Oh, really?

I'll bet she wouldn't be if you stuck a pair of forceps in her skull. I'm just saying...

Things to remember about raising boys

Readers who remember the habañero incident will have some idea of what my Lovely and Brilliant Wife and I have to look forward to. She comes from an all-female family (one of five daughters, and her mother was one of five daughters as well), and the only boy she's raised so far was an unusually well-behaved kid. So she's not prepared. I, on the other hand, proved several of Miss Cellania's points below. (I can personally attest to numbers 2, 9, 12, 16, 19 and a variation on 23.)

Do not be alarmed. Be very, very frightened.

THINGS TO LEARN AND REMEMBER

1. A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq.ft . house 4 inches deep.

2. If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.

3. A 3-year old Boy's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.

4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20x20 room.

5. You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few a times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.

6. The glass in windows (even double-pane) doesn't stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.

7. When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh oh", it's already too late.

8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.

9. A six-year old boy can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old man says they can only do it in the movies.

10. Certain Lego's will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year old boy

11. Play dough and microwave should not be used in the same sentence.

12. Super glue is forever.

13. No matter how much Jelly you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.

14. Pool filters do not like Jelly.

15. VCR's do not eject sandwiches.

16. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.

17. Marbles in petrol tanks make lots of noise when driving.

18. You probably DO NOT want to know what that odour is.

19. Always look in the oven before you turn it on; plastic toys do not like ovens.

20. The fire department has a 5-minute response time.

21. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.

22. It will, however, make cats dizzy.

23. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.

24. Raw eggs and semi digested cheese stick to walls and ceilings very well.

25. 80% of men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.

Anybody got any more lessons learned from raising boys?

World domination and sex!

Wahoo! Who could ask for more?

Tonight is my induction into the Knights of Columbus, which I'm assured is just like being a Jesuit, but it's for married men, which means with licit nookie!

Of course, I won't know all the secrets of the conspiracy until after tonight (and then I'll either have to pretend I don't or kill you), but I think I've figured it out. See, Knights get to wear these blue vests as their uniform. Where else do you see blue vests? That's right! Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart, you may recall, is only the biggest retailer in the world. They have what, thousands of stores? With millions employees who are disgruntled, underpaid and ripe for the revolution! Once we take over the cheap-clothing-and-housewares market, it's only a short step to wrecking the world economy and installing the Black Pope in Rob Walton's place. What need have we of the Throne of Peter when there's the Armchair of Sam? Then we can really rule the world! (Insert mad scientist laughter here.)

I'm looking forward to having an army of brainwashed minions like the one at right saluting me as I stroll through the auto parts aisle. But that's down the road a few years. In the meantime, I'll settle for some of the lesser perks of belonging to a secret society: Getting to use the carpool lane, getting out of a ticket by making the secret sign to the cop, and maybe even scoring a spot on Jeopardy!

See you at the New World Order pancake breakfast!

Once again, Mark Shea coined the right phrase

When "What could it hurt?" becomes How were we to know?"

How long do you reckon it'll be before calls start coming in for a shiny new (and gay-friendly) development on property occupied by Antioch Bible Church? Of course, nobody would ever manipulate the law against a religious organization for political reasons. Nah, can't happen.

Hooray for Franklin

I missed Ben Franklin's 300th birthday, which should have been celebrated with revelry and debauchery. Stacy Schiff of the NYT remembered, though, and sums up beautifully what his contributions were to our country. He not only gave us bifocals, stoves and newspapers, he also gave America its go-to-hell attitude. If Washington was the father of his country, Franklin was more like the disreputable uncle who teaches you to spit, swear and ogle wenches, and whom your parents would rather you didn't spend too much time around.

Happy birthday, Ben! And a H/T to Patrick at the Paragraph Farmer.

Americans are slow developers

Ran across this from Albertus Minimus:

Abortion. You know, the thing is, if the supporters of abortion could tell me when a human life begins, then there would be no real problem about it. After all, in essence this is not a religious argument but one based on reason: at some point after conception, according to those in favour of abortion, the status of the creature changes from non-human to human.

