Happy mommy birthday!

[cleolinda]

Ugh. I just ate three Samoas on an empty stomach, and that was kind of a bad idea.

Meanwhile, today was my mother and her sister's birthday. Note: they are not twins. That's right: they were born five years apart on the same day. My sister and I were actually born seven years and three days apart. Altogether, it's a little weird. Anyway. There was Johnny Ray's barbecue and chocolate roulage. I think we now have an entire month without a family-gathering holiday, but we'll be back on Easter with, if I remember my family traditions correctly, baked ham and four-layer chocolate dessert. The Jones family is nothing if not deliciously predictable.

Happy Year of the Pig from Neil Gaiman: "Pigs, I learned as a boy, reading books, especially young pigs, are loveable, brave, noble and intelligent animals who have adventures. I hope this year you get to be brave and noble and intelligent. But mostly I hope you get to have adventures. (As G. K. Chesterton once said, An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered... )"

Nowadays, an inconvenience really is just a journal entry waiting to be written, and an adventure is just a particularly awesome interpretation of an inconvenience. Or at least that's how I like to think of it. Of the entries on this journal worth reading, this is, in fact, the basic format of half of them (see also: the rooster story, the Sonic incident, "It has stripes!," and so on). I'm just saying, think about that the next time something crappy happens to you: it's going to make a great story.

Also: Longford, AIEEEEE. Who knew that Andy Serkis was pure evil?



Reid: Iraq 'worst...policy mistake' in U.S. history. Yes, even considering Vietnam (he says).

Confessed Web addict sues IBM for firing him.

Sack of baby skeletons found behind hospital. Almost too depressing to post... but too weird not to.

Mummified body found in front of blaring TV. The body had been there for more than a year. They're already confused as to why the power was never shut off. Here's my question: why was the TV blaring only then? In other words, had it been on for a full year, because that's what he'd been doing when he died--watching television? But if so, why had no one ever reported it before? Had they just put up with an oft-blaring TV for a year... or had it only just started blaring? I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, except that... weirrrrrd.

This one's going up there with the Liz Hurley safety pin dress and the Jennifer Lopez spectacle: "Thai actress Chotiros Suriyawong poses for a photograph in Nakhon Ratchasima, 260 km (162 miles) northeast of Bangkok, February 12, 2007. Suriyawong, a rarely known Thai actress who has become infamous overnight after wearing a revealing black dress to Thailand's version of the Oscars, will read for the blind for two weeks, a penalty from her university for the controversy."

Ghost Rider Burns Up Box Office. I was shocked until I remembered that it's February, the box-office graveyard. Even August has better movies than February.

WB Issues Press Release Defending Dan Radcliffe. This after weeks of either threatening to replace him or being rumored to be threatening to replace him. My theory is that either Warner Bros is too smart to have ever threatened any such thing, or they're even smarter and they did threaten it just to have millions of fans rise up foaming about how much they love him.

David Cronenberg Working on Opera Version of 'The Fly.'

A New Poster For The Star Wars Comedy '5-25-77.' Believe it or not, there are actually two Star Wars Fanboy movies: "If Johnson keeps to his release date, it might put the film in competition with MGM's Fanboys, but considering what Erik thought of the Fanboys trailer, 5-25-77 should have a fighting chance."

Oscarwatch: The Costume Design Guild winner (period costume category) was... Chung Man Yee for Curse of the Golden Flower. This is the only movie I've been worried about beating Marie Antoinette, and now you see why.

Vote for new Edy's ice cream flavors in some kind of American Idol tie-in thing. All I know is, Sister Girl wants you to vote for Take the Cake, although I'm more interested in the triple chocolate one myself. (Yes, I already had a pre-existing "ice cream" tag. I can't believe it ei... well, actually I can.)

Comments

[ambiguousreason.livejournal.com]

Oooh god, now that you mentioned Samoas I want Thin Mints. Mmmm.

[the-lone-jen.livejournal.com]

will read for the blind for two weeks,

Were they trying to be ironic?

And the press release regarding Radcakes is so vaguely worded that you just know they're still pissy with him.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Heh. My great-aunt and I have the same birthday. It's actually kind of fun considering how adorable she is. (She's seventy-three, tinier than I am, weighs about ninety pounds soaking wet, has a high-pitched Long Island accent, told everybody at a family party how romantic she thought Brokeback Mountain was, and got all excited about standing next to my uncle's boyfriend because she said she wanted to stand next to her favorite nephew. AWWWW. :))

And that dress might be revealing, but damn, it's pretty.

[-paxromana.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday, Mrs. Cleolinda! :)

[meshuggeneh.livejournal.com]

Am I unreasonably shocked that CNN had video of them removing the baby bodies?

