Sounds like Newt is ready for his first Metallica album.
Go Newt go!
See Newt dance. Dance, Newt, dance. Fly, Newt, fly!
Sit down, Newt. Rest, Newt!
Will Newt dance more?
No, Newt, no!
Awesome.
Would it be impolitic of me to suggest that it would sound as though he had his mother's temperament?
uncle (is he my brother-in-law? He's Buck's, but does he get to be my brother-in-law by marrying my sister-in-law?)
My father always called any such person, for whom we had no other name, "a connection." But you're right, it would be normal to call him "uncle" to a child, and therefore to think of him that way yourself.
With my family 'uncle' and 'aunt' was the term for anyone a) vaguely related or b) a close, pre-children, friends of my parents or grandparents.
I'm "Auntie Jackmormon" to all of my sisters' and cousins' children. And my grandparents' siblings were "uncle" and "aunt" to me. Memorizing the family tree came later.
My father always called any such person, for whom we had no other name, "a connection."
Wait, he bought drugs from all of them?
The dance floor was occupied by the usual teenage girls dancing with small children to the hits of the 80's (one wonders what the teenage girls think of the music selection.)
Probably all were too busy fending off St*ph*n A. M**gs.
Doomed to become a running joke, that is. One really wonders what to do about such people. If his blog ever enters into evidence, should we feel bad?
There is a furious rage for the eighties among my daughter's set at the moment. Boy George, Tears for Fears, Roxy Music. I get points for remembering that stuff; my wife either had stopped listening then or doesn't remember.
12 -- Jeez, I had the same thought about an hour ago. "Oh Ghod, what if I'm pushing his buttons and setting in motion a course of events which will culminate in his doing someone harm?"
If his blog ever enters into evidence, should we feel bad? What for? I mean, if it enters into evidence, that is.
Good for Newt. I'm especially impressed that he didn't say that until pressed on his no. Jane Austen--well, maybe not Jane, but Frances Burney for sure--would approve heartily.
12, 14 -- In that case this blog's owners can retain Pa/ul Dei/gnan's lawyer.
What for?
Well like let's say, for an alleged cross-country serial abduction and rape spree.
There is a furious rage for the eighties among my daughter's set at the moment. Boy George, Tears for Fears, Roxy Music.
Exqueeze me, but Roxy Music is properly a 70s band. After all, the album of theirs I was just listening to earlier today, For Your Pleasure, was released in 1973.
I don't remember capitalizing that.
Check out those lapels! And Brian Peter St John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno off in the corner with his meticulously tended-to hair.
17--Yeah, that's kind of what I meant.
Anyway, whoever left a link to here in his blog's comments made us part of the evidence, as it were. Hi, FBI! I honestly didn't believe him capable of acting on his desires!
Maybe I didn't hear them then. Back when WXRT, which you will remember, played new music it played RM in the early eighties. I thought they were new then. When did Brian Farey(sp?) record that piece that Bill Murray sings in Lost in Translation?
5: Impolitic? Perhaps. Doesn't mean I'm going to argue with you about it.
Physically, he's all Buck's family, while Sally is all mine. Personality-wise, they're more mixed.
You still haven't answered his question.
22: One wonders, after a while, how much nurture is informed by nature when it comes to personality. Of the four of us: two of us are sweet-natured and gentle-tempered. Two of us are set to 'caustic sarcasm' as more or less a default.
(We leave it as an exercise to the reader, etc.)
The Aunt / Uncle thing is funny. I remember talking with a 5 y.o. dutch niece; she has always called me uncle. She asked how I was related to her dad and when I said he & I were cousins she paused a moment to think and then a look of complete confusion came over her. The confusion didn't last long. She seemed to chalk it up to "crazy grownups" stuff.
PK has usually called his friends, especially the long-distance ones, his "cousins." Including my godson and his little brother. Only within the last month has he started asking, "wait, are we actually related to them?"
I don't know how old I was, but I was at my grandparents' house with an aunt and uncle that we saw all the time. My dad liked to sort of test children to see what we actually knew (he found it fascinating how children can function in a world full of things they have no way to understand), so I guess he suddenly had an idea, and he turned to me and said "Ned..do you know who my sister is?" And I thought for a while, and I had definitely never conceived the idea that my parents had brothers and sisters before...so I said "Mom?"
