say hello to your friends

It's been quiet here at scuttlebuttering, and I apologize for that.  Life has gotten away from me, what can I tell you.  Today's post isn't groundbreaking, but its hopefully a start of more blogging to come.

Today I was cleaning up the foreign language books in the kid's room when I came upon this French Baby-Sitter's Club book:

Some thoughts:

1.)What, what, what are they wearing?

2.) When did Stonybrook become a slum?

3.) What is the title of this book?  My limited french leads me to think it's Mary Anne and the Sadness?  I don't think that's right.  But it does look pretty depressing judging from this cover.

I so wish there were more.

phrase origin

So I'm watching some 'Glee' last night, and at one point Kurt said the phrase "eat your heart out."  And this morning I woke up thinking about how disturbing a thing this is to say.  Seriously.  Think about it for a second.  I'll wait.

Gross.

I wanted to know the origin of this phrase, so I turned to the interwebs for help.  I'll tell ya, I wasn't thrilled with some of the answers.  A lot of people seem to think it has to do with eating a whole lot, but that sounds even grosser and I don't believe that's true at all.

The best definition came from Scorpio Tales - "The ancients believed that sorrow or envy were bad for the heart, and would eat away at it, each sigh draining blood from the organ. This idea made its way to England and became well established - Shakespeare often refers to it, as in, 'Might liquid tears, of heart-offending groans, / Or blood-consuming sighs recall his life, / I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, / Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs' (Henry VI, part 2, III.ii). We still describe someone as broken-hearted by grief. By the beginning of the 20th century, to eat your heart out was well-established as a term for pining; but more recently, it has also been used as a cry of triumph when someone else has cause to envy the speaker."

Not great, but hopefully it's enough to get my mind off the disturbing nature of it.

I'm having a difficult time choosing which picture to use for this post.  I don't want to look for pictures of people eating hearts.  Instead, as often happens when thinking hard about a particular word or phrase, it lost all meaning for me.  Which led me to this gem:

Glorious

fact #2

This is a true story.

One weekend when I was working at Disney after college, some family friends came to visit the parks and I met up with them for the day at MGM - er, Disney's Hollywood Studios.  It happened to be Soap Opera Weekend at the park, so there was an abundance of all of our favorite soap stars.  They were actually a bit aggressive in trying to hand out pictures of these actors that I could later get autographed or something.  I'm actually not quite sure what goes on for Soap Opera Weekend.

Anyhoodle, my two friends and I go on the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster where Steven Tyler begs his manager to get us a super-stretch limo and backstage tickets to see their show.  Joe Perry came so close to forgetting his black Les Paul which would have been awful.  We blaze through the ride and arrive at the unloading area as well as the point of this story - as we are disembarking from our vehicles we notice a horse standing there.

We all take a glance at it and continue on our way.  As we're exiting the building I go, 'so, wait, was that a horse at the end there?'  The three of us agree that it sure looked like a horse.  We think about it some more and then begin asking our questions as to why there would be a horse in that building.  This discussion has continued on and off for the last 5 and 1/2 years.  Our various theories cover a wide range, from it being a seeing-eye pony, or perhaps some Soap Opera star had it in her contract to appear at the park that she would only travel around via horse.  Perhaps we had a group hallucination.  Or maybe it was just a crazy big dog.  Afterward, we were kicking ourselves that we didn't just ask someone why there was a horse at the unloading part of the ride.  And I know it is a question that has haunted me for years.

I looked for a long time - there are no pictures of horses on rollercoasters

the color of cheese

I had two questions for my loyal readers while I was driving into work this morning, but now I can only remember one.  I hope for your sake I remember the other.

I've been a big cheese eater my whole life, and my lunch of choice as a kid used to be American cheese sandwiches.  Sometimes on the weekend, my dad would fancy it up and grill them.  I know, we really broke new ground there.  When I was very young, I remember the slices of American cheese were always yellow and then at some point my dad started coming home with white American cheese.  He always ordered the cheese from the same deli, and I remember being uncertain by this new color of the cheese and I didn't eat it for awhile. 

However, nowadays, all you can get is white American cheese.  Sure, they sell yellow Kraft singles, but I always thought those were highly weird and I'm not convinced that's real cheese.  My question is, why did the cheese change color?  Was it an anti-chemical thing?  Can you in fact still buy 1/2 pound of yellow American cheese?  Maybe I just haven't been paying attention at the deli counter.

I hate when it's wrapped in plastic

Christmas Gifts

So, my mother's been bugging me for a few weeks now about giving her my Christmas list.  The problem is, I have no idea what to ask for from my parents.  If I need something, I'll usually just buy it, so there's nothing I can't really live without.  And my parents are very generous to me year-round, and I just feel bad asking for more from them.  I'm great at giving advice for gifts for other people, and gave them wonderful ideas for what to get Bert.  But compared to his great presents, the only thing I have asked for so far is a shoe rack.  My mom said that that's a little sad and she needs more suggestions.

So help me out, kids.  What did you ask for from your parents?  Or do you have any suggestions of things that I don't even know I need, but will soon wonder how I lived without?

My sad Christmas gift