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Remodel! (update 1)
Baby name uploading is continuing smoothly – it’s more time consuming because I have to write headlines for all the original BNaBBT posts (but, you know, new material!)
Comments are now OPEN everywhere!
Thanks, Diana
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Peep Jousting Thunderdome
The first rule of peep jousting is you do not talk about peep jousting. The second rule of peep jousting is that joke’s kinda obvious. The rules are simple – two peeps, two toothpicks, and one microwave. Whoever pokes the other first wins. Then both are eaten. By wolves. Just like Catholic tradition demands during Easter. The crowd goes wild as the competitors enter the arena. The purple and yellow teams and their coaches have been preparing for years to reach this level of competition.
Please stand for the national anthem.
Round 1: Plessy vs. Ferguson
We who are about to die salute you.
We set the microwave for two minutes on high. The battle takes off immediately as Ferguson (yellow team) swells to disgusting proportions in a matter of seconds. Plessy is cautious.
Ferguson begins the traditional peep dominance display.
Plessy draws his opponent out with a feint and goes in low for the kill. 10-love purple team.
Plessy’s skin cracks with fury. Ferguson is visibly intimidated.
Defeated, Ferguson deflates with shame.
Losers are mushy.
The broken bodies of these noble warriors are taken to a better place. They go down chewy.
Round 2: Brown vs. Board of Education
The athletes raise their lances toward the heavens, to which they both may soon be dispatched.
Competition is fierce. Board of Education opens his maw in what can only be described as a cry of tribute to his warrior gods.
Their weapons glancing off each others’ hard armor, Brown at last is victorious. 20-love, purple team.
Second stringers are brought in as a sop to the heavy losses on both sides.
Round 3: Alien vs. Predator
Two of the amateur-leaguers take their place among the spilled gore of their heroes. Their fear is palpable.
They fall on their swords.
Their families die of shame. Their corpses are left to swell in the midday sun.
The sacred arena is getting pretty gross by now. It’s time for the headliner match.
The Main Event: Ninja vs. Pirate
We’re coming into the home stretch in the Kitchen Arena, and the crowd is going wild. Cheers are mixed with wailing and gnashing of teeth as the crowd stares transfixed at a horror they did not anticipate. It’s time to bring this to an end. Which team will be victorious as its champions face off?
“Arr! Yaarrr! Booty and grog, me hearties!'”
“…”
The noble combatants steel their jaws at manly angles. All is silent. Then they start rolling around on the ground, randomly waving their swords at each other. It’s pathetic.
Ninja and Pirate blubber as they try to see who can apologize the most.
Pirate is a broken man. Ninja is so ashamed, his ancestors die.
That bloodiest of sports, Peep Jousting Thunderdome is closed for another year. It sits silent, waiting to claim the hopes and lives of another young peep generation.
Chinzilla Gets Kinky
When Chinzilla was feeling sick last month, he loved to cuddle up to us. It was adorable. He’d lie in our laps and nap – it’s the only time he’s sat still since we got him. But now that he’s feeling better, he still wants to cuddle, but he gets aggressive about it.
Evilninja’s been working long hours at his awesome job over at GamesRadar. He keeps coming home, letting Chinzilla out to play, and then falling asleep on the couch. This makes him the perfect target for aggressive snuggling. I keep coming downstairs and finding this:
He’s also starting to lie in wait for cuddles. I get up in the morning, put on my crappy sweatshirt, and he’s already there. Waiting.
Can you spot the chinchilla in this photo?
Sometimes he gets bored with plain old vanilla cuddling, and gets kinky.
The inventiveness of his stealth attacks is starting to scare me. Things have gotten worse since he commandeered my furry Russian hat and turned it into a flying command unit.
You KNOW laser cannons will be next.
His message was clear.
Yay! Validation!