And he said "No, Aunt Jan is my sister." I was amazed! Finally, an explanation of what "Aunt" means! It means the sister of one of your parents!
I must have been really little, but somehow I remember it.
Heh. Once not too long after I'd gotten back from visiting the boyfriend, Mr. B. went on a trip to visit his sister, and PK said, "Papa's going to visit his girlfriend!"
My boyfriend's three-year old... um, cousin, once removed, I guess, but 'nephew' is close enough.. was asked by his grandmother upon learning his mother was pregnant, whether he'd prefer a baby brother or a baby sister.
First response: "I want a baby brother so I can be a brother."
[explanation.]
Second response: "Oh. I want a big brother then, 'cause babies cry all the time."
has anyone played the cranium where the charades involve one person trying to puppet the story with another person, who is guessing what the answer is like everyone else on the team? it's kinda fun, if super frustrating.
My wife's nieces and nephews don't seem to call me 'Uncle' . Instead, it's just 'Matjak' -- the Czech dimunitive form of Matej -- or (when shouting for me to chase 'em around) 'Matjaku' -- the vocative form of the same.
I don't know if that's because 'Uncle' isn't commonly used when addressing people in Czech or not.
huh, i find it really weird to be called "aunt mmf". maybe this is because my niece is catching on slowly to talking and so i am not used to it, but it's such a mouthful.
(and i definitely seem to have no choice what she calls me - that's what my brother is teaching her to do)
It's so weird to go to afternoon tea/kibitzing, pre-dinner drinks, and the slowest fucking dinner in the history of the universe, and to come back to the office and find only two new comments in the last six hours.
Though the clock only says four hours. I must have come back and commented after tea without remembering it. That's one of those serious warning signs, isn't it?
Hrmphf.
What? It was meant as a compliment!
I sense that I'm being characterized as irascible, and let me tell you that really irritates me.
(Newt's actually fairly easy-going. He just doesn't like being used as a prop.)
Totally off topic (or so I hope), but awesome: Hitler cats!
Four posts down, we read LB characterizing herself as an "unpleasant and hostile person," which I think rather inaccurate but, then, I also live in New York.
Imagine that for some crazy reason I was mostly not reading comments this weekend. Throw me a link for 11-12, 14, 17?
Read w-lfs-n's latest post, the incomprehensible one, and follow the links therein.
(I mostly missed it too -- I'm not sure how w-lfs-n found the guy -- but that's who's being discussed.)
Tim, we've all seen the Hitler cats already.
w-lfs-n's latest post, the incomprehensible one
Don't you mean, "w-lfs-n's latest incomprehensible post"?
Check out Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street.
Speaking of cats, cat circus update: I decided to go, but we got there and the show was sold out, so we were standing looking through the window while buying tickets for the next show, and I saw a bit of the show. I watched this woman handle a ferret in a manner I thought somewhat rough, my eyes welled up, and I was like "I can't do this." I am such a pansy.
handle a ferret ina rough manner
Wait, is Emerson connected with this cat circus?
That Stevie Wonder clip is stupendous.
My favorite part of the Stevie Wonder clip is the little kid headbanging in the background. Well, and the rotound trumpeteer who looks almost exactly like the perpetual PhD guy who clerks for our writing department.
Bryan Ferry, Stevie Wonder, who knew b-wo was so cool?
But us kewl kidz was into that roxy shit in the seventies, Mr. Joe-Come-Lately.
Do you say the same thing about phil collins?
Yeah, that little kid just rockin' out in the background is teh coolest.
Phil Collins contributed some great drumming to some of Eno's solo albums.
How old is Newt? That's great.
33 - That's everything we love about you. But aren't you worried you'll somehow become an issue in the Santorum-Casey race?
64- My whole worldview was just shaken. Really? He also was in Hard Day's Night, although its not likely that he drummed.
65 -- this page thinks that Phil Collins was not in fact in Hard Day's Night, though he was one of the kids filmed as a possible extra for the movie.
65: He'll be 5 in the beginning of August.
