Castine, Maine, July 2007; Cape Elizabeth, Maine, August 2012
Well folks, what can I say? It’s been a crazy few weeks, with back-to-back long weekends in South Carolina and Maine and a massive deadline at work. But I’m back! (And better than ever? Hmm…)
Since I managed to miss last week old-timey post, here’s a bonus set from a few days later in July 2007 (on our way to South Carolina from Maine):
Outside the World of Coca-Cola, Atlanta, Georgia, June 9, 2010
In 2010, Dairy Queen celebrated the 25th birthday of its most popular treat, the Blizzard, by introducing a mini version of the dessert and driving around the country in the Blizzardmobile, giving out free samples. Fortunately, my office was within walking distance of the Atlanta Blizzardmobile stop, so I braved the sweltering heat on my lunch break for a tasty freebie. (Or two… maybe three.) While I was there, I got a photo with the Blizzard itself. An instant classic!
Allison Hall girls’ triple, Evanston, Illinois, spring 2003
In honor of my excellent former roomie Allison’s birthday today, I dug up some photos from the first year of our friendship. The above photo was taken before an evening out at a house/apartment/dorm-room party and features some sweet ’90s makeup action on my part. Please also note that there is a choker involved.
Posted in friends, hair, lowbrow, Old-Timey Tuesday
I would be remiss if I let this day pass without noting its significance in my life. Twenty years ago today, Wayne’s World hit the big screen and forever lodged itself in my brain, for better or worse.
I went to see it with Abby and her family not long after it opened (possibly even on opening day); I remember her mom called my mom to get permission for me to go with them, since it was PG-13. Although Abby and I didn’t get much of the humor then, we still thought it was the funniest movie of all time.
Fished in! (that would be me & Abby)
If you’ve spent any time on this blog you know how frequently this movie comes up for me (and those links are only from the first couple weeks of posts). I try to keep it to a socially acceptable level, of course, but sometimes my Wayne’s World reflex can’t be suppressed. I might have a problem. Nevertheless, I’ve seen the movie several dozen times and it continues to crack me up.
I’ll end this tribute with an excellent link my sister called to my attention earlier today — a then-and-now cast slideshow. Click on the screengrab to check it out:
Wayne’s World, on your 20th birthday, I salute you. Scha-wing!
Posted in lowbrow, nostalgia, pop culture
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems from their emails that the designers at J. Crew have been taking tips from some of my favorite bits of ’80s pop culture. To wit:
The mixed-media wrap pencil skirt. The way it’s styled here, it looks like it was cribbed from that scene at the beginning of Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985) where Helen Hunt converts her catholic school uniform skirt to a pleather mini by turning it inside out. (She also tears the sleeves off her blazer and reverses it to reveal a blue plaid vest, saying, “Velcro — next to the Walkman and Tab, it’s the coolest invention of the 2oth century!”) I couldn’t get a screenshot of this moment, but this picture basically shows you the before and after uniforms:
photo via here
Next up, we have the Velvet Ludlow:
If you’re me, that makes you think of Velvet Jones (1981), one of many excellent Eddie Murphy bits on SNL. Whoever put that on YouTube apparently didn’t want it embedded, so just click on the link above and ignore the French subtitles. (And if you’re watching from your desk, make sure you have headphones on.)
I can’t wait to find out which somewhat obscure ’80s reference will surface next!
Posted in lowbrow, pop culture
As predicted, I started off a little self-conscious about my costume at the party we attended on Saturday night. Fortunately that didn’t last long. The first guy to ask me about my costume asked if I was Sexy Abe Lincoln — nope, Babe-raham! — but that was the only time that happened. “You’re not Abe Lincoln, you’re Babe Lincoln!” a guy by the cakewalk exclaimed. Yesss! But the best reaction by far was when Freddy Krueger approached me and, without a word, held up his smartphone, which was playing the appropriate soundbite from Wayne’s World. (Bonus: I am now aware of the excellent Wayne’s World Soundboard app!)
(I should also acknowledge Jon’s homemade-with-love potato sack costume. Being Idaho-grown himself, it was only appropriate. And it cost just $11 to make! Many thanks to my mama for sewing up the sides on her sewing machine.)
The bartenders and lots of other folks got it too. (One super drunk dude called me Boobieham Lincoln — close, but not quite?) It was pretty fun having a costume that compelled people to talk to me about it. At some point while I was in the bathroom line, Jon was talking to some other revelers who identified him as being with Babe-raham Lincoln. I was costume famous! Not only that — by the end of the evening I hardly even knew I was wearing a beard anymore.