Oh happy day! “Baby’s Named a Bad Bad Thing” has surpassed Drake & Zeke (of Memphis Rock 103) and Misanthropic Bitch’s great rant on the subject to become the Web’s top bad baby names site on all the internets. I feel all blushing and proud and stuff, because I’ve done exactly nothing to promote the page, at all, ever – it gets a hundreds of hits a day entirely off of people posting the link on blogs and bulletin boards or e-mailing it or whatever, people seeing it, liking it, and passing it on.
Ah, external validation! Thanks, guys!
Live and in Person
Nw/oMH is going to now at was at the Super Bowl of the retail world – the San Francisco International Gift Fair. Normally, I just slink around the show waiting for someone to notice I’m carrying 18 purses and a box of business cards, but this time I’m going to be in an actual booth, on the actual show floor, and won’t be asked to leave by actual security. The SFIGF is a giant market for retailers to check out new wholesale lines of products and order lots of interesting new stuff ahead of the holiday season. There are lots of boutique businesses right along more established brands, and definitely something for everyone. Sean the wallet/belt guy scheduled a booth, but due to family reasons, he couldn’t fly out to attend the show, so I’ve stepped in to man the booth. We’re going to have something for everybody – wallets, purses, watches, t-shirts, hoodies, ninjas, pirates, dancing, sword fighting…. You think I’m joking? I guarantee every one of those things will be in our booth at some point. Come and see for yourself at the S.F. International Gift Fair Aug. 5-8, 2006. Or take the interactive booth tour! (Click pics to enlarge)
1. Tire bags
2. Deer antlers for displaying wallets tastefully
3. Brass statues of monkeys holding platters of business cards
4. Everybody likes leopard print!
5. Hastily-made sign for Sean, using business cards
6. Ingenious chain-and-bamboo rack for displaying belts
7. Model hands for watches that co-booth babe Joe (who screenprints t-shirts) had in his apartment, for some sinister and mysterious reason.
8. Joe and Diana t-shirts on display
9. The album cover purse corner, with iPod clothes nearby
10. Yes, more antlers. So?
11. Lesley’s hats – definitely getting the most attention
12. Moroccan bedspread – gold design doesn’t show well in photo
13. Our neighbors, “Successories in the Caboose.” Cute jewelry, sold from a real caboose by the side of the road in Pacifica. Not, you know, a fetish.
14. Joe, who agreed to man the booth with me without even knowing the show hours (9am-6pm) or length (4 days, plus 2 day set-up), or sheer scale (monumental). This man is my hero. I will add his shirts to the site soon, too.
15. Sampling of Joe and Diana t-shirts
16. Lesley’s hoodies and tanks
17. Another neighbor, “The Naked Bee.” What they were selling was a total mystery until the start of the show, when they brought out bee-produced beauty products.
Tiny Freelance Publishing Empire
There are two books out now featuring articles by yours truly. Both have something to do with websites and both involve advice. (Hint, hint baby name book publishers.)
“First Digs,” by Yee-Fan Sun, creator of digsmagazine.com. It’s Yee-Fan’s first book, a how-to decorating guide for post-college/pre-children types. You know, people who have no money but want to have something more stylish than milk crate shelving. Within is a reprinted basic how-to on painting a room I wrote for Digs waaaaay back when I also still had milk crate and 2×4 shelves, before I moved up to cinderblocks and laminate, and then all the way to Ikea units. Sniff! How time does fly!
The other book is Jeanne Hamilton’s second book – “Wedding Etiquette Hell: The Bride’s Guide to Avoiding Everlasting Damnation.” There’s a story in the planning section about the worst wedding I ever attended. Around here it’s known as, “the reception directed by David Lynch.” Slow, disturbing, and the main soundtrack is buzzing flourescent lights. Oh, l’amore!
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I am Chuck Woolery
We’ve got a bunch of weddings of BNaBBT board members coming up, but I just realized I have yet to properly exploit one in particular for my own nerfarious commercial gains.
The bigbadbabynames.net forum has made its first love connection. Two long-time members who met on the site started dating, moved in together, and will be married May 20th, 2006. Several other BNaBBTeers will be in there, and, to make sure everything’s especially surreal, I have been asked to officiate. Seriously. I threw out, “Ha ha! Maybe I should perform the ceremony!” as a joke, and they said “Good idea!” So thank you online ordination! I knew it’d come in handy! (My grandmother’s both proud and confused by suddenly having a rabbi in the family.)