64- My whole worldview was just shaken. Really?
Yeah. On "Sky Saw", for instance, the rhythm section is him and Percy Jones, his bandmate in Brand X.
Hiya Armsmasher.
I take it the answer is no, in which case I recommend it. I'm surprised you lot aren't all over the Cranium. Wordplay, wacky factoids, and opportunities for physical innuendo. Sounds just like the comments but with food and sofas.
Not quite on the level of Stevie's Sesame Street gig, but here's a 17-year-old Notorious B.I.G. freestylin' in a rap battle:
65 is some relief. But it doesn't make up for a breach of the fabric of space and time of the sort that Ted Nugent might as well have been in the Golden Palominos etc.
My son has discovered youtube. We sometimes sing 15 miles on the Erie Canal when he rides on my shoulders, and he is totally into watching Springsteen sing it on the Internet. "Its real music daddy!" (as opposed to that fake stuff we do together. He loves that and Thundercrack, although when at the age of 2.5 he sings in that sweet little voice the "she bumps, she grinds" part I wonder if my family too will become an issue in the Santorum Casey race. I can't see Stevie at work, but unless I've missed something ironic, I expect I'll be showing it to him this week too.
69: I've only played cranium a few times, and have found it so easy as to be massively unsatisfying.
Of course, that could have had something to do with the fact that I was teamed up with my older sister, and we have virtually the same brain, so it was mostly just like telepathy.
Hey thanks Ben for the Superstition link -- that is my favorite Stevie song, which I listen to far too infrequently. Anyone notice midway thru, "If you don't release me, I'll have to sing a Sesame Street song"?
Anyone know who the personnel are? The sax player looks really familiar as does the lead guitarist but I don't know their names or from where -- I think I might be misrecognizing him as a British actor whom he resembles? Is it Stevie's band or the show's?
[And don't bother pointing out the degree of my musical ignorance, I'm already aware of and embarrassed by it.]
Cranium is a great game, especially if you have a group of people with different strengths, with all the different categories.
Oh, I've never played cranium with my sister, which sounds like it would be problematic since we too are basically telepathic. But with friend-of-friends strangers it's awesome.
if you have a group of people with different strengths
I never miss any of the word ones, but when it comes to shaping play-doh, I look like a special ed student.
The humming/whistling ones are insanely hard.
Is this some kind of newfangled Trivial Pursuits thingy?
The humming/whistling ones are insanely hard.
Yeah, that's been my experience.
But wait, this isn't the GBJD thread, is it?
It's kind of like Trivial Pursuit crossed with Pictionary crossed with charades and Name That Tune and some other stuff.
I'm really competitive with board games. Fortunately not to the point where I'm an obnoxious winner/loser but I do get very intense.
YOU'RE ALL GOING DOWN.
(Ahem. Sorry.)
Oh, man. 84 probably belongs in the GBJD thread, too.
I have to admit to having a strong prejudice against the new-style games that involve charades or drawing pictures or performance or whatever. Hate them. Even though when I'm forced to play I usually enjoy it. I don't know why those games bug me so much, but they do.
79: I punt on the charades-like ones and the playdoh ones. (Although a friend does 2D 'drawings' with clay on the table that works well since she can't model in 3D.) This is why god invented significant others with complementary cranium skills.
80: especially when your boyfriend is tone deaf and has a three note range. I'm just sayin'. For extra fun, play the Canadian edition when the person with a mind for trivia effluvia is American. Wait for the relatives to pick up on this.
TMK, it's like trivial pursuit & charades & pictionary mixed together with a few other types of questions, like spelling a word backwards, or modeling the answer out of clay, or humming a tune for the person to guess. It's played in teams and some of the questions are head-to-head competitions.
Most of winning involves the teams being telepathic or just knowing who to make sing and who to make model clay.
Yeah, choosing who to do which thing is key.
I hate board games but usually enjoy myself when roped into them.
(This is not passive-aggression. I swear.)
I begin to understand the comments in "One is the Loneliest Number" a bit better.
The sleep ones, or the castration ones?
86: What B said, except that I've never enjoyed playing them on the rare occasions when I've been roped in.
