just in case you were wondering if any of the boys has a bright future in the motion picture industry...

i'm thinkin maybe THEY DON'T.

it's all fun and games until they don't let you quit...

they had fun raking the front yard. then i tried to get them to rake the back yard, too. i explained that the truck that sucks up the leaves can only suck them up from the curb, hence, all back yard leaves needed to be raked all the way to the front.

this was the point at which they caught on to the fact that raking leaves was work.

random conversation with EvilGremlin

EG wanted to look up some attributes of various bakugan. the official bakugan website wasn't that helpful, and neither was the wikipedia entry. so we did some googling around, and after surfing various "pictures of my bakugan collection" sites, found some youtube videos that were initially exciting, but turned out to be just advertisements for websites that sell bakugan. we cruised around some sellers' sites a bit, and i pointed out the wild variations in prices, from the retail of $3-$5 per bakugan, up to $60 for a single limited editon bakugan. we had a more in-depth discussion of the marketing principles of artificial shortages, and how "limited availability" can trick people into buying stuff - possibly even for an inflated price - that they wouldn't have bought at all under normal circumstances.

PRM really delivered the killing blow when he told EG that, often, after a few months or years of the super-rare limited edition stuff being sold out and in great demand and selling for 10-100x its retail price on eBay, the maker will suddenly re-issue the whole series of previously unavailable stuff in a special "collector's edition," and everybody who couldn't get them before can suddenly buy them, probably at an inflated price, and the seller gets rich. talk about horrified... i wouldn't be surprised if EG joined the communist party soon.

EG: man... i don't even want to look at this stuff anymore.

me: kind of upsetting?

EG: yeah. are you SURE it's legal for them to do this?

me: yep.

EG: i wish i knew who that guy was who was only making a limited supply of bakugan, so i could tell everyone not to give him a birthday present. not even a CHRISTMAS present. he should get NOTHING.

me: so you're finished with youtube?

EG: yeah. definitely. unless you think somebody's posted a video of kicking that guy's butt?

me: uhhh... well, if somebody ever does find him and kick his butt, i'm SURE it'll be on youtube.

EG: okay. let me know when you see it posted!

random conversation with DramaQueen

SpazMonkey was banging on the table with a large plastic mallet for no particular reason. i told him to stop. more than once. for about the third time in an hour, DramaQueen immediately started doing exactly what i had just told his brother to stop doing.

me: PUT the hammer DOWN NOW.

DQ: okay. why?

me: because i said NOT TO.

DQ: but you said it to SpazMonkey, not to me.

me: son, when i tell somebody NOT to do something, you DO NOT start doing it. when i tell one brother not to do it, i mean ALL THE BROTHERS. if you are going to start doing it again, you are going to be in TWICE as much trouble as the first brother i told to stop because you already DONE been told.

PRM: nice. should i get you some menthols and a tuna fish sandwich now?

DQ: weeeeell... then what can i hit with the hammer?

me: HOW ABOUT MY LAST NERVE?

DQ: right here? (hammer poised over my knee.)

me: that's probably about right.

DQ: okay!

random conversation with SpazMonkey

note that a "conversation" with SpazMonkey doesn't necessarily require anyone else making any noise.

SM: WHAT'S THIS CALLED AGAIN? BACON. BACON. I LIKE BACON! BACON IS MEAT. IT TASTES LIKE SMOKE. IT'S SMOKEY! YOU KNOW WHERE THE SMOKEY COMES FROM? FIRST YOU TAKE A PIG AND THEN YOU NAIL IT UP AND THEN YOU TEAR IT AND THEN YOU REACH IN AND YOU TAKE THE BONES OUT AND THEN YOU BREAK THE BONES AND GET THE ROCKS OUT OF THE BONES AND THEN YOU BREAK THE ROCKS AND THE SMOKEY IS INSIDE OF THE ROCKS. YEAH. I LIKE BACON.

crackbook is whack. and hack, and haw, and caw, and...

so after years of holding out, i finally signed up for facebook, aka crackbook. my original intent was to sign up just so i could view other people's pages, and not get sucked in with all the time-wasting apps, or do a bunch of attention-whoring shit where i post a glamour shot for my profile picture, try to build a huge friend list, etc. but i got friend requests from a bunch of people... some of whom immediately challenged me to facebook scrabble games. ooooh, did they hit my weakness. i can resist requests to grow a li'l green patch, write on people's walls all day, play poker, whatever... but i cannot resist the power of the scrabble. i loves me some scrabbling. i'm used to playing real scrabble, and the real-time imitation-scrabble at yahoo games with IAlsoHaveADream, so i was a bit skeptical about the fun value of delayed-action scrabble. turns out, that shit rocks.

i've been playing a series of scrabble games with some of the smartest people i went to high school with - a doc in st louis, a writer (the actual PAID kind!) in southern illinois, and a lawyer in chicago. and i kicked their asses in the first game! despite the fact that this was mainly due to the most perfect run of letters i've ever gotten, this made me feel like a freakin genius.

