Secret Santa
People are starting to receive their secret Santa gifts! Hooray!
Figured I’d start this thread if people want to post what they got (or share shopping/shipping stories).
As far as anonymity goes I’m fine with gifters outing themselves or giftees outing who their gifters are. Personally I went to a bit of effort to stay anonymous but it probably won’t be difficult to deduce.
Hope everyone gets their gifts before Christmas!
She had a nose ring.
She slides the papers across to me and asks if I am so excited about my new car.
I do not look up, I say: “It’s just another material posession.”
She laughs brightly and I sign my name twenty times or more.
dear clusterflock
Today is better than yesterday.
Tomorrow will be better than today.
2CELLOS: Welcome to the Jungle
I’m sure these guys could’ve pulled this off without the excellent headbanging hair, but it certainly helps.
quotes out of context
(Crickets and flies, for example, have tufts of them on their rumps to sense prowling enemies.)
The car is so exclusive, so luxurious, that the only way to increase its sticker price is to order interior surfaces finished in real gold or ruthenium, a rare metal in the platinum family that’s popular at the moment in the world of high-end wristwatches.
Embarrassingly, I had to ask the monsignor to stand aside, so I could get a proper view of the most notorious image, of the randy goat-god Pan leaping from the bushes with a monstrous erection.
Gone were the warm, velvety vaginas of yesteryear — the smooth, Brazilian-waxed vagina was the wave of the future.
tweet of the day
“Diarrhea” is one of those words that really looks like what it means.
— Garrett Miller (@heyitsgarrett) December 16, 2011
from the comments
One of the few homilies I remember from the days I went to Mass was about when the priest, Father Rich, was a young boy. He sat in mass one Sunday and watched as a man took cash out of his (Father Rich’s) mother’s purse. Young Rich said nothing.
When the money was discovered missing and Rich was asked about it he told his parents what he’d seen. Incredulous, they asked why he hadn’t said anything sooner. The young boy told his parents that they were in church and that he just assumed that nothing bad could happen in church; he thought it must have been ok. Of course, his parents didn’t believe him. They too couldn’t believe someone would steal from them during mass and young Rich was blamed.
I don’t remember what Father Rich was getting at by telling the story. It probably wasn’t to highlight the danger of sanctity.
As a side note, Father Rich (the same priest that married Alicia and I) later left the church after coming to the realization that he was a homosexual. For some, I’m sure this was an assault on the sanctity of the church.
from the spam
If a turtle doesnt have a shell, is it naked or homeless?
headline of the day, II
Portland police arrest man after alleged ‘Star Wars’ light saber assault at Toys’R'Us
(this happened about half a mile from my house)
Lost in Translation
Xfinity recently started adding transcriptions of voicemail messages to its email notifications. Most of the time they’re non-sensical. Sometimes almost funny. Here’s a message to my wife Lois from our Dr. Allegar, reminding her of an upcoming physical.
“Hi this message is for Luis I’m calling from Doctor alexander’s(?) Atlanta to confirm your appointment for Monday at two o’clock for his vehicle immediately. If you could give us a call back here blaming me for Monday at two o’clock. Thank you.”
I can understand Lois->Luis and Allegar->alexander, but it took me a while to figure out that vehicle was the translation for physical. Why they asked us to “call back here blaming me for Monday” still totally eludes me.
from the comments
I know this isn’t really the place to post this, and I’m not campaigning or anything but the only thing I know about Chick-Fil-A is that they hate the gays.
dear clusterflock
In what contexts, if any, are sanctity or the idea or possibility of sanctity valuable?
once upon a time
I started dreaming there were empty rooms — an unknown space that suddenly existed at the turn in the stairs, or if you crouched beneath the mantel of the fireplace. I also dreamed my mother wore a mask, and if you reached to take it off, another one appeared. The empty rooms came back. There’s a gap between at least of twenty years. I feel the potential now of waking up and they’ll still be there, an extension of the default.
tweet of the day
So full of X-mas cheer, my junk has grown a Santa beard.
