Obvs, if you're going to engage in some kind of wretched excess, this is a pretty low-key, low-impact way to go. But still. I predict a bunch of these kids will develop (a) coke habits, (b) a lasting hatred of their parents, (c) a penchant for quoting the Frankfurt School at the dinner table, or (d) all of the above.
I am hoping the author is actually a Marxist trying to incite revolutionary sentiments.
Also, this is cooler:
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2011/07/covered-dog-wagon.html
Dear god, this is... actually, you know, fuck it, what does mcmanus have to say about this?
Ok, shut up, all of you. Nobody sunsets the Bush tax cuts until I get my playhouse. Debt ceiling be damned.
My playhouse will have a deck with no ceiling.
As a child, I briefly had a playhouse in the backyard!
It was the box that the new refrigerator came in. We cut windows and even painted the whole thing a cheery yellow. By the time the rain finally came and destroyed it, we had mostly run out of games that involved keeping house.
A new refrigerator? Bloody luxury! We made a tent out of a few old fencing planks and a worn out bedsheet. The point was, we made the damn thing. Then we went and did something else (probably played in the Anderson shelter at Gordon's house, which was more fun anyway.)
They spent $3,400 on it -- nothing close to cost of the pirate ship, but still a considerable sum for Ms. Lagana, who works as a marketing director for a publishing company, and Mr. Aubin, a stay-at-home father.
$3,400? Good grief. Just go and get some scrap timber and a hammer and build the damn thing yourself.
One summer my brothers and I made an igloo-shaped hut in the back garden from a big pile of hedge clippings (box hedges, some quite long and sturdy bits in the pile). It was more or less waterproof and lasted a surprisingly long time.
yeah, I pre-emptively endorse whatever bob has to say. fuck it. I am going to be xth against the wall as my children have a little playhouse with a swing, built at the same time as the child-proof gate/fence for the pool. I think I pretty clearly deserve to get got.
if you'd like you could console yourself with the fact that I'm being financially irresponsible.
and the little fuckers don't play in it enough. they use the swing in the morning before school, but they never play house in the tiny hut. you know why? because we live on the equator and it is hot as fuck every single day, and as humid as it is possible for air to be. so they reasonably play with me in the pool while I do my physical therapy, or we hide in the air conditioning and imagine elaborate stories about the world of mario bros. you may be interested to know that house peach has family nukes. it's definitely a surprise to house bowser.
you may be interested to know that house peach has family nukes. it's definitely a surprise to house bowser.
The world is definitely ready for Dune/Super Mario crossover fiction.
it also turns out that mario (renegade bad guy of house marrapese) has been in cahoots with bowser the whole time in the hope of winning princess peach's hand in marriage. but she's already in a serious relationship...with princess daisy. (all my kids' invention.) luigi's still a good guy though.
Peach and Daisy aren't the same character? Mario rescues more than one princess? I had no idea.
This is sounding more like "A Game of Super Mario". Sean Bean as Luigi!
In Houston, John Schiller, an oil company executive, and his wife, Kristi, a Playboy model turned blogger...
And if you thought that was good go read her blog, it's fucking fantastic! For example:
Kristi is currently the passionate Chairman and founder of K9s4Cops, a non-profit charitable organization that supplies K9 service dogs to police/sheriffs departments. Her goal is to supplement Texas border protection with hundreds of highly trained dogs protecting the citizens of the great state of Texas.
Only the thin shaggy line stands between Texas and the illegal aliens!
Sean Bean
I can never decide whether his name is properly pronounced Seen Bean or Shawn Bawn.
How many Playboy models turned blogger are there? There was the one with the kid named Mozart, and now this one. Maybe this is a rich vein of entertainment to be mined.
