A Face (And Hairdo) Only a Mother Could Love

We all remember the perms of the 80's. I do, because I had at least eight of them in my school career and I still have the smell of a freshly new perm in my mind.

Let me tell you, when you left the beauty salon, the smell of fried hair lingered with you, that is until the beauty salons went new age and got in fruit smelling perm solutions. Now when I left with a new perm, I could smell like both strawberries and burnt hair. I don't know which one was worse.

But with Phil Spector, somewhere amidst the perm solution and the curl relaxer, damn it, someone got this one wrong. And if you haven't noticed the elephant in the room, I'm talking about yes, that particularly charming looking fellow up above.


Phil Spector, a famous music producer back in the 1960's, is charged with shooting Lana Clarkson. (Which many journalists so politely denote her as "B actress Lana Clarkson" - as if her life was only mildly important.) http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7005994

Five women from his past came forth and said that Spector threatened them with guns so he obviously has a fascination with firearms, which may or may not be compensating for a lack of something else he may not have elsewhere. (I don't know? Big hair, big guns - you be the judge.)

So here is what I think - the perm is being used to house a small pocket pistol, like the one you see James Bond sporting in his earlier movies. I mean really, it could fit in there, right?

If a person is going to court and especially if he is being charged with murder, I have always felt it is in their best interest if they dress up a bit, do their hair, clean their nails and such. It is not however, the time to get a fresh perm.

However, once the deed is done and there is no going back, it's time to use styling products to diminish the damage. He could sprinkle some water on top of it to flatten it down a bit and take out the frizz or perhaps another option, take a hand full of Pantene hair mousse and run it through so the poof relaxes a few feet. In any case, he certainly shouldn't have appeared in court with a hairdo which could have been easily achieved by sticking his finger into a light socket.

Here is the clincher: The court had to declare a mistrial because the jury did not come back with a unanimous verdict.

It had to be the hair.

In other news, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or as Whoopi Goldberg on The View called him, Mahmoud I'm-a-dinner-jacket) spoke at Columbia University to a fiery crowd. Not only does he deny that the Holocaust happened which is baffling but he also thinks that being gay must be strictly an American thing.

Ahmadinejad told the audience: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this." http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.ahmadinejad25sep25,0,4057721.story

And there you have it. Obviously, someone never asked either of these interesting gentlemen: "Where did you come from?" Because these two certainly fit the bill. http://soyouwouldthink.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-did-you-come-from.html



And with that smile and wave, perhaps the now deceased televangalist, Reverend Jerry Falwell, would have a different take all together for Mr. Ahmadinejad as well.
http://soyouwouldthink.blogspot.com/2007/06/quote-of-day.html
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/276677.stm

SHIT HAPPENS

Our House and the soon to be "crap" sidewalk

2:00 A.M.

Olivia has a severe cough, we are both up all night.

7:00 A.M.

Dog chews her cast from her leg. (She had a $700 operation last month.)

7:30 A.M.

Call vet and make an appointment for 8:00 A.M. for a new cast.

8:30 A.M.

Drop off baby at daycare and go to the office for a full day of work.

2:00 P.M.

My eighteen-year-old niece came up to stay and help with the baby while my husband is on a business trip in Virgina for the week. She has my father drive her three hours back to her house because she misses her boyfriend and I yelled at her. Go figure.

5:30 P.M.

Pick up Olivia from the daycare for which I am told that she had a diarrhea blowout and her new pink pants and white shirt are sitting in her daycare cubby hole in a sack fermenting since lunch time.

6:00 P.M.

I arrive home and I find that the new partial sidewalk in the front of our house has been finally put in by the city. (Our tree uprooted a segment many years ago.) Where upon I became aware that some kid had pleasured himself by writing CRAP in big giant letters on our newly wet cemented sidewalk. I, being the creative solution solver, go over and try to make CRAP into four large squares but give-up when I realize the cement had completely dried about a half an hour ago. Therefore, I can always tell someone who is looking for my house, "Just look for the house where the word "crap" is on the sidewalk.

11:30 P.M.

Go to bed and hope that tomorrow is a better day. And as long we all wake up - I guess that's something.

Side note:

As you can see by this last picture, for the first two years we moved in I went crazy on planting flowers. Anywhere and everywhere.

"Stephane, can you dig a hole here?" "And one here?" And how about over here?"

"Is there any method to this madness?" he would say. Finally, he said firmly, "No more flowers or plants. There isn't any space."

And that's when I started sneaking in the flowers and planting them before he arrived home.