— Aaron Winslow (@adwinslow) December 15, 2011
headline of the day
quotes out of context
Here he presents some of the 50 paintings of that particular tree he made during three years, and the journey of light and colour on which it sent him.
“He is not even a black man,” many will tell you. “He is just black because he came down the chimney.” Then, you may reply, why aren’t his clothes dirty?
The supermarket downstairs from my apartment has plenty of butter. Surely we could ship some to Oslo.
In many cases a major obstacle is your deeply seated belief that you are not interesting. And since convincing yourself that you are interesting is probably not going to happen, take it off the table.
“It is one thing to kill an insurgent in a head-on fight,” Sergeant Major Sax testified. “It is a whole different thing — and I hate to say it, the way we are raised in America — to injure a female or injure a child or in the worse case, kill a female or kill a child.”
The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing.
Update:
For me, and most Americans, owning a Ferrari is a more realistic dream than swimming in a pool full of M&M’s.
An Introduction
My car is a Kia.
I drive to IKEA.
I had Chick-fil-A for lunch.
tweet of the day, II
‘Stocking stuffer’ is pretty graphic terminology.
— Aaron Winslow (@adwinslow) December 14, 2011
my current desktop
Fictionaut: Cooper Renner
I am almost envious of the simplicity of living that long time flocker, Cooper Renner, describes:
What is it like living sparely and simply, something you have mentioned to me, having a simple life as a creative person in all the ways that you do…
I wish I could live even more simply. I guess it all started twenty years ago when I started getting geographically restless. Moving lots of things around gets really boring (not to mention heavy and time-consuming), so I started divesting. About five years later I bought and moved into a travel trailer for the first time and started living in RV parks. One simply can’t pile up a lot of stuff if one has only 200 square feet to live in. And then several years after that I switched to a trailer with less than 100 square feet, so… Having a Nook helps in the book area, and using an iPod helps musically. I’ve long since gotten to the point that things feel like a terrible burden to me, something to care for and worry about. If a university somewhere would give me an office to work out of, then I would almost certainly let books start piling up again, even against my own will, in that office, and still keep my living space light. I tend toward the thought, though I haven’t quite attained the reality of it, that I don’t want to own anything that anybody would want to steal from me.
Cooper, however, mostly talks about his writing with a rather nice hat tip to clusterflock’s creator, Deron Bauman:
Because I didn’t go through the MFA (or any comparable) system, most of my learning about writing has come through reading (mostly older) writers and from contacts with editors (generally writers themselves) who published my poems, notably Gordon Lish and Deron Bauman. I also had long and encouraging correspondences with Donald Hall and Guy Davenport, though we didn’t necessarily discuss my work all that much. We wrote about books, writers, all sorts of things.
from the comments
My parents are a doctor and nurse respectively and both would like to donate their bodies to science. They both agree that they would not like any medical intervention to keep them living longer. Also, my dad has tendencies to not get medical attention when needed. I was a day away from being admitted to a hospital with pneumonia, as both parents thought I just had an upper respiratory infection. I’d like to see an article about children of medical professionals and their thoughts about dying.
you are going to need this eventually…
for that email or IM conversation, I just know it.
quotes out of context
I got a girl activity book with stickers — I’m not a girl! You’re the worst family ever.
OK, let me just say it: I was born a boy.
As the protagonist of the tale, imagine, if you will, a man who, as Speaker of the House, orchestrates the impeachment of a President for an adulterous affair with a White House aide twenty-six years his junior while he himself is conducting an adulterous affair with a congressional aide twenty-two years his junior, having earlier left the first of his three wives while she was hospitalized with cancer.
“I was trying to evaluate URLs, and found I was clicking in and out a lot, and the data connection was slow,” D’Aloisio says. “I thought there should be a service that lets you assess a website’s content quickly and easily.” And so, the idea for Summly was born.
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, 2009, is a black, acrylic box that places itself for sale on eBay every seven days thanks to an internet connection, which, according to the artist’s conditions of sale, must be live at all times.
How doctors die
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. These are his observations:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. [...]
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this — that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
from the moderated comments
Chinese restaurants have been doing this for a while with a similar shaped product. They put fried rice in them…
