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Adorable Parent Factoids

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1. My dad never invested much energy in remembering which fast-food restaurants served which items, so any time we stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast, he would order a Croissandwich (which he liked) and then look really crestfallen when they said they didn't have that. He once looked so disappointed that a McDonald's employee apologized, in a tone that kinda acknowledged the Croissandwich was way better.

2. My mom always spelled broccoli "broccholi," presumably by false parallel with "zucchini."

3. Every so often, my dad would come across a new American expression he found charming and hilarious, and would start using it heavily. For one straight month he said "holy mackerel!" in practically every conversation, until (I'm guessing) one of his co-workers decided to teach him a new one, and so he switched to "holy Toledo!" for the next month.

4. My dad, brother, and I came home from someplace once and found my mom standing in the back yard, in her gardening clothes, looking very agitated and holding a shovel. At her feet was a small garter snake that had been pulverized into about 16 separate pieces, some of which looked like they'd gone through a food processor.

5. I once asked my mom for $10 so my friend Tim and I could buy some Dungeons & Dragons book, on the grounds that it "had new spells." She said, "How about a reality spell? Does it have one of those?" Tim laughed, and I did not get the $10.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:27 (eighteen years ago)

I once asked my mom for I once asked my mom for $10 so my friend Tim and I could buy some Dungeons & Dragons book, on the grounds that it "had new spells."

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:28 (eighteen years ago)

6. My mom has set multiple toasters on fire, and I have two separate distinct childhood memories of her running outside holding a flaming toaster in her hands.

― Mr. Que, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:31 (eighteen years ago)

Where is your Dad from Nabisco?

― Will M., Monday, 9 April 2007 19:33 (eighteen years ago)

I have to go with the all-time classic moment when my mother turned to me and asked me, in all seriousness, "do lesbians have periods?" (I don't know if I'd say that was adorable, though.)

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:37 (eighteen years ago)

My mom wrote a "rap" for her 7 brothers and sisters to perform on their parents' 50th wedding anniversary, held in the basement of a church in rural southeastern Minnesota, 1991. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the MC Rove footage because they all tried to dance like how they imagined a "rap dance" would be like.

― iiiijjjj, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:39 (eighteen years ago)

7. The back of our house and my dad's office both faced out on the same stretch of prairie, about a mile apart from one another. One summer weekend, my dad bought a telephoto lens for his camera, to take pictures of soccer games. On Monday, I was drinking a glass of orange juice when the phone rang. It was my dad, calling from work. "Hey!" he said. "That's some good orange juice, right?"

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:40 (eighteen years ago)

hahaha

― elmo argonaut, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:41 (eighteen years ago)

Okay, Nabisco, that orange juice story rules the world/creeps me out/makes me roffle/all of the preceding.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:41 (eighteen years ago)

this is already a pretty aaaw thread and it's only gonna get aaawer i bet

― rrrobyn, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:42 (eighteen years ago)

number 7 sounds like something my dad would do

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:42 (eighteen years ago)

yeah that is a great OJ story!

― Mr. Que, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:42 (eighteen years ago)

8. My parents dated for six weeks, were engaged for one day, and eloped. They have been married 28 years.

― jessie monster, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:42 (eighteen years ago)

- my mom plays piano to me over the phone, has a pixie haircut, phoned me yesterday to tell me there was a rat in the greenhouse (i live thousands of miles away) and began the conversation with 'omg omg i have to TELL you! did i tell you?! omg, eeeeeeee!'

― rrrobyn, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:43 (eighteen years ago)

9) English is not my Dad's first language so he sometimes gets things a little confused even after more than 40 years in the US. He used to be a chef and it never failed to make me laugh when he'd give me the list of specials to write on the board and I'd see "beaked" clams listed as an appetizer. He also invents words. One of his favorite words is "asinating" which I can only imagine is a combination of asinine and ??? He once told me that he had some kind of skin rash on his face and thought he should probably go see the Taxidermist.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:43 (eighteen years ago)

10)He once got so drunk at the NYC St. Patty's day parade that he and some random cop switched clothes. My Mom opened the door to find him dressed as one of NYC's finest, badge and all. At first, she thought she'd been sent a striper. She through the whole uniform into the incinerator because she was afraid he'd get in trouble.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:44 (eighteen years ago)

10) He drank with some of The Beatles while in Hamburg.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:44 (eighteen years ago)

11) My Mother proposed to Rex Harrison in an elevator at The Connaught Hotel in London sometime in the 60's.

12) Said Mom was given a cat as a present when she lived alone as a young woman. Within days the cat got very ill with some sort of chest infection. She rushed the kitten to a vet who very quickly guessed that she'd never had cat before. When she asked why, he explained that the cat was not sick. It was purring.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:44 (eighteen years ago)

whoah

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:44 (eighteen years ago)

At first, she thought she'd been sent a striper.


Mistake, or not?

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:45 (eighteen years ago)

lol - whoops!

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:46 (eighteen years ago)

Haha, I think that says way more about how drunk the cop was.

― Jordan, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:46 (eighteen years ago)

That lasbian one is just totally funny

― james, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:47 (eighteen years ago)

Good point. He probably could have gotten into some serious trouble for that!

x-post

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:47 (eighteen years ago)

My mom thinks gay dudes are born gay but lesbians are just too unattractive to get a man.

(that's not very adorable, actually)

― Jordan, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:48 (eighteen years ago)

13. My mother once mixed up an entire batch of brownies from scratch and then called me over to the mixer and said, "would you look/smell/taste and tell me if I missed something? They don't feel right but I just can't tell...". I peeked into the bowl to see that she had never added ANY FORM OF CHOCOLATE and the batter was roughly the color of tapioca pudding.

NB: She is otherwise totally functional, has all her senses, is not blind, etc etc.