Now, in Britain we say that's at 24 weeks. In America it's only at birth. In Germany and France 12 weeks, Italy 13 weeks and Sweden 18 weeks. So from this I am forced to conclude that proto-Germans and pre-French turn into real German kinder and teeny French enfants a week quicker than Italians become mini bambini. The Swedes are pretty late developers, taking five weeks longer to change from being a bundle of cells into a full-on human being - it's probably the cold that slows them down. As for we Brits, it must be the weather, or the diet or something, but it takes us a full three months more than the Germans and the French (no!) to become little John Bulls. Finally, it's almost embarrassing to mention this, given that I have quite a few American readers, but I must sadly inform you that Americans are the tardiest of all: you don't turn into human beings until you're actually born. I can only conclude that it's a result of too many burgers.

Not even then, apparently. Even in the process of being born, we're not human until the mother and/or the doctors say we are.

This alone warrants a spot on the sidebar for Albertus. And I think I need a burger.

Jaw-jaw is better than what?

My first response, when I read the headlines about the members of Fathers 4 Justice who were arrested for plotting to kidnap Tony Blair's son was to shield my eyes and say "Oh, you idiots!" What Oklahoma City did for the constitutionalist, patriot and other political movements, this may yet do for fathers. Who will ever again take "fathers' rights" as anything but an oxymoron, especialy in Britain, which has policies that make ours look downright egalitarian? This might well have been enough to set fathers' rights (already shaky at best) back a decade or two. Up to now, Fathers 4 Justice has mostly pulled off stunts: running around in Batman costumes and the like to get publicity. An actual abduction would be a whole 'nother can of worms.

I should have read the story closer. Seems talking was all they did; there's no evidence that there was any definite intent:

Police sources have told the BBC they knew of suggestions of a plot to kidnap Tony Blair's five-year-old son Leo.

The Sun said police believed a fringe section of campaign group Fathers 4 Justice discussed the idea but did not have the ability to do it...

[BBC correspondent] Ben Ando said police had been investigating extreme groups linked to Fathers 4 Justice for some time.

"The plan only got as far as what they [police] called the chattering stage," he said.

"No real reconnaissance was carried out, no actual kidnap attempt was made, no-one has been arrested, and the police are not convinced those at the centre of the alleged plan had the capability to carry it out."

Men's advocate (and a bit of a loon) Angry Harry has his own take on the incident:

Thus far, this alleged 'plot' to kidnap Tony Blair's son - which is also on the very front page of the Sun today - seems to be nothing more than the police having come across some inane chatter on the internet - which probably went something like this.

"Blair's government has really fu##ed up my family. I bet he wouldn't like to see his own son taken away from him."

"Wow, Zingbat. That's a good idea. Why don't we kidnap Blair's son? That would teach him. And it would bring about some publicity too!"

"Yo, KingKong24156, that really would be a great idea. What other ideas do you have? I think that we should also all dress up like King Tutankhamun and build a huge pyramid in Hyde Park."

LOL!

But, thus far, this is what really seems to have gone on. And, from this, we have a conspiracy to kidnap Blair's son.

I can sympathize with these guys to a certian extent, if talking was all they're doing. Child abduction, you understand, is illegal – for men. For women, there's government assistance available.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. There's plenty of legal bias to go around, as my Lovely and Brilliant Wife has pointed out to me, on the many occasions that I've gotten bitter over a dad's plight. There are a lot of situations where a man has the upper hand, and especially in some states over others. But the fact is, it's a lot easier in general for a woman to restrict a man's parenting rights than it is for a man to get those rights back. There's an unwritten assumption in the public mind that men whose wives or girlfriends leave them are abusers (or at least jerks); it's the smoke-fire connection. I ran into this one three years ago, when I found out the hard way that there was effectively no legal recourse for parental abduction. It was technically illegal, but nothing was going to be done about it. (Of course, you can imagine what would have happened to a man who did the same.) All a father can do is wait to find out what parental rights (and how much of his paycheck) a vindictive woman wants him to have. When it comes to child custody, men and women are equal de jure but not de facto.

Things are a lot worse in the UK than they are here, I'm given to understand. In Britain, when a couple with children separates, Mama's word becomes law. If you think I was angry and frustrated (and you'd be right), imagine what a man with not even de jure legal standing goes through. He's basically a checkbook with a name. And the name is just as likely to be "Sperm Donor" as "Daddy."

