John & Belle Have A Blog

In Praise of Teethy

In comments a couple folks have more or less hinted at my hypothesis: that the woman who stole the doll was some sort of rogue Singaporean hipster who didn't realize that uglydolls are readily available, so if you take a shine to one, you don't have to steal from a child. Example: you can buy it from Amazon. They've got a whole bunch of 'em. There's actually a wikipedia entry on the subject.

The Rescue of Teethy

Here's a weird story. Zoë was on the playground and some strange woman tried to steal Teethy, her stuffed ugly doll thingummy. Zoë and two of her friends actually chased the woman in question, while Mei-Mei shrieked 'Zoë's doll!' The woman then claimed it was actually her doll, because it had been on a bench and she'd had her keys on it. (Weird theory of doll ownership.) When our maid picked up her cell to call Belle and check whether Zoë's doll was maybe at home - maybe this woman had an identical doll? - the woman caved and handed over the doll. Well, anyway, that's the story I got from Zoë and our maid. Weird. Here's a picture of Teethy, after the spectacular rescue. Zoë is very proud of herself, and is telling the story over and over. (The band-aid on her forehead is from taking a header off the bed into a sideboard. Went to the emergency room for that one. Different story.)

It Came From The 90s

I've been scanning some old photos and correcting them with photoshop, a pleasantly mindless task when you've got sweet sweet power pop to keep you entertained. Here's me and my sister in NYC in 1992. I happen to know I had one of the worst hangovers of my entire life that day--yet I look fine! Ah, youth.

Taking Sexyaway

Hard to argue with this Fametracker When Stars Split feature on Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake. Sample:

4. Two of her best girlfriends are her Charlie's Angels co-stars Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore.

• And they totally just love to hang out and braid each other's hair and pig out on junk food and play "Bloody Mary" in the bathroom mirror, you guys! Maybe you've heard?

Like all consumers of chick magazines, I have indeed heard this. I even remember when the editors of Marie Claire sent the three of them on a wilderness survival course and they had to huddle together for warmth. The guy leading it helped them catch a fish with their bare hands and then Drew wouldn't eat it. He seemed worried she might be faint from hunger, thus showing that he had never thought very hard about what or whether Hollywood actresses ever, ever eat.

When It Hits

JBB readers take note: you can buy the first two Shoes albums (Present Tense and Tongue Twister) on iTunes for only $9.99! "When It Hits" is one of my favrorite songs ever. But why don't they have the re-release of 20/20's two LPs? The CD is out of print, but why should iTunes care about that? I really don't see what the barrier could be, and it's not as if the record company is making money off the pricey resales.

The Future's So Bright

I was searching for sky colors on flickr so I searched for photos tagged with sunset. There were about one and a quarter million. That's enough for 3,000-odd years of sunsets, and of course almost all the photos on flickr were taken in the last few years. Among those years there are thousands of pictures of each day's sunset, from all over the world. That's just beautiful. If you had told me that when I was a teenager, and that I would also be able to upload pictures from my phone, I think my desires for futuristic stuff would have been satisfied. On the other hand, actual present me is shopping for a new phone and I'm a bit disappointed. The most megapixels on a camera I could find was 2.0 on a Motorola. (Well, on a phone that I also generally wanted, because I kind of just want that phone. But only blue?) The phone I have now has one point three, and it's a year and a half old. I was thinking I could get four at least. Grumble.

New Crobuzon

I've been trying to draw a picture of New Crobuzon. This is equal parts Pudong and termite mound; what do you think? More fruiting bodies? Doing the google image search for fruiting bodies has been hard for me already.

 

Dwums

A few days after X-Mas Zoë got bored. We were at grandma's house, which was sort of a mess. So we decided to go around the house collecting change. Eventually we had about $10 in quarters, dimes and nickels. So we walked together to CVS to see what could be bought for $10. And - lo and behold - the awesome drum set that was originally $20 was marked down 50%. So when Belle and grandma came home, Zoë was proudly bashing the hell out of the drums she bought with her own money! But first there was this tragic scene with Mei-Mei, who fell instantly in love with the drums, didn't want to share them with their actual owner. Mei-Mei loves drums. Every day I walk Zoë to school, I take Mei-Mei. And then I take her into the school's music room. She gets to take down a 'dwum' and beat it for a few minutes before we go home. So here are the pics.

Happy Birthday Ben!

Today is my brother Ben's birthday. Happy birthday, Ben! This is one of my favorite pictures, of him and me at Palmetto Bluffs in Bluffton.

Hello?

I had an irritating appointment with my GI specialist the other day. He's actually quite a good doctor, along one axis: he is good at making a diagnosis. To do this he had to listen to me initially or he wouldn't have known what the symptoms were, I would think (although he did want to not consider some symptoms). He's all up to date on what treatments there are for things, and that's good too. I started taking some new medication with him which I felt at first was working well, until I went through a spell of being really sick, and now I can't decide, but I figure I might as well stick with it. But this time he just really wasn't listening to what I had to say at all, which I find so annoying. I told him I had been really nauseated for quite a few days in a row in November and December, so badly that I was worried I might not be able to travel, and that it had improved during the trip but still wasn't great. Naturally he hypothesized that the stress of travelling had caused the nausea. I told him I had lost weight from not being able to eat, and he more or less said that's OK because you're probably trying to lose weight anyway. Which, OK, fine, it's true that I regarded it as something of a silver lining to the dark cloud of feeling like puking all the time, but it really doesn't seem like an appropriate reaction for him to have on my behalf. Maybe once he thinks I'm thin enough he'll start to care if I can't eat? Humph. And why am I just bitching about everything on my blog? I'll try to improve my attitude. You should read this interesting post at Pandagon. Or this one at Feministe about purity balls and related issues; it says a lot of really obvious things that still need saying, and says them well.