― Laurel, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:51 (eighteen years ago)

Ha, the telephoto-lens thing bugged me as a kid, obviously -- I was concerned about whatever sneaky stuff 12-year-olds do in the house when no one's home -- but at this age, c'mon, if I had kids and could peek into my own house from the office, I totally would. Plus I appreciate that he just did a funny gag about it and then brought the lens home, instead of actually keeping it up there and spying.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:52 (eighteen years ago)

For several years in a row, my dad would give my mom a giant trailerload of horse manure on their wedding anniversary as fertilizer for her gardens.

― dan m, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:55 (eighteen years ago)

14. Conversation between me and my mom five days before I left for college:

MOM: Have you ever done cocaine?

ME: [mortified silence] ...uh...

MOM [looking at me with a vaguely wistful expression]:You know, if coke had been as cheap in the 70s as it is now, you probably never would have been born.

― max, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:57 (eighteen years ago)

ha! I love your mom, Max.

― horseshoe, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:58 (eighteen years ago)

stop distracting me, this thread!

― horseshoe, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:58 (eighteen years ago)

omg max

― ghost rider, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:58 (eighteen years ago)

xxxpost

!!!!

― Ms Misery, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:58 (eighteen years ago)

Mom only went out with pops because he was holding?

― milo z, Monday, 9 April 2007 19:59 (eighteen years ago)

lol max - parents are always hilarious in that they apparently think we did/do WAY more drugs than we actually do. My mom once told me she did LSD "a couple of times" as if it was no big thing. My reaction: "MOM I've never even SEEN LSD."

― jessie monster, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:00 (eighteen years ago)

also, the schef to thread!!!

― horseshoe, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:00 (eighteen years ago)

My mom told me she didn't like w33d because it turned her into "a cunt".

― dan m, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:01 (eighteen years ago)

once my mom e-mailed me an e-mail that said in it only these words:

"why are there crows? :)"

never did get an explanation.

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Monday, 9 April 2007 20:04 (eighteen years ago)

The first time I ever smoked up it was with a bowl I found in my Dad's dresser. When I was applying for my first job, he told me to watch myself and stay away from the "Maui Wowie" (imagine being said with heavy German accent)for a while in case they did a drug test.

x-post I love your Mom!

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:05 (eighteen years ago)

my mom sent me an email last month about taking some 7-year-old percocet she found, is that adorable y/n

― ghost rider, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:05 (eighteen years ago)

my mom once IMed me pretending to be my dog.

― jessie monster, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:06 (eighteen years ago)

omg ENBB DID learn it by watching his dad!

― David R., Monday, 9 April 2007 20:07 (eighteen years ago)

my mom, slightly drunk on new year's, discussing with neighbors the unfortunate string of teen pregnancies at my high school, unaware i was in the other room:

"i mean, can't they just give them blowjobs or something?"

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:07 (eighteen years ago)

a valid question, btw

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:07 (eighteen years ago)

David R. - he has no idea that I ever found that bowl!

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:08 (eighteen years ago)

Dad edition:

15. My dad used to tell any number of Cosby-style stories about his childhood in rural Ethiopia, many of which contained some heroic feat involving animals. The truest-sounding ones were about helping his father in his ongoing battle against the local hyenas that had killed their dog. (This mostly involved setting traps and going to bed chuckling.) The one about riding the horse across the flooded canyon, or the one about the warthog, I'm not so sure.

16. When I was really young, I was really impressed with the way he drew trees. They looked like this:

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y257/nitsuh/tree.jpg

17. Sometimes, at the dinner table, we would make fun of how, when he chewed, the muscles at his temples really throbbed in and out, visibly, and funnily. What's totally unfunny is that this now happens to me, and with something chewy enough it gets to the point of hurting, and it's probably related to my having a super-tense jaw and grinding my teeth at night.

18. One time, when I was maybe 8, he took my brother and me to the movies and said we could have one candy item. We chose Skittles. Toward the end of the previews, he tried one, and then took them away from us. "This tastes like poison," he said.

(xpost Jessie I've done that quite recently, except I made a whole gmail account for the dog and had him doing stuff like sending Evites and lame forwards and bidding on dog toys on eBay and stuff) (cuz he's a dog, he has bad netiquette)

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:09 (eighteen years ago)

18. One time, when I was maybe 8, he took my brother and me to the movies and said we could have one candy item. We chose Skittles. Toward the end of the previews, he tried one, and then took them away from us. "This tastes like poison," he said.


HAHAHAHAHAAAAOMG

― Mr. Que, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:10 (eighteen years ago)

This is out of an e-mail from my aunt, not my mom, but still: no matter what one may be the lonliest number, we are taught that two people in love become one... and if love is blind, how can their be love at first sight? go figure....

― Jordan, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:10 (eighteen years ago)

19. My mom decided she didn't like her strong regional accent in college and consciously picked up the phonetics of her classmates from northern Maine, so she has a mild Canadian accent despite never having lived there.

20. My dad grew up in farmland, and he said when he was younger he and his friends smoked corn silk and pretended it was cigarettes. I asked if he'd ever gone cow tipping, and he said of course not, that's terribly cruel, but he'd persuaded his friends to touch electric fences.

21. At the drunkest I've ever seen my dad, he went out to play tennis with some Russian guests and came back from the courts at 4 AM.

― Maria, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:12 (eighteen years ago)

The first time I ever smoked up it was with a bowl I found in my Dad's dresser. When I was applying for my first job, he told me to watch myself and stay away from the "Maui Wowie" (imagine being said with heavy German accent)for a while in case they did a drug test.

Relatedly (a memory about my parents that doesn't directly feature them), the first time I ever smelled p0t the first thing I thought was, "Hey this smells like my dad's office!" It took me another ten minutes or so to make the connection.

― max, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:14 (eighteen years ago)

the thing is i feel like i have told many, many parental anecdotes that they're basically boring by now.

