Image-Google that title and you'll see what I'm referring to.

Now cut and paste the URL below:

http://health.discovery.com/convergence/duggars/baby-name-poll.html

If you've run out of ideas for new names and have to make a poll to have other people decide your baby's fate, maybe you should just stop breeding. Ones ability to breed should never surpass ones ability to come up with ideas. If I had a religion, that would be one of its laws.

What's so odd about this overpopulating resource-exhausting entire-school-of-Jesus-fish family is that they love the limeiight that Discovery Health and TLC gives them, which seems odd since they don't own or watch TV. Ironic, isn't it? TV is the work of the devil except when it pays you to continue in your breeding-addicted SUV-driving millennial consumerism-based lifestyle. Don't let the quaint Little House on the Prairie dresses fool you...they're not plucking raspberries and pulling rutabagas from their garden...there's more brand name non-organic canned products in their pantry than in my local neighborhood grocery store. Watch one of their TV specials...the resources this family consumes is astounding.

What's also ironic is that their family website is now hosted on Discovery Health. Well, I don't see anything "healthy" about having 17 (working on 18) kids.

Labels: It Takes All Kinds

The scene last night where Locke goes into the cabin reminded me so much of the season finale of Twin Peaks where Special Agent Dale Cooper goes into the Black Lodge opening/gateway under the Sycamore trees. First you have Locke going into the cabin and Hurley and Ben stay behind, just like Cooper going in and Sheriff Harry Truman (and was Andy with him, or did he come later?) stayed behind in TP. Then when Locke's in the cabin, he's met with whom I assume are dead people...Christian (Jack and Claire's dad), who by all accounts is dead (of course we don't really know!), and Claire, who is either dead (Stan thinks she is, but I don't know) or, like Locke and Jack and Hurley, can see dead people, and for some unknown reason followed her biodad into the cabin, leaving her baby behind. Of course the TP scene when Cooper is in the Black Lodge is incredibly terrifying and the people he sees, dead Leland Palmer, dead Laura Palmer, The Little Man from Another Place, Señor Droolcup/The Giant, Windom Earle, Bob, and Cooper's Evil Shadow Self are much more scary due to all the screaming, backward talking and white contact lenses, but the LOST scene was still quite engaging. Then outside, you've got Hurley and Ben sitting waiting for Locke like Harry and Andy waiting for Cooper. Except when Andy asks Harry, "would you like pie?" "would you like a plate special?", Ben and Hurley are completely silent the whole time, and Hurley actually grabs what is probably an Apollo bar out of his pocket and offers some to Ben. I wonder if the makers of LOST did this scene as a nod to Twin Peaks? It was very deja vu!

Now about Claire, Stan's theory is that when that blast occurred a few episodes ago and Sawyer goes to rescue her from that house, there were biological weapons in that blast that have affected both of them, and they are dying. He says that explains that she is dead. Also, Sawyer is dying. Of course that doesn't explain why baby Aaron isn't dead...we know that he he's a living, breathing, apparently healthy toddler from flashforwards. Wouldn't a baby be first susceptible to biological agents than healthy adults with developed immune systems? Yet, death would explain Claire's actions. Usually she's so cautious with Aaron, why would she leave him alone in the woods to follow her biodad that she doesn't even like? Of course Sawyer and Miles were nearby, but they were asleep. It's not like Claire.

Weird advice dead Christian gave Locke about "moving the island." I wonder if the Tsunami will play into this? Certainly the Tsunami should be happening soon... How weird it is that after this series was already being made, the Tsunami happened and it has got to force them to write it into the script.

Labels: LOST

I saw the oddest bird at our birdfeeder today. It had a white body with black head, black wings and black tail. It sort of looked like it had a skunk stripe down its back, but it was just because the body was white and the wings were black. On the black wings and tail were a few random white spots. It had a gold beak and was eating sunflower seeds from our feeder. I've never seen anything like it. I tried to shoot it (with a camera, that is) from the bedroom window, but it flew away, of course. Maybe it's a migratory bird. It returned again this afternoon and I noticed it also had a reddish-orange breast. I tried to shoot it again, but could only get the picture below which I had to crank up the brightness and contrast on. I couldn't get any closer to it, and shooting it through a window without it seeing you is a little difficult.

Mourning doves have to be the stupidest birds in the world. A few days ago I saw one land on top of our feeder. It's one of those feeders that hangs from a fishing wire and is supposedly squirrel-proof. It has a bottom part where the seeds go in, and a top covering that deflects rain and jumping squirrels. The dove was standing on this top part, making those jerky head strutting pigeon movements, looking around, wondering where the food was. Well, at the time, there might not have been food in the feeder, but if there was, it wouldn't have been on top. But it happened again today, shortly after the mystery bird sighting. It landed on top of the feeder, wondering how to get at the food which was in the level below. The stupid bird could not figure out how to get to the food. All our backyard birds, from large crows to baby sparrows learning to fly figure out how to fly into the bottom level, except the Mourning Dove. Such a stupid bird. They have such small heads in comparison to their body size. If a chickadee had a body the size of a Mourning Dove's, it would have a head the size of a tennis ball. Wisconsin recently passed a law that allows people to shoot Mourning Doves. I guess they are overpopulated, yet I thought it was a stupid law. But considering the skyrocketing price of food, our doves might look pretty good when gas is $60/gallon and bread is $15/loaf and chicken is $30/lb. Actually, we have an overpopulation of Allium in our backyard which started from a few bulbs. Each year there's more and more and they're taking over the tulips and everything else in our yard. Allium are from the onion/garlic family, so we can cook the doves with the allium bulbs.

