It's September 30th, so I'm Preemptively Ranting about Halloween

I love Halloween. I love pumpkins, I love costumes, I love all the candy the kids don't like that I get to eat.

I hate shopping for costumes, on line and in stores.  I really hate it with children.

Why?  Because the stores all sell the same thing, and worse, they have the obligatory creepy bloody display which terrifies my younger kids, grosses out the older ones and ensures I lose sleep because somebody has nightmares.

So Sherry you're thinking, go to the online stores, but even that's risky.  Why?  The webpages can't resist having sidebar costumes wildly inappropriate for everyone.  

I'm going to get asked about the Adam and Eve costumes, or the Sexy Pickachu Costume or the Bloody Daniel Tiger Costume, I'll get asked why there are 15 million girl costumes and ten options for boys.  I'll get asked why every boy must be a superhero or a ninja or a superhero ninja, and why every girl costume has  v-neck and/or is pink and sparkly.   Some of these questions will be from teens who need further clarification, some will be from kids who feel bewildered by the become a skeevy Carny for Halloween pitch, and worst of all, will be the kids who don't know why something is wrong, and want "that costume."

It's almost enough to make me learn to sew.

But not quite enough, so I tried typing in some qualified searches, but the word Innocent with costumes...doesn't work well.  I was very grateful no children saw the results.    I'm rather scared to research what chaste+costumes might conjure.  You can find decent stuff with children+costume.  I don't need my kids to dress up as saints or people from the old testament or Veggie Tales or even Lord of the Rings, but I would like a policewoman to look like a policewoman and not a pole dancer, and Batgirl, a personal favorite, to not require my daughter have hit the gym more than Barbara Gordon.   Every costume is a skin tight catsuit.  It's just the colors of the sequins that vary.

That sewing needle is mocking me.  I can hear it from its lonely former cookie tin, lost amongst extra buttons and thread.  

Wonder if I can convince any of them to be old fashioned ghosts?  I've got some extra sheets we could use.

Not the Patriots, Not Nixon Related Brady Water Gate

When the Pope came to Congress, Representative Brady saw an opportunity to procure a unique keepsake from the occasion, and took the pontif's glass of water (which Pope Francis had already sipped from), and took it back to his office to drink.

Now I get wanting to touch greatness, to somehow connect yourself to someone who seems beyond what you can aspire to being.  (It's the pitch made for Dos Equis).

But Representative Brady also dusted the glass for prints.  So the unasked question at this point is, "Why?"

Here at Chocolate for Your Brain, quick internet research revealed the following possible theories to explain the representative's behavior.

10) The Pontiff's finger prints are on file, cross referenced to ensure we aren't dealing with a Pope decoy. *You know, like in that Star Wars Prequel.  I'll apologize right now for even reminding you of that movie.

9)  Aspirations for discovering the holy gene have been thus thwarted by the inability to find a suitable candidate within the governing body politic from which to obtain a sample.  It was never the water on the outside of the glass Representative Brady was after, it was the sweat and cellular residue on the outside.

8)  Check the office pool at the House and Senate, Brady must have lost a bet somewhere, and to prove he'd swiped the Pope's H20, the winner demanded a "Trust but verify" measure of proof.

7) Having read all of Dan Brown's novels and watched all the National Treasure movies, Brady feels convinced the Pope has a state of the art secret layer underneath the Vatican Bank where the treasures of the world are located, and the only means of access, is coded to the pope's fingerprints. His junket to Rome leaves next week.

6)  The office water cooler was drained earlier. Brady had the hiccups.  He needed a drink.  Since he was going to have to drink from someone else's glass, he wanted to make sure it was only the Pope.  After all, anyone else might have cooties.

5) Not saying he was looking for mutants or aliens, but it makes more sense than any of the rest of these theories.

4) The plan had been to lift the prints and put Speaker Boehner's prints in their stead, but it didn't work out.

3) Brady apparently has done this sort of thing before, sort of doping on someone's water in hopes of procuring for himself whatever midi-chlorians might be left behind in the backwash. Last time it was President Obama after he made a historic speech.   As for the dusting for prints, he has a collection of famous people's finger marks, don't ask how he got some of them, it isn't as pretty as this time around.

