Glass Ceiling Breaks As Women Across the World Stand Up!

Some products are revolutionary.  They actually change the way we live.  The television, for one.  Computers, for another.  Cell phones and refrigerators and motorcars.

This morning I found out about  a product that is so revolutionary it could actually change the balance of nature.    It mat finally lead to that glass ceiling being shattered.  It will change life as we all know it, and make the world a better place for our children and our children’s children.

Yes, it’s the GoGirl.    

Ladies, no more hovering over nasty toilets in dirty restrooms.  No more squatting on the side of the road on a long stretch of highway with no restroom in sight.  No more being forced to go back to the ski lodge, (one can’t risk ass frostbite, can one?), be forced to choose between quitting that marathon or peeing all over yourself.

No more dates trying to cop a look while you cop a squat.  And no more peeing on your jeans when your form isn’t juuuuuuuuuust right.

Now ladies, you can write your name in snow with the big boys.  You can stand next to them and mark your own territory as they mark theirs by peeing into the  Mississippi River on a drunken trip to New Orleans.

GoGirl lets you do all that!  It’s funnel-like shape with it’s patented spill-guard protection put you in charge of where you pee, not roadside gas station owners.

Sound odd to you?  Well, our Your-A-Pee-In sisters have been using similar devices for years.  It’s time we stood up with them, don’t you think?  And no, using it does not mean you need to let your armpit and leg hair grow.  Not if you  don’t want to!  And yes, you should keep waxing your mustache ( Really, no one wants to see that).

They’re affordable, at only $6.99 apiece or 3 for $18.99.  They’re disposable or reusable.  They’re pink, so they will be easy to see in your purse.

You can even enter their sweepstakes to win GoGirl apparel!  Or you can buy some youself.

We’ve all been looking for that special gift for the women in our lives, and now we’ve found it.  Don’t forget that the  holidays are just a few short months away!

Ohhhh, ladies.  I sense a shift in our world.   Men no longer have this important advantage!

Gee, I wonder how much they’d pay me to get a car wrap like that…

Remind Me To Never Go to Taipei…

From last year's birthday trip to Metrozoo, where his only interest was the restrooms...

Everyone who reads my blog knows that Son’s favorite thing is a restroom.  Ever since he was a baby he has been fascinated by toilets, and they day he discovered a urinal our whole lives changed.  He wanted to be a urinal for Halloween, and whenever you ask him what he wants for his birthday his answer is invariably “A restroom!”

One of last year's efforts. Today's are much more detailed.

Thank goodness he doesn’t  know about this restaurant in Taipei, the brainchild of someone who is obviously a kindred spirit to Son.  Or four years old.

“The servers bring your meal atop a mini toilet bowl (quite convenient, as it brings the food closer to your mouth), you sip drinks from your own plastic urinal (a souvenir), and soft-swirl ice cream arrives for dessert atop a dish shaped like a squat toilet.”

Seriously, who wants to eat food that looks like poop?  Out of a toilet bowl.  While sipping upon one. Here are some more photos, for those who appreciate my not  posting them directly.

I’m one that loves desserts.  But you can bet your ass that I’m not eating ice cream called “diarrhea with dried droppings” (chocolate), “bloody poop” (strawberry) and “green dysentery” (kiwi). But my, how Son would love it!

No, we’ll not be going to Taipei.  But if any of you go, would you please bring Son one of the souvenier urinal cups?  He’d be ever so grateful…

Losing Sleep, and It’s Costco’s Fault

They were out of Caffeine Free Diet Coke, so I bought regular Diet Coke.

And was wide awake until 5 am.   Wide.  Awake.

The good news is that I got to watch Celebrity Rehab, with Tawny. You’ve gotta love Tawny.

I really, really, really hope Costco has not stopped carrying the Caffeine Free variety.

Great post,  huh?  Blame Costco.

Flatulent Felon Faces Further Felonies

Sometimes reading the news is a such a source of frustration that I must take a break from it’s onerous affect on my well being.

Today is not one of those days. This news isn’t onerous, it’s odorous.

Apparently it is against the law to pass gas in Charleston, West Virginia. Well, at least in the presence of a police officer. And if you are so unfortunate as to fart in front of a police officer, it is in your best interest not to fan it towards him or her, even if the fanning is meant as self-preservation, not assault.

Apparently in Charleston, West Virginia the prosecutors are so bored that they are stretching the definition of battery to include fluffy attack.