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Monday, 9 April 2007 20:15 (eighteen years ago)

22. After watching a scene in Good Morning Vietnam in which Robin Williams informed one of the lieutenants that he was in more dire need of a blow job than any white man in history, I asked my mother what a blow job was. Her response: "I'll tell you when you're old enough to get one."

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:17 (eighteen years ago)

OMG - that is the best response ever. Amazing.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:17 (eighteen years ago)

lol max - parents are always hilarious in that they apparently think we did/do WAY more drugs than we actually do. My mom once told me she did LSD "a couple of times" as if it was no big thing. My reaction: "MOM I've never even SEEN LSD."

When two of my close friends went into rehab for heroin addiction, I remember being way more freaked out about it than my mom, who told me that "rehab is better than moving to an ashram in New Mexico and gaining 40 pounds." She refused to explain further.

― max, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:20 (eighteen years ago)

xpost so when did she tell you?

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:21 (eighteen years ago)

Max, I think I love your Mom.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:21 (eighteen years ago)

i'll be she still hasn't, see???

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:21 (eighteen years ago)

xxpost I was wondering that as well - like how old is old enough?

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:21 (eighteen years ago)

23. My dad was very upfront about the 'sex talk' and once tried to explain how the self-lubrication of the vagina made it "kind of like a slip & slide."

WHAMMO, indeed.

(this may not, in fact, be adorable)

― elmo argonaut, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:23 (eighteen years ago)

xpost so when did she tell you?

i'm still waiting. (see: "picking up this waitress")

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:25 (eighteen years ago)

24. Haha, I also remember my dad taking us to Pizza Hut a LOT for a couple months when I was 7 or 8 because he was trying to score with one of the waitresses.

― elmo argonaut, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:26 (eighteen years ago)

More "adorable" (by which I mean drug-related) quotes from my mom:

--On speed: "Don't do it. When I was writing my thesis I was doing a lot of dexedrine so I could get work done, and then I started seeing spiders crawling up the wall so I had to stop."

--On heroin: "Peter [name of family friend] got really into heroin, to the point where he refused to take a pottery class his senior year that he needed [my parents went to Princ3ton]. He never graduated and I don't think his father ever forgave him. [Pause] When I did it, I mostly just threw up."

--On peyote: "Once I filled my pocket with some cocoa powder and peyote and got so high I ended up on a secretary's desk in the dean's office."

PS Nabisco your father actually does sound like quite an excellent dude, I don't mean to hijack your thread with stories about my junkie parents.

― max, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:28 (eighteen years ago)

25. My father, the most stubborn, wrongheaded man in the history of earth, once stupidly advanced the notion that the fruit in the bottom of fruit on the bottom yogurt was NOT intended to be mixed into yogurt, but rather savored, uncut, as a reward for making your way through an entire cup of vanilla. I was eight years old. He was a truck driver, for Canada's largest dairy, for whom he delivered yogurt.

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:30 (eighteen years ago)

i think that's my favorite

― river wolf, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:31 (eighteen years ago)

I love all of your parents.

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:32 (eighteen years ago)

max, at least your junkie parents had adorable moments. Mine are just fucking pathetic.

― Ms Misery, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:33 (eighteen years ago)

my parents are dipshits too. i think the key here is to think of "adorable" as a continuum.

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:35 (eighteen years ago)

when we were talking about montreal, my mother told me that she climbed mount royal in 1970 wearing burgundy velvet hotpants, matching tights, and platform wedge sandals. sadly, no photos exist.

― lauren, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:38 (eighteen years ago)

i think the key here is to think of "adorable" as a continuum.

That's exactly right; I have a ton of "my mother is hilarious" stories, but they are probably matched by my numerous "my mother is a hurtful, unempathic person" stories. My Dad is less unintentionally funny, so I don't usually tell stories about him.

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:39 (eighteen years ago)

my parents are great but my mom's foibles are on their way from 'adorable' to 'worrisome' :-(

― deej, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:40 (eighteen years ago)

My parents took me and about 8 of my friends to the tree lighting in NYC for my birthday one year. We parked somewhere way uptown and took a cab from there to avoid the traffic. After the ceremony my Mom was trying to get us all back into the cabs. She was basically just shoving us in while keeping one eye on the rest of the group one of the girls started to resist and say, "I don't want to get in the cab!!!" She persisted a bit in her hurry to get out of there until the girl called her a bitch! At that point she looked down and realized she was trying to shove an adult male little person into a cab. She let go and started apologizing profusely but he called her a c*nt and stormed away. I still tease her about the time she tried to kidnap the dwarf.

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:41 (eighteen years ago)

My father, the most stubborn, wrongheaded man in the history of earth, once stupidly advanced the notion that the fruit in the bottom of fruit on the bottom yogurt was NOT intended to be mixed into yogurt, but rather savored, uncut, as a reward for making your way through an entire cup of vanilla. I was eight years old. He was a truck driver, for Canada's largest dairy, for whom he delivered yogurt.

wait i totally agree with this philosophy

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Monday, 9 April 2007 20:41 (eighteen years ago)

He once got so drunk at the NYC St. Patty's day parade that he and some random cop switched clothes.

man this is awesome

― kingfish, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:46 (eighteen years ago)

Mom edition

26. At some point in the mid-70s, she and my dad had some sort of disagreement over whether peanuts could be salted without being shelled; my dad and his friends maintained that peanuts can't be salted inside their shells, for crying out loud, and she was being ridiculous. Days later, she did some elaborate "taste this peanut" GOTCHA thing, like George Costanza with the Twix bars, to demonstrate her rightness. When I was young, this was one of her favorite stories, and was often told at seemingly irrelevant moments as a substitute for the sentence "I am right and your father is wrong."

