Not words, not music or rhyme I want --

I was watching Hulu and an ad came on for car insurance. They were talking about things we've learned. "That's who's around your TV is more important than how big it is." etc. And finally ending with "And people who switch to (whatever) from (blahblah) save $$$ dollars a year."

Anyway, one LITTLE snippet amused the hell out of me. One of the lines was "We've learned that the best things in life are free." And it shows a women holding her baby.

Babies are technically free. However... You need hosptialization while you have said baby and the doctor visits leading up to that time. Then you have the carseat, the stroller, the carrier, the crib, the toys, the food, the clothes, etc. That shit ain't free. At that's JUST the beginning.

I even found this little calculator to prove it. "Child born in 2009, annual household income being 38,000 to 64,000, with a two parent household and public college." Life-time cost of child: right around $250,000. Give or take about $10,000 depending on where you live.

That's a QUARTER OF A MILLION in 18 years. Children are not free. They are FUCKING EXPENSIVE. /endrant.

1. Could anybody link me to the flow chart showing what corporate companies own natural/organic product brands? like Tom's of Maine & Colgate, Burt's Bees & Clorox, Pepsi & Naked Juice, etc.

Hey all-
I ran across this site, accidentally really but then got intrigued. Have any of you ever been to it, and if so what do you make of it?
More specifically, does anyone have experience using fenugreek or saw palmetto for breast growth?

http://www.greenbush.net/fenmorin.html

thanks!

Does anybody know of any GOOD used record stores in Nashville? By records I mean vinyl by the way, not cd's. Especially if they've got good 60's and 70's stuff and not just the usual boring yard sale Barbara Streisand fare.

Somebody mentioned McKays to me but if the nashville store is anything like the one in knoxville, I'd rather avoid it if possible. Bonus internet points if you know of any near donelson/hermitage but I'll drive a bit if necessary.

http://jezebel.com/5413949/cleaning-company-pulls-shiny-suds-video-apologizes-for-any-offense-we-caused (link with ad in case you didn't see it)

Here's a statement Method's spokeswoman just sent us(Jezebel):

"Thank you for your sincere feedback about our "Shiny Suds" video. It was not at all our intent to offend or promote any form of harassment. We understand the concerns associated with our video and are removing it from YouTube and all other controlled sources.

We heard and understood all of the feedback and concerns we received about the Shiny Suds video. We have removed the video from YouTube and other controlled sources, and we have reached out to every person who contacted us to let them know that we removed the video. We also apologized for any offense we caused.

Our intent in this campaign was to raise awareness for transparency in cleaning product labeling, and we will continue to push for that. I'm not sure if you recall, but at the end of the video, there was a link to a page where people could learn more about the Household Products Labeling Acts and submit letters to their representatives in support of the proposed legislation. Shortly after the video was released, more than 600 people had sent letters.

Method is a brand that is constantly growing and striving to improve. We've learned a great deal from this experience, and those learnings will certainly help us as we work on future projects."

Just in case any of you guys want to go back to Method/keep using it.

Yesterday may have been the first time that a parent seriously irritated me with something they said in relation to their spawn.

Mini-Background: I work in an historic fortification. It's 300 years old, the walls are fragile, and there are at least three places where you can read a "Do not sit or stand on the walls" message before you ever get upstairs. But does that deter people? Noooo...

Yesterday evening, near closing time, I was upstairs trying to keep the crazies off the walls and cannons (day after Thanksgiving, YIKES we were busy). There was a boy, probably about 11-12 years old, making his way along the wall, stepping from concrete steps (which you are allowed to walk on) to cannon embrasures (cutouts in the wall, which you are not allowed to walk on). I walked over to him and politely asked him to please not walk on the walls. He got down and rejoined his mother.

Apparently he said something to her about it, because I heard something about "...whole family standing on the wall over there..."(come on, I'm not made of eyes), and then she asked me, "Does that apply to everyone, or just my child?"