then TheWriter challenged me to a game of "scramble," and i got instantly addicted to it. it's basically boggle, with a slightly different scoring system, and the option to play on a 4x4 or 5x5 board of letters. in addition to getting a score for each game, you get a lifetime rating (your "word IQ," which is based entirely on the percentage of the total words on the gameboard that you manage to find in the 3-minute time limit) AND you get ranked against all of your facebook friends who play the game. there is something very, very motivating about seeing a list of pictures of a dozen of my friends, with their stats and ranking displayed. so motivating that, when i went to blow some gift certificates at the bookstore yesterday, i bought this 2-inch keychain:



so i can practice finding big-ass words at stoplights and stuff. (i actually bought two, because i assumed - rightly - that the kids would immediately run off with one of them.) because dammit, i am sitting here now, looking at my facebook page, and i am angered by my second-place ribbon. the first-place ribbon is on another high school friend's profile picture. which is actually a picture of her week-old baby boy. (i think she beat my score while she was in the hospital. i wasn't kidding about the crackbook, yo.) this aggression will not stand! i beat TheWriter's top score of 123 on my first day of playing, with a 129. a few days later, she topped me again with a 136. i am fast approaching her wordIQ of 105 (i've gone from 98 to 103 just in the last 48 hours), but i haven't even come CLOSE to that damned top score. this aggression will not stand, either, dammit! i must win! there can be only one!

on the upside, TheDoc is solidly inferior to me on all counts (you hear that, bitch?), and TheLawyer refuses to play me (i will pretend this is out of fear of my awesomeness rather than because he has a job, two little girls, and better things to do.) also, the final stat displayed in your facebook "box" o' scramble stats is "longest word" you've ever found. mine is not only, at nine letters, longer than everyone else's, it is "CREAMIEST." because i'm awesome like that.

so much for my resolution to not "really" use facebook. i've accepted a ton of friend requests, and everytime i get a friend request, i challenge my new friend to a game of scramble and a game of scrabble. two weeks later, i have over 50 facebook friends (as of today, i don't feel like too much of an attention whore about this, since i just became friends with my little cousin, PornStar, who it turns out has nearly 200 friends), and nearly 20% have taken me up on the scrabble/scramble challeges. on non-fencing nights when i take a few minutes to sit down at my computer after the kids are in bed, i have half a dozen rounds of scrabble and scramble waiting for me to play, which is kind of awesome. that 20 to 30 minutes a day has really cut into my rockband 2 time, but my kids are not begging neighbors for food (yet,) so... so far so good on the addiction factor. i can control the little monkey on my back.

after several nights of watching me scramble, PositiveRoleModel actually signed up for facebook so he could play, too. this is a guy who likes so much to remain anonymous that he won't even wear shirts with anything written on them - not even a logo. he makes his email unsearchable. his facebook profile is also unsearchable, and he won't even post his picture to it.

anyway, i'd like to announce that i have soundly kicked his ass many, many times. unlike my other opponents, he can hear all the talking of smack i do. he may have to challenge me to a few rounds of my ass getting blown to bits at halo3 to shut me up, because he can't seem to do it over the scrabble or scramble boards.

IAlsoHaveADream is the most anti-facebook person i know... and, after much pestering, even he may be teetering on the verge of signing up. he can only take so much "I AM TOTALLY KICKING EVERYONE'S ASSES!" from me - someone whose ass he beats at least 2/3s of the time - before he is forced to come dominate on facebook, too.

okay, i have to go kick LiquidCourage's ass now. word. (dow, rod, row. yep.)

election win!

ChristmasEveryDay, DirtyMartini, TexasRoadKill and MyEvilTwin came to watch comedy central's election coverage and eat meatballs and various buffalo chicken products. the kids got to stay up late, too, reaffirming jon stewart's status as their personal hero, since he made a joke about their new favorite ailment, explosive diarrhea. cracked the champagne at 10 PM when the election was called for obama - the candidate who didn't put "women's health" in derisive air quotes, whose health plan means more health coverage for a lot more people instead of less coverage for a few more people, and most importantly, the candidate who isn't going to die and leave us in the hands of a snake-handling nitwit.

the kids' school was a polling place, and they got to help out with the voting, which they were very excited about. they even held a mock election. EvilGremlin voted for obama. SpazMonkey voted for mccain "BECAUSE HE USED TO BE A SOLDIER AND THAT'S AWESOME. AND BECAUSE NOBODY ELSE VOTED FOR HIM. YEAH, BECAUSE HE'S REALLY OLD." DramaQueen was pretty hard to nail down. i'm still not sure who he voted for. it kind of sounds like he put in a write-in vote for himself.

anyway. i'm going to go watch me some fox news now. for teh lulz!