Weird Things FridayTM: Octopuses

Say hello to my little friend.

My daughter went through a phase where her favorite animal was the octopus. And I thought that was the coolest. I mean, how unique! How not My Pretty Pony of her!

We bought her stuffed octopi wherever we found them. One of my favorite memories is watching her, aged 5, leaving the aquarium gift shop carrying a giant leopard print stuffed octopus. It was as big as she was, so from the right angle, it looked like the octopus was walking.

Unfortunately, she's gotten over octopi. She thinks they're babyish. But I haven't. And neither have a lot of people.

For one thing, octopi are unique. And intelligent. And versatile. I mean, here I am, thinking I'm so great with my large mammalian brain and opposable thumbs--meanwhile, this octopus is working as an archeologist.



Admittedly, sometimes octopuses have terrible taste. For example, this octopus loves its Mr. Potato Head toy. Oh well. At least it's not a Bratz doll.

No wonder octopi are trendy!



An octopus can be a lamp that looks like an octopus or acts like one. Here's a whole bunch of lamps named for the amazing octopus. Although surprisingly enough, I couldn't find a single lamp with eight tentacles.

Then there are octopus purses



and necklaces--silver


and gold

an octopus Wiggle



and for very wealthy grown-up art collectors, this dazzling octopus bracelet from Tiffany, which will set you back $270,000.



There's even a blog, Everything Octopus.

Just wait until I tell my daughter. I mean, come on. When people are blogging about something, it's HAWT. Maybe she won't make me give her stuffed octopuses to the thrift shop.

So. I love octopuses. So much that I see them where they don't exist. Like those round yellow cakes that Yankees and ignorant people use for strawberry shortcake? If you line them up, they totally look like a row of suckers on an octopus's arm.

So do the little round holes the contractors made in the ceiling when they installed my Spacepak air conditioning.


Don't look now, but your ceiling is growing suckers ...

Maybe I'm a little obsessed, but we're all lucky this isn't Japan. If this were Japan, I'd probably be asking an octopus out on a date. Because you know how Japanese women apparently can't stop thinking about having sex with octopi.* Just think of the ramifications if I posted a picture of what is, inexplicably, a rather common fantasy in the land of the rising sun.

Because that would be porn.

Unless the picture is really old and by a Japanese master



in which case maybe it's OK.

* This gives a whole new meaning to WTF.

Our new favorite--the Harry Potter/Voldemort rap contest

And now, a brief shorts report

I am just sick in love with this meme thing. Weird Things Friday has me bubbling over with creativity. And since I never do anything by halves, and prefer to err on the side of overkill, I now proudly present

Truly Tacky Tuesday

which is the day I'm going to blog about the cornea-searing amounts of bad taste I see everywhere I look.

Especially if I'm at home.

I was really pleased with the idea of making fun of other people's bad taste (and in a pinch, my own.) I thought it was genius. And then the other day as I was shopping for groceries, I found myself wondering. What if I couldn't find anything to post about? What if I encountered a shortage of tackiness? What would I do then?

And then, as I left the grocery store, as if to put my fears to rest, my muse presented me with this:

Strolling along, lowering property values where ever they go.

I had to sneak the photograph, so let me describe what's going on there. This is two old ladies. Don't let the bright red hair fool you; the woman on the right was even older than the gray haired on the woman on the left.

Now, please notice the shorts. It was probably 80 degrees, and I was perfectly comfortable wearing jeans, sandals, and a shirt with three-quarter sleeves. And yet these women went outside wearing the kind of shorts I find problematical on 12 year olds.

It gets worse. The woman on the right had such--how can I put this tactfully--such vivacious flesh on her legs that with every step she took, it moved in all kinds of directions. Seriously, it was all over the map. Up, down, left, right, jiggle jiggle jiggle. Although the woman on the left with the gray hair had amazingly firm legs.

And then I took a closer look. She had on pantyhose. White pantyhose. The kind business women used to wear with their navy blue skirt suits, Reeboks, and floppy disk ties. Except this woman was wearing hers with shorts.

And so, since we're talking about abbreviated things, a haiku.

If you must wear shorts

--and really, no one wants that--

don't wear pantyhose.

I'm feeling campy today

Tuesday Am
Originally uploaded by iDTechCamp

This isn't a mommyblog. It's more like a Menoblog. A Menoblog in which I drivel on about the things middle-aged housewives become interested in when their child-bearing years are over. Like interior decorating, T.V., dead celebrities, annoying bureaucrats, and what to do about those kids who won't stay off my lawn, dagnabit!

Which means if you're looking for poop stories and tales of bloating and weird food cravings, look elsewhere. (If you don't know where to look, shoot me a comment. In my wanderings through the blogosphere, I've come across more Craving Mommies/Pooping Children blogs than you can shake a stick at.)

So anyway. This here is the boy (not the girl in brown, the tall fellow in green) at Here's My Hero How Do I Make Him Move? 3D Game Design camp (or whatever he was doing last week.)