"Everyone!" I said.

She nodded, and they walked off without saying anything else. But the way she said it, and the implication, really just burned my biscuits. Like she thought her child was so good he was beyond reproach, or that I was singling him out for some reason, or... I don't even know. It just irritated me for the rest of the workday (which was thankfully not long).

The evening got much better, though. ( This part is pretty much shameless self-congratulation. )

Hey folks!
Was just wondering if anyone knew of a good, natural remedy for monkey butt, something both my brother and I have struggled with for many moons since we were kids first riding our dirtbikes.
For anyone thinking "say what?" monkey butt is the rash you get on your tokhes after you ride a bike or drive for a really long time, its most annoying and most of my usual anti-itch/rash remedies don't do much for it. Please lend me your wisdom!

This whole blog is pretty cool, but this article just shouted at me, "Post me on childfree!"

http://www.violentacres.com/archives/327/the-new-definition-of-a-bastard-child/

If I were to meet a pregnant, unwed Mother who told me that while she loved her partner and was committed to him completely, she would not be getting married because she didn’t think it was necessary to legalize her love, then I would applaud her wholeheartedly.
If I were to meet the same pregnant, unwed Mother, only this time she claimed that she might like to get married someday, but maybe not to her unborn child’s Father because she didn’t really know him that well and wasn’t sure that she wanted him as a life partner, then I would have to fight the urge to knock her vacant little teeth out.

( Text under here! )

Easiest way to ruin a nice meal in a restaurant? Get seated behind two women with a shrieking child who laugh every time it screams.

The only thing that kept me from chucking my ice water over the wall was the way my parents freaked out when my brother said that someone should shut the kid up. They were both, like, scandalized that the two women would hear him. Luckily, they left soon after he said that, because it was making my already bad mood a zillion times worse.

Crying and screaming children = one of the most annoying things ever.

Here it is once again this one note
from a string of longing

tightened suddenly from both ends
and held for plucking

tone torn out of one birdsong
though that bird

by now may be
where a call cannot

follow it
the same note goes on calling

across space and is heard now
in the old night and known there

a silence recognized
by the silence it calls to

Hello everyone,

I need your help! I have a rash on my face and neck (as seen in the pictures), and I'm not sure how to get rid of them. I'm hoping that they'll go away on their own soon, but it's been three days since I've had them and I haven't seen a significant difference. I'm not 100% what caused the rash, but I'm pretty sure that it's a cream sample that I put on my face (as seen in the pictures).

If I had health insurance, I would have scheduled an appointment with my doctor, but I'm unemployed right now so I have no health insurance so I'm trying to clear this up by myself. I don't mind waiting for it to clear up naturally, but I'm not sure if it will and I'm not sure if delaying will cause me to have any scarring (I'm probably freaking myself out, but I've never had anything like this happen before ...)

The only thing I've done is kept my face clean and applied some aloe vera gel on the rash. Please post possible remedies, advice, links, whatever. Thanks in advance.

( warning: somewhat large pictures behind the cut ... )

Does anyone know of a good, affordable ($20, $30 at most) place to get one's hair cut where they specialize in weird/ alternative/ asymmetrical cuts? It seems like every time I go to a professional stylist, my hair ends up looking not at all like what I wanted and/or really boring, I think because they're afraid to go too "wild" and that I'll regret it if I get the hair I actually want.

Hello,

Could anyone point me to some poems they enjoy that center around the theme of, or mention, monsters? Thank you.

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

Hi ho!

Last weekend I cleaned my laundry using vinegar for the very first time, and was pleased with the results. I was curious to know, could you use apple cider vinegar for this purpose too? Or is it just white vinegar?

