Monthly Archives: January 2014

The eleventh day

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Our tree this year, the theme is Cartoon Characters.
Our tree this year, the theme is Cartoon Characters.
Today is the eleventh day of Christmas. Christmas starts, traditionally, at sunset on Christmas Eve, you see. Most of us don’t think of it that way. A lot of people in the U.S., myself included, tend to think of the start of Christmas Season as beginning the day after Thanksgiving. So by the time Christmas Day arrives, we’ve been decorating and celebrating for at least four weeks.

So I understand why some people are tired of it all by Boxing Day.

It feels like people are more impatient to end it than they used to be, and a friend had an interesting theory about that… Continue reading The eleventh day →

Friday Links!

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It’s Friday, here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:

The Duck Dynasty star’s warped vision of civil-rights history feeds his warped view of today’s gay-rights struggle.

What You Believe About Homosexuality Doesn’t Matter.

The Great 2013 Sunday Show Race.

The Rise of the New Left.

Everything You Urgently Need To Know About Donald Duck’s Car (the article and illustrations are awesome!)

South Carolina Democrats back bill calling for mandatory daily prayers in public schools.

IN 2013, FAILING THE BECHDEL TEST WAS BAD FOR YOUR MOVIE’S BOTTOM LINE.

Comment: How God Hates Fags and its friends like Linda Harvey further gay rights.

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood (Metadata is king!)

And a sneak peek at the next Spider-man movie:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Don’t like bandwagons?

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Bandwagon meme diylol.com
I think we need a bit more meta…
If my various social media streams are any indication, there are a lot more people posting about why they aren’t going to create year-in-review posts or new year resolution posts, including sometimes rather snarky comments about those that do. For someone like me, that just increases the pressure to do it.

I’ve already posted about some goals I’m setting myself, so I’ve already probably outraged or disappointed a few. I could do a really verbose and intricate summation of my 2013, but I really don’t think even I would enjoy that. But all this talk about not doing things just because other people are does have me thinking…

Continue reading Don’t like bandwagons? →

A new chew toy

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Kitten falling asleep on an Apply keyboard.
I nap a lot…
My friend, Sheryl, posted about looking at resolutions and the like as forms of behavioral modification. I especially liked her third guideline:

Replace an undesired activity with a desired activity. A good dog trainer knows that just yelling at the dog for chewing on your shoe is bad, and instead giving your dog an acceptable chew toy while removing the shoe is better. Rather than beat yourself up for obsessing over that metaphorical shoe, give yourself a metaphorical chew toy to occupy yourself.

Because it’s the time of year when lots of people compile retrospectives of the previous year and/or set goals for the next, it’s difficult not to at least think about it.

I’ve been thinking about several things that could fall into the category of resolutions.

Continue reading A new chew toy →