“your mother called. She wants you to swing by The Home and sex her up again.”
Mark should never have told me I could abuse spammers.
Talk about opening Pandora’s Box.
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Category Archives: Blogging
Join the Harry Potter Challenge
Well, get a move on.
We have, as of this typing, exactly 29 days before the July 21st release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Cold Hallows, the seventh and allegedly final book in the Hogwartian Mythos Cycle.
Which is, should you be a speedy reader, just enough time to get through all of the previous books, particularly if you read them before. If you read them before but you were drunk, it counts as reading them for the first time, for purposes of scorekeeping in this highly competitive international competition.
And no, watching the movies does not count, especially if you mostly just fast-forwarded and rewound and replayed all the parts with Luscious Lucius Malfoy until the DVD started to burn out on you.
For bonus points, you may also read the purportedly-but-not-confirmedly-false version of HPatDH which was posted on the internet last month. And you may do so here.
So what are you waiting for? Get to work!
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Best Before: this post is entirely motivated by my wish not to have a stupid quiz at the top of the blog the day I get a direct link from Defamer
There, I said it.
So now I’m just going to up and tell you about the time my mother was offered a quarter of a million for me.
Shoot. There goes the punchline.
So…previously on the ol’ raincoaster blog…my mother used to live in Riyadh with a CIA agent. Her job was at the King Fahd Hospital (I think every Saudi city has a King Fahd Hospital) in medical records, and, as one does, she had pictures of her children on and around her desk.
The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world, had imported vast numbers of support and technical staff from the West, yea even unto Canuckistan, and occasionally ther would be slight episodes of culture shock in one or more directions.
This was one of those times.
The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world but nobody’s fools, their Gucci tabs notwithstanding, had sent entire generations of young men to be trained in the West, choosing top of the totem pole jobs like doctor, dentist, etc. You won’t find many Saudis abroad studying to be lab technicians: that’s what Americans are for, duh. Support staff is imported, bosses are homegrown but schooled abroad.
And one of these Saudi doctors was in my mother’s office, no doubt complaining, as they all did, that the medical transcriptionist (who hailed from, if memory serves, Tennessee and had, consequently, great difficulties with English) had mistaken his Oxonian vowels, not to mention his Etonian (or at least Harrovian) consonants, and typed that the pregnant woman was dilated to “twenty-five hundred meters” rather than the “twenty-five sontemeters that he’d actually said.
And his glance happened to fall on a portrait of yours truly. And it is a fact universally acknowledged that a young Saudi doctor possessed of a secure job at the King Fahd Hospital must be in want of wife #1.
So he made an offer.
A quarter mil.
I should be honoured: Brooke Shields‘ mother was only offered forty racing camels. I did the exchange at the time and figured out I was worth about fifteen thou more than she was. Obviously the economies of Riyadh and Milan operate on completely different principles, if not planets.
Mother was nobody’s fool, and also possessed of the same demented and twisted DNA as I, myself: the family anything-for-a-story trait surfaced and she decided to bicker with him.
Fifteen minutes passed and she got the price up by forty k and a couple of pedigreed camels, but he wouldn’t go to three hundred thou, for very good reason.
As he pointed out, there’s got to be something wrong with a girl who’s 23 and not married yet. Smart cookie: it took my boyfriend of the time simply months to figure that out.
Yes, I was marked down because I was past my Best Before date.
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i can has nihilism?
The meme may now be retired; this roundup of decayed lolcat corpses will never be bested. From Heart on a Stick, via Gawker. Warning: NSF Lunch. Or cat people. Is this how god kills a kitten when you…hmmm, much to think on.
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my mother, the CIA agent, the Filipino forger, and the meaning of Christmas presents
I’m kind of disappointed my blogging diploma isn’t from Miskatonic, but that’s nothing a little hacking won’t fix.
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Blogging Degree
From Go-Quiz.com
And this reminds me, it does, of the time my mother wanted to buy me a Doctorate from Harvard.
She was living in Saudi Arabia, as one does, shacked up with a CIA agent whose job it was to teach battlefield communications to the Saudis. As one does.
Islam was the bane of his existence, as five times a day no matter what they’d all pull out their rugs and face mecca and present a nice, juicy target to the Israelis. No indeed, this did not take him to his happy place, for yea, he was a very conscientious battlefield communications instructor. Over and over he lectured them, over and over he proved that the Israelis could wipe them all out at any of those five, widely known and unvarying times of day. And over and over they happily replied “if the Israelis kill us we will go straight to Paradise as martyrs,” and I believe one of them even made a reference to that bugger, I can’t kill him when he’s praying scene in Hamlet, obviously stretching to try to find some common ground with Jerry the Baptist, out in the wild Arabian desert.
As a sideline, Jerry ran the local casino and house of ill repute, which brought in several times his salary, and which he was allowed to keep because what his bosses were truly interested in was the blackmail material gathered by the tiny cameras placed strategically around the premises. He also had the local distribution rights for Johnny Walker, which was as the mines of King Solomon in terms of putting out the gelt.
Where was I? Oh yes, about to get to the religious police.
Naturally, Jerry was quite conscious of the activities of the religious police. The main trouble with the religious police was, as you can imagine, that they tended to be quite…well, there’s really no way around this, I’m just going to have to come out and say it… quite religious.
And the whole living-in-sin-with-a-Canadian-and-a-socialist-at-that thing was exactly the sort of thing with which they were Not Cool.
At. All.
Now, Jerry and my mother were by no means originals in their living arrangements, which did tend to give a rather louche reputation to even the primmest Mormon that the Yanks sent over, and so, as always happens where there are problems and lots of money around, a man materialized with a solution.
He materialized at the same time every year, swinging through the Middle East like an olden days tinker would swing through, say, Simcoe County, offering his wares.
He was a Filipino forger, and he was a very busy man.
They took one of the American marriage licenses for $250, which is really cheap for a piece of paper that you show the religious police and they don’t have you stoned, when you think about it, really, and my mother pondered long over the very tempting Harvard Doctorate, but decided that even she was not overpaid enough to spend $500 and besides, what would she get my sister, eh? Answer me that!
That year she got a camel saddle and I got a silver veil. Gee, I guess Mom DID love me best, even if she thought I was ugly.
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raincoaster 