ANIMALS

The phone call, from
my wife. She’s hungry,
she’s pregnant, someone
kicked her in the stomach—

we have to. I said yes,
but the reply I kept
to myself was We don’t
have to do a goddamn

thing. A dog. I’m talking
about a dog I would have
otherwise left to starve.
Now though, five years

since, I love this animal
more than I can most
people. And the boy,
six years old, who named

a dog and five cats after
our Lucy, the rescue?
The boy, my brother,
born in Henry Ford’s

hometown, lives now
in Lebanon, which
the Greeks called Phoenicia,
and they tried but failed

to subdue it, same as
the Egyptians, the Hittites,
Assyrians, Babylonians,
Alexander the Great,

Romans, Arabs, Crusaders,
Turks, the British, the French,
the Israelis. There, my father
built a house with money

earned in Detroit--as
a grocer, with social
security. Also there,
the first alphabet was

created, the first law
school built, the first
miracle of Jesus--
water, wine.

•

On the first day
the bombs fall they flee,
and the boy asks
to go back for Lucy,

the dog. As for the cats,
No. They take care of
themselves. One week
into it, he wonders

who feeds them, who fills
the water bowls. Maybe
the neighbors, the mother
thinks out loud. The father

is indignant--What
neighbors? The mother is
stunned--What do you
mean, what? After a month,

everyone forgets or just
stops talking about
the animals. Here, on
the other side, we can’t

help but shake our
heads so to say, Don’t
think about them.
During the ceasefire

my father drives south,
a thirty-minute trip
that lasts six hours--
wreckage upon

wreckage piled on
the roads, on what is
left of the roads.
The landscape entirely

gray, so catastrophic
he asks a passer-by
how far to his town
and is told You’re in it.

•

They found three of
the cats, all perforated,
one headless. The dog
was near the carport,

where it hid during
lightning storms, its torso
splayed in half, like
meat on a slab; its entrails

eaten by other dogs
scavenging on the streets.
Look. They’re animals.
Which is to say,

there are also people.
And I haven’t even
begun telling you
what was done to them.

I'm not sure how many of y'all have seen one of the newest Cracked articles, but it's quite relevant to our interests.

( For the link-phobic, 7 Things Good Parents Do That Screw Kids Up For Life )

I highly suggest clicking the link, though. The pictures and captions just make it. I know I'm not the only one to point these things out to certain people (especially that Baby Einstein thing), but now there's science to back it up =D

Under the cut is the most awesome thing these twenty-eight year old eyes of mine have ever witnessed: The Muppets doing their own rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". The epic win level on this is just through the roof. However, I have one slight complaint: people's reaction to it. I noticed on youtube (out of the near 5 million views it's recieved since being posted on the 23rd of this month that I've briefly sifted through out of curiosity), and people I personally know whom I've showed this to that, that excluding those who simply say "Awesome!" Or something simular that when someone mentions someone ABOUT the video itself it's the Animal section where he says "Mama!" a bunch of times. Granted, yes, that's part of the lyrics, and it's amusing and cute (even I'll admit it) in satire, but rarely does anyone mention anything ELSE. I've only seen two of my friends mention anything else, and neither of them have or want kids. The first is a female friend who mentioned how she loves Miss Piggy and how she finds it funny that herself and Miss Piggy think the same way and friend number two is a musician who's reply was how Electric Mayhem is the best band ever. But everyone else just obsesses over the "Mama!" part. It just goes to show how even in a little amusing video where people's belief's and feeling's are subconciously vs. those who think outside the family unit/breeder mental box and other things are what caught their attention.

( Read more... )

In light of the article freefloat posted about stroller moms, this is my own recent experience with one:

( I'm sure we've all heard our fair share of irritating stroller stories )


Also, an article I came across at the LA Times - Screaming kids and airplanes: Mayday! Mayday!

It's unfortunate for the rest of us that in both this article and the one that freefloat posted, the moms have become indignant and prevented any real change. It's not necessarily that people hate children or are too selfish to help, it's the sense of parents' entitlement, exemplified by the SUV strollers, and the "little muggings" of everyone's patience, safety, and peace of mind.