How did this entry keep growing on me?

[ciroccoj]

• Went skating today. ::sigh::
  
  2.5 hours, Beaver Tails, hot chocolate and apple cider, and once more marveling at how much my kids teach me every day. Justin must have fallen at least a hundred times, but refused to leave, or get frustrated, or even hold my hand to keep himself steady. Consequently, he's a better skater today, at age seven, than I was by age twenty, because I spent so long terrified of falling on the ice that all I ever did was sort of shuffle around uncomfortably, for years on end.
  
  
• clearbell and daf9: have not forgotten the Open Letter thing, I just need to do a bit of research.
  
  
• Anybody buying a Palm?
  
  Get the Dealer Warranty, NOT the manufacturers. For dealer's, you bring it in and they send it off to be fixed, which is a pain. For manufacturers, you call and get handed off to six different people before you get one that knows what you need to do, then you get cut off, then you get re-connected, then transferred again and called back and cut off again, then they need your receipt faxed over so that they can give you Call Number 24601, which has to be e-mailed - but they don't actually e-mail it - but when you get it you're supposed to send them the e-mail number back by fax so they'll send you an envelope and you send them your Palm in the envelope with your number and firstborn child's dental records, allow 6-8 weeks for shipping to Kuala Lumpur where they'll probably make triplicates of the order and take bury it in peat moss for a couple months and send your Palm to a distant cousin of your aunt's nephew twice removed (lovely singing voice; eunuch) if you're lucky and can correctly identify all three sub-references in the paragraph above.
  
  
• Random Quote:
  Chris: (doing a crossword puzzle) Love, what's "perspicacious"?
  Me: Shrewd, or able to notice details.
  Chris: Thanks, hon. I love having a foreign wife.
  
  
• snarkhunter, I Feel your Pain. You were feeling sympathy for Bush the other day? I'm feeling it for Harper.
  
  For the record, I don't like Stephen Harper. I think he'd love to turn Canada into a rich-get-richer-and-screw-everyone-else country. I also don't think he gives a damn about the environment. I think he either inhabits "Climate change is just a huge hoax"-land, or, like so many people, has moved directly to "Climate change will only harm polar bears, Inuit, brown Polynesians and black Louisianans, so why worry"-land.
  
  But. The Liberals are raking him over the coals over stuff he said about global warming years ago (standard "this is all a socialist plot" ranting), and not just implying, but outright asserting that there's no way he - or his party - could possibly change their minds or actions on the issue. Despite what they've said and done in the last little while, when they finally realized public opinion was starting to desert their side on this.
  
  I mean... come on. The guy may have the environmental morals of a pine beetle, but he's not a complete idiot and is just as capable of reading polls as anybody else. And if he can actually show some real commitments or plans, why not support him on it?
  
  Besides... I dunno, the Liberals being holier than thou on the issue? Wow. That takes some major chutzpah. If anybody should be afraid of their past environmental record coming back to bite them on the derriere...
  
  
• Speaking of derrieres, it's quite entertaining to hop from the depressing mouth-frothing and posturing on the Greener Than Thou stuff to the brouhaha over Harry Potter Baring It All.
  
  Damn, but I'm grateful to my parents for raising me blasé towards bodies and nudity in general. We spent a lot of time on nude or topless beaches when I was a kid, and people wandered about our house in various stages of undress without much of a second thought. A body's a body, to me. There's some things I don't much like seeing, mostly for aesthetic reasons, but very little short of public elimination of bodily waste really offends me. It sure seems to make a lot of other folks twist out of shape, though.
  
  Case in point, Daniel Radcliffe, who is, in fact, not actually Harry Potter (gasp!), is doing a non-Potter-related play which calls for nudity, and posed for some pictures in the buff. Now, OK, I was doing some eye-bleaching the day they came out because, augh, little Harry Potter in the altogether wasn't something I'd really wanted to picture, and I did kinda wish I'd had my brain in the ON position when I saw the first cut-link and clicked on it, but holy crap has the s*** ever hit the fandom! Parents saying they won't be taking their children to see any future Potter movies, may not let them read the last book, wailing and gnashing their teeth, aghast and horrified and totally disappointed in Radcliffe and Where Are His Parents and Oh ye gods won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILdren...
  
  I have to say, if your greatest fear as a parent is that your children will be mortally morally wounded because the actor who plays a character in a children's book has taken another job and this other job requires him to expose his bits, y'all must live in a much happier world than I. Or a much more nervous one. See, I worry about my kids' health, safety, education, and ability to be kind to themselves and to the world around them. It honestly hadn't occurred to me to worry about the irreparable damage nakedness could cause them. Other than as a general "don't run around bare-ass in the snow." Although perhaps I need to rethink my parenting.
  
  Oh dear - I just realized, I let my kids watch Star Wars!! Didn't Ewan MacGregor strip at some point? DAMN! And - and Robin Williams took it all off in The Fisher King! What if some of the nakedness of that movie bled through into his voiceover for Aladdin! OMFG!
  