27a. Once, at a Pizza Hut in New Mexico, some clever person had loosened the top on the chili-flake canister as a prank. This clever person did not count of my mom's fondness for spicy food. After the whole canister had dumped on her slice, she just shook off the excess and ate (and visibly enjoyed) the pizza.

27b. Her enjoyment of spicy foods was in fact such that my brother's best friend used to enjoy going through the refrigerator, finding spicy things he couldn't believe she ate, and then getting her to eat them in front of him.

28. Says she has never in her life been drunk, except for one time in her youth when she stayed home with my dad and intentionally got drunk, just to see what it was like. At some point, when I was in college, I made the mistake of responding to this claim, saying that there had been plenty of dinner parties at our house where, well, she wasn't anywhere near wasted-drunk, but probably somewhere around the legal-driving BAC and "tipsy." She didn't really speak to me for the rest of the evening.

29. When one of my cousins married a girl from a small, religious Ohio town (at a dry wedding, no less), my mom seemed to have a certain impish fun in getting all the Ethiopians together to ululate and watching the Ohioans look a little freaked out.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:47 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah. Although he also his not so great points, my Dad is pretty much awesome.

x-post

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:48 (eighteen years ago)

should have read, "also has his not so great points"

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:49 (eighteen years ago)

Grrrrr. I can't type today!!

― ENBB, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:53 (eighteen years ago)

Dad wins and dad loses

30. Embarrasses mother on rainy day by bustling around the foyer after someone's dinner party innocently saying "where are my rubbers? where did I put my rubbers? I found my umbrella, but I think I've lost my rubbers!" (LOSE)

31. Soccer game is called on account of light rain on muddy field; families begin walking 100 meters back to parking lot, where father's newly purchsed Volvo is waiting. Suddenly dad goes "ooh!," points a finger at the sky, and begins sprinting toward car, calling "c'mon, c'mon!" Family laughs, other people look at us like we're nuts. Ten seconds later, giant hailstones start zinging everywhere at incredible speed. (WIN)

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:54 (eighteen years ago)

LOL @ thought of nabisco's parents arguing over who is more OTM

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:58 (eighteen years ago)

Hahahha.

My parents are famous for uttering certain lines, which I will share with you here:

Mom: "Look at me when I'm talking to you; don't look at me that way." And "Don't you duck when I swing at you."

Dad: "When my children get hurt, they heal. When my children hurt the cars, *I* have to fix them."

― Laurel, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:00 (eighteen years ago)

Pop culture

32. My mom was doing that Sandra Bullock Miss Congeniality "you like me, you want to kiss me" type of voice/joke all the way back in the late 80s.

33. Their 70s record collection consists of lots of Tom Jones (mom), Sudanese folk music (dad), random soul 45s, and an incredibly rare Sun Ra LP (listed at around $400 for collectors) that was "a gift from some friends -- they were strange."

34. My father's most-used catchphrase for two months in the early 90s, derived from an episode of Martin: "Let it marinate." Unfortunately this was no competition for his older brother's still-legendary George Jefferson walk.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:05 (eighteen years ago)

the yogurt thing: well now that you've got me thinking... why would fruit be on the bottom of it weren't to be enjoyed as "dessert"? I mean, if it were meant to be mixed it, wouldn't it just be... pre-mixed??

― homosexual II, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:05 (eighteen years ago)

one time my mom was gone for a week and my dad was playing "mr. mom"...anyway, growing up me and my sis always ate Chex Mix, my mom made it all the time because she didn't want us to eat potato chips and stuff.

anyway, my dad decided to make some chex mix, and it ended up tasting AWFUL...so we were complaining...he got sorta mad cuz all week we were doing the whole "mom does it like this" whining about everything...

anyway, mom finally came home and heard about the whole Chex Mix controversy and it turned out that my dad had made it with soy sauce instead of worsteshire sauce...he felt bad and mom would always tease him about it.

― M@tt He1ges0n, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:08 (eighteen years ago)

Last week my mum was going to get her haircut, and as she was on her way out, we had the following conversation.

Mum:"You know Ronan, there have been so many weddings and funerals in the family lately. If you were a hairdresser, I'd save A LOT of money"

Me: "haha, yes mum, but I guess you're happy I'm not actually a hairdresser aren't you?"

Mum: "hmmm, well I would save a lot of money"

Me: "yeah but you know, I wouldn't really enjoy it, and it's not a very good job, and you wouldn't want to be telling your friends 'yes Ronan is doing great as a hairdresser' would you?"

Mum: "No lots of hairdressers make huge money nowadays! And I'd save so much. I'm telling you you'd make a great living!"

Me: "erm.....OKAY!"

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:18 (eighteen years ago)

I have re-hashed this on the Hastings threads before, but...

When I was in high school, my mother used to say that she approved of my friends, "as long as they were good Christians."

Me: John and Jeff are atheists and Mel1ss4 is Jewish.

Mom: Well, just as long as they are good Christians...

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:20 (eighteen years ago)

My mom's story about buying an ounce of maui wowwy for $25 and watching people turn into friendly reptiles to thread. Also her very recent dream in which I was a famous touring musician and she came on tour with us and rolled famously awesome joints for me and all the musicians and crew on tour.

In fact, pretty much any commentary on stonerdom by my mom is adorable. Mom if you somehow read this I'm sorry I told all these strangers on the internet about what your life was like before I came along and ruined the fun for you.

― nickalicious, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:30 (eighteen years ago)

mandee, my eight-year old argument at the time was that consumers: enjoyed having an extra level of control over their fruit to plain yogurt ratio; appreciated the elimination of the fourth wall between them and the mixing process; and were excited by the faint possibility that they could, if they ever wanted to, segment the process into twenty spoonfuls of boring old vanilla followed by four sweet, syrupy gulps of fruit.

for me, FOTBY has really always been about freedom and versatility. my father, however, believed in no such thing: you either waited for the fruit or you didn't, just like a gay weak communist who never wants to do his paper route.

