Whatever

Girlchick
I started doing some writing for this zine, and so far I'm impressed with what she's doing. Other zines I'd like to promote a bit: Ennui Magazine (you can figure it out from the title), Girly International, Pencilbox (college zine, but good writing), and She-Zine.

Barrier Methods
This one may blow your mind: why birth control/STD protection sucks, and find out more about microbicides. But I gotta say that some of this worries me, like they're only working on microbicides for the vagina.

The Vicious Circle
Read this pretty depressing one for yourself if you'd like- it's pretty much "Love Stinks", the article. I'm sort of frightened at how much I related to this line: "In fact, you keep him hanging on because you're bound and determined to get on with our life, even if it's with someone you don't want to kiss, and before you know it, you are treating Mr. Potential Perfect Match exactly the way Mr. Emotionally Unavailable is treating you." Except I can come up with plenty of reasons why not to date the PPM.

Lite Brite!
Another childhood toy slapped online. Have fun.

Pimping Yourself AND Your Product
(Ok, not the official title of this, but mine's better :P) As a journalist, part of my job is dealing with press releases. They're bloody everywhere. You'd be surprised what people send in, and the Washington Post apparently is no exception. However, the Post has one intrepid reporter who wanted to see how far PR people would go to push their product: He promised to plug their product/company if the PR person would tell an embarrassing story about themselves for publication. There were a lot of takers...

The Top XXX Cliches of alt.sex.stories
Pretty damn funny. Gotta warn y'all, though: it IS porn stuff. Proceed however you proceed with that warning.

Christmas Couch
I'm just amused. It seems like something my roommate and I would do, given our strange decorating taste.

MASH
Who remembers MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack/Street, House) from elementary school? The tradition continues....

Star Wars Episode II Plot
For those of you who want to peek, this seems like a pretty damn detailed (and probably right) plot summary. I was stunned to see it on the web, so for all I know it's fictional, but what the hell. And continuing on the theme of insider information, here's 11 dang pages on stuff cut from Episode 1. While a few bits would have been interesting to have in (there's a LOT of Anakin/Padme lovey-dovey-hint stuff, Darth Maul lines cut, etc.), I'm so glad they cut out even more stupidass Jar-Jar-has-ANOTHER-accident scenes. Bad enough already, dudes. This isn't necessarily a webpage link, but if you telnet to blekko.net and type starwars at the prompt, you can watch practically the whole first third of Star Wars IV in ASCII animation. Assuming you want to sit through that much, it's really pretty cute.

Boyfriend in a Box
Don't be surprised if I buy one of these someday and show off the stuff in it to my snotty relatives.

Minifig Generator
Continuing with the Lego theme, this one lets you pick and choose heads and bodies to form Legos. So cute! And wouldn't you know it, there's a LEGO lug.

White Cheerleader Epiphanies
Oh lord, this one's a hoot. "I'll bet that if someone wrote a really good cheer for them, they would stop being such drugged-out sluts." As for Punished by God!, all I can say is those armless children are sure disturbing. But the Emotional Tampon is probably my favorite, for some twisted reason.

The Bunny Dance
Once upon a time, I did my own bunny dance and bunny hop pages, but this is pretty sad. I kinda like the pudgy bunnies, though.

Your Guide to High School Hate
Yes, I AM back to attempting to do entries (at work, no less), as my hellish quarter is over. The title of this link is self-explanatory. "High school is the root of more unpleasant memories and psyche-damaging experiences than in any other time in a person's life with the possible exceptions of a brief stint with the Manson family or dousing yourself with gasoline around open flame." "Although it seems interminable, High School does not go on forever. In fact, it's over with faster than you can say "graduation," provided you repeat that word 630,720,000 times." "Everyone in Saturday School hates everyone else. Molly Ringwald wouldn't last five minutes in there, man!"

Popular Names
Jennifer is one of only seven names to have been in the top hundred every year between 1944 and 1994, the others being Sarah, Elizabeth, Catherine, Heather, Helen and Maria.
It's a pain being a Jennifer. There's almost always at least one other one in whatever room you're in (and she gets all your messages). I usually had at least two Jennifers in any given class (one time there were seven), and one of them had to have the last name right before mine so I'd answer to her name by mistake. (I've been known to automatically go "Which one?" when someone calls Jennifer, only to be told "You're the only one in here.) Everyone had to divide up who got to be Jen, Jenn, Jenny, Jennifer, or anything else. In recent years people have started calling me Jen-Jen, Jfer and Nifer. I don't even answer when someone calls my name any more- it's never for me.
So years ago when I found this society to prevent people from being named my name, I thought "right on!" Though a few other links I just found make me feel a bit better about it. The assumptions that go with the name are like me. This is pretty cool, though. And Jen's kinda flattering in China. But what's with the so-different versions of the name? In other names, This article's hilarious (my aunt's a Susan), and points out how named people have to deal with annoying problems. Or outright become generic. (I saw "Jennifer Doe" on a sample ID last month. Yikes!)
Or alternately, some folks just brag about their popularity and celebrities attached to their name, or just hunt up every Wendy they can find. Or start their own army or cult.
Ok, I'm worn out on typing separate names in here, go find yours yourself. Names are all useless anyway...

Salon's presidential quiz
My God. Do we have to elect anyone to be the president?

soulbath
Indescribable. There's also bewitched, or that weird constructor thing, or Superbad, or Redsmoke. Or you can just watch the butterflies, or make a nice collage.

The Ultimate Build Your Own Cow Page
In case you never quite liked how the originals looked... there's also Cow Therapy if you're interested.

