Hello Dead Bro Walkin' fam,

A bit of context - about a year ago I moved from Montreal to Haiti (where I'm from) with my partner (Franco-Canadian) and 3 kids (who are now 8, 6 and 20mo). My eldest is a brilliant, sensitive boy who has a solid Midas touch but his visual artwork is especially moving.

I'd love to get him into really good comics and won't necessarily say no to super hero but he gets so much of that stuff from TV I'd like to steer him into something diff. And, of course, protags of colour are highly sought after (though not a dealbreaker, either). It would have to be stuff that's easy to find online, too.

Any suggestions?

You know what I could stand never to hear again? Complaints about stupid people, when such complaints are perpetrated by hip 25-to-44-year-old upper-income types.

Yes, I'm aware that I used to more or less build my identity around complaining about stupid people. I'm trying not to do that anymore. I don't want to hear you complaining about how all the world's problems are due to stupid people (or religious people, or people who fail to share some trait that you congratulate yourself about) if all you do is work at a corporate job and play video games. You are not doing the world any favors by merely existing. Your intelligence is of no value to anyone else unless you're using it to help alleviate the suffering of some other human beings. If your life goal is accumulating wealth, you are actually worse than the stupid people you revile.

Relatedly, I really don't want to hear anyone bemoaning how terrible it is that "people like us" (see previously mentioned hip 25-to-44-year-olds) aren't reproducing, while "stupid people are having so many kids". If you would teach your hypothetical kids to drive a Subaru Outback to the grocery store and aspire to a plush defense contracting job, the world is probably actually better off without those kids. If your life more or less amounts to consuming large quantities of consumer electronics and artisan-made waffles, what makes you think your kids are going to be any different?

In summary, shit is not fucked up because of stupid people. Shit is fucked up because of some smart people who are intent on using their power to make sure they get the goodies whether anyone else or not. And it's also fucked up because a lot of very smart people spend their lives keeping the power structure going rather than using their talent to undermine it. Blaming stupid people is a great way for that latter group to vent their frustrations without threatening the former group's power.

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So Janelle Monae was on sgu last night?

http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/issues/abortion/access-to-abortion/health-care-reform.html

"The House is set to vote today on the anti-choice amendment proposed by Reps. Stupak and Pitts.  This is a serious threat to women, even though whose private-insurance plans include abortion coverage."

Abortion access is massively under threat- this isn't an issue that will be in process for years; this is all happening imminently. The pro choice cause really needs as many of you as possible to lobby Congress right now.

To the rest of us: Cross post and draw as much attention to this as possible. We can't help directly, but we can reach more people who can. And a donation to NARAL wouldn't go amiss either.

Just so you know, sblmnldrknss knows that "comic books aren't challenging."

Reading should only ever be at age level or above and though she claims to read EVERYTHING in one comment, she is quick to later inform us that, in fact, she never reads children's fiction for fun because it is beneath her.

Apparently "if you're over, I don't know, 12, reading Harry Potter doesn't 'count' as reading anymore than reading People magazine 'counts' as reading." An interesting judgment from someone who has never read the books at all.

In that same vein, one doesn't have to actually KNOW about something in order to deem it unworthy in her world. she has never seen an episode of the Simpsons, but can claim with all confidence that it is juvenile because it involves animation. Also, all video games are childish.

And yes, this is the same person who would let a teenage daughter die after a botched abortion because abortion is wrong and getting her child medical help would make her morally culpable for the abortion.

Lol someone just told me they wouldn't be able to handle my dorm because of the pest problem - they had never seen cockroaches scurrying around before.  (Whatever, our roaches are rare and I've never even seen any of the rodents we supposedly have - aaaaaand now I'm thinking about that time in high school when a squirrel got into a building and everyone was torn between cooing with delight and screaming in panic.)

Is it true there are no cockroaches up north?  Why does anyone come down here for college?

I suppose the trade-off is the horrible, deadly cold.

( maybe what you want is right here... )

When some cracker mows down a bunch of Unitarians, you don't see reporters cornering random WASPs to make them deplore the violence.

Not sure if this has been posted here yet, but, ATM, I have cupcakes in my oven, made from this recipe:

( Joan's Grandmother's Cake )

My local market has some lovely asparagus on sale, so I thought I'd try my hand at some cream of asparagus soup. Thing is, I've never made it before. Do you any of you have any tried and true recipes for cream of asparagus soup? I'd like to keep it low fat/low cal if possible.

Thanks in advance!

1. There is a certain amount of wealth at which point you are expected to stop having taste.

2. Rich people are supposed to spend their money on watches. Ugly watches. (The ones they write about aren't so bad, but the ones in the ads are unspeakably hideous.)

3. Apparently the economy is affecting rich people to the point where they have to buy jet timeshares instead of outright owning a jet.

4. Rich people are vulnerable to ridiculously transparent flattery.

Hello, I am new here. I am looking for a nightstand (I currently have a tv tray as a nightstand)! I was inspired by some pictures of Louis XIV's Versailles Palace, but I find that antique French furniture is a bit on the pricey side, hahaha. Reproductions of antique French furniture are also expensive. I decided I'm going to cheat, and make some fake antique French furniture!

Here is an example of a cheat that seems feasible with a bit of paint, gilt, moulding, a saw, some old buttons & pulls, maybe some plywood or putty or wood filler or just whatever:

( pics )

It will never look exactly like the $1300 nightstand but the shape is similar and I think it could be transformed into something very "inspired" by the $1300 piece.

Here is a website with a lot of good pictures of expensive French furniture. It may be good inspiration: The Furniture Market: French Furniture Section

I'm still looking for a similar gilded furniture piece with a black base color, and that's been more difficult to find than the white and ivory pieces. Does someone know of a website with pictures of Versailles or baroque furniture?