It’s a good thing it wasn’t an SBD, or they’d have to a heck of a time proving he was the, er, perp. They’d have to interrogate everybody present:

Prosecutor: Mr. Cruz, did you in fact fart in front of Patrolman Parsons?

Mr. Cruz: Wasn’t me!

Prosecutor: Mr. Cruz, Patrolman Parsons smelled it.

Mr. Cruz: Well, he who smelt it, dealt it!

Prosecutor: He who denied it, supplied it!

Okay, I’m done.

No! Wait…

I hope his sentence isn’t too harsh. Perhaps instead of Taps this will be played at his sentencing…

NOW I’m done.

The Unknown, One Word Meme

I started this Meme three months ago and never got around to finishing it. I don’t remember who sent it to me, and I don’t remember the rules.  But it’s 10:15 on Saturday night and I just threw a dinner party for eleven people and I have no post for tomorrow.

1. Where is your cell phone? table
2. Your significant other? working
3. Your hair? frizzy
4. Your mother? Connecticut
5. Your father? Drinking
6. Your favorite thing? book
7. Your dream last night? None
8. Your favorite drink? water
9. Your dream/goal? house
10. The room you’re in? dining
11. Your ex? unchanged
12. Your fear? death
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? home
14. Where were you last night? family
15. What you’re not? cruel
16. Muffins? corn
17. One of your wish list items? svelte
18. Where you grew up? Jersey
19. The last thing you did? call
20. What are you wearing? capris
21. Your TV? off
22. Your pets? comforting
23. Your computer? entertaining
24. Your life? lucky
25. Your mood? content
26. Missing someone? yes
27. Your car? Durango
28. Something you’re not wearing? jock
29. Favorite store? Target
30. Your summer? busy
31. Like someone? yes
32. Your favorite color? green
33. When is the last time you laughed? ten
34. Last time you cried? yesterday
35. Who will repost this? Patty

Please tag yourself!  Me? There are some brownies just calling my name.

The Five Things Meme

I was tagged by Good Fountain to do a meme. I love memes because they help me out when I’m blocked. So now you know that today I can’t think of a darn thing I want to write. 🙂

Five things found in your bag:

1. A picture of Son.
2. My three small wallets (one holds money, the credit cards I use most and my insurance cards, one holds the rest of my credit cards and one holds discount and gift cards). Hey, it works for me.
3. Purell.
4. Halls Sugar Free Cough Drops.
5. Colonoscopy Preparation instructions. Aren’t I lucky?

Okay, technically that’s seven things, but whatever.

Five favorite things found in your room:

1. My grandmother’s antique bedroom set. I love it, even thoguh the drawers stick and it’s a bit banged up. When Husband moved in he couldn’t sleep in Grandma’s double bed, so it lives beneath the king bed we bought together.
2. My dog Jonah. He, or rather his ashes, reside in a box on my bookcase. I know it’s morbid, but I loved him so very much that when I go I want us to be buried (or have our ashes spread) together.
3. My parents’ wedding album. Even though they only stayed married for ten years it has pictures of them when they were young, and pictures of their parents, siblings, cousins, etc.
4. Bunny and Cubby. They are the only two toys from my childhood that survived the maybe-she’s-allergic-to-stuffed-animals purge that preceded my tonsillectomy four days before my seventh birthday. Bunny was my first toy and my Mom let me keep it. Cubby was my first post-tonsillectomy stuffed animal/birthday present (no party for me that year), and I remember clearly going to the ToysRUs and buying it. Bunny and Cubby sit next to Jonah on the bookcase.
5. Husband.

Five things you have always wanted to do:

1. A cartwheel. Couldn’t do one to save my life. Being able to do anything athletic well would do.
2. Have an artistic talent. I’d like to be able to bring on goosebumps when I sing, but in a good way for a change. I’d like to draw something recognizable or sculpt something that doesn’t look like a lump.
3. Be able to eat anything I want without having to worry about my weight.
4. Visit Siberia. I’ve wanted to ever since reading The Endless Steppe as a child. Seriously.
5. Meet Helen Keller.

Five things you are currently into:

1. Playing with Son. He is currently very into driving his trains into his trucks and cars. And so am I.
2. Packing my Dad’s house.
3. Rummikub.
4. Blogging.
5. Fuzzy socks.

Five people you’d like to tag:

I think perhaps I have tagged some of these friends before but, hey, what can I say, my circle is not that big.