Today they followed it up with a story about how passe it is to drive to your $2k/week summer camp, all the real people charter jets. As always, skip to the end- at this point someone at the paper must be assigning these stories as an ongoing joke:
But some parents have already tired of this private-plane status infiltrating the simpler world of summer camp. Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer, made several summer trips to Maine in the past decade, where her children attended camp. She once managed to get on a charter plane from the airport in East Hampton, N.Y., for $750 (her husband had hung a sign in the airport seeking a ride). After listening to enough banter among parents about "who is flying, who is flying private, who they can get a lift home with," she decided she "was done with Maine and the planes and all of the people.
"It's a crazy world out there," she added. She now sends her children to camp in Europe.
Apologies to my fans, but I am not Savonarola and have not developed a taste for conspicuous condemnations of sumptuous overconsumptions, as long as the tips of shoes are neatly tucked in belts on airplanes. Nor do I focus on individuals, preferring the guilt I assign be collective and irredeemable. Michelle Bachmann is the mere tip of the Speer.
In any case, if we don't allow the rich to accumulate stuff, how much fun will it be to take it away? Shall we sacrifice our future ecstasies to the green-eye-shaded demigods? The money will wisp away in the Revolution, the playhouses can be moved to public parks.
No, the mansion on the hill must remain as the pinnacle of our ambitions.
(Ito Northern Culture Museum is a decent google. Clan Ito accumulated much of its land and booty from middling bourgeois in late Meiji, and gave it up after WWII. This is Marxism, see, the bourgeois accumulate so the proletariat can appropriate. It is inevitable.)
12: $3,400? Good grief. Just go and get some scrap timber and a hammer and build the damn thing yourself.
But those are the plebes. Any one who doesn't lay out that much might as well not even exist at this school in this economy.
20, 22: The World Of Men Will Fall, And All Will Come To Darkness: The Sean Bean Death Reel.
24: I was just about to link that one.
Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
I'm scheduled to build a treehouse for my kids in the brief interval between recovering from surgery and the start of my semester. I've got the wood and a design drawn up. But if anything takes longer than I'm anticipating, the whole thing won't get done.
31: If history teaches us anything, it is that construction projects rarely take less time and money than anticipated.
Start with the platform. Then when that's all you get done, they've got a neat platform.
We had a neat platform. I really loved it actually. It was really gross and moldy by the time I was big enough to use it. It was never intended to be more than a platform, though.
Speaking of construction projects, I had planned to post the next installment of the JRoth Promotional Posts, but now I hate to stomp on all these posts. I guess people can scroll.
Yeah, a platform is actually all I have planned for now. Any actual house on the platform will have to wait until next summer.
20 - but then Luigi would have to die! Sean Bean (and yes LB, he should just pick one rhyming name and be done with it) could be Waluigi perhaps, he's more killable?
My kids had a playhouse. It was a little plastic one for about 40 quid. They were most disappointed when I finally got rid of it, long after none of them could fit in it any more, because they liked to sit on the roof. At the moment in our garden we have a trampoline and a tent. And a massive shed which is a good place to play when it's tidy (which it isn't at the moment).
Our neighbors left us a little wire contraption playhouse, of the same technology that makes car sun shades and laundry baskets fold up into neat thirds.
I'd like to sit in stern judgment on these people, but if I had kids I doubt I'd think twice about signing the checks for Fallingwater II: Now With Pink Gables and Unicorn Corral.
When I was a kid the University of Botswana got rid of their clapped out second hand mainframe and my Dad brought it home for me to take apart. It was awesome - big boards with discrete components, longs runs of brightly colored wires, and the enclosure was the size of a very big wardrobe. I used the sides of the enclosure to roof a big pit me and my friends dug in the back yard so we could make an underground bunker. Sadly they were not designed to take the weight of the earth backfill and collapsed. Luckily nobody was inside at the time.
Now that I think of it - my friends and I did a lot of digging and it's a fucking miracle we didn't get killed in a tunnel collapse or something similar. We riddled the neighborhood with little tunnels like a band of delinquent moles.
I had a treehouse (very slapdash; built by me and the other neighborhood kids) and loved it. Also, you can climb up there and smoke cigarettes in high school.
