Resolution

My New Year's Resolution:

Anytime I see a link referencing Sarah Palin and REFRAIN from clicking on it, I will give myself five points. Get to 100 points? Go buy myself ice cream. Rinse. Repeat.

It is the only way we can make her go away.

I recently saw her described somewhere as a "link farm." Truer words were never spoken.

Catnip Overdose

Okay, I promise there is more going on here than my animals being hilarious, but I can't let this video go unseen. The husband let Gizmo stick his entire face in the catnip container, and Gizmo subsequently started to trip. Hard.



Suffice it to say we'll be a bit more restrictive about the catnip dosage in the future.

(Gizmo is fine. He walked it off, then sat down and stared off into space until he came down.)

Snowball Dogs

Despite the occasional mention of the dogs and the cat, I haven't really properly introduced all the animals in this space. I think each of them deserve their own post, starting with Ellie, as the one-year anniversary of her adoption is fast approaching.

In the meantime, however, here are the two dogs, Annie (black/tan) and Ellie (tan/white), enjoying the season's first measurable snow:



And from about a year ago, here's Annie's big debut, playing the "find it" game:

Crafting with Leftovers

I love it when my mom comes to visit, because she often comes bearing gifts. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, those gifts are home-related. A few months ago, she came through with some garage-sale finds, including this lovely framed portrait of…some flowers:

She picked it up with the understanding I’d probably change out the contents, because hey, a frame’s a frame. Figuring I’d get inspired enough to do so, I happily accepted.

After stalling for months because I couldn’t figure out what images I’d want to put in the 8” x 10” mats, the proverbial light bulb appeared over my head this afternoon and I decided to get to work. And because I am lazy resourceful, I flipped this cheap find completely with stuff I happened to have around the house.

For the images themselves, I decided to isolate an illustration I found on iStockPhoto.com when I was hunting around for artwork to use for my wedding invites. Wanting to use something nature-inspired, I had stumbled upon this graphic:

...and fallen in love with it. I bought it without knowing how I’d use it, and sadly, it turned out I couldn’t. I tried to make one of the elements work, but it ended up relegated to the programs in favor of some more elegant scrollwork on the invitations themselves.

But I still love the image, so I popped open Illustrator this afternoon and pulled out the second and third trees, sized them to fit the mats, and isolated them in black on white. I printed them on our home printer on the linen-textured paper I had left over from our wedding programs, to surprisingly good results. (Pro-tip: Changing print quality settings from “fast draft” to “best” makes a big difference here.)

In addition to changing out the images, I knew I’d want to lose the gold mat between the ivory mat and the existing photos. I cracked open the frame and was pleased to find that the gold mat was a stand-alone and not fused to the white mat as I had feared. Using some paint that was left over from when I painted over the forest-green accents (hello ‘90s!) on our dining room furniture, I slapped two quick coats on the gold mat. I really only needed about ¼” of the border around the opening to be black, but I painted the whole thing just in case someday I (or my future garage sale patrons) need a black photo mat with two 8” x 10” openings.

Once I got into the guts of the frame, I discovered the floral images were in fact wallpaper, which had been scotch-taped to the backing of the frame. It's easily been a good 15 years since that wallpaper could have been in style, so I felt good in the knowledge that this already-DIYed ensemble had lived a full life and was ready to move on.

After the paint dried and I got everything re-assembled, I was pretty pleased with the end result:

Simple, but contemporary, and a little personalized too. Start-to-finish time: Less than an hour. Cost to me: Nada. If this is crafting, sign me up!

Study Time!

Caught the tail end of this one on CNN this morning:

Study: Hyper-texting teens more likely to smoke, drink, have sex

FTA:

All that texting and social networking by teenagers could come back to byte them.

A new study by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine links poor health behaviors -- including smoking, drinking and sexual activity -- to hyper-texting and hyper-networking.

I'm so glad someone conducted a big fancy study to tell us that kids who have more social interaction are exposed to more experiences. I mean, that's not what the story says the data shows, but really, what other logical conclusions could be drawn from these results?