Thanks! I will update the community with my progress, should any be made!

I've gotten some answers on the 2012 post but they're coming through screened to me and unaccessible. Anyone else experiencing the same?

Or y'all trying to silence me? Huh? Really, I smell a conspiracy here!

CON-SPIR-A-CY!

1. Mitch Albom. Oh, he won't be there, gentle reader, but just as his terrible presence oozes through this piece of writing he will ooze out of the mouths the well-meaning people around you who probably weren't English majors and are looking for something comforting to say. They will quote Tuesdays with Maurie and I lose the ability be a good sport and start snarling about scabs and elia kazan. People will think this is funny. I do.

2. Rose Kennedy and Her Daughters of Spite. These people, mothers mostly are my favorite. I trade a thousand of them and their shrill judgement opinions for one weep "she lit up a room time". I shall strive from this day forward to attend the funerals of all troubled daughters in order to catch a Rose Kennedy in action.
For those of you who don't have a great collection of Kennedy Trivia, Rose's daughter (and JFK's sister) Kathleen Kennedy married the Marquess of Harrington, a non Catholic!. When Kathleen and the Marquess died in plane crash a few months later Rose took to the pulpit to explain that that is the fate that awaits girls who don't listen their mothers. My great-aunt Patsy did a fabulous Rose Kennedy impression when her daughter Tracey died of complications from bulimia. It was, as the story goes, a 30 minute lecture directed at Tracey, sitting there in her coffin about the motherly advice she ignored.

But like I said, these people are my favorites. They annoy me the least. Judgmental bitches they may be but that the decency the honesty to remain same judgement bitches they were the day before their daughters died.

It's the truest kind of love to remember someone as they were. And in this, the Rose Kennedy bitches maybe the only grieving people on this who ca be said to have ever loved their children at all.

3. The wearers of tacky jewelry. Let's talk about my father's Joey-Bag-Donuts outfit that caused such distress last winter at this time, to the point where it was called "triggering". He walked around the house in the mornings wear nothing but a robe and a gigantic crucifix necklace with green plastic gemstones from Claire's accessories. It was my tacky necklace and I was just annoyed to still be mistaken for my sister. But it increasinly enraged my mother. He dug into her car to find the necklace, which she had borrowed from me a fews before and not return and assumed it was a piece of meaningful jewelry that look ungodly tacky. That's bad enough. But to make such a gesture, tacky and in our face was a way a reminding us of something we were trying to hard to forgive him for: He never bother to know anything about her. He couldn't tell you a thing about the adult she had become. He didn't even know or remember how she had come to be a bright up and comer in his own little cult. She might as have been a stranger to him.
And, damn, did we need to forgive him for this because she was hard to love and secretive and he was just doing what his people do....but that stupid cross made it a lot more difficult.
My mother's best friend Lynn, she who has given up all holidays and stopped speaking to her living son, is also a tacky jewelry wearer: she wear a giant D with a vial of her sons ashes. Like my father, she had a rocky relationship with her son. He was troubled. She was troubled. So she's created this mystique of the dead perfect son. Which leads me to:

4. The parents of children who "Lit Up a Room". Never light up a room. It is a path to certain death. You should probably start turning off light as you enter rooms. The parents of children who were always sweet, the loving, beautiful daughters and the sons who always said, "I love you Mom" a just sort of sad and pathetic in their lying lying lying ways. I can just roll my eyes at their bullshit. But I inadvertently offend them because I have the gall to say that my sister was a junkie who died of an overdose.
It's murder, really, what they are doing. I don't know their kids so it doesn't effect me to watch their parents murder them over and over again. But I worry about my dad, I know the southern in him makes it tempting and I know he doesn't like to tell the funny stories of how insufferable Gina could be. I worry because this is murder and I will not be kind to him and forgive him while he sits there murdering my sister and turning her into some angel who lit up a room.

5. The parents who want to erase it all. The parents who have never let Paul Farrell speak at their child's funeral. My sister's was the first time he had over presided over the funeral of one of his church members ever. When people die in his church on of two things happen: the body is abandoned in the morgue and buried by the state or the parents of the dead person take them away and don't tell the church where it is. For the parents who have been so beaten down by this disease that they can't even come love their children even death, I have such compassion. It's the ones that take them away that enrage me; the ones that yell at the kids who leave NA literature on the graves, the ones who put "natural cases" in the obits, the ones that are still so shamed by their child's disease, even in death.

I'M SERIOUS!

( I MEAN IT! )

I brought Kitten home. She is de facto Zinda because that's what Amy started to call her in the car. She is so pretty, omg.

However, the most awesome part about little Zinda?

SHE HAS THUMBS OMG. I went to get a kitten collar for her and a few last minute things like toys and I was talking to the guy at PetCo and I was like :D my kitten has thumbs! and later, "My kitten will take over the world! :D" He laughed at me awkwardly.

I don't care, I don't even care. I do care that my back hurts some because her idea of responding to OH SHIT THAT'S A CRITTER is to climb me which made me move my hips funky and Amy was like "I halp :D" and Zinda was like "lol fuck no. -claws-"

Picture~

...if that flood were MADE OF FAIL. Basically, there's already going to be a sequel to the movie 2012 -- a TV show called 2013. The director is Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "10,000 BC"). In the TV show:

At the end of 2012 the cast members who have survived the massive floods and volcanic destruction on Earth head over to Africa, the new center of the world... These ships show up in Africa and [in] Cape Town there are survivors, and they are not happy people. Because they were left behind. And how do you start a new society? It has no visual effects, it's all about characters. What will the future bring? Hope for us?

Which "us"?