Only click on this if you're prepared to see the absolute dernier cri in trailer couture.

The buyer feedback/ comments start out hilarious and get better from there.

I say this as a veteran of the Seanbaby.com-sponsored "Portal of Evil," site back in the day.

I say this as a veteran of Rotten.com.

I'm not sure if I've changed or the internet has. Or if America just has too much time on its collective hands now.

When I wasn't paying attention, pole dancing became a sport. Which is interesting- there's a DVD collection for you to self-educate at home called The Art of Pole. There's also some (NSFW) video clips on YouTube, an Australian national competition, and overall some rather impressive aerial work going on out there.

What's nice about the pole dancing competitions is that all the competitors appear to be over 18 and have gone through puberty, which is WAAAAAAY more than you can say about the pixies now winning things like figure skating championships and gymnastics gold medals. So it's good we ladies have another sport we can aspire to.

Yeah.

However, it appears that the situation has seeped over into places that...you just wouldn't expect. Where is where this guy, "Poledancefan" comes in. He's a 47-year-old Chicago-ian who constructed a pole in his basement, bought the DVD's, and has been filming his progress as he masters things called, "the seated butterfly," "inverted poses," and shaking his hips in between moves.

It's creepy, yet fascinating, yet unsettling, yet funny, yet alienating. He makes EXCEPTIONALLY poor wardrobe choices. The landing pit he's constructed at the base of the pole to keeps evolving from concrete to gym mat to every couch cushion in a 3 block radius.

As a taster, this video happened sometime after he first managed his first aerial. And a Merry Christmas to all of us indeed.



And even better, here's the video where the butterfly spin first "worked" for him.



What a world. Watch it and see if you can look away unchanged.

I started the "Circle of Friends" blanket from Joelle Hoverson's book "Last Minute Knitted Gifts," on the 18th of September, thinking that I would have plenty of time to finish it before my friend's baby shower on the 18th of October.

Okay, I admit, I am an IDIOT. The pattern, for those of you not in the know, is intended to be divided equally amongst 7 knitty friends and then sewn together. Add to that the fact I made a 1 inch extension to each of the requisite blocks and you end with a big smirky realization that I knitted myself right into a corner.

These ladies also did this blanket, and have posted the results of their work here. I used very different colors in an attempt to subversively imprint a pro-University of Texas mindset on a young baby.

I ran out of yarn in the middle and had to go back to the yarn store. They were missing one of the colors and that had to be mail ordered from Yarn Country.

The aggravation of having them be out of one of the colors caused me to completely space on picking up one of the OTHER colors. When I went back to correct that mistake they were out of that color. So back to Yarn Country I went.

Baby arrived: 8th of November (and she is adorable.)

Binky finished: 15 minutes ago.

I will photograph it. Maybe the new owner will be photographed lounging on it.

Then we will NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.

"beat down lot lizard"

Runner up, Insult of the day

"low-rent cocks*cker"

In other news, and I say this to the people of Austin more as a public service announcement than anything connected to the two situations above,

Use your turn signals!

We fired up the furnace for the first time yesterday, and as per usual the first few times produced a burning smell as packing oil, dust etc. burned off.

It set the smoke alarm off at 3:45 this morning.

Truman HATES alarms. I mean just loathes them. So we had random smoke alarm + the howling to enjoy this morning.

Fortunately, I get to share. I took a flip video of Truman having one of his disputes with the alarm clock.



Please try not to judge the state of my house. It was the morning that the cleaning guy was due :)

I know that this has been written about all over, but the parallels between the last few days and the last few episodes of the West Wing (or hell, the last two seasons of it) kind of freak me out.

The latest in the series of freak out realizations: The guy selected to be the chief of staff was the guy upon whom Josh Lyman was based.

I feel terribly over Proposition 8, but the rest of the election results feel like a dream come true. To the point where Christophe and I, having lived through the roughest day imaginable, still felt compelled to head out to the Dog and Duck to be amongst [what we hoped would be] the euphoria when the good news was announced.

Worth it.

The other thing I find myself thinking about (although it's not available anywhere) is the speech that Jon Stewart gave when he came back on the air the first time after 9/11. Something about how he kept thinking about Martin Luther King Jr's speech during the march on Washington, how 9/11 crushed a lot of dreams, but that everything that happened from here on out could be nothing but a dream realized.

It was painful to watch that speech even six years later knowing how seriously everything got fucked sideways in the name of vengeance afterward. However, now I think he's right. It was just a dream deferred for seven years and then realized.

I feel so awful for Jennifer Hudson right now. This is just a horrifying story. So sad.

I had a feeling that whatever it was that pulled attention away from the constant economic doomcasting and election drama was going to be even worse.

This show didn't really have my attention until parisgarters commented on it.

So I gave it a whirl. It was all interesting and everything, but then this scene happened. Now I'm hooked.



Three words: Tip your Waitress.