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Awesome action this weekend, complete with fumbles, flags, interceptions and touchdowns, and everyone is twittering about what the final outcome will be. Of course the season’s not over yet and it’s too soon to tell who’s going to be drinking champagne and who’s gonna be stuck wearing pancake makeup.
One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be a mess to clean up in the Blogmocracy Rec Room once it’s all over and done with… but it’s not over until WE say it is, on The Overnight Open Thread.
That image was kindly provided by our own Snork. Although it’s mean and green and My Little Cthulu means something to someone, I never read C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia.” any of H.P. Lovecraft’s stuff.
Years ago, our daughters Bunkessa and Bunkarina opted out of the little plastic foofoo horses with pink hairy foreheads, manes and tails and wisely chose the path of barbering Barbies before they came up with the traditional game of BarbieBall.
BarbieBall is a lot like Hackysack, except with goals. It’s traditionally played sitting down in a narrow hallway with the bathroom and bedroom doors closed, and you have to wear socks with animals on them. That’s really all you need to know about the game as it’s self explanatory once the game starts. You can use hands and feet to attack or to protect your goal. Oh, almost forgot. You have to remove the rubber Barbiehead from her torso prior to play.
[Note: there are NO bathroom breaks allowed during play, otherwise it’s a forfeit for the player who gives into the pressure of the bladder. This makes it a physical game as well as a psychological one.]
After all, when you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way, so let’s have an Overnight Open Thread instead.
This is hilarious in a sick, dysfunctional sort of way.
Gordon Fleming is, by his own account, an environmentally sensitive guy.
He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store.
Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough.
Ms. Cobb chides him for running the water too long while he shaves or showers. And she finds it “depressing,” she tells him, that he continues to buy a steady stream of items online when her aim is for them to lead a less materialistic life.
Sleep with hippies…
Mr. Fleming, who says he became committed to Ms. Cobb “before her high-priestess phase,” describes their conflicts as good-natured — mostly.
But he refuses to go out to eat sushi with her anymore, he said, because he cannot stand to hear her quiz the waiters.
“None of it is sustainable or local,” he said, “and I am not eating cod or rockfish.”
Nobody said it would be easy:
As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.
Mass hysteria does that.
“As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”
While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.
No, really? Sanctimonious holier-than-thou hippies are irritating? Maybe that’s why I want them all to die.
But I think the article is being a bit dishonest, or at least naive. In my experience, for every holier-than-thou hippy who walks the walk, there are a dozen who merely talk the talk.
Those with a heightened focus on environmental issues, on the other hand, can find it hard to refrain from commenting on things that they view as harmful to Earth — driving an oversize S.U.V., for example.
Find it hard to refrain? I see no evidence that they even want to. And back to my earlier point about walk-the-walk vs talk-the-talk, what I’ve experienced far more often is the green preacher in the “oversize S.U.V” preaching to someone in a Honda to take the bus, while justifying the “oversize S.U.V” by saying “I need it”, or the seats aren’t comfortable in the Honda, or something equally arrogant.
“Food is such an emotional issue,” she said.
Oh, the drama! The opera of the onions!
Women, Ms. Birkhahn said, often see men as not paying sufficient attention to the home. Men, for their part, “really want to make a large impact and aren’t interested in a small impact,” she said.
Oh, you noticed? Men are kinda designed for large impacts.
In the ensuing discussions, Ms. Birkhahn said, her husband argues that the changes she is making may have a large effect on their lives but have little or no effect on the planet. He fought every step of the way against the gray-water system she installed in their bathroom to recycle water to flush the toilet, calling it a waste of time and money, she said. The system cost $1,200 to install.
Ms. Birkhahn said she found it hard to dispute his point but thought it was irrelevant. “I am trying to be a role model for my son,” she said.
Dumb and pointless is a role model?
Still, Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said he had seen divorces among couples who realized that their values were putting them on very different long-term trajectories.
“One still wants to live the American dream with all that means, and the other wants to give up on big materialistic consumption,” Dr. Brulle said. “Those may not be compatible.”
Yeah, I’d say that sums the dichotomy up pretty well. Hippies are self-hating humans. If they won’t respect themselves, they have no right to expect anyone else to respect them. The good news is their fertility rate is depressed.
Hat Tip: Silhouette.
The Diary of Daedalus
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