1. My friend Patty
2. Mrs. Micah
3. This Wasn’t In The Plan
4. Frugal Babe
5. Twist & Skewer

Brushes With Fame

Kate at One More Thing… told us some of her favorite celebrity stories, and asked readers to comment. This post started as a comment, but I had verbal diarrhea and it got too long. A blog post is born!

I’ve had many run-ins with the famous and the wish-they-were-more so. All of them are memorable, except the ones I’ve forgotten.

The band at my 8th grade St. Valentine’s Day Dance was a terrific band named Atlantic City Expressway. I was on the Dance Committee, so was involved in set-up and break-down. Now we were quite rockin’ in the Jersey burbs, and would dance the night away at our dances. At that dance, though, there was little dancing because the band was soooo good. In addition to the normal drums, bass and electric guitar they had a horn section! And did I mention that the lead singer was hot? Hot! Afterwards my pubescent friends and I took some of the paper cupids we’d used to decorate the gym and got his autograph. I also got a very Monica Bradyesque kiss on the cheek. A few years later that lead singer, Jon Bon Jovi, became a Really Big Deal with a different band. A note to Wikipedia: I see you removed my contribution about Jon being in Atlantic City Expressway and playing at least one local school dance but you kept the edit about him having a very large penis. Couldn’t they both be true?

I hit the jackpot when I was doing promotions for a large fair, including but not limited to:

• I had to keep hiding newly-opened beer bottles from a very drunk Peter Noone (of Herman’s Hermits fame)
• Took a fun-filled golf-cart ride with a smokin’ hot John Stamos and a huge bodyguard named Tiny and later turned down an offer to hang out at his hotel (no hanky or panky being offered, just a really nice guy)
• Watched security remove a belligerent John Waite from the premises
• Was told off by Randy Travis’ wife/manager for no good reason, though he was perfectly wonderful
• Michael Damien. Enough said.

When I was eleven I spent our country’s Bicentennial 4th of July weekend in a hotel room in Toledo, Ohio. My siblings and I spent one of the Most Special Days in History in our hotel room while my father and stepmother went out on the town. In those days it wasn’t an arrestable offense to leave your children alone (and our ages ranged from 10-14), but at the time I thought they should have been arrested for robbing their children of the experience of celebrating the Bicentennial. Therapy has only slightly lessened the pain.

Still, there were two celebrity bright spots that weekend. We played pinball in the game room of the hotel with Mark Spitz and members of the US Olympic Swim Team. We also discovered that Peter Cole of Mod Squad fame was staying there. I had a mad, mod crush on him, so my sister and I snuck up to his floor and listened at his door. And we heard…nothing. We did not come away empty-handed: we reached under his door and pulled out a few carpet fibers and ran back to our room with our treasure. What can I tell you? I was eleven.

My father and stepmother were personal friends of the late, great Joe Williams. In addition to being one of the greatest Jazz singers ever, some of you may remember him as Bill Cosby’s father-in-law on The Cosby Show. One of my favorite celebrity moments was at my sister’s wedding, when he joined the band to sing my sister and new brother-in-law a special song. A terrific, warm man. May he rest in peace.

My most embarrassing brush with fame occurred in a local bar/dance club in the early 1990’s. Ed Begley, Jr. was there, and we wound up chatting with him for a few minutes. I knew who he was, sort of. I’d not watched St. Elsewhere, but I knew he was in it. I told him I loved him in the movie Something Wild . He looked at me like the moron I am and said, “Uh, that wasn’t me, that was Jeff Daniels.”

Whoops.

What about you?

The 7 Random/Weird Things About Me Meme

Emily from Remodeling This Life has tagged me to participate in a fun meme. I get to share 7 random/weird things about myself with you and then tag 7 more people to do the same.

Here we go.

1. Seven is my favorite number. Why? When I was a kid I noticed that whatever age I was became my favorite. When I was five my favorite number was five, etc. When I was seven, of course my favorite number was seven. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I was going to try to hate the number eight and see what happened. So I went around saying to myself, “I hate eight! i hate eight!” To this day seven is my favorite number, and while I won’t say that I hate the number eight (it’s even sillier to hate a number than it is to love it), it is my least favorite.

2. I once went tubing naked (except for my life preserver) on Lake June.

3. I love onion flavored things (onion bagels, onion dip) but I hate onions. Too slimy. Blech. I’ll even cook with onions because I love how they flavor food but I won’t eat the onions themselves.