My kids have a little playhouse and their very own little slide. Both plastic fischer price things. Both were given to us by a neighbor whose kids had outgrown them. I'd never have bought them, but am totally fine having them.
We got a huge backyard trampoline on freecylce. It took a lot of labor and, like, $200 worth of new parts to get it up, but it turned out to be a really good deal.
We also got our piano from Freecycle. We're fans.
groovy, helpy-chalk. my brother, step-brother and I built an awesome fort in the woods in SC our of existing trees and chicken wire and then weaving palmetto fronts through the wire to make walls. it was only stupid because we couldn't stand in it, thought we could have just as easily built it high enough. d'oh!
in remembrance of how blasé parents used to be, we had a club on a floating dock down at one of our neighbors down the bluff, on the may river, and we were called the "bluffton river rats." no sides on the thing, just a floating platform and a palmetto roof; no life jackets; wicked fast current, and they would let us hang out there for hours, till dinner, with me baby-sitting my 3-year-old brother. I was a responsible 7-year-old, and obviously trustworthy.
more awesomely, my brother was in a "gang" in kindergarten called "the bad pickles." that was when we went to public school in DC.
3: The link in 3 is quite appropriate given that today is Pioneer Day in Utah and I had to bike around a Pioneer Day parade to get to work.
We used to build teepees in the backyard out of old sheets and willow branches, and one time we got ambitious enough to do a hut, woven out of young willow and yucca. Good times, good times. Not the best for water logged climates, though.
We grew up with a big-sized vacant lot across the street, and so sometimes we played in old hobo lean-tos. Only when we could tell they'd been abandoned for awhile.
The lot has since been plowed, developed, and turned into 6 or 8 multi-million-dollar homes.
||
For BostoniangGirl, Epic fuck-you resignation letter from a Whole Foods employee.
|>
No treehouse in my youth, but big enough trees that the crutches could be slept in and were dry-ish. There were some helpful bits of 2x4 nailed here and there, but rope rotted.
49: I keep reading this as "epic fuck you to Bostonian Girl."
I like togolosh's story best, not just for the Ozymandian mainframe but because I have just drafted an abstract concerning the f0zzorial rodent hypothesis. Dig, dig, smother.
||
To British eyes, the sight of Charles Moore writing in the Telegraph: "The credit crunch has exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked. The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people. A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different." is only slightly less remarkable than the idea of John Boehner standing up in Congress and screaming, "PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!"
|>
More wisdom from the former editor of the Torygraph and the Spectator:
What about the workers? They must lose their jobs in Porto and Piraeus and Punchestown and Poggibonsi so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.
49: It is awesome. I saved in a special gmail e-mail the newsletter that included a reference to a Red Sox baseball player (sent to the new store in London which was part of the North Atlantic region) about what a great model it was for someone to continue to play when they have a broken arm.
I had a plan for a satirical novel about a guy who lived off of his rich mother, who then died and found himself with no marketable skills working for a Whole Foods.
I mean, you have to read this thing from the regional president Dav/e Lann/on. This is really long, but I could not figure out which parts to leave out:
Spring is here! Which for me means the beginning of baseball season! Because the stores in the UK are part of the North Atlantic region that makes all of you Red Sox fans, just like everyone in the rest of the region, so follow along:I was reading an article about Daisuke Matsuzaka the new pitcher for the Red Sox who came from the Japanese leagues. The article in Sports Illustrated was talking about "Dice K's" work out regiment being much more strenuous then the American pitchers.