― ^@^, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:31 (eighteen years ago)

"just like a gay weak communist who never wants to do his paper route."

If only my parents came out with stuff like this...

― james, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:37 (eighteen years ago)

Once, in the 60's my dad's family went to a big party for some Arab prince or other and invited my mother (they were still just dating). The day before had been my mother's birthday and they had given her this beautiful exotic garment as a present. It looked vauguely arabic to my poor mother and she assumed she was supposed to wear it to the party. My mom spent all day doing her hair and getting pretty. She even bought a new pair of heeled shoes! (quite a purchase for a wild hippie girl) Anyway, the party was in some hotel and they all met in the lobby. But when my mother showed up my dad and his mother completely ignored her and rushed on ahead to the party. My grandpa was nice though and escorted her upstairs. My mom then tracked down my dad and a few friends he knew there and sat next to him. The table grew silent and my dad kept inching away from her. By this point she started to feel a little hurt. But, being who she is, she just shrugged her shoulders and went in search of her own fun. She drank and danced and made friends with a rowdy group of royal teenagers who loved her antics. The next morning her best friend came by and heard all about the party. My mom then showed her the beautiful dress she wore. Her friend burst out laughing and told my mom she had been wearing a bathrobe all night.

― King Kitty, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:40 (eighteen years ago)

This was from one of my friend's fathers, a kind old man (he was over seventy years old even when we were in high-school.)

FATHER: Would either of you girls like a hamburger?
FRIEND: No, that's okay, Mr. Ramsey. We're vegetarians.
[pause]
FATHER: Would you like a cheeseburger instead?

― Pleasant Plains, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:48 (eighteen years ago)

When I came out to my mom she looked me in the eye and asked me:
"The rear-end kinda gay or just the kissing kind of gay?"

― King Kitty, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:52 (eighteen years ago)

anyway, mom finally came home and heard about the whole Chex Mix controversy and it turned out that my dad had made it with soy sauce instead of worsteshire sauce...he felt bad and mom would always tease him about it.

My dad used to make curly wurly fried eggs for us when we were kids. Or, if you prefer, burnt fried eggs. He also made a thing he called stackinhacky mince. It was mince with, you know, stuff in it.

My Dad used to work for Aer Lingus, so we used to get cheap or free flights back in the seventies and eighties when such a thing was possible, but we didn't have any actual money so we could only ever go on holidays somewhere if we had people we could stay with. When I was nine we spent two weeks' holidays in an apartment in Queens. We got to throw trash down in the incinerator and drink Orange Julius and ride around New York on the bus. It was possibly the best holiday I ever had in my life and has almost certainly made me the person I am today.

My mam used to do a radio programme with my younger brother where he would chat to guests and she would mix them gin and tonics at 9am on a Saturday. She liked Magnus Magnusson best.

― accentmonkey, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:53 (eighteen years ago)

i just got this email from my mother, which i consider pretty adorable:

I went to see Grindhouse, believe it
or not. Boy, was it fun. :-) If someone gave me $60 million, I'd make a
double feature like that, too. :-)

― lauren, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:44 (eighteen years ago)

my mum just now sent me a text, from upstairs

"hi ronan, can you lock the door. see you in the morning. love mum"

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:51 (eighteen years ago)

just sent back

"hi mum, long time no chat, i've just locked the door, speak to you soon!"

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:52 (eighteen years ago)

lol awesome

― HI DERE, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:53 (eighteen years ago)

I think she was trying to bypass grandma's radar for noise. She's like the fucking predator after 8pm.

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:56 (eighteen years ago)

I want to swap parents.

― Bob Six, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:56 (eighteen years ago)

"what's that? I'm 24 and living at home you say? yes that's right. no I spent most of my late teens doing drugs. yes."

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:56 (eighteen years ago)

ha my mum just texted "yes talk tomorrow, thanks a lot, mum"

― Ronan, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:57 (eighteen years ago)

[i]"what's that? I'm 24 and living at home you say? yes that's right. no I spent most of my late teens doing drugs. yes."[/i}

Yeah I was still at home in my early/mid 20s and it still freaks me out to think that my parents were completely straight (born 1920 and 1923) and yet in their very house on saturday nights in the 80s I regularly had friends round for sessions of dope, acid and poppers (what a combination).

― Bob Six, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:07 (eighteen years ago)

Mother:

This is hard to explain, but my mom (who was a clinical nurse for most of her adult life) has this really awesome way of communicating with the elderly that is charming, caring, and thoughtful but not at all condescending. It's really wonderful to see because she just makes people incredibly happy.

My mother's two mantras during my childhood were, "People are for loving," and "We can't (do/buy/whatever X); we must be parsimonious."

My mom once referred to her first lover's penis as "a little pickle."

At a wedding reception (it might have been hers when she married my stepfather) my mother, getting fed up with her sister-in-law (who is an extreme irritating person), pulled the SIL's shoe off, poured beer in it, and put it back on the SIL's foot.

― Jenny, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:25 (eighteen years ago)

Jenny, I want to swap mothers with you for a while!

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:27 (eighteen years ago)

My most bizarre Dad story:

A few years ago he called me up on the phone and told me he thought he might be having a stroke. The reason he was calling was to ask my opinion on whether or not he should see a doctor about this potential health crisis. (Uh, YES!) It turned out he just had ear infections in both ears.

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:28 (eighteen years ago)

Sara, it was a little touch and go during the early to mid-eighties but she's pretty excellent now.

She signs all of her emails with:

LOVE,
YOUR MOTHER

During my aunt's first husband's father's funeral (phew), which was a real fire and brimstone, altar-calling, come on up and get saved if you want to see your loved ones again affair, the pastor started babbling about how the judgment day was coming, and God would read the names of all the saved souls from a big book. My mom leaned over and whispered, "Will he read them in alphabetical order or order of appearance?" which resulted in both of us giggling very inappropriately through the rest of the service.