  OK, I can't take the stress. I'll just have to go hunt down some naked Ewan MacGregor to relax drink some soothing herbal tea. Anybody have some URLs blend suggestions?
  
  
• I hate QuickLaw.

That is all.

Comments

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Haha, the HP thing is hilarious. I havne't been paying much attention to that fandom and so hadn't really heard about that "scandal." I just googled it a bit, and got an article that quoted this guy I can't believe exists:

r. James Dobson of the "Focus on the Family" Institute expressed his organization's outrage at what they considered outright pornography. "We've been trying to warn people about this whole book series for years," stated Dobson. "People should come to expect this from Satanic worship. I feel for this young man and woman who have now become ruined by this, and to say nothing of the small children that they have disappointed and influenced. It's frightening that children will now have to consider nudity and sexuality as something healthy."

So frightening!! Sexuality is the work of the devil!! Your body is evil!!

Oh, man.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

It's frightening that children will now have to consider nudity and sexuality as something healthy."
... I can't... even...

[nonniemous.livejournal.com]

Oh, just walk further and further out on that plank, Dr. Dobson, just keep walking. You're going to walk right off the edge one day, and I will be there with popcorn--if I can be bothered.

Thank you; I haven't laughed that hard in ages. Unfortunately, though, Dr. Dobson is real, and a real power in the American Evangelical community, both political and social. Here's hoping idiocy like this pulls him down a few rungs on his ladder.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, though, Dr. Dobson is real, and a real power in the American Evangelical community, both political and social.
It's so baffling. Really makes me think of this beautiful icon I used to see on lj with the caption "Faith... is not an excuse for stupidity."

I mean, seriously. The Bible is full of so much wisdom and beauty. Why do some people seem to use it as an excuse to leave the brains God gave them at the church door?

[nonniemous.livejournal.com]

Because it's not about wisdom and beauty, it's about righteousness and fearing God. And if you think too much, you won't fear God as you should, so check your brain at the door and only listen to those who know better and don't try to think for yourself. Seriously. I was there, for far too long.

[snarkhunter.livejournal.com]

If it weren't practically tame compared to some of the other shit Dobson spews, I'd be aghast.

As it is? It's kind of hilarious. (Nudity is not healthy! If you're not wearing a bathing suit in the shower, you're a depraved Satanist.) How that's even something you can take remotely seriously is totally beyond me.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

If it weren't practically tame compared to some of the other shit Dobson spews, I'd be aghast.
God, if that's tame I probably don't want to hear any more, do I?

Nudity is not healthy! If you're not wearing a bathing suit in the shower, you're a depraved Satanist.
I read a book once where Catholic girls were told that, in order to avoid Near Occasions of Sin, they should always put talcum powder in the bath so that they wouldn't catch a glimpe of their own naked body and be tempted to commit Impurity.

The protagonist, a good Catholic girl, had tried it. Ended up gooey and overly-scented, and decided God probably wasn't nearly as stupid as his talcum-powder followers were ;)

[sterling-sky.livejournal.com]

I've never been a HP fan, but your commentary cracked me up. (I have a close friend who has very strict religious parents, and they probably hate me for "corrupting" their children, LOL!)

You make me want to go skating on the Canal too. I'll have to settle for our pond, as it is *much* closer.

Don't rethink your parenting. Then again, I'm probably a good example of when parenting goes awry. ;)

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

You make me want to go skating on the Canal too. I'll have to settle for our pond, as it is *much* closer.
I'm just so glad it finally opened. Hadn't realized how much I missed it till we were back on it. ::sigh::

[officerjudy.livejournal.com]

OK, where are the Radcliffe nudie pics? I wanna see!

(Yeah, I'm a pervert.)

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

OK, where are the Radcliffe nudie pics? I wanna see!
Arg, the only place I know has them, I can't link you to because my browser's crapping out on me. But it's called Veritaserum (I believe the URL is veritaserum.com, but you should probably just google it) and it's a general-info site on the books, movies, etc.

(Yeah, I'm a pervert.)
They may disappoint, then ;) That's another thing I find funny about all of this: they're not actually porn. You can tell the guy's not wearing anything, but you certainly can't see anything R-rated. And they're (IMHO) tasteful and somewhat artistic pictures, once you get over the cognitive dissonance of "wasn't this guy like, illegal last year?"

Then again, I'm apparently not the best person to rate perviness/non-perviness, since even full frontal nudity probably wouldn't rate on my pervometer ;)

Yay skating!!

[culturevulture7.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm envious!! So, hockey skates or figure skates?

Re: Yay skating!!

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Hockey, though at my level of skill, it really makes very little difference ;)

Re: Yay skating!!

[culturevulture7.livejournal.com]

Actually, you might like figure better, if you just remember to stay away from the toepick ;-) The blade's flatter and it might be easier to stand on (although I've never been on hockey skates, they just look harder to balance on).