A Few Good Men
Between this article, this one and this one, you get pretty gutwrenched. And hoping to God I don't end up like this too someday.

Babes in Willy Loman-land
Linking to this one awhile back, because selling in the schools has always annoyed me. Even back when I was a wee tot they had me selling myself for money on a spelling test in kindergarten, where the more words (well, stuff like write your first/last name, draw a triangle, draw a square) you got right, the more money you made off your family in sponsorship. Seeing as I was in music when I got older, it just got worse. I quit Girl Scouts mostly because I didn't want to have to sell again and be the one with the fewest prizes earned. My parents were sick to death of this stuff (and were reluctant to push it on people at work, since door-to-door was forbidden). Which sucks when everyone else at school keeps earning the "cool" prizes and you're getting keychains. About the best thing I ever won was a phone, which I've never used.
Too bad the Sacramento News and Review doesn't bother putting features up, or I'd link to their article this week that ticked me off about making Pepsi the official drink of the district to get money. I don't bloody want ads pushed on me or anyone else every hour of the day, much less in a place I can't leave. But of course the CA schools are so broke they will of course sell their souls to the devil to get money, anywhere.

Lego Star Wars
I am easily amused...I've been collecting the littler Star Wars Lego kits since they started coming out, and was embarrassingly happy to finally get my hunkahunkaburningsarcasm, Han Solo, in Lego form (he even smirks!).
(The more I keep looking at these old links, the more I go "Gee, I didn't know I was THAT into Star Wars...")
Anyway, I'm also amused that they have a group such as this.

neighbor-sex
I couldn't believe I was reading this. Of all the things to do a blog on...these pictures are hilarious, though. I'm just glad my one roommate with a boyfriend is usually not that loud, though they've got to hear the laughing I do when I can hear it.
"I am the one who has to put up with the slamming headboard, tissue-paper walls, and the Godzilla roars of ecstacy that penetrate that very fabric of time and space. Stephen Hawking can hear these people. Parties at all hours of the night followed by foul, drunken vomiting, which can be heard also. People falling off the bed, horny inebriated laughter followed by the trompimg of cloven hoafs as Satyrs play their music then fornicate to a combination of "The Thong Song" & Merle Haggard."
"I am not going to approach someone and say, "Pardon me. When doing the ol' In/Out, In/Out on your good lady friend this fine evening, would you mind facing her to the North. I do believe the view is quite lovely this time of year."
There's something perverse about putting this one up right after I put up Harry Potter stuff...

Escape from Tele-hell
None of us answers the phone any more at our house. No one ever calls for any of us- just telemarketers. Over and over and over and over and over till I feel like I'm being stalked. Just today we got 14 @#$^%^&$%@%&* hangup telemarketer calls ranging from approximately 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., usually occuring within 10-15 minute intervals. If we weren't going to all move in September, I'd start doing the things on this site about it. Really scary to read about how you can't ever get off their lists and how many hoops you have to jump through just to have peace and quiet. Not to mention not having the experience of running across the house every time the phone rings only to get a hangup or a sales pitch.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire review
I work for a newspaper, and spent Saturday morning (all Saturday morning) immersed in Harry Potter. The line went around the block at the store I was at, kids with their noses pressed to the glass and screaming, kids dressed up as characters (Cho, Alicia, Hermione, and Ginny). Some kids were really hyper- they were going to have a reading aloud period in the store but the kids wouldn't stop banging balloons and yelling and running around being obnoxious (most of 'em). The girl at the store offered to give them a sneak peak at the book, but they turned her down, wanting to read it at home. Weird...A Sacramento Bee reporter was there with me, and here's his account of the whole thing (though I doubt this link'll last forever). My account is here, though it won't last forever either.
I ended up buying the book at 1 a.m., and spent the whole night reading it (except for passing out for an hour). I finished it in about six or seven hours...now I know all the secrets! =) Was zonked the next morning when I had to cover the Potter-themed pancake breakfast at Borders, but so were people there. Not as much fun. But I did get to go into work that night and brag that I'd finished =) My boss (like most of us, a big fan. She was supposed to put at least three HP things on the front page today) immediately asked, eyes shining like Christmas morning, "Can I borrow it?" "Sure." "Really?!!" It was cute.

Brunching Shuttlecocks
Good stuff.

TeeVee
Snarky, cynical commentary on television. I understand Mighty Big TV does the same thing in show recaps.

Screenmates
Cute, sometimes a bit kinky (i.e. nude cartoons) animated programs.

Newgrounds
Very bizarre. Very filthy. Very funny.

Kinky Fruit
(Warning: Not for the children)
I'm surprised people even think up stuff like this.

Rant on "ladies"
I'm reminded of a column by Cynthia Heimel along the same lines...(exerpts here):
"The term connotes females who are simultaneously put on a pedestal and patronized. A lady is softer and weaker and more dependent than a man. Implicit in the definition is that a man must defer to her, take care of her, because she's not competent to do things on her own.
They had a whole litany of things that "ladies," which we were supposed to become, were not allowed to do.
I despise this word! Call me a "lady" and I feel like I'm wearing a white dress and can't go splashing through mud puddles. (Note this comes into play on this page.)
When women hear a guy say "I want a terrific lady," we know we're dealing with someone with a different frame of reference and we talk slower."

Episodic Review
Once upon a time, I was really into web soap operas. Think about it: you can read them when you want, and they're shorter than watching hours of tape of the real ones. Though I'm not so much into them now, this site's a good spot to find most of the ones still running today, plus other information on them.

Casual Links
Basically a huge sci-fi links page that I have yet to get through all of it.

Star Park
Star Wars, drawn like and influenced by South Park. 'Nuff said.