[spidey-88.livejournal.com]

My mother has two sisters who share the same birthday (7 years or so apart) and one of those sisters has a daughter who shares a birthday with her own daughter. It's all very weird and coincidental.

[bigeyedrabbit.livejournal.com]

I hope your mom and her sister had a lovely birthday. It sounds as if there was no familial drama of any kind, which is lovely in itself where relatives are concerned. :)

[luna-k.livejournal.com]

Shit, how did you manage to stop at only 3 Samoas? I ate a whole fucking box of them last night. *still ashamed*

[golden-d.livejournal.com]

Mmm, Thin Mints. I discovered that they make a reasonably good meal, if you put non-salmonella-causing peanut butter on them.

And by "discovered," I mean, "had nothing else in my dorm to eat." :)

[kestrel127.livejournal.com]

Well, if it makes you feel better, let me tell you about my best friend from elementary school, Lisa. Her birthday was June 9th. Her younger sister, Emily, was born three years later on June 5th. Her younger brother, Ross, was born three years after that on June 9th. She was always mad growing up because her mom had missed two of her birthdays to have the other kids.

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

There was a fabulous guide book written in the early '70s called The People's Guide to Mexico. It really could have been called The Hippie's Guide to Mexico, but my parents had it anyway and found it more useful than any of the "normal" guides. There was a line in it that became a family in-joke whenever we were in some weird part of the world getting tense because strange stuff was going on around us: "This has become uncomfortable enough to be an adventure."

And it would actually help for the most part; we'd all take a deep breath and try to regain our perspective, because sure there were live chickens on the airplane with us, but then again, we were coming back from a trip to Persepolis and really, how cool was that?

Of course, these days, my sister and I would probably add "which we will then write about in our LJs."

[ninepointfivemm.livejournal.com]

My grandma and I shared a birthday. And my best friend's mom and my best friend had birthdays 2 days apart.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

and got all excited about standing next to my uncle's boyfriend because she said she wanted to stand next to her favorite nephew

That is officially the sweetest thing ever.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I don't like them all that much, that's how. That's why I opened them instead of, let's say, the Tagalongs. Oh Tagalongs, how many times I have eaten a whole box of you in one sitting.

[serenenuit.livejournal.com]

The link about the mummified man is too sad for words. It doesn't concern me that the TV was blaring though. What concerns me is that he was blind AND in front of the TV. I guess he was listening to it, but would he really need to sit in front of it? That story is creepy beyond words.

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Chocolate ice cream wins. The other flavors sound either pedestrian or nasty.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Heh. If there's one good thing I can say about my family, it's that nobody cares if you're gay or straight, just as long as you don't bring home some idiot. :)

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

Aw, happy birthdays to Momma Jones and Auntie Jones. (There's your next short story, by the way. How did Cleolinda/Una's mother feel about the whole dragon thing?)

The mummified body watching TV thing is bizarre. The story just doesn't add up. I know that when my power goes down, as it does at least once a year, the TV (back before I used my computer for TV) would shut down and it wouldn't come back on when the power came back. That suggests that someone was sneaking in and turning the TV back on. Probably also paying the electric bills. Now wouldn't that be creepy?

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

Do you speak Tagalong now? I come in peace from ThinMint.

[jennnk.livejournal.com]

I share a birthday with my (late) grandfather. He would have been 75 the day I was born. My younger brother shares a birthday with our uncle - the younger of mom's 2 older brothers.

And is it bad the first (and second) thought I had about the Thai girl's dress was "wow, those are fake boobs?"

[gracefallson-me.livejournal.com]

that's cool about the birthdays. my brother's and i are a day apart but if you want to get technical we are 5 years, 364, 13 hours and 6 minutes apart. we were both born on Fridays but he is a Taurus and i'm an Aries. my birthday is before his but he's older!

[gracefallson-me.livejournal.com]

i must come back and comment on the dead man for a year thing. i read about that earlier today and was just sickened about the lack of communication this poor man had with his neighbors! couldn't they hear the tv on?, what about bills was this a free place to live? if any of my relatives or friends, even neighbors i don't know very well seems to just disappear I WILL BE FINDING OUT WHERE THEY WENT! i can't believe they never though to check on him. DUH! i hope i never have them for nieghbors!

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

My mother’s birthday is June 20, while my father’s mother and I were both born on June 27.

Re: the opera version of The Fly — is anyone else flashing on Elephant!, the musical adaptation of The Elephant Man in the Jeff Goldblum film The Tall Guy?

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

Wordy McWordersons on those scurriously addictive Tagalongs. You need a 12-step program to escape from those things!

[lilgoala.livejournal.com]

No, I thought that was unnecessary too.