She still refers to my friends as "your little friends." I am 34.

― Jenny, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:32 (eighteen years ago)

Oh, and she sends me birthday cards from her cats.

― Jenny, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:33 (eighteen years ago)

27a. Once, at a Pizza Hut in New Mexico, some clever person had loosened the top on the chili-flake canister as a prank. This clever person did not count of my mom's fondness for spicy food. After the whole canister had dumped on her slice, she just shook off the excess and ate (and visibly enjoyed) the pizza.

holy crap, that gives me flashbacks. when i was 12 or so some close friends, really more family friends, had lost their father due to suicide. after the funeral that summer they sort of became shut-ins and we didn't see them for three weeks or so, finally their mother relented and their family came out with ours to pizza hut. it was an awkward meal, and the only time my friend and his older brother really laughed was when we loosened dozens of parmesan and chili shakers. of course, this wasn't in new mexico.

― sanskrit, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:37 (eighteen years ago)

Oh, and she sends me birthday cards from her cats.

Awesome! My mom is totally afraid of cats, so I suppose that would put you off from even a temporary swap. I'm jealous!!!

― Sara R-C, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:41 (eighteen years ago)

My mother used to make up fake bible verses and tape them to my bedroom door before I got home from school. They would say things like "clean thy room lest ye be banished from the valley of the dinner table" and things like that, and the citation would always be "First Motherings 2:11" or something random.

― Laurel, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:49 (eighteen years ago)

Or, things like this, as she wrote to me in a card last week: "Spring, a new season of sunshine. For lo, the winter is past -- may it ever be so."

― Laurel, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:51 (eighteen years ago)

And if you're wondering how the same woman can write that and also be famous for "Don't you duck when I swing at you", you know why my mother is so awesome. :D

― Laurel, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:52 (eighteen years ago)

For lo, the winter is past

song of solomon 2:11

― gabbneb, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:57 (eighteen years ago)

Today my mum told me she overheard some kid stacking shelves in Sainsbury's explaining to his colleague what the kind of music he was into and said it was some of the same sort of things I like. She doesn't really have much of a grasp of what I'm into so I was kind of dubious. She then said that he had mentioned "free improv" and "noise". Now it's not like we have in depth conversations about this kind of thing so I found it kind of nice that she remembered and could recognise these things.

― jim, Monday, 9 April 2007 23:58 (eighteen years ago)

i think lauren's mom's review of grindhouse is the best review i've read so far

― rrrobyn, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:01 (eighteen years ago)

My mum was convinced for years that Richie Cunningham and John Boy Walton were played by the same actor. This was pre-internet so I couldn't show her imdb.

― jim, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:04 (eighteen years ago)

One time, when I was maybe 8, he took my brother and me to the movies and said we could have one candy item. We chose Skittles. Toward the end of the previews, he tried one, and then took them away from us. "This tastes like poison," he said.


NABISCO DAD OTM.

― g®▲Ðұ, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:04 (eighteen years ago)

Haha okay I wasn't going to post this, but here is an actual quote about my mother from a college-newspaper article. (I know it's paranoid to google-proof this, but still.)

"In terms of d1scussions at the dep4rtment m33tings, she is the vo1ce of re4son," said [a co-worker]. "She makes ins1ghtful c0mments, part1cularly on issu3s that are contr0versial or s3nsitive."


I.e., Nabisco's mom OTM! Obviously I think she's awesome and am glad when her colleagues agree.

― nabisco, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:27 (eighteen years ago)

When my siblings and I got old enough that my parents could start leaving us home alone without a babysitter, thier parting words were always:

[/quote]No grease fires![/quote]

They always thought they were so hilarious.

Years later, as a highschooler, I was over at a friend's house unsupervised after school one day and we (he) actually started a greasefire bad enough that half his kitchen had to be replaced.

― g®▲Ðұ, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:41 (eighteen years ago)

My mum once sent me a bizarre email talking about some mysterious person who I had never heard of, and oooh what could she ever possibly be on about, I was starting to wonder what drugs she was on. Turns out she'd found all my old teenage writing and was having a laugh at me, because it was full of Duran Duran fanfic and she thought it was hilarious. =(

More recently, she phoned me up to tell me she had found an old working Speak n Spell in a thrift shop, and did I want it? OMG hell yeah mum! So she bought it for me. WHich was completely awesome.

― Trayce, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:46 (eighteen years ago)

last weekend i called my mom to ask for the score of a hockey game. i'd had a few beers, but wasn't lit or anything. she refused to believe it was me. as if someone else is going to call her, claim to be me, and ask for the score of a hockey game. what the hell, mom.

― mookieproof, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 01:09 (eighteen years ago)

I'm considering trying to talk to my mom for the first time in several years. Not because I actually want to communicate with her, but because some comics I want to read are probably at her place.

Adorable, huh?

― Oilyrags, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 01:44 (eighteen years ago)

oh, Oilyrags.
Talk to her. get comics as well.

My dad, an immigrant from Scotland who served in WWII thought the END CONSTRUCTION signs were a sign of protest.
He was pretty adorable at times.
He really liked being called Andy (as opposed to, um, Dad or his name, George) and he called everyone Billy.
Four kids - and all of us were Billy. I miss that always - his rich brogue saying "Well hello there Billy!"
He has been dead for twenty years.
Hello there,Andy.

― aimurchie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 04:19 (eighteen years ago)

(none of us were named Billy, or even William.)

― aimurchie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 04:28 (eighteen years ago)

The other day when I went to visit my parents, my Mam was making salad for the tea and she said to Dad "you're having salad for your tea". He shouted back from the other room "NO! I hate salad!"