Week before last it was 2D Games Design, or, Pac-Man Is Not Lame. Next week it's Let's Completely Rewrite World of Warcraft to Produce Version 2.0, and then we'll end the summer with Introduction to Programming in C++. (I know. How lame. But that's the medicine, and the three weeks of game design were the spoonful of sugar.)

See, we get more and more technical around here, and not all of us have the skills we need. So my son needs to learn moar computer-y stuff so he can help his mother with her blog. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm kicking myself.

I just know the formatting on this entry will be all screwed up. Whenever I use Flickr, the post ends up in single-spaced, teensy font. Why, oh, why, didn't I sign him up for HTML Programming for the Sons of MenoBloggers? Dagnabit!

Weird Things I LikeTM: Old crappe

Confession time: I'm a pack rat married to a pack rat.

And this is good news! It means there will never be a shortage of Weird Things for me to write about. I've got a few years worth of posts right here at home. This means you can look forward to some delightfully schadenfreude-y Fridays.* You'll look around at your tiny accumulation of old newspapers and catalogs and think "At least I'm not as bad as Poppy."

Here's how bad I am. Yesterday Mr. Buxom got a new violin string from Amazon.com. He'd been missing a string for a while, and as soon as he tuned up, he wanted to play.

Mind you, the last time he played the violin, internet shopping hadn't been invented. There was no Amazon.com. Or if there was, it was for buying books. Which gives you an idea of how long it's been since he's played.

Anyhow, he tuned up the violin and started looking around for his sheet music. And couldn't find it, so he asked me if I knew where it was. Now, we moved into this house 11 years ago and he hasn't used the music in all that time, so no, I didn't know where it was.

The contents of what we laughingly refer to as "the music room":
Four instruments, one amplifier, a bunch of music, and two
misplaced board games. What's missing? Talent.

I started digging through the sheet music. When I was finished going through my vocal music, my old piano music, my now-deceased father's piano music, the flute music for my daughter who never learned to play the flute, the recorder music from each child's third grade recorder-playing stage, my collection of sheet music from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, a few random bits of accordion and organ music of my father's which really shouldn't be here because we don't own or play an accordion or organ, I still hadn't found it.

A small sampling of my massive accumulation collection of vintage sheet
music. Do I actually play it? No. Do I frame it? No.
Does it hang out in the piano bench? Yes.

He started giving me the hairy eyeball, but I didn't throw his violin music out, I swear. I told him that if I haven't thrown out his Ranger Rick magazines from the early 1970s, or his high school spelunking equipment, or his grandfather's genealogy charts, or the 12 linear feet of National Geographic magazines even though ALL of the NG is available on disks now, I wouldn't have thrown out his violin music.

I mean, there's been an empty violin case in our basement storage area for years, and I haven't thrown THAT out.

And he believed me. Not because of my eloquence, but due to the completely ridiculous amount of crap I generously allow him to own.

I guess this means I need to clean/reorganize the basement, because I really believe there's a box of violin music down there somewhere. So if you don't hear from me for a few days, send paramedics. I'll probably be pinned under a collection of vintage Fisher-Price Little People sets.

---
* Yes, people. The internet has spoken, and the weekly Weird Things post is going to take place on Friday. Apparently people like the whole WTF idea.

If you look like your passport picture, you're not well enough to travel, or, why this entry doesn't have pictures.

Oh, internet; argh. Argh. ARGH.

I know it's not The Done Thing to whine and complain. I know that in the larger scheme of things, the little inconveniences I find so vexing are not really all that important. They're minor bagatelles along the lines of Eva Gabor as Lisa in Green Acres discovering that she chipped her nail polish while making flapjacks for Oliver.

But I swear to God, my attempts to get a U. S. passport today gave me a new respect for illegal immigrants. If it's this hard to get out of the country, what must it be like to try to sneak in?

At first I tried to do this the high-tech way. But have you ever visited the passport website? Don't. You'll drown. It's a perfect example of the Too Long; Didn't Read school of bureaucrat-ese. It's so bad that if you Google "passport" the first hits that come up aren't the government site; they're businesses that make their profits by adding a handling fee to the fee charged by the state department--just for walking you through the process.

Now I'm as cheap as the next Yankee, but today I spent over an hour in the post office dealing with a tiny little clerk named Bob while he tried to help me get a new passport. By the end of our time together, I was ready to pay any number of handling fees to make sure this passport thing would actually happen.

Bob was so tiny and woe-begone and incompetent, he was straight out of central casting. He could easily have played Bartleby the Scrivener or maybe one of the lesser Dickens characters. I felt sorry for him. After all, he's this tiny little white-haired postal worker. How loserish must he feel? So I turned on the charm and was patient and understanding. I smiled a lot. And when the pictures he took of me came out looking not just bad, but incredibly bad, making me look like a cross between my own grandmother and a jar of Grey Poupon mustard, I didn't fuss.