Posted in holidays, lowbrow, nerdery, pop culture
I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for the rules of the Dawson’s Creek drinking game my roomies and I devised for the start of the final season that I mentioned a couple of Old-Timey Tuesdays ago. Today’s your lucky day! Here they are:
As you can see, we had a few late adds: take a sip if someone (anyone? not sure.) turns up scantily clad, “Pacey gets ass,” or Grams says something dirty. Some of the rules are specific to latter-season Dawson’s — and even the particular episode, because, duh, when else would Dawson and Joey consummate their awkward and abiding teenage lust but the 2-hour-long first episode of the last season — but a lot of them can apply to the series as a whole. I guess you could even sub Andie in for Audrey and carry a few more rules back to the Capeside years. Frankly, you’d be tipsy after an episode following just the first rule.
My favorite rules are nos. 5 and 9. If Mitch turns up — in ghost form, of course, at this point — you have to take a shot (even though we only had Bud Light); and, every time Dawson is a whiny bitch, you drink. Classic. Now, break out the DVDs (it’s not on Netflix instant) and throw your very own Dawson’s & Daiquiris party!
Posted in booze, lowbrow, nerdery, nostalgia, pop culture
You may have noticed that posting’s been a little light of late; what you probably couldn’t have noticed is that the mirthmobile had a HUGE spike in visits last week. A couple of tumblrers with decent readerships linked to my post on the fancy Bernardaud cat bowl. I’d be lying if I said those inflated numbers didn’t help me rationalize slacking off last week.
Another contributing factor was the glacial slowness of my laptop. I swear I’ve lost weeks of my life watching the rainbow spinny wheel on my OG 2006 13″ white MacBook. This weekend, I finally caught up to the times and bought myself a shiny new 15″ MacBook Pro.
Upgrade!
Frankly, I’m surprised the white plastic one lasted this long given all I put it through during grad school… and, okay, maybe I could have offloaded a few more gigs to speed things up. But! I’m thrilled with my purchase. And I’ve pledged to be much more conscientious about labeling documents, organizing my photos and iTunes library, and keeping the desktop tidy this go-round.
Saturday brought not only a new laptop, but an excellent photo opportunity outside the Braves game. Behold, the latest addition to the ever-growing collection of pictures of me with giant inflatable foodstuffs!
Who doesn’t love Combos, am I right?…
Posted in grown-up stuff, lowbrow, nerdery
Some of my coworkers were standing out in the hall earlier today when Steven observed that Matt had gotten a haircut. “Flowbee?” he joked, and the other three people laughed. “Wait, what’s a Flowbee?” I asked, already knowing what the answer would be. “You mean, like, a real-life Suck Kut?” (That’s the best link I could find for reference — the only YouTube clip was in French. Alright!)
Y’all — HOW is it possible I didn’t know this existed? It’s obvious that the Suck Kut was a riff on the Flowbee, but I guess my 8-year-old self thought that this totally amazing excellent discovery from Wayne’s World was too ridiculous to be real, and I never thought to question it later on. I consider myself a pretty good authority on all things Wayne and Garth, so I was shocked to learn I had missed something like this — an actual Suck Kut! — that was common knowledge among my coworkers. Turns out there’s a RoboCut too, and hundreds of Flowbee videos on YouTube. People really use these things? Get right outta town!
Posted in lowbrow, nerdery, pop culture, Whaa?
Last Friday, right as I was about to shut down for the weekend and leave the office, I got an email that made me laugh out loud. Here’s how it started:
They just wanted to say thanks and let me know how much they value me as a member of the eBay community. Aw, shucks eBay!
10 years since I first signed onto eBay. July 15, 2001. I totally know where I was, too: in the staff lounge at my summer camp where I was working as a support staffer (aka odd-jobber), sitting on a crappy plastic deck chair in front of the old computer we always joked was powered by hamsters, most likely waiting for the dial-up connection to work its magic on my yahoo account. (This computer met its demise at the end of the summer when we dropped it off the four-story climbing tower and proceeded to go all Office Space on it with a baseball bat and an axe at the staff party. Too bad I don’t have those photos handy to scan in…)
My first eBay purchase was a Wayne’s World poster for my future dorm-room wall. I remember thinking Damn! eBay is a goldmine! when I saw all the random and awesome things that came up from that search alone. In fact, my second eBay score was the Wayne’s World VCR Board Game — wow, that sounds even more ridiculous now that VCRs are obsolete — for one of my best buds.
I think my amassing of Wayne’s World stuff ended there, with the exception of the mirthmobile-model toy car pictured in the blog header. It turned out that Waffle House memorabilia became my eBay addiction. (I’m still not totally sure why or how that came to be, but I have an extensive collection!)
Have any of y’all out there hit an eBay anniversary lately? Do you remember the first thing you bought? Or is it just me?
*How many posts can I title with some cheesy variation on the word anniversary? The possibilities seem endless, really.
Posted in lowbrow, nerdery, nostalgia, pop culture, the internet
