priests are no longer needed, and are ordered to re-assimilate with the public.

This then, is the time in which the film takes place, years after the end of the war, with humans still crowded in church-ruled cities and vampires corralled in reservations, and only the “un-godly heathens” populating the still-radioactive wastelands in-between.

When a vampire attacks a Priest’s family back in the wastelands, he braves the sanctions of the church to track down the vampires responsible and rescue his kin.

First things first:

The acting was brilliant all-around in this movie, especially Paul Bettany and Maggie Q.  They managed to imbue such stoic characters with so many levels of deep feeling.

The special effects were briliant, in that it never actually occurred to me at the time that they were special effects.  Everything from the stunning post-apocalyptic vistas to the slobbering, double-jointed, eye-less vampires flowed seemlessly with the live action.

The story drew me in, and even though I saw the “twist” coming for a ways, it really worked and so I didn’t mind.

Where Priest excels, though, is in the vision of the world itself.

I found myself totally immersed in the world of the priests – The cities are places of darkness and dirt, the sun blotted out by smoke from the fossil fuels burned constantly to meet the overcrowded populaces needs.  The Priests have difficulty “re-integrating” into society, much like our own soldiers often do.  They’re relegated to menial work, and ostracized by the society they saved.  The church is an ever-present, all-powerful authority. Their motto:  To go against the church is to go against God.  That is indeed the choice the Priest must face, when the clergy forbid him to leave the city to help his family over concerns that a Priest returning to the wastelands will spark fear that the war is not over.

The image of our protagonist is one of a man of deep faith, frustrated by the clergy he serves.  He turns to the church for answers and peace, and finds only platitudes and indifference.  The hierarchy is more concerned with maintaining control than serving truth.  He chooses to follow his heart and his conscience, knowing that he will be ostracized by the church. The Priest is a man of few words, but Bettany manages to say volumes with none.  It seems clear all the time that the Priest is deeply conflicted and struggles with the cognitive dissonance between the picture he is presented of God, the edicts of the church, and doing what his heart knows to be right.

As the story goes on, we meet a female priest (played by Maggie Q) who served with him during the war.  It becomes clear that there are (or were) strong feelings between them, but for the Priest, his vows to the church, and some personal baggage to boot, are enough to keep him chaste.  The romantic tension between these two is palpable, and my heart ached along with them.

This movie is easily one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.  I highly recommend it!

That is, if you listen to the folks at Elenin.org, who believe that the recently discovered comet Elenin, which is currently passing through our solar system (closest to us in early October) is a harbinger of destruction.   I don’t really feel like going through all of their rationale here; suffice it to say that their reasons are many.  It begins with the unlikelyhood of Elenin’s discovery, the presence of another comet in the vicinity, and progresses to Hopi prophecy and the ever-popular Mayan calendar (with an impressive recalculation of dates based on calendar changes through time) to come to the conclusion that the end of the world is nigh.

Could this be it?  Maybe this is the end.  Maybe it’s time to accept the inevitable, brace ourselves for planetary catastrophe, and (should we be among the unlucky survivors of this astral armageddon) the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse which will follow!

Don Yeomans, a scientist at NASA JPL begs to differ.

“So you’ve got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers [about 22 million miles),” said Yeomans. “It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean’s tides than comet Elenin ever will.”

So, really, it’s more like we’re having a very slow snowball fight with distant solar systems, who have very bad aim.  Darn.  And I already ordered my Zombie Survival Kit.

So, at the Bristol race this past weekend, this happened.  A man was arrested for streaking- not a novel event for a Nascar weekend, surely.  Things didn’t really get interesting until detectives searched his car.  In the words of  Matt Austin, of the Bristol, Tenn. police:  ”With that we also [found that] he and a companion were in possession of a raccoon.”

In possession of a raccoon.  Is that a thing?  Like, in possession of a loaded firearm; in possession of drug paraphernalia; in possession of a RACCOON???

But wait, there’s more!  From Matt Austin, of the Bristol, Tenn. police:  ”They said his girlfriend rescued it from a park, but as far as where it actually came from, we couldn’t really say for sure.”  Apparently this is the mystery of the year for the Bristol, Tennessee Police Department. And why wouldn’t it be?  Raccoons are the most shady of all the woodland creatures.  Maybe he was rescued from a park, maybe he wasn’t; I couldn’t really say for sure.

Maybe he just came from a burglary – he is wearing a mask.  Maybe he came from the strip near the raceway, where he was conning tourists with the three card monte trick.

Maybe he came from a fraternity kegger, filled with loose women, loud music, and underage drinking.

You never can tell with raccoons.  Not for sure.

So, I’m trying to picture the sequence of events, here.  Let’s say you and your girlfriend have a raccoon in your car for some reason.  Maybe you rescued it from a park, maybe you didn’t; I couldn’t really say for sure.

Maybe the raccoon got on the wrong end of a business deal with a one-fanged rat and a murder of crows, and needed a quick get-away.