In that situation, I suspect I'd find myself daydreaming about making a politician feel the same thing I did. I might even talk to a group of equally-screwed-over dads about my anger. Which is what this appears to have been. Meanwhile, the feminist goon squads (those same uterofascists who brought you abortion-on-demand and the Vagina Monolgues) gain a huge victory: Fathers 4 Justice is disbanding, and it will be a long time before any British father dares speak out too loudly again.

Congratulations, ladies.

Bones! This! Hurts!

Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a jeweler!

I may not remember the 80s as well as I thought I did, but at least I beat Miss Cellania on this one. My ego is restored.

True English Nerd You scored 89 erudition!

Not only do you know your subjects from your objects and your definite from your indefinite articles, but you've got quite a handle on the literature and the history of the language as well. Huzzah, and well done! The English snobs of Boston salute you.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 93% on erudition

Link: The Are You Truly Erudite? Test written by okellelala on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

What would yours be?

Your last meal, that is. Given it any thought? Me neither. Now I'll be lying awake at night constructing the perfect menu on which to meet my maker.

If you have a taste for really, really macabre trivia, check out Dead Man Eating.

I was there in the 80s! I was!

I only got 74.3 percent on this, which is kind of sad. For heaven's sake, I remember most of these songs from my teenage years. And I wasn't stoned through the decade, either.

I though this was particularly unfair:

Your generation stuck mine with a motherload of cultural horrors (bradys! disco! plaid! roller skating!). -30% for being a yuppie.

I was a child in the 70s! What's more, I was in one of those pockets of America that missed out on disco and roller skating. The Dukes of Hazzard and Little House on the Prairie were a lot closer to my experience. Of course, by the time high school rolled around, I was living in the suburbs of Seattle and experiencing real pop culture for the first time. (And the last; I gave up on it in about 1988 and shifted gears abruptly into geezerhood.)

Okay, all you grown-up Breakfast Clubbers. Let's see if you can do any better!

The end of the search?

Like any blogger with a fragile, insecure ego, I watch Sitemeter carefully to see where my meager readership is coming from, and some of the search engine referrals are amusing. Today's is probably the best I've seen so far:

Miss Tacoma hiney contest

Never heard of it, but it sounds fun. Anybody know where I can get a list of the winners?

Who the hell do these people think they are?

Yes, I know it's hard to judge an ignoramus for being one. But there's no excuse for taking a girl with Tourette's syndrome and asking her in front of her friends to leave a theater.

Jennifer Irizarry, 13, went to see "The Chronicles of Narnia" at Cinemagic on Dec. 26. Before the opening credits, several other movie-goers complained about her high-pitched squeaks and vocal outbursts.

She claims a manager led her to the lobby and threatened to eject her if she had another outburst. But theater management denies that she was asked to leave.

"What I told her was between me and her, but she wasn't forced to leave," said Jamie Pinard, the theater's general manger.

Realizing that her condition would worsen under the stress of being singled out in front of her friends, Irizarry decided to leave.

I don't give a rat's patoot if she was ejeccted or just hinted at. If she's got Tourette's, she jolly well knows she's making noise and is already killing herself to keep it down.

I know. I've got Tourette's, possibly a souvenir of my dad's Agent Orange exposure. (So does my oldest son, although he didn't get it from me; no genetic connection.) I was diagnosed at seven, and I spent my entire school career dealing with punishment from teachers, peer bullying, and horrid side effects because of it. My fifth grade year was spent hooting like an owl about every thirty seconds. Off and on, I've had tics like clacking my teeth like a nutcracker, and rolling my eyes as far back as they would go. Both of those result in brutal headaches. Fun, fun, fun.

"But why don't you just stop?" whine the ignorami. You betcha. Let's see you stop blinking. Really. I can stop ticcing just about as long as you can keep your eyelids still. And if you go too long without blinking, you do it twice as hard when you do give in to the urge. It's the same way with tics.

I'm not usually sensitive about Tourette's. It's technically a disability, but it's not like it's crippling. And it's not going to go away, either. So there's really nothing to do about it but laugh at it, and I do. For a while, my online name in chatrooms was "Twitchboy." I joke about being the "human castanet," that being my current tic.