80: The most comical Trivial Pursuit game I ever played was when my cousin showed up from southern California with his southern-California-stereotype girlfriend (as in, asked whether there was a mall around within 100 words of being introduced) who had brought along the young player's edition because she found the regular game too difficult.
I once played the Harry Potter trivial pursuit with my youngest sister when she was ten or eleven. She was excited. I was the only one in our family who had read the books with her, so we began to play.
After six turns we had both answered all of our questions correctly. Without invoking the younger player rules. She won on the account of twenty-year old should be ashamed to know the books that well but I swear I only read it the once!
I once played the British version with a group of British people and our team was me and my Greek wife. We didn't do very well. You'd be amazed at how much of their own trivia UK folk have (and know).
But in general I love games. And I'm confidant that I would totally pwn Becks.
The best board games uniformly come from Germany. I have no idea why this is so, but it is.
94 was talking about Cranium, btw.
So M/lls has a Greek wife and McGrattan has a Czech wife. Right? Trying to keep these nationalities straight.
And yeah, the Germans games are great. Don't know how it got started, but they have a very strong gaming culture and buy a lot of them, which supports a significant community of game developers and publishers.
We used to play Trivial Pursuit a lot in college, the version with pictures on the spaces in addition to different colors. My then roommate became famous throughout our dorm for asking why Morgan Freeman was on a yellow square for history instead of a pink square for entertainment. ("Morgan Freeman" was actually Nelson Mandela.) She never lived that one down and, after that, we always played by Morgan Freeman rules, where if you landed on that square you got to roll again.
Siedler von Catan ist österreichish, na ja?
My favorite Trivial Pursuit question (in Genus) ever was:
Q: What political interest groups is represented by the Log Cabin Republicans?
A: The gays.
WTF? It's "the gays"?
Absurd. Everyone knows it's the Moops.
Siedler von Catan!
Oh baby, don't get me started. Also, Puerto Rico and Power Grid are teh bomb.
Ich bin nicht sicher, teo, aber ich habe doch geglaubt, daß das Spiel deutsch war. Keine Ahnung, wirklich.
? ???????? ??? ??????????? ???????????? ?????
Foreign alphabets is cheating!
I have a beer.
Ich habe geglaubt, daß es österreichisch war. Ich bin aber nicht sicher.
Oh. That's too bad.
(I read 106-107 as "you want foreign languages?! I'll give you some fucking foreign languages!". But maybe that's because I can't read what they are actually saying.)
I cheated and used Babelfish. I am a foreign language incompetant. Six years of Spanish and I can't even speak in the present tense.
I have the feeling I've told this here, but I can't find it in the archives, so what the hey: A friend and I lived in London for about eight months back in the early nineties. At the end of our soujourn there (our work permits expired after six months and it was getting harder and harder to find decent work), we rented a car and drove all around the island.
We were doing it on the supercheap and sleeping in the car most nights. Every third to fifth we'd check into a hostel and shower. We had been up in Scotland for a while and then were working our way back to London fairly quickly.
So, we were pretty rangy when we arrived in Oxford, and one of our stops that night was this pub, the Bear, that's apparently been there since the 13th Century or something. It's got these big timbers and low ceilings and stuff, and it was full of tweedy professor types and students in jackets and school ties, all speaking the most exceedingly toff-like English you've ever heard. Brideshead Revisited, it was.
Of course we felt extremely out of place, but hey, we were young brash Americans, and weren't going to let any Playing-Fields-Of-Eaton poofs scare us off (I firmly believe upper class England is the only place where it's acceptable to act like an Ugly American, as long as you do it consciously).
So we ordered pints and almost got into it with the barman because he refused to accept Scottish bank notes ("too likely to be counterfeit") and I asked him pointedly what the "U" in "UK" stood for. But we found enough British notes to pay, and then we hung around over in the corner just sort of listening and taking in the scene.
At a big oak table near us a group of students were having an extremely animated discussion, and we just sort of assumed it must be about something intellectual or important or something, until we heard the loudest one at the table passionately asserting that the only viable strategy was to take and hold Australlia early and then expand anywhere else besides Asia. The cream of British intelligentsia were arguing, at length, about Risk!
