“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
A comprehensive piece by Omar G on Twittiquette/Twitter annoyances.
My new favorite site, via Glark: Sexy People.
My latest Dirty Sexy Money write-up for SOAPnet. (SHUT UP, LISA.)
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
Wow. Just…wow. I’m simultaneously terrified that the next photo will be a forgotten shot of me from the 70s and convinced they’re all staged. And I’m now second-guessing every pair of glasses I’ve ever owned. Soooo unfair to have grown up in the 70s and 80s.
That photo of “Christine” made me scream like a little girl with spiders in her hair. Made my three-year-old cry. Mommy’s sorry, baby.
There’s a photo of my family taken for a church directory (I know!) in the mid-’80s that is so disastrous, I may have to scan it in and send it to these people. I kind of don’t want to sell out my parents that way, though.
Oh, the church directory photo! (cringe) Such evil in the service of religion!!!
There’s one of me in a short-sleeved bright aqua polyester shorts-suit that my XMIL picked out just for the photo. OMG, I must send it in. Maybe my 70’s self can date Lou’s 80s self…LOVE that pose, Lou!!!
Thank you for the Sexy People blog. I’ve already sent it to just about everyone I know. It’s now my favorite thing in the universe!
It makes me feel like I’m back in my grandma’s living room, in 1988.
i have several of myself i could post. back when my mother cut my hair using the “bowl” method (which was green glass, btw) and my glasses were pink plastic – including the lenses…
and ohh, how well do i know thee, church directory! o bane of my youth…
Ugh, church DI-rectories. Our family photo from 1984 has the rest of my family looking relatively normal (for the eighties) and me looking like my parents were Vidal Sassoon and a portobello mushroom. Wrong, wrong, absolutely brimming over with wrongability.
I know it’s mean to laugh, because some of the kids are obviously thrilled to be having their pictures taken, but OMG I laughed until stuff came out my nose. Poor Glasses Boy, I feel your pain. I’ve been wearing the suckers since 4th grade….
” … and me looking like my parents were Vidal Sassoon and a portobello mushroom.”
Jaybird, you’re hilarious! And I’m going to burn every school photo ever taken of me, just to be on the safe side. (
Oh, that sexy people blog is SO. FUNNY.
I may have some pictures to submit. Like the one where I had a turtleneck sweater with different decals sown on to it, a mullet, and giant blue glasses. Oh the horror.
I just peed a little when I saw the mullet man’s jheri curl update.
But Christine rocks!
If I could find a print of the worst picture of me ever, I would send it in. I was in what I affectionately refer to now as my “Ugly Phase.” Think big metal braces, purple plastic framed glasses that were too big for my face, a curly mullet (thanks, Mom!), no fashion sense at all, even for the 80s, and large dark freckles that resemble acne in the picture. I had described this picture to my husband and he actually saw it years later (where it lives on forever in the form of a coffee mug someone had made for my grandmother) and he actually recoiled in horror. He was all, “Let us never speak of this again. To anyone.” I couldn’t even be hurt by his reaction. It’s that bad a picture.
I have to call my mother and thank her for never making us sit for family photos. My school pictures are bad enough.
Sars, I’m more inclined to say “Shut up, Karen”. Yeah, Lisa’s being a hardass (and her art gallery deal with Jeremy was monumentally stupid), but Nick’s been a wife-bullying idiot most of the season. Lisa’s not wrong about Nick’s inability to handle 50/50 custody. And, seriously, if I were Lisa, I wouldn’t let Karen within a mile of my kid. ( I hate that Karen has been so one dimensionally bitchy and selfish this season.) How long would it take for Karen to get bored with being a babysitter, or fall in love *again* and shove Kiki off on the chauffeur so she can be with her latest soul mate? Given Karen and Nick’s history, and their unwillingness or inability to let go of it, I can’t think of a more inappropriate person than Karen to take care of Kiki.
Also, I hate love triangles. And I am apparently way too involved in DSM for my own good.
About as long as it takes Lisa to dump Kiki on her mother, which she seriously does once an episode. Would Karen make a great stepmom? No. But 1) it was one weekend, 2) Lisa’s proposed solution was not to spend time with Kiki herself either, and 3) Karen’s successful interference in their marriage is pretty much on Nick, who should have drawn a thick line and put her behind it immediately.
If Lisa WERE being a hardass, I’d maybe like her a little; she should have put her foot down with Nick once and for all like a year ago. But she’s a passive-aggressive martyr and a hypocrite, and I’m not letting Nick off the hook for anything, by any means, but if the writers wanted us to sympathize with Lisa, they’d have had her boot Nick with prejudice in the first season. Not telling Lisa he and Karen were ever engaged was a pretty serious betrayal; that Lisa’s reaction was the same boo-boo-kitty “I don’t know you anymore” mewling/Jeremy-smooching she does every time? Bah. Annoying.
This is why the show sucks now, though — none of these characters is sympathetic anymore, except Jeremy a little bit, and Carmelita, whom they just killed. I was glad to hear it got cancelled.
Sars said: “Not telling Lisa he and Karen were ever engaged was a pretty serious betrayal; that Lisa’s reaction was the same boo-boo-kitty “I don’t know you anymore” mewling/Jeremy-smooching she does every time? Bah. Annoying.”
Ah yes, the inevitable cliche ” I don’t know you anymore”. Has anyone ever actually said that in real life? I agree with everything you said here. The Jeremy smooching was annoying. And stupid. Also, it wasn’t Nick’s fault that Karen ended up with Kiki. Letitia was supposed to be watching her, and Lisa should have understood that. Still, I wouldn’t leave Karen in charge of my newspaper, let alone my kid. I get why Lisa wouldn’t want her around Kiki. I wouldn’t put it past Karen to try to usurp Lisa’s role as mother, just long enough to pull Nick in. “Just friends” my ass.
I rolled my eyes over Jeremy’s amnesia, and loved that he’d been faking it. When they first said he had amnesia, I was feeling lucky they didn’t introduce an evil twin instead, complete with a goatee and a pack of cigarettes.
The show does suck now. Last year, they had just enough soapy elements to make it fun. This year, it’s been absurd. I’m not sure I’m glad it’s been cancelled, but it sure as hell deserves to be. I’ve been sticking with it because I want to see how it ends.
Poor Carmelita. *Sniffs a little* I loved her.
Me too! Candis Cayne did really good work with some dreadful material, too. And if I may take a dip in the shallow end for just a moment here…one of the better boob jobs I’ve seen. In fact, possibly the second-best all-time.
“Second-best”? Who was the first, if you won’t get sued for saying?
I have to convince my sister to send in the school photo taken right after she got her hair permed with the kit that came with her “Perm Barbie” or whatever the heck that Barbie was. Completely fried her head!
@Jaybird: It’s just my opinion, but Tiffani Thiessen’s front-porch design is the best I’ve seen. You know they have to be fake because she doesn’t need a bra, but they look really real.
Hee. “Front-porch design”. Ain’t no milkshake been bringin’ them boys to da yard, it’s a porch swang.