When my brother was a teenager he slept on the ground floor and his friends used to climb in and out his window in the middle of the night. One night, some of them were trying to get in, but he was asleep and the window wasn't open wide enough. To try to wake him, they wrapped little pieces of soil from the garden in Rizla papers and threw them through the window. Next day my dad was cleaning up the room, found all the little Rizla wrapped pieces of soil, picked them up and left them all in an ashtray on the coffee table in the room and never said anything about it.

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 07:11 (eighteen years ago)

Once my mum asked me out of the blue "so, how often do you smoke dope?". I almost had a heart attack.

She'd been reading my LiveJournal ;_;

― Trayce, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 07:30 (eighteen years ago)

quit it, this thread, you're making me cry.

every so often i get a text from my mum saying something like "help! there is a bat in the kitchen! how do i make it go away? i have to cook dinner and it's hanging upside down at me!"

― emsk, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 08:01 (eighteen years ago)

My mother's emails are seemingly composed with these three restrictions:
1) No capital letters (maybe she thinks something will happen if she presses the shift key)
2) No punctuation
3) The last word must be 'love' (i.e,. not 'love, mom')

As in:
as of right now the plane is going sparta limo wants to pick us up at 4:30 as it's taking 2 hours to get to the airport right now wish me luck love

or:
will call tomorrow but meanwhile think about what you'd like us to bring love

The above two are each the entire text of an email.

― G00blar, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 08:48 (eighteen years ago)

My mum always puts "mum" as her email subjects no matter what. As if I wont be able to tell its an email from her, wtf.

― Trayce, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 09:43 (eighteen years ago)

I remain fond of the time one of the (enormous) kids my (five foot nothing) mum tauight tried to freak her out by saying "You've got kids, so you must have done it. But have you done it five times?" Cue giggles and hush. Without missing a beat mum looked up from her desk and replied "what, a night? Sure" and got back on with her marking.

― Matt, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 10:45 (eighteen years ago)

Two classic mum quotes:
Reacting to some new church scandal: "Jesus must be spinning in his grave"
On my brother's wilfulness and unpredictability: "It's like he has a mind of his own"

― Frogman Henry, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 10:55 (eighteen years ago)

Major Lance once chatted up my mum. He asked her to dance. My dad was a raving mad crazy rabid fan of the man, but had drunken himself into a stupor because he was so nervous about meeting the man backstage. When he noticed my mum dancing with ML, he attempted to get into a fight but of course, being so drunk, made a fool of himself. So he slept it off slumped against a wall.

― nathalie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 10:57 (eighteen years ago)

My mum once had a go at Asher D in the street, for pulling up dangerously outside the school where she works, because she didn't know who he was. He said sorry.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 10:58 (eighteen years ago)

Awesome.

Mine gave Arthur Brown (of "Crazy World of...") a massive bollocking for following her into the toilet at a gig when she was a student. According to my auntie the tirade contained the line "I know you want to get off mwith me but this is a LADIES TOILET"

― Matt, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 11:03 (eighteen years ago)

My mum is something of a maternal figure for many of the young men on the Uk and Irish comedy circuit, because she came along to gigs and supported them when many of their own mums thought they were mental and asked when they were going to get proper jobs. I think she always wanted to be on the stage herself, so when my brother started doing it, she was 100 percent behind him. When he started out in Glasgow, she would load everyone down with boxes of Tayto and packets of cereal when they were going to see him, so he wouldn't have to spend his cash on food, and could spread the Tayto around the Irish contingent, thus winning approval.

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 11:42 (eighteen years ago)

I just went to Tayto's website. Chicken flavored chips? Prawn? Huh.

― Jesse, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 11:50 (eighteen years ago)

Rather crisps, I guess, but you know what I mean.

― Jesse, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 11:51 (eighteen years ago)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/250/453853328_b6b11e2515.jpg

An adorable photo fo my mum. Taken some years ago obv.

― Anna, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 12:03 (eighteen years ago)

one time my mum left a note that said "chicken lies in the fridge".

never asked her about it.

― Ronan, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 12:22 (eighteen years ago)

My mum's been trying out this instant messenger malarkery recently. First time she used it, she was talking to my uncle, and I realised that they were basically trying to send e-mails to each other on the thing, like, writing three paragraphs worth and getting angry when the message word count limit was reached. Also, on MSN, her tagline is "Tina - in the wild east".

There was this one time where we went to some doctor's office, and the nurse lead us to the waiting room, which looked very barren and unwelcoming. Also the nurse had seemed sort of stressed out, and forgot to say anything like "the doctor will see you soon". So my mum went into a fake sobbing and said "we have been abandoned!" - head buried in hands, thus unable to see that the nurse had come back.

She's a philosophy major. Got a good grade on her final paper, too (a dissertation on Kant) - her teacher allegedly told her "well, I gave you a good grade, but to be honest I don't know what the heck you were on about here."

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 12:23 (eighteen years ago)

My dad was a total revoluzzer in his youth. His class skipped class (ahem, "went on a strike") to go to anti-Vietnam war protests (he lived in Hamburg, Germany) and chant "Ho! Ho! Ho chi min!" He also glued his sk00l's doors together with superglue to prevent "strike-breakers". And handed out marxist pamphlets outside the factory where my (very burgeois) grandfather worked. I'm sure he wouldn't be too keen on any of this being described as "adorable", but it kinda is.

I also got a very politicized/theory-heavy education. My dad went on at lenght about "the aesthethics of reception" and whenever I got scared because of vampires or ghosts, he'd point out that "as Schoppenhauer says, the world is but will and imagination. You want these creatures to exist, so you will them into being." Yeah thanks, very reassuring dad.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 12:34 (eighteen years ago)

My mother is almost entirely computer illiterate - meaning she doesn't even know how to turn on a computer. She has had a mobile phone for about 3 years but only just picked up text-messaging last year, after it became clear that she really couldn't keep calling everybody who sent her a msg. her first text to me read "your brothr tght me how t sms. CAn send u messgs now".