But when I was 13, I was mortally sensitive about it. Kids would follow me in the school hallway, mimicking me. I had teachers who punished me for disrupting the class, as though I were getting a big ol' belly laugh out of grunting and twitching. And this lout with a manager's nametag has the gall to treat this girl as though she were one of those little splats that sit in the third row and throw popcorn at other patrons.

I hope the parents sue this theater raw. And if I knew how, I'd try to tell Jennifer that it really does get easier when you grow up. Nobody says anything to my face anymore; the people who know me know what makes me tic, and the people who don't are apt to think twice before giving trouble to a full-grown man. Eventually she'll learn to dismiss them with a withering look or phrase. But in the meantime, she's going to have to put up with ignorami who think the only disabilities are the ones that involve wheelchairs.

H/T to Amy the Advice Goddess, who, I hasten to add, doesn't strike me as ignorant. She does, however, strike me as both funny and right on target much of the time.

Perfectly understandable

He played the same Elvis song over and over again until she stabbed him with scissors. A fairly restrained response, if you ask me.

PERTH, Australia -- A woman stabbed her boyfriend with a pair of scissors because he repeatedly played the Elvis Presley hit "Burning Love" on the King's birthday, police said Tuesday.

The 35-year-old man was treated for six stab wounds to his head, back and legs at the hospital in the farming town of Northam in Western Australia state late Monday night but was allowed to go home, state police spokeswoman Ros Weatherall said.

Ain't love grand? H/T to Peculiarosities.

Society to Cut Up Men

Valerie Solonas would make a good guest-blogger at Pandagon or I Blame the Patriarchy. (I'm beginning to be unsure if the latter is really subtle parody or not.)

From the SCUM Manifesto:

It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the y(male) gene is an incomplete x(female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the service of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can't relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half-dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings - hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt - and, moreover, he is aware of what he is and isn't.

The hell of it is, this isn't parody. She's serious. (And, thank God, incarcerated.) Read the whole thing, and cringe.

Better a dinner of herbs...

Read this at Waiterrant and see if you don't just hurt for the woman.

The man orders an appetizer, soup, and the rack of lamb. When I turn to the wife she’s holding the menu in one hand and a Weight Watcher’s point book in the other.

“Oh, I don’t know what I can have,” the woman pouts.

“Oh for Chrissake’s pick something,” the husband says. What a nice supportive spouse.

Read through to the end. She should have married a waiter. If I ever treat my wife like anything less than the treasure she is, don't bother to shoot me. Just put me on the curb with the rest of the trash.

Thanks to Julie D.

Eichmann and Mengele were comfortable, too

From an ABC interview with the Arkansas Abortionist:

For years, he has been performing three abortions before lunch and three after, four days a week. He is unabashed, some would say shameless, in recommending the procedure. He has argued with everyone who has challenged his position, from local officials to protesters who oppose abortion, some of who firebombed his clinic in 1985.

And he remains entirely unambiguous when it comes to the fundamental issues at stake when considering to terminate a pregnancy.

"I consider the mother's life to be much more important than that little blob of tissue, and that's all it is at that time," he said.

I challenged him on this point, saying that this little blob to which he refers has by 20 days a beating heart and by 40 days a brain that's directing the functions of all the major organs.

The doctor conceded to me that all of that is true — and that he's comfortable with killing this notion of life.

Work makes free, and murder makes born again!

Just answer the question, Judge!

Jeff Goldstein should be bottled and dispensed only under prescription.

Biden: “With all due respect, Judge, don’t dodge the question. Will you or will you not allow hillbillies to take control of a woman’s uterus by removing it from her body and using it as a kind of mini-accesorized rucksack? A simple yes or no will do, sir!”

Read the whole thing with an absorbant pad of some kind on your chair.

Left-wing comic says more than the author intended

It's supposed to be a jab at wiretapping and torture apologists, but it doesn't take much of a stretch to make a few adjustments like filling in "fetus" for "kitten," and get the pro-abort party line. My hammer, my choice!

H/T to Washington State Political Report. Original cartoon here. I'm on the opposite side from this guy's politically, but cartoons like his mark a worthy adversary.

"Red Communist parasite snakes of hell"

As Dave Barry would say, that sounds like a good name for a rock band.

The Crusty Curmudgeon heard a hoot of a radio show that proves once again that the Fundie fringe is weirder than we ever suspected. There are more things in the airwaves, Horatio...