This symbol is Doryoku. "Doryoku", meaning "effort" or "endeavor", is an important value of Japanese culture. The Japanese are known as perfectionists and it is the spirit of "doryoku" that often spurs them on to unflagging effort. This concept is very central to work in Japan. Matsuzaka is a true believer in this concept and will throw and work out harder and longer then his fellow players. It reminded me of one of my favorite baseball books: You Gotta Have WA by Robert Whiting. The book describes the cultural differences American baseball players experience when they join the Japanese leagues. The concept of Doryoku is central to the book. Here is an except:
The spotlight then turns to iron man Sachio Kinugasa, who held the consecutive games played mark until he was recently surpassed by Cal Ripken Jr. Kinugasa played through all types on injuries, including a 1979 fractured shoulder blade. When asked how he could play with a broken shoulder Kinugasa responded by claiming that it only hurt when he swung, whereas if he didn't play he would feel pain for the duration of the game. Japan's iron man represents the concept of doryoku, which has the rough English translation of "effort."Why do I bring this up? We are entering a period of Doryoku in a sense with the opening of the Kensington store. We need the unflagging effort of the entire region to open this store successfully. There are small windows of time in any career when you can go beyond yourself to achieve lasting success. Kensington is our chance to do just that. The best store in London? Be the standard bearer for all future WFM stores in the World? Change the expectation of what UK customers should expect in a food store? Make the multiples rethink how they do business? Show Europe how profits and team member happiness are not mutually exclusive? Drive the stock price up 10 points? 20? Move the Organic Movement to a new level? Be the first of dozens of stores in the UK and Europe?
(emphasis mine)
There's no crying Doryoku in baseball retail!
Emulating the self-mutilating example of Sachio Stakhanov Kinagusa is supposed to show that profits and team member happiness are NOT mutually exclusive? And why would employees care about the stock price anyway, let alone imagine that they could have any influence on it?
You Gotta Have WA was completely devoid of any judgement as to whether American or Japanese culture was better. Only a psychotic person could take away the lesson the guy in 57 took away.
60: And nobody respected this short little whiny president. Whole Foods needs Evelyn Waugh so badly.
Feh. Alan Prescott played a whole international Rugby League match with a broken arm. Now that's hardcore, and even more impenetrable to even most Londoners than yer man. (Vince Karalius did the same one with weird nerve symptoms in his neck, which goes from "heroic" to "suicidally stupid and very lucky indeed to get away with it".)
29, 30: I'd actually intervene in favour of Brideshead Revisited. It's far from my favourite Evelyn Waugh, but then poor Waugh beats out almost everyone else's best. What people tend to hate most is the TV series, either the Thatcher-era reactionary chic one or the Andrew Davies kitsch one. The book has a harder edge than that.
But I did repeatedly want to kick Charles Ryder in the jaw, and I had to read it suppressing the literary gag reflex.
Waugh later sort-of disowned the book or at least the taste of the book - he said that the reason why there was so much food and general luxury in it was that he wrote it in a grim commando training camp in northern Scotland in 1942 as a form of escapism. It makes sense: Scoop is very different and so is the Sword of Honour trilogy. Hardcore modernism and irony you could get rust off a bulkhead with. (As with the gap between the TV version and the book, a lot of people who hate him actually hate his son, infinitely tiresome Tory hack Auberon, and project it onto dad and his books.)
But that's what he needed between grinding marches across the peat and dreadful army meals. Someone else would have written a lot of smutty letters to his woman; Waugh wrote a major novel.
57 -- Any company promoting Dice-K as a great investment needs some basic lessons.
re: 63.1
The former president of the international frenchy-boxing federation won a match in Japan fighting with two broken arms.* I've trained with him at seminars, and he's a cheerful smiling baldy middle-aged bloke, not at all scary in manner, but it's best not to be the person he's demonstrating on.
* he didn't start the match with two broken arms, naturally.**
** one of my club mates -- super skinny, wouldn't say boo to a goose -- fought in the world champs last year, in an ostensibly light-contact match. She had three ribs broken about half-way through the 2nd round, but she fought the whole thing. ***
*** I can't imagine I wouldn't have wimped out.
Does FS have an uptown location ?
I think that comment was intended for here:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_11460.html#1337230
I blame the drinking !