Yes, I was a closeted flower maniac. I was seriously suitable for some Garden Center Anonymous, for people who had addictions to garden centers. Finally, I can say I'm four years clean. I now only buy enough to fill the urns in front and to plant a few herbs and I didn't even do it this year. It shows you what you can do if you fight the urge! I bypass the garden centers and if I go, I look straight ahead and close my eyes to all of the bright beautiful "real" flowers or else I'm sure that would be on the divorce papers, "wife obsessed with planting". But no plastic ones! http://soyouwouldthink.blogspot.com/2007/07/flowers-flowers-everywhere.html

Where Did You Come From?

Every once in awhile, the full moon comes out and the crazies abound everywhere. And for those people who do not have a full moon to blame their abnormal behaviors on, well, perhaps they are singing to a different tune. So you would think.

On Labor Day, the four of us went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, to the Chicago History Museum, to the lakefront and finally, out to eat to Sweet Tomatoes. In other words, it was a labor intensive non-stop day with my husband and I taking up the lead, an over extended grandpa in the back and a toddler in desperate need of a good nap taking up the middle. It was fun, but alas, this is not the true nature of this story.

As we were driving out of the parking lot near the lake, a young boy, probably around ten, had his pants down and was mooning us from the sidewalk. His pants were clearly down to his kneecaps, his derriere showing for any passerby to see. Worst of all, his father and mother were by the side of the car laughing at him. Stephane and I agreed, if we had a son at that age who thought it was funny to show his backside to cars as they went by, he would have quite a slap on that backside to convince him otherwise.

On our way back, we stopped at Sweet Tomatoes, the salad bar buffet, where at dessert time, I took a small bowl of tapioca pudding, and while in line, I put it down beside me to get something, and a young little preteen girl runs up to me, sticks her finger in my bowl of tapioca pudding and licks off her finger. I must have given a look of shock, because she stared up at me with an ice cream mustache, probably ice cream from some other person’s ice cream bowl, and said, "Sorry" and then hopped away.

Then tonight, I went to Sam's Club to get some groceries. It wasn't very busy and very few people were there. As I took my cart and started pushing it down the long aisle, this fuzzy headed middle-aged woman with a long brightly colored skirt, bobby socks and 1950's shoes walked up to my cart and stayed glued next to me while I went down the aisle. At first I was like, someone must have lost their mentally challenged aunt and for some reason she's hanging out with me, but then after several minutes, up from her side came a clip board and binder and she said in a thick Eastern European accent with some kind of speech impediment, "Would you like to buy a sunroom?"

Now if you've ever been to Sam's Club or Costco, you know as soon as you step an inch past the checkout counters, these people come at you, trying to sell you sunrooms, cell phones and whatever else they can attack you with right when you get into the door. So I relaxed a bit once I knew I wasn't being followed by some crazy lady but instead was being followed by a weird woman selling sunrooms.

"No thank you," I said as she went on with her spiel. "See," she said. She flipped through the pictures, quickly trying to keep up with me while I was trying to get away with my cart. "No," I said, "I'm not interested" and turned the cart immediately to the right to enter another aisle and to hopefully, be out of her selling zone.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm on the other side of the store looking at outfits for Olivia and I see the fuzzy headed woman heading straight toward me again. I move into the hanging clothes a bit more, hoping she doesn't see me however, there are only around ten people in the entire Sam's Club so I guess she felt she had to be persistent with a low volume of customers to badger.

She stopped directly beside me. Obviously, me hiding behind the clothes rack didn't work. "Would you like to buy a sunroom?" she said again in her thick accent and meaningless expression.

"You already asked me," I pointed out and with no response she immediately left and was on to a new customer she spotted coming down the aisle.

I know there are crazy people out there - people with no social discretion, people who think everything is their domain to claim like the tapioca pudding girl, people that are, as the saying goes, "two colors short of a rainbow" which can certainly describe the fuzzy headed sunroom saleswoman from Sam's Club. (And her kaleidoscope of a skirt I might add.)

The world is filled with people that you wonder, "Where did you come from?" Because sometimes it sure doesn't feel like they came from planet Earth.

When I first started working at United Airline's answering phones, we blamed it on the full moon. We all knew what kind of customer phone calls we were going to get when there was a full moon that night.

Like clockwork, they would call us. And we knew it would always be an interesting night when we worked the late shift.

The only thing I can say is there must be a full moon out this whole entire week because I certainly had my fill of strange people.

So the next time you run into one of them, someone you consider crazy, strange, peculiar, a little bit off - because you know you will, we've all seen them out there - stop and say, "Where did you come from?" and then thank God nobody classifies you as one of them.