Goddamn we laughed so damn hard we almost dropped our pints, and the entire pub ended up glaring at us icily, and the barman finally walked over and asked us to quiet down and think about moving on. Which we did, although we made a point of finishing our pints slowly, and we actually did end up talking to a couple of students, but it wasn't very interesting and we soon headed off for greener pastures.
Foreign alphabets is cheating!
I had a beer earlier.
I have a (cheap) bottle of champagne in the fridge. I bought it when something (promotion? I forget) celebration-worthy happened to my roommate last year but it turns out she doesn't like the bubbly. (I'm not a huge fan but The Gay Indian Roommate was really into celebrating all of life's small victories with champagne and I thought that was kind of a nice tradition.) It's been in the fridge ever since because it seems kind of sad to drink champagne alone.
Yeah, I'd love to participate in all these language acrobatics, except that the only language I know well enough besides English to communicate in (that isn't a programming language) is Spanish, which everyone can at least read, if not actually write.
I could try writing in Lojban, perhaps, but I'd be looking up every third word.
Wir haben zusammen keine Ideen! Ausgezeichnet.
I had six weeks of Arabic in sixth grade and the only letter I can recognize is the ell sound. And maybe the H. And we learned that we shouldn't pre-judge other cultures. And how to say hello. And we were taught by the French teacher.
if languageGaming then
{pdfCanPwn;}
else
{sadFace;}
(Does anyone else read pdf23ds as 'portable downloadable file'?)
Acrobat's PDF stands for Portable Document Format. 3ds is a file format for 3D Studio Max.
I'm drinking the Scrimshaw from the North Coast Brewery. Yum.
it seems kind of sad to drink champagne alone.
You'll never make it to rehab with that kind of attitude, Becks. Also, if you have to buy cheap champagne, go with Spanish cava or Italian prosecco.
There's no reason to hate all comments in foreign languages, Becks. Especially not in the language that's given you rejuvenating, healthy COK.
95: A card game rather than a board game, but Bohnanza pwns.
The one time I was playing Cranium, one of the other players hummed the melody at great length, and his partner just didn't get it. Then I offered to demonstrate how it could be done
you know, it's a wonder I haven't been assassinated yet
and hummed, "Ooh, ooh. Ooh, ooh."
"Billie Jean!"
Which is even more amazing if you've ever heard me try to hum.
This has been a story for the dagger aleph.
matt
['Get back to work, Bruce.']
I believe I will have to go get a beer now.
123: I had a kick-ass Spanish grenache tonight.
Especially not in the language that's given you rejuvenating, healthy COK.
That cracked me up. I forgot about that.
If you have cheap champagne you should make Bellinis.
I finished my beer.
you should make Bellinis.
Or mimosas. Then you can get drunk first thing in the morning.
Cheap champagne and pomegranate juice is also good. As is cheap champagne and Chambord.
So, apostropher, you drink fancy wines, stay up until three a.m. every night, and post cock jokes on the internet?
Man, that occupation:all occupations::bacon:pork products.
121: The intended meaning of my name might be more obvious, if not less corny, if it were something like "doc2mpeg"--along the same lines, but more easily parseable.
129: It didn't crack me up, 'cause I didn't get it. Link? Something??
Mimosas are sometimes the only reason to get up in the morning.
I wonder, though, if we're all being assholes talking about drinking when Alameida just got out of rehab.
Huh, 136 was me. Dunno what happened to my name.
134 -- I always read the latter part of your handle as "twenty-thirds".
Silvana, I don't know. I just wonder.
Well, I think the scales are probably tipped in favor of "yes", all things considered, even if they're not firmly there.
Hey, Settlers of Catan! Sadly, all of my real life friends are too cool for board games -- I'm waiting until Sally and Newt are old enough to play games I like. (And putting in a lot of time on the Connect 4 and Parchesi to that end.)
144 -- I spend a lot of time teaching the youngster Backgammon and Monopoly. Not sure why I spend the time on Monopoly, a game that has never really appealed to me; but she thinks it's a gas, so. Backgammon is a slow learning process -- she has basically got the mechanics of it down but any notion of strategy is a long way off still.
(Also: a year or so of practice with jigsaw puzzles is starting to pay off.)
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