It’s Thursday and I am half sick of shadows. How about some miscellaneous mental marginalia?
First: caption contest! Pietro Lorenzetti, who seems to specialize in Madonnas who have just about had it, painted the image above. Maybe it’s just summer vacation talking, but to me it says, “You don’t have to stop making that squirty sound, but you have to make it over there.”
Second: Neil deGrasse Tiresome Tyson said something about something, again.
[img attachment=”110064″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 11.01.40 AM” /]
As Charles C. W. Cooke at National Review Online pointed out, we already tried this, and here’s what it looked like:
[img attachment=”110065″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 11.05.46 AM” /]
So, that’s-a no good. Boy, I wish I could make a living out of saying dumb stuff. Oh, wait.
Three: As long as we’re picking on Mr. I-Am-a-Golden-God, here’s a prescient comic from 2012. “Remember, he’s suffering inside, too.”
Four: Most of the time, women’s tennis is about as important to me as men’s tennis, which is to say “not.” But I saw the dumb little flippy nightie Nike required its sponsored athletes to wear to Wimbledon, and I says to myself, I says, “How come they never do this to men?” Seriously. Official uniforms for professional athletes should be all about making it easy for the athlete to be athletic. No foofiness. Is outrage. I shall now go back to forgetting that tennis exists.
Five: A truly handy compendium of charts for bakers, including egg substitutes, metric conversion charts, which tips to use when icing cupcakes, how to diagnose baking temp errors, and so on.
Six: WEED WHACKER MAN!
Public shaming of kids on social media is such a crap move. Every few weeks, some self-styled “meanest mom in the world” preens herself over having the courage to make her kids miserable in public, rather than correcting them and moving along like normal parents do. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t about being a good parent; it’s about getting your fifteen minutes of internet fame in the pathetic and craven hope that you can somehow spin your child’s damaged psyche into a reality show. For that reason I refuse to link to any of these creeps.
However. Glomming off your kids’ public humiliation is one thing. Bribing your kids to be publicly humiliated is a completely different thing. One is exploitation, and that’s wrong. This is just good old fashioned commerce. And so I present to you this video made yesterday on the ride home from the oral surgeon, where my daughter had four wisdom teeth extracted.
I only wish I had gotten footage of the part where she was furiously working on a BFG-themed Mad Libs. I noticed she had x-ed out several words vehemently, so I asked her why. She shouted, mouth packed with gauze, “BE-TUZ THEY NOT WEAL WORDS!!!”
I said, “But you’ve read the book, haven’t you?” And she gave me one of these!
And then, because I’m the meanest mom in the world, I got her some chocolate ice cream.
**
Images:
Pietro Lorenzetti [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
By Georg Heinrich Sieveking (http://www.uncp.edu/home/rwb/louis16_execution.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
