Gun Toting Babies

As I was driving this weekend I came across a truly befuddling car. This Honda Civic was sporting an obnoxious sticker announcing to all that there was a "Baby On Board." Why said driver felt the need to share this information is beyond me. I personally would never put a sticker announcing the contents of my vehicle to the world, probably because it would say something to the effect of "Alcoholic Friend on Board" or "Overachieving Younger Brother On Board," and I don't particularly want to flaunt either of these things. Situated snugly against the "Baby On Board" sticker was a NRA sticker. Yes, you read that correctly. "Baby on Board" and National Rifle Association Life Member stickers sitting cozily next to one another on the car's bumper. The presence of a "Support Our Troops" and "Pro-Schwarzenegger" stickers lead me to believe that this was not in fact a joke. Do you store your rifles near that baby? Or is baby perhaps already a junior member in training of the NRA? It could just be me, but I never really thought babies and guns mixed well. Either way, the sheer paradoxical nature of the situation made my head spins. What's next, a Bush/Cheney '04 sticker juxtaposed with a gay pride sticker? Actually, come to think of it, that's probably what Mary Cheney's Subaru looks like. Maybe she should join the NRA. She did just have a baby.

The Death of the English Language Brought to you by Craigslist

The advent of the World Wide Web, text messaging and instant messaging has begun to make the world a smaller place and open up communication channels in unfathomable quantities, making it possible for a small child in Korea to converse with a desperate housewife in the Galapagos Islands. These new communication outlets are seemingly accompanied by a complete disintegration of the English language as we know it. Somehow, someway, numbers are creeping into the middle of words and punctuation has become more of an optional decorative art form with commas strewn about haphazardly. And apparently question marks are the new periods.

The epitome of this tragedy can be found at one of the only places I know of where you can buy a couch, post a haiku, get a job, adopt a kitten, hire a dominatrix, or peruse ads for the area's best labiaplasty doctors. I speak, of course, of Craigslist. Now I don't know Craig, or what kind of guy he is, but I am hoping that he would also be aghast at the butchery of the English language that occurs under his namesake.

This little gem was taken from the missed connections under women seeking women section:

I CAME UP BEHIND YOU AND LEANED UP AGAINT ALL THAT A$$ U GOT...AND WOW!! DID I WANT UR NUMBER..ALTHOUGH UR GIRL WAS ON ME SUPER HARD..I WANTED TO TALK TO YOU..ARE A VERY SEXXY!! WITH LONG BRAID TO UR BUTT...ITS ALL GOOD THO..IF UR THERE..EMAIL ME..I WANT U ..NOT HER..LOL

How interesting. I had no idea that ass was spelled with two money symbols. Nor was I aware that the effort required for typing "your" was so exhausting that we are now switching to "UR." I am not even going to mention the lack of apostrophes since we are talking about a girl who thinks "I wanted to talk to you are a very sexxy" is not only a complete sentence, but also thinks this is the way to win a girl over.

Moving right along, here is another literary masterpiece, and let's hope that this lady finds a girl with spell-check:

so theres a coupla birfdays at el rio tonight, and i thought i post to get some new faces out there, because, well, there is going to be some hotties there, and i already know all of them so i thought maybe we could get some new hotties there, andyways..... be there or be boring or sad, or lonely or not at el rio.


I would so much rather be lonely and sad than with a woman who thinks that "coupla" and "andyways" are actual words that exist in the Oxford English Dictionary and does not understand the concept of capitalization.

And finally, I bring you this little opus:

I'am a very good women.I dont have time, for issues.I have a wonderful soul.Looking for someone that is strong and willing to be happy.I'am really a true lesbian.Looking for the same. I have a lot of ambition.Alway's growing.YOU KNOW... PEOPLE SAY THAT THEY ARE TRULY REAL AND WHEN U MEET THEM,TH1EE NONTHING... WHAT THEY SAY THEY ARE.I'AM THE REALEST AS THEY COME.IF NONTHING COMES OUT OF THIS THAT'S OK JUST MAYBE I CAN FIND A REAL FRIEND.ALL MY PICS ARE RECENT, I TOOK THE LAST ONE THE OTHER DAY.L8TER -BREE

Well now Bree, I'm not even sure where to begin. I was under the impression that the whole point of a contraction (and their indentured servants, apostrophes) was to combine two words while shortening one of them, but you have gone and reinvented the whole process. Let's take BOTH words and instead of using them independently, we will marry them with an apostrophe WITHOUT shortening them! Pure genius. If you cannot sense the sarcasm here, please leave now. And take Bree with you. As for the sudden switch to all capital letters…I don't even know what to say. The misuse of "there," misspellings galore, and the whole "l8ter" thing…numbers have no place in the middle of words people! What is happening here? I implore you, invest in a dictionary! And don't post an ad seeking an intelligent woman when you plan on ending your post with an atrocity like, "Plz send pics so i can reply or describe urself. so i hope to hear from u soon MuAh." The muah works for Dr. Evil but it does not, my dear, work for you.

Harry Potter is for Sissies

Like any self respecting Muggle I love Harry Potter and his misadventures at Hogwarts. Recently, however, I have discovered something more scintillating than anything He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named has ever cooked up.

Enter Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy series. As fantasy books go, my general rule of thumb is as follows: it must have the word "epic" somewhere in the description, it should have a map of the magical kingdom we are about to explore, and/or a glossary to define all of the strange creatures and powers we will encounter along the way. If it has one (or preferably all) of the above, then count me in! Jordan's series goes above and beyond, offering not one but anywhere from 2-4 maps and a glossary thicker than my entire college transcript per book. With the series at this point totaling 11 books, 9,353 pages and 3,115,519 words, The Wheel of Time is not for the light of heart, or the soft-core fantasy fans. This is balls-to-the-wall fantasy my dears, and it simply doesn't get much better than this.

What, pray tell, do these 3 million plus words cover? Enter Rand, sheepherder extraordinaire, and requisite small town villager turned mankind's last hope for survival. Like most fantasy books, we are dealing with the classic Good vs. Evil scenario, but this one packs a punch. Rand and his friends must embark on the adventure of a lifetime if they are to beat the Dark Lord and save the world. To even begin to summarize the plot of such an exhaustive series would be impossible (and probably really boring for you, dear reader) and I will therefore not even attempt to do so.

But I will say this: Jordan's series differs from the many formulaic fantasy novels out there, his attention to detail is astounding and he brings a surprisingly feminist perspective to the series, which is an added bonus as a female nerd in a predominately male-nerd-world. Furthermore, this is the first fantasy series I have read that has gay characters. Granted they are not overtly gay (rather, it is implied) this is still the first time I have seen a gay presence in this genre.

His readers are not fans, they are fanatics for life, and that says something. CAUTION: Reading this series will alienate you from people you love (at one point I stopped going out on the weekends because I simply had to know if Egwene was being raised Amyrlin Seat), disrupt your performance at work (My daydreams of becoming an Aes Sedai became increasingly difficult to ignore once I hit book 6), and become a serious financial burden once you finish the series. Because at that point, you will need copious amounts of anti anxiety medication in order to calm the voice screaming inside your head: "I can't wait two years for book 12! I MUST HAVE MORE JORDAN! NOW!" In summation, I leave you with these final thoughts: Best. Series. Ever.