Oh yes, there will be pictures, and I’ve promised not to do anything to ruin things, like dressing in a Star Fleet uniform or doing the whole “Princess Bride” mawwidge thing. Or both at the same time. (Note from the future: I totally opened with “Mawwidge.” The bride OKd it. The wedding party all cracked up, but most of the audience just stared blankly.)
So there’s another reason for us all to come together in the love/criticism of bad baby names – you may find that special someone. Awwwwww….. Next step: setting up a celebrity boxing match between me and that eHarmony guy. I could take him. Congratualtions Hunter-Gatherer and Undine!
Spam spam spam spam SPAM!
So, the forum’s down again, and there’s an interesting reason for it this time. We’re getting spammed.
We were planning on shutting down for some maintenance some time in the next few days, but an adorable wave of some sort of spam attack made the tech guys decide to do it sooner rather than later. The board will be back up when it’s up.
One of those responsible for the attack, the “ringleader” as far as I can tell, has been contacted with an offer to have her and her friends stop any and all contact with the website in exchange for me not suing the pants of them. Hopefully she’ll let all her friends know and get back to me before my meeting with my lawyer; otherwise, IT’S ON! and a couple misguided netizens are going to learn that actions have consequences.
It’ll be a good lesson they can teach their kids: “Mommy’s crying because she has to pay the legal fees of that lady because Mommy committed 16 acts of libel instead of behaving like a grown-up.” I’ll keep you posted. (Update: They learned it’s OK to disagree, preferably on their own site, but denial of service attacks can have actual, legal consequences. And I don’t fuck around. And their kids’ names still suck.)
Oh, and Bay Areaegians should check out the San Jose Mercury-News this week for the fab article where I’m interviewed about why weird spellings on normal names don’t make them any more special than painting a landfill green and calling it a tree. I’ll leave to you to consider that confusing metaphor.
Pictures from Cancer Relay
Huge, huge thanks to everyone who donated last month to Alison’s Cancer Society Relay for Life team. Thanks to BNaBBT readers and forum members, we raised
$573.69
for cancer research. This earned us a mention in two Bay Area newspapers. Woo! Spreading the gospel!
Alison (right) and her friend Courtney don’t let a hot SoCal day stop them from fighting cancer.
Alex is from Britain, and he maintains his cultural identity in L.A. by having no tan at all. I’m allowed to say this because a) he’s my former roommate, b) through me he met Alison, and they dated for a long time got married, and c) I’m somehow even paler, despite living in California for 20 years.
Alison and her mom, Trudy.
The whole team. Each team had to pick a theme that had something to do with music, and they picked “The ’60s.” Alison claims it was not a ploy to make everyone else wear tie-dye. I don’t think I believe her. This is like her vision of heaven right here. Hippie!
Thanks again to all our donors and everyone who helped out!
Fundraising Drive!
I’m donating the usual bad baby names sponsor space to my friend Alison, who’s going to be walking in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life next month.
Alison and her family had one hard summer last year. In June, her dad was his usual affable self, then he noticed his left foot wasn’t working right. Just not connecting to his brain somehow. They go to the doctor and find out it’s a tumor – he has a very aggressive cancer in his kidneys that has spread to his brain, his lymph nodes, his lungs. He had surgery right away and started radiation, but in just three months, he was gone.
Alison, her sister and her mother are all walking in the Relay for Life – she says it’s helping them not feel so helpless. And this is where you come in. I told her I’d put up a fundraising link and she thought that was all nice and stuff, but I want to utterly shock them with the awesome power of bad baby names fans and how much they care. If you can donate anything at all, awesome. If you can get your friends to donate = even better. Everything is greatly, greatly appreciated.
As added incentive, everyone who donates through the site will be entered in a drawing for NIFTY BNaBBT STUFF! Thanks everybody!