zombie dreams

After a marimba, a zip line, skateboard parts and art supplies, this may be the next thing on my material possessions wish list:

the remote control is brains! sooo awesome!

good bad guys

Dick Dastardly and ol' pal Muttley

You had me at the dog with the wheezy laugh. Hanna-Barbera nailed it when they made these characters.

On another note, I bet Dick Dastardly could pick up stuff using nothing but his jaw and nose.

crazy green snow

what do you see here? (for normal people, the answer is "crazy green snow.")

It is said that the Intuit language has 12 different words for snow. And the Zulu language in South Africa has a bunch of words for green. Apparently all that stuff is a bunch of lies. But still, the urban myth starters were onto something.

The English language should have at least 25 different words for crazy. Our culture is filled with all kinds of crazy. There is crazy like Aunt Ruth who wears her pajamas to the mayor’s luncheon, and there is crazy like when Sonny the Cuckoo Bird goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. There is crazy like the guy who goes to the football game dressed as a gorilla in a referee suit, and there is crazy like Jack Nicholson in the shining. There is crazy in love, and there is crazy Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. And those are just off the top of my head. There has to be 25, easy. Crazy abounds.

We need standard crazy archetypes. The crazies need to be pegged and named. It would be good for everybody. But you know who would especially appreciate it? Shrinks. Because when you’re in there lying on the leather couch, they wouldn’t have to be scribbling notes the whole time. They could just peg you in like 5 minutes, then spend the rest of the time telling you how to hide your dirty little personal issues and try to blend in with the normal people.

You know who else would love this? Our friends in the pharmaceutical industry! I bet 25 new/re-purposed meds would be on the market in a snap. There would be things like Kraemazor (for crazies like Kraemer from Seinfeld) and Lobotarol (for crazies who surf in hurricanes and try to make the Jackass highlight reel.) And police could profile suspects even better, and our world would be a safer place. Holy crap! This could be my shot at the Nobel Peace Prize…

Blast From the Past

photo by Austin Post May 18, 1980

I was 10 years old when the mountain exploded. Like the rest of the people in the Seattle area, I was completely fascinated with the story long before the eruption. I was especially intrigued by Harry Truman, a man who lived on Mt. St. Helens with 16 cats and refused to evacuate. Everyone said he was a grumpy old man, but I liked him. I wanted him to change his mind. I felt sorry for his cats.

I don’t remember hearing the eruption. Our next door neighbor Stan told us the news, then drove some of us neighborhood kids up to the Nike Missle Launch Site. We climbed up some towers that we probably weren’t supposed to be on. From the top, we looked out at the big fat mushroom cloud above the treeline.

I knew this was a big deal. I consciously made an effort to remember what I was seeing. But I also remember getting bored, and wondering if we had to stay all the way until the cloud came down, or until it all blew away. I don’t think we stayed much longer.

One last Mt. St. Helens memory- That summer, my friend Eric took a trip to eastern Washington, and scooped up a bunch of ash from the side of the road. We put some in a Gerber baby food jar and sold it to a stoked garbage man for a buck.

cereal numbers

i bet Kool-Aid would looove to crash through this wall.

this is the majority of the 39 boxes of cereal we had in our house last week. through a delicious loophole in the cogs of capitalism, i had the privilege of buying 36 boxes of cereal, 4 tickets to Toy Story 3 in 3D, and $20 in concession stand gift certificates, all for $32. there wasn’t even tax. or shady business.

THE CEREAL DEAL

Our local Kroger grocery store had a sale. Selected Kellogg’s cereals were $1.67 a box.

5 boxes of cereal costs $8.34

when you leave the store, the coupon that is printed with the receipt is worth $4 off anything in the store. you get this coupon whenever you buy 5 boxes or more of Kelloggs cereals. So I went to the self check out and scanned 5 at a time, getting as many of those $4 coupons as possible.

$8.34-4.00=$4.34

$4.34 for 5 boxes equals $.87 a box.

87 cents a box!

If only I would have had the Kelloggs coupon, it would have cost $.38 box. that’s 1970 pricing…

THE MOVIE DEAL

On the back of the boxes, there is a deal- collect codes (1 in each box) and get cool prizes.

For 3 codes, you can get $5 concession stand cash at the movie theater.

For 6 codes, you get a ticket to Toy Story 3 in 3D, or any Touchstone or Disney movie through June 2011.

for my plan, 4 movie tickets would cost 24 codes. $20 concession stand cash would cost 12 codes. I needed 36 boxes of cereal.

Extra cool is that the codes are entered over the internet, and the vouchers are printed from your home computer. No mailing stuff. Kellogg’s only lets you enter 5 codes a day. So far I’ve entered 26.

We’ve unloaded half of our cereal fortune onto unsuspecting friends, but pantry shelf-space is still a sold out show. I find it beautifully ironic that we are out of milk.

peanut butter and roasted marshmallow croissant

a crunchy all natural peanut butter (like Adam’s) is a nice contrast to marshmallow fluff.

if a campfire isn’t an option, marshmallow fluff can be bought in a jar in the marshmallow section. also, the microwave does a great job of roasting marshmallows.

croissants are good. I think pancakes might be even better.

hi mom

this is my mom at the grocery store with a potato.

Lamb History

this is a copyrighted wooly sheep puppet from animal world

Lambs. Where the hay did lambs come from? The wild? I would imagine they did at one time. then they got caught by farmers. and they were so easy to catch that the farmers all went out and grabbed as many lambs as they could. and pretty soon, PSHWTT! all lambs are claimed. Then the Lamb Wars. Everyone wanted lambs. but there were none to be had. So the farmers had to watch their backs. And instead of working their farms, they sat there and watched over their flocks. That’s when shepherds were invented. And the shepherds became kings because they cornered the lamb market. (the later years brought about the rent-a-shepherds and that whole fiasco with little boy blue.)

Lambs are cool because they don’t hold grudges. If they did, they would have attitude. But they don’t. They just chill. They didn’t even need to be tamed. they wanted to stay. there were no immediate threats on the horizon. so they just kind of relaxed into pastoral living. Easy livin’. They are now so domesticated that it really isn’t that unusual to imagine a lamb wearing an apron and pouring tea.

dang- i’ve spent all my time and i didn’t even get to talk about prehistoric brain tools. maybe next time.