Maybe he was standing outside the Bristol, Tenn. Wal-Mart with a cardboard sign saying “need ryde, wil bartar” (raccoons have terrible spelling), and you thought, “What the heck, why not live a little?” so you told him to hop in, and enjoy the ride.

The important point is that you have a raccoon in your car.

So you say to your girlfriend, “You and the raccoon stay here, I’m going to take off all my clothes and go run around the parking lot of the liquor store up the road; I’ll be right back.”

Or maybe, you challenged the raccoon to a little strip poker, thinking you’d get to see what he’s hiding under his itty-bitty black mask, only as everyone (but you, apparently) knows, raccoons always win at card games, because they cheat.  So you lost, and you’re running around the parking lot of the Grab ‘n Go liquor store with your business hanging out for the world to see, and he’s just sitting there in the car, watching you, and laughing.  With your girlfriend.

And now, you”ll be sitting in the back of a squad car, naked as a jay bird (except for the handcuffs) while Matt Austin, of the Bristol, Tenn. police and his fellow police officers are stuck trying to wrangle this (also naked) raccoon (except for his itty-bitty black mask) out of your car and into an animal control van, pending further investigation into where, precisely he came from.

Raccoons, man.  You gotta watch’em.

The other thing is, having bipolar disorder, it’s really hard to know who this “me” person is, anyhow.

I’ve been struggling a lot lately.  I’ve been a bit depressed, a touch hypomanic, kind of all mixed up really.  I’m working with my doc to get my meds straightened out and get me back on an even keel, but it’s rough going right now.  Sometimes I’m so antisocial that leaving my bedroom seems almost unbearable, and I would rather stare into space while i retreat into the fantasy world in my own head than speak to my family; sometimes i want to start a dozen projects at once, fully confident in my ability to accomplish them all, despite never having finished – and rarely even begun – similar schemes in times past.

I see myself alternately as confident, independent and successful, and then helpless, needy, useless.  I have planned to be an artist, to study linguistics, to write a novel, to leave this mundane life and backpack across Europe (despite the fact that I don’t do the outdoors) and a million other things.  I guess I’m still not sure what I want to be when i grow up.

For now, I’m going to blog.  I’ve wanted to write, and small bite-sized articles seem a whole lot more feasible than a great big book.

I’ll take it slowly.  For now, I’ll do this.

Baby steps.

I’ll be the first to admit it; I am not immune.  Far from it, in fact. I have read sappy teen books about sparkly vampires, and vampire brothers fighting over the same girl; I have read adult mysteries about vampire detectives, and half-selkie amateur detectives with vampire boyfriends, and telepathic barmaids embroiled in vampire politics; and I have followed brother, barmaid, and sparkly vamp boy to film and tv screens.

So, what is the appeal?  How do you find romance with a dead guy who wants to eat you?

Maybe, that’s part of the allure – we are drawn to that which is foreign and frightening to us; we seek out that thrill, that rush of adrenaline from the unfamiliar – and potentially unsafe.

But isn’t that the way love goes?

I’m going to make a broad generalization here that’s not very politically correct, so if you’re the sort of person who is easily offended, you might want to stop reading now.

Still with me?  OK, here goes:

Men and women are different.  We are.  Physiologically speaking, we’re just wired differently.

For instance, when a woman experiences a stressful emotion – fear, anger, etc. – a great many areas in the brain go on high alert – emotional centers, as well as areas responsible for conscious thought and social skills.  What that means is that we are constantly thinking about how we feel, and how everyone around us feels.  We can’t NOT think about it, as that’s where the feeling is taking place.  (Also, the hormone cortisol which floods the body during times of stress causes serotonin levels -naturally higher in women than men- to drop, triggering cravings for fatty, high-calorie foods.  This may explain women’s propensity to respond to crises by baking casseroles.)

On the other hand,  In men, the area of the brain responsible for the  ”fight or flight” response is activated.  So a man’s first reaction to an emotional situation is to look for something to do about it.

Let’s look at a practical example.  Think of early man, living in small villages and sleeping in simple huts, before the advent of concrete and home alarm systems.  The children are playing with small rocks, and dolls made of leaves and grass, The women are cooking small mammals over an open fire, and the men are sharpening their spears and talking about how skillfully they hunted down and killed the small mammals.

Suddenly, an angry ravenous bear- an altogether larger mammal than either the dead ones over the fires or the live ones gathered round it – charges into camp, towers over the small children, and roars angrily and ravenously.

A woman’s thoughts at that moment might go something like this:

” Oh my goodness, an angry ravenous bear!  I’m so afraid!  The children!  What if the bear eats one of them?  I would be devastated and overcome with grief!  They must be so terrified!  And Sally is right there, too, she must be terrified as well.  I hope we all survive!  When this is over, Sally and the children will be too distraught to function properly.  I’ll have to go and visit them to offer comfort; I think I’ll take them a casserole.  Do I have enough vegetables for that yummy one with the berries?  I may have to go gather some later, when there aren’t angry ravenous bears charging about. Someone really ought to do something about that bear!”