I've seen lots of studies reported in such a way as to imply causation, usually through clueless, sensational, and/or inflammatory headlines. Often the subject is something meant to strike a righteous fear into the heart of parents about what is silently, secretly killing their children.

But the typical dumb study results story does not usually feature a dumb quote from the study's lead researcher. This one does:

"The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers," said Scott Frank, lead researcher on the study. "This should be a wake-up call for parents to not only help their children stay safe by not texting and driving, but by discouraging excessive use of the cell phone or social websites in general."

Congratulations: you have just blatantly exposed your agenda and thus discredited yourself.

The implication is that lots of texting causes drinking, sex, and other risky behavior. This is infuriatingly dumb. But it taps into those righteous fears, and thus gets clicks, so why bother bringing logic into the equation?

On "Borderline" Comedy

"And you guys wonder why Dave Chappelle quit and went to Africa. Wanna know why? It was because of dumb fans."

I've heard this from more than one comic. Chris Hardwick threw out a variation on the theme on a recent Nerdist podcast. His comments were more to the effect that Chappelle quit at the height of his game because the tongue-in-cheek racial comedy he delivered with the intention of satirizing racists was embraced and non-ironically co-opted by, well, racists.

The above quote came from Daniel Tosh last night, who played at the Murat Theatre in downtown Indy. It came as part of what seemed to be a canned response to hecklers, although he deployed it in response to some disruptive-but-not-malicious "woo!"-ing and shouted requests for particular bits.

But I was reminded of Hardwick's comments during Tosh's set. Tosh has blown up in popularity since Tosh.0 started airing on Comedy Central, and part of the show's schtick is a lot of borderline (and not-so-borderline) racist and misogynistic riffing on the people featured in the web videos. I was admittedly addicted to the show through the first dozen or so episodes, but my interest started to wane when the off-color jokes seemed to make up the majority of the content. Not because I was offended, but because it seemed to rely on the principle that it's funny because it's wrong, which is not inherently true. And also maybe a little because if you repeat something enough, people start to think you really mean it.

Although my husband and I and quite a few of our mid-20s, totally non-racist friends are pretty regular viewers, I can't help but wonder if Tosh.0 hits a lot of the same demographic that made Chappelle pull anchor and GTFO. I'm sure Tosh and his show's writers don't really subscribe to the stereotypes they play off of, but  I'm guessing the material is received by a few people who kinda do.

Tosh's standup last night was hilarious, and he's a very talented performer. His standup does weave in some of the funny-because-it's-wrong stuff, but it's balanced out by enough non-squirmy material that it didn't bring down the show for me.

I did find myself bracing a little every time he rolled out another black or Latino joke*, but it was mostly because I was afraid the Indy audience would break out in roaring applause and cheers and just generally be a little TOO appreciative of the stereotyping and all "he's one of us! this guy gets it!" I was pleasantly surprised to see this not happen. But I still walked away feeling a little like maybe this isn't for me.


*There were some misogynistic jokes in the standup too, but (logically or not) this bothers me a little less. I guess because I find it plausible that some people in the audience are "a little bit racist" but I'm not really banking on anyone being "a little bit of a wife-beater."

Smugly Rocking My "I Voted" Sticker

I rolled out of bed bright and early expecting a long detour, but even after stopping to vote and to get coffee, I STILL made it to work earlier than I typically do.

I think that says more about my all-around punctuality than it does about how long it took me to vote, but turnout at my polling place did appear to drop off remarkably from the presidential election two years ago. It was my first time voting in a mid-term (yeah, I know), so I guess I didn't really have a frame of reference. Still, I waited in line for something like an hour - 20-30 minutes of that actually outside in the cold - in '08, whereas this morning there were three whole people ahead of me. Almost two hours into the day, I was the 35th voter at the polling place.

So today I will be proudly displaying my "I Vote/I Count" sticker, on my purse, which sits under my desk most of the day. Maybe tonight I will exercise my newly codified right to purchase alcohol on election day, just because I can. Welcome to the 21st century, Indiana!*


*Now how 'bout we legalize Sunday carry-out sales.