2)  With a name like Brady, he didn't think he'd get caught, and even if he did get caught, nothing would come of it.

1)  Representative Brady wasn't dusting for prints at all, he was measuring the Pontiff's hand span, Given the Eagle's 1-2 start,  He's searching for someone who can throw a Hail Mary and save the season.

*Editors Note to Bernie Sanders, Trump and anyone else who starts to catch fire in the coming months, drain your beverages or Brady will.

Batman? Really?

Once you've been compared to Jesus, Noah, God, Superman, Martin Luther King, to JFK, to David before the Goliath, to all good things in all times that ever existed in your first term, how do you then go for a second? How does one go about creating a sequel and making it 20% cooler?

You reboot.  First rule of reboot? Do not talk about the reboot. 

Written back in 2012...found it when doing research...the political part no longer applies, but the subsequent stuff does.


President Obama: Premiering for the first time as if you've never seen him before: I'm Batman!

But you can't be a hero without a villain so of course Romney is the evil villain BANE...cue the boos and throwing of lettuce and rotten oranges.  So what does that make all of us who aren't rooting for you? Henchmen? Flunkies and toadies? or just the duped citizens of Gotham?  Are the 99percenters protesting Wayne Tech?

It is an insult to Americans everywhere to think this sort of pandering heroworship/demonization not only should work, but should even be considered. This would be laughable except I'm so stinking tired of being told that any GOP who actually attempts to disagree with the DNC is selfish, lazy, cruel, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic, ignorant, stubborn, hateful, racist, corrupt, demonic etc. etc. etc. and anyone who does not agree with this assessment is also ignorant, bitter, uninformed, unevolved...put your favorite insult here. 

Don't tell me it doesn't apply to me, it has been draped on everyone who disagrees with this administration or the Democratic party if they disagree about anything. And I ignored it for a long time...but at some point, you get tired of ignoring an insulting bully. The intent has been to silence dissent, discourage debate and make one ashamed of not being at the cool table with all the beautiful popular people. This nerd is annoyed. This nerd doesn't want to sit at their table, but she sure as hell doesn't want to spend the rest of her lunch period listening to insults.

Now I know plenty of lovely people in real life who disagree with my politics.  We talk, we engage over email, we have a few laughs when we're together and we don't always just talk that stuff because that would be terribly boring and mean we don't have lives.  They don't call me names.  They don't presume that I don't mean what I say or have reasonable reasons for my thinking.  I likewise think the same of them.  It is what civilized people do. 

However it is election season, and politicians running for office and their flunkies, view civil discourse as something for the flyover people, a tool used to sedate the masses, a mask of a smile and a glad hand to secure the vote and move on.  Treating one's political opposition with genuine regard is not something one does in earnest --or at least that's how it appears given their broad sweeping statements about all who do not go hand in glove with their agenda. 

To those who say, well, there's Rush and Hannity and Mark Levin and Ann Coulter, let us say we don't like the slinging of mud on our side either.  For me there is a frustration that a meeting of minds that happens in parking lots and playgrounds and over phone calls and coffee in the real world, doesn't seem to touch the political stripe class. It's time we recognized it's the cliquey kids in DC and those who only live inside that fish bowl of DC waters that view all things as an R and D first, while the rest of us (those not elected to office), who do not struggle to get along or understand each other.  We don't think something is profoundly wrong with the people of California or New York or Kansas or Texas.   We don't presume bad faith and we don't assume malicious intent or design.  We're Americans.

So this is a call out to all who specialize in talking so they can be heard to have spoken, have something to say, the media class and the political class that plays with the media. Think about why the other side might disagree and trust that we the public actually want to have skin in this game and be involved.  Don't dismiss our disagreements with insults. It's boring and frankly, shoddy thinking.  If all you have is insults and (frankly you've run out of insulting insults, so now it is just getting stupid) you must not either believe your argument will hold or trust that it is tolerable for someone to disagree. Surely you are smarter than this.

But in case you're not...

I propose we all purchase some of those air horns used at basketball games and blow them whenever you start dipping into the muck.  So if you want to be heard, you'll have to learn how to play nice.