I don't know if I could actually kill a warm-blooded creature. We caught our own crawfish and carp and ate them once (Stan caught the fish with his bare hands). But a bird? You can't catch a bird with your bare hands. You might be able to ambush them with a net...they're pretty slow and tame...and stupid. But I refuse to have any sort of gun.

What will we be willing to do when the food crisis gets bad?

Labels: Animals, This Boring Life

Recently I have been researching natural perfume-making and have been collecting essential oils to work with. Like any topic, there are blogs devoted exclusively to the subject, so I feel a little hesitant on adding to the mix since this is not something I have a lifelong experience with. My comments and thoughts on the matter may sound uneducated and naive since I am just beginning. But at least I admit that. I have no desire to become part of the online perfumerati, or part of an online anything anymore. Those days, the 90s and early 00s of web communities and cliques are so old and tired now. I just want my own little journal here where I write about my life, be it my animals, movies, music, art, plants, whatever.

And lately I really want to write about scents. I've already made some concoctions that I feel smell as good as anything commercially available. There are so many essential oils I'm unfamiliar with, so I add a small bit to some carrier oil and wear them as a single note perfume so I can take them in and "learn" them. Then there are some EOs I had been hesitant to get because I have a prejudice about them from my past.

I started obtaining my own perfumes when I was in Junior High. It began with some cheap mini bottles from Woolworths, plus some Avon solid sticks...they were sort of like lip balm, but scents. They came in little decorated tubes, Lilac, Hyacinth, Lily of the Valley and Hawaiian White Ginger. I didn't care for the Hawaiian White Ginger, but I wore it anyway. Then my 8th or 9th grade art teacher, a curmudgeonly old white-haired woman near retirement, wore the same scent. I really had a hard time wearing it after that.

So after that, up until this day, I have not been able to wear any Ginger. Nonetheless, last week I ordered a 1/6 oz size of Ginger Root from an online EO company. I thought I'd give it a second chance. I tried it in carrier oil. It smells nothing like my grumpy art teacher, or the cheap Avon scent. It smells like...crystalized Ginger. It's wonderful, and would make a good scent on its own.

The unfortunate part about natural perfumery is that the scents don't last as long as with synthetics, which is most everything on the commercial mainstream market today. But at least this gives me a way to sample more of my essential oils during a day, than having to wait until I shower next to try something else.

And here's one final thought for the day: I absolutely abhor all the silly Divacelebs with their fragrances. These chickies had absolutely nothing to do with the perfume other than lending their name to it. They probably know nothing about notes and fragrance families let alone tried their own hand at blending. And if anything, it would make me want to try it *less* than something with an abstract/non-celeb name (that is if I were still buying commercial perfume, which I'm not). The thought of a Br*tn*y Sp**rs perfume makes me wretch as I think of horrible smelly things I don't want to mention. Yes, some EOs have quite the...odd, if not downright unsniffable, waft to them. Valerian Root, even diluted, takes my breath away not in a good way. Black Currant bud, which is supposed to be so prized in perfumery smells like cat piss to me. I had such hopes for Galbanum, but I tried it diluted the other night and it left nothing but the smell of paint brushes that had been sitting in mineral spirits for a week. I need to try it again--that just can't be right! But I'd wear those any day before I'd put on any P*r*s H*lt*n. Yuck.

Labels: Scents

Hey, addictionary word submitters: Would it kill you to use your word in an example sentence? Or can't you think beyond just the definition of your brainchild? I mean, it's *your* word, FFS, use it! I subscribe to addictionary, and it bugs me to see a fairly decent "werd" w/definition arrive in my inbox...but there's no example, no context. How hard is it to frame your "werd?"

Reminds me of Freshman Art History at CSU when we only had to remember the artist, the name of the work and the year it was produced. No, nothing about the context in which the work was created or the culture of the country and the era. The first test was a total shocker. I think I got a D. It would've been a boon for Rainman and Aspies who get off on that trivia date stuff. This is probably one of the underlying roots of all my anxiety dreams about not studying for tests. I pulled my grade up to an A for the second semester, but only after cramming to remember useless and irrelevant trivia that I soon forgot after the test. That's what fact- and data-based tests do, make you forget after you no longer need the data--unless you have Asperger's and you thrive on that--but for us Neurotypes we want to go beyond: "32. Artist: Max Benkelman; Title: "Sunflowers in Evening with Farmhand"; Country: Germany; Year: 1927; Genre: German Expressionism. In fact, I don't even think in my class we had the Genre or Country. The instructor didn't care that you studied--as well as a freshman could study given the reading material that was given for the course--about German Expressionism, or Max himself and that he soon emigrated from Germany to the United States, Southwestern Nebraska, specifically, where he set up the Sunflower Institute that was sort of like a Van Gogh cult for suicidal artists. No one cared that Max's fixation on Sunflowers was obsessive to the point that he painted nothing else, not even starry nights. No one cared about how colorless Max's paintings became throughout his years until finally his canvasses were nothing but thick black paint. No, there was no context back in Freshman Art History.

(Sound of current and former art and art history students Googling Max Benkelman because they can't remember studying him in class).

I didn't think about it then, but now I realize it was probably so that the TAs could grade the papers easier since there were hundreds of people in these classes. Wouldn't want a TA to have to mull over essay answers and different TAs give different marks for similar responses.

Why not simply give multiple choice, for that matter? That'd make it even easier and the university could forgo employing TAs as test graders altogether and implement the tests with the number 2 pencil where you fill in the circles and have a computer read it?

I never met a TA that didn't feel a sense of entitlement. Grrr.

So, if I say the work was created in 1788 but the work was actually created in 1787, does that make me every bit as wrong as the bozo who said it was created in 1632? Yup, according to the way Art History 101 is graded.

Labels: Art, This Boring Life