What topic says! We've got an all-new Crayon Haiku and a special Christmas Memory Filler Stuff piece. Festive filler! And it's got a pedolicious picture of Wes in '88, so you know you wanna give it a look. 😉
In other news, I've added Steve's blog, Captive Thoughts, to the links. I don't know Steve personally -- he posts in Amanda's comments section regularly -- and I can't recall having addressed him by name in the discussions (though I very well may have), but today he posted a comment to which I could only respond with, "Hear, hear." That won him a link easily.
Yesterday I was so disgusted that I spent the entire day in bed, following a morning during which my mother went out of her way to be especially nasty to me -- calling me useless and worthless and shouting "you ain't no man" at me because I don't have a driver's license. (Was I supposed to be offended by that latter remark? I responded, "The next time I go around calling myself a 'man', you let me know.") And then she showed up in my dreams and was nasty to me there too! I'm not sure whether that was because it just stuck in my mind or whether it's because she was standing outside my locked door and continuing to bitch at me -- I woke up a few times to hear her screeching at me through the door, so that's a definite possibility. These last couple of weeks have done wonders for my desire to hang myself and get it over with, I tell you what. Between these incidents (and others like them throughout the years) and the mining of my childhood photos, we're building up to one helluva post when I get around to discussing my younger years in comparison with recent ones. Watch for it.
And no, Supermutant Donatello wasn't enough.
TMNT CAMO-BANDANNA TURTLEFLAGE + 13 #12
TMNT FLIP HEAD TRANSFORMER LOT #6
The second of those wins leaves me with Super Turtles coming out of my ears, and the Next Mutation figures in the first batch are a pretty sweet find. I've already got a lot of the ones in that batch, though, which means I can either sell 'em or use 'em for spare parts -- and there are enough to do a little of both. I've been thinking about some other custom figures I could try to make, so having such an excess of Raphaels should come in handy for that. Apparently at one point Raph took on the role of the Shredder, so you can imagine the outfit I'm planning to make for one of those bad boys. 🙂
But was that enough? No. Oh no.
Yep, the motherfucking motherlode. We're talking all four of the Supermutant Turtles, Supermutant Shredder, and Supermutant Splinter. Note that I'm not hanging around to snipe this one -- no, I bid on it outright. I bid pretty highly too. If someone else outbids me on this one, that person deserves 'em more than I do and can bloody have 'em. Win or lose, this is it for me. When this auction ends, I quit. I've won enough Turtles. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
Unless I see another Supermutant Shredder. It's all about the Shredder. Damnit. I have a problem.
Still with us? Check this out then: Sex and Silence at Yale. There are things in this article that bring back memories -- Yale's really a pretty shady place underneath all of the vines and foliage. Expect to hear about that sometime in the future too, maybe in that epic post we're building up to. Someone should offer me an autobiography deal...oh, the stories I could tell you. Here, my favorite exchange from page five of the article:
I asked Dean Brodhead how often the committee met last year. "It met more than no times and not many times."
"What?s 'not many'?"
"This isn't a court."
"Are these matters of public record?"
"No, they are not. To open the matter to public record is to expose the person who made the charge."
I'd really love to contact Naomi Wolf just to tell her how amused I was when I read the last sentence of that excerpt. And to tell her the rest of my story, of course, but that's really great -- I got into a bit of trouble at Yale during my freshman year (I was innocent, of course) and they kept trying to force a confession out of me without telling me exactly what I was supposed to be confessing to, since if they told me a specific incident I would know who was involved. There was a whole lot of intimidation and name-calling ("You're a negative force in the college!") and a lot of "you know what you did; don't play dumb with me" stuff, but no charges were ever filed and with the exception of the mental anguish I was caused by deans threatening me and e-mailing the mothers of some of my acquaintances to find out all they could about me, nothing really happened. Yale is notoriously unwilling to bring the law into these matters (they have a private police force that deals quietly with these things) -- not only would that "tarnish the reputation of the university," but there protections one has under the law that one lacks when you're alone in a roomful of administrators trying to bully you into saying what they want you to say. This is one of the reasons I don't think I could ever go back to academia, despite really enjoying the studies and the interaction with a certain kind of intellectual (namely, the one who cares about finding real truth instead of merely appearing to be smart and successful) -- there's just so much crap that goes on between the pages of those books in their dusty jackets that I've been thoroughly disgusted with the "establishment," as they say. Better to hang.
And that's a wrap for this post, slick.