The thing is, Bob couldn't remember how much the passport fees were. He couldn't work the camera. Then he couldn't get the picture to print. Then he wandered around for a while looking for the "expedite" stamp, because it was so important. But then he stamped the wrong kind of envelope.

And I couldn't figure out why the sign on the wall was telling me that an expedited passport would cost $192.25 but he kept telling me it would be $135. I mean, since when does the federal government low-ball itself?

It turns out that by having me fill out labels and forms and self-addressed envelopes and such with my own white hands, he was saving me $25. Which I realize still doesn't add up. But when I asked him about it, he'd get out a piece of scratch paper and start adding columns. And I mean, come on! Scratch paper? Columns? Where's the sign on the wall with the fees? Even McDonald's does that. How do I know Bob's not giving me tonight's Lotto win?

After being sent back to the end of the line for not having everything ready to mail out, I wanted to grab Bob, pick him up by the front of his Postal Employee Shirt, and bounce him around like a paddle ball. And I could have done it. I think he was all of 5' 2" and weighed 70 pounds, including his pocket protector.

This is not my passport picture.
It's way too attractive.
But I think that's Bob.

I finally told Bob, "Hey, listen. I know I don't look it, but let's just assume for the moment that I'm rich. And eccentric. And don't want to save $25 by doing all this myself. Let's say that I'm willing to shove $192.25 at the nearest competent post office employee who will assure me--with a straight face--that I will have a replacement passport in my hand by August 6th. Because on August 6th, I'm getting on a plane to England even if I have to take you hostage to make it happen."

For some reason, he didn't take me seriously. It was very frustrating. I mean, things have come to a pretty pass when it's the customers who are going postal.

I don't feel at all confident that my passport will show up in time. And even if it does, I'll be kicking myself because that is seriously the worst picture that has ever been taken of me. And with my luck, I won't lose this passport. No, I'll probably be carrying it around for the next ten years, like a portable Picture of Dorian Gray.

Weird Things I LikeTM: Taxidermy

You know how all long-term bloggers decide to start something meme-ish so they devote a day a week to a themed post called "Wordless Wednesday" or "Song Lyric Saturday" or "Bodacious Tatas Tuesday?"

(OK, I made that last one up, but I think it's a great idea, so if you start it, email me. I might have some pictures you could use.)

So anyway, I tried to think of a category that would work for me. Because like many other long-term bloggers, I sometimes get tired of talking about my life.

And I think it's time I got famous for something. You know, like Five Star Friday (which I actually appeared in once) or Perfect Post (which I've never won. Even though I'm a long-term blogger. A bitter one.)

There's a problem with awards. To hand them out, I'd actually have to read a shitload of blogs. Even more than I read now. And a lot of what people seem to like are posts that moved them. You know, emotional stuff. And I hate stuff like that.

OK, what could I do week after week that wouldn't get old? Things I like. And thus was born Weird Things I Like.^TM

I have a really good feeling about this. This is a rich chocolately vein of blogging greatness. And I'm going to become famous at last! You'll meet me at BlogHer and then, after Weird Things I Like^TM has taken the blogosphere by storm, you'll be amazed when you realized how humble and almost ordinary I seemed!

It will be just like the time Susie Sunshine and I sat through the writer's panel at BlogHer in 2007 and there was Ree from Pioneer Woman and we had never heard of her and two seconds after BlogHer was over, she was this massive star who invented the maga-blog! And yet, she had seemed so normal.

Well, it will be just like that for me and Weird Things I Like^TM.

Now, because long-term bloggers seem to be stuck on similar sounds and like things to be awfully alliterative, I'd call my new meme-like thing "Weird Things I Like^TM Wednesday." Or, when it gets really popular, WTW.*

My first weird thing is taxidermy, which I love. Not to own. Don't go all PETA on me and start throwing paint at me or picketing the cocktail party I'm having at BlogHer** because I don't own any dead stuffed animals. Much as I admire real dead stuffed animals, I don't want to own one, because it would be really gross if I bought one and it didn't end up being preserved all that well.

But I love that part of the Field Museum where they set the dead stuffed animals up in little dioramas. First of all, it's cool that they set up the diorama once, maybe in the 1890s, and except for a once a week when the cleaning ladies come in to dust the giraffes, they never need to work on it again. Talk about efficient!


Also, dead stuffed animals have the sense to stay still so you can really gawk at them. Live animals are always asleep or hiding in a cave or something--everyone else at the zoo sees lots more animals than I do. I always seem to be looking in the wrong direction. Either they're not there at all, or they're going to the bathroom.

And taxidermy animals get along with each other. You can squeeze all kinds of them into a small exhibit space and they don't eat each other, have spats, or fight over territory.

And if they do fight or try to eat each other, it never really happens. This tiger will never actually eat that deer. It's kind of like Keats' Grecian Urn. You know?

So anyway, while this kind of thing is admittedly way over the top


This? Is cool.


* Maybe I should have Weird Things Friday, or WTF. Please leave a comment and let me know your preference.

** Saturday night. Email me for an invitation!