4. I don’t think penises are pretty. Really, does anyone?

5. I’m fairly loud, assertive and clumsy. I’ve often wished I was more soft and graceful, like Audrey Hepburn. When I’ve tried to be people ask me if I’m sick.

6. I’m fair, as in objective. My best friend tells me that I’m the most fair person she’s ever met, but to be fair she hasn’t met everyone. I tend to see all sides of issues, much to the chagrin of Husband, who wants me to agree with him on all things all the time. Even when I do agree I can see the other side of the coin, see how the other person might feel, and can see how the issue or person’s feelings can be valid. At times it’s caused some strain in some relationships, as some (including Husband) think I’m being disloyal. I can see why they feel that way, but I don’t think that pointing out the other point of view, or having a different point of view altogether,  is being disloyal at all.   Besides, I can no sooner cease being what I consider fair than I could cease wanting chocolate. Neither is gonna happen in this lifetime. That doesn’t mean I love or respect the other person any less. Just so you know.

7. I hate 99.5% of rap music. I can take the Sugarhill Gang. And Will Smith. A little Pink. And that’s about it. Have you noticed that every generation thinks the next’s music is the worst ever, and wonder how bad music will sink in the next generation? Yeah. I’m already thinking about what’s going to be worse than rap.  I get those thoughts when I can’t get back to sleep at 4am. Really, I’m scared.

And there you have it. Me. It.

I will tag some terrific people I know:

1. Jennifer at Good Fountain.

2. Kate at One More Thing….

3. Patty at Our Life as an Air Force Family.

4. Lisa at Ramblings of a Pseudo Intellectual.

And some people whose blogs I enjoy and would like to know better:

5. LJ at Mommy Gets Paid.

6. Funny About Money at Funny About Money.

7. Learningwoman at Learningwoman’s Weblog.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog. Some random, some weird.
3. Tag up to 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. Well, I’m not doing this. You’ll see the pingback! I may comment on some other post, though. 🙂

It’s a Good Thing I’m Not Watching the News This Week

If I was watching the news this week I’d have to comment on:

this: Jamie Lynn Spears engaged … good idea? ,

this: TSA Forces Woman to Remove Nipple Ring, Woman Represented by Gloria Allred, and

this: Drew Petersen’s PR Expert Tangles with CNN Host Nancy Grace.

I could have had a lot of fun with these.

Indeed.

Zero Tolerance for…Skittles?

Husband sent me an e-mail just now, and here’s what it said:

Maybe you or Deb (my sister) can find out exactly what school this was and get me an e-mail address so I can tell them what I really think of them.

I feel a real dickish moment coming on.

At the very least – maybe you can write about the absurdity of this whole thing.

Personally – I would like to ask them why they didn’t just shoot the kid onthe spot and then execute his whole family.

After reading the article, I wholeheartedly agree.

Michael Sheridan, a student at New Haven’s Sheridan Middle School, was suspended from school for one day, barred from attending an honors student dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president. His transgression?

He bought a bag of candy from another student.

The horror!

As part of it’s wellness policy, the New Haven school system banned candy sales as fundraisers in 2003. There is no candy allowed in the schools. Okay, a bit stringent, but I can support that.

The student who sold the candy also was suspended.

Nothing like killing an ant with an uzi, New Haven.

It makes a great deal of sense to obliterate a child’s sense of accomplishment for having worked hard to attain honors because of a relatively minor transgression. And why on earth wouldn’t we want to spit on children who have the character and gall to wade through the rampant apathy and self-absorption of the middle school biosphere, get involved in their community and learn about the democratic process by taking on the office of Student Government Vice President?

Why indeed.

It certainly wouldn’t have made sense to give him detention, or to have him, in his role as Vice-President, make a presentation to the student body about nutrition.

No, it’s much more important to teach them how to rebel against unfair and overdone punishment, to seethe with injustice.

And why did the nefarious candy dealer get less punishment than the user-addict? Perhaps he’s supplying the school board….?

(By the way honey, the name of the school was right in the article, babe. But I’m sure your ire made your eyes skip over that part. Love ya!)

Update March 15, 2008

Both students’ suspensions have been expunged and the buyer has been reinstated to the Student Council. Apparently the school administration failed to notify the parents of this rule in writing.

I don’t think the school needed to undo all of the punishment. I just thought the punishment should fit the crime.