My father, on the other hand, is a complete gadget geek who spends more time on the computer than I do, spent almost an entire month after he retired building a home entertainment system in our attic, and reads Wired and PC Magazine religiously.

― Roz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 12:45 (eighteen years ago)

My mam can work a linear accelerator, but cannot put contacts into her mobile phone without a major production.

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 13:22 (eighteen years ago)

instead of posting any anecdotes i'm just going to repost this old picture of my mom and you can all extrapolate as you will.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/251/453432297_3e3340d482.jpg

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 13:37 (eighteen years ago)

I found an old photograph that my dad had taken from when he used to work at ICI.
It was a picture of one of his colleagues lying down fast asleep in the office with a sign next to him, which my dad had made, that read:

"The Horizontal Champ!"

― Ste, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 13:52 (eighteen years ago)

i wish i could find the scan i had of my dad and the goat but i can't and i don't feel like asking my mom for it again.

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 13:53 (eighteen years ago)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/43/111863088_20ba639599.jpg?v=0

My mom being her foxy self. She was about 23 yrs old at te time.

― nathalie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:12 (eighteen years ago)

this is best i can do for my dad lacking the goat picture
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/224/453972128_68748ff46f.jpg
(in the sunglasses, pictured with my grandfather and my cousin)

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:13 (eighteen years ago)

Your dad looks like he could have come straight out of a 70s cigarette or aftershave advert.

― james, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:15 (eighteen years ago)

are they making sausage, y/n?

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:16 (eighteen years ago)

they are making sausage and also vast quantities of tomato sauce

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:18 (eighteen years ago)

I don't know whether it's a sign of my mindset or a sign of my family that I can't think of any adorable parent factoids about mine! I'm almost worried!

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:19 (eighteen years ago)

yeah me neither ned. I adored my parents but they didn't do "adorable."

well one thing comes to mind. my dad's "mid-life crisis" car:

http://www.seriouswheels.com/images/a_1970_Volkswagen_Beetle_Convertible_3.jpg

― m coleman, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:20 (eighteen years ago)

Amazing. I suppose my dad had a mid-life crisis bike, but it was and is a sleek bike.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:21 (eighteen years ago)

How long before someone makes an inappropriate "hey, I'd hit it" remark about someone's mum, I wonder?

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:22 (eighteen years ago)

that's pretty funny-last week my wife and I were driving around and we saw an old VW bug and I said, "Maybe my midlife crisis will be to restore an old Volkswagen."

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:22 (eighteen years ago)

How long before someone makes an inappropriate "hey, I'd hit it" remark about someone's mum, I wonder?

not that I would, but if I did it would be age-appropriate in many cases(sighs)

― m coleman, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:25 (eighteen years ago)

[img][Removed Illegal Link]
my gran, with her dad, late 60s, i guess. she's always been glamorous - when I was about 3 she'd come over in her green MG two-seater and take me for rides, blaring music on her 8-track player. she had two cartridges - the best of Abba and the best of Supremes. later, she drove a Fiat that was like an egg-box on wheels, and had quite a thing for homoerotic SAW productions like the London Boys which she pumped on her in-car cassette player. she doesn't drive now, but, at 80, she still works 14 hour shifts at Wimbledon tennis and takes at least 3 foreign holidays a year. she rocks.

my dad was big into psychedelia in the 60s, and told a great story of tripping at sunday lunch, and thinking the roast was a bunch of bananas, and asking his dad why they were eating bananas for sunday lunch. he was pretty much wheelchair-bound from the 1970s onwards, but thought nothing of saying "Cool" from his car window at hot chixxx on the street, while i squirmed in the passenger seat.

my mum is like me in a wig. she puts things in 'safe places' and forgets where they are. she's awesome.

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:34 (eighteen years ago)

[img][Removed Illegal Link]

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:35 (eighteen years ago)

my favorite dad anecdote: he was getting on an elevator in a building in boston and had his work id clipped to his jacket. there was a red-headed kid with down's syndrome getting off the elevator as my dad got on. the kid noticed my dad's id and said "Hi Tom!", my dad said "hi corky" just as the doors were closing.

― chicago kevin, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:36 (eighteen years ago)

i don't think you can use a photo as a link, it's never ever worked for me on here?

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:37 (eighteen years ago)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/231/453766146_8730a71bfa_m.jpg
[what the hell was i doing wrong?]

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:37 (eighteen years ago)

http://flickr.com/photos/steviechickfoxyboxer/453766146/
http://flickr.com/photos/steviechickfoxyboxer/453766146/

if this doesn't work i give up. anna, how did you get it to work??

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:38 (eighteen years ago)

the generational dividing line here is your parents taking drugs, being hippie, listening to rock&roll. absolutely unimaginable for me, not that my folks were swingers or rat pack fans either. far from it.

fascinating thread.

― m coleman, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:41 (eighteen years ago)

I think I'm halfway between Mark and a lot of other people on this thread. My parents listened to rock and roll a bit but everything else, forget it! (My dad being born in 1940 and my mom in 1944 explains a lot, I think.)

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:48 (eighteen years ago)

omg stevie her shoes!

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:49 (eighteen years ago)

my parents didn't start having kids until they were in their 30's (which was old for the early 70s) so my folks really didn't have much in common with my friends parents. for instance, despite having close to a thousand lp's & 78s in the house there were only two beatles albums, they both owned a copy of rubber soul. no stones. hundreds and hundreds of jazz records (my dads) and lots of r&b/blues (my mom) but very little "rock 'n' roll".

― chicago kevin, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:49 (eighteen years ago)

Wow, they're awesome (xpost re Stevie's gran's shoes)

My mum and dad still call each other mum and dad, even though we're all way old enough to know that they actually have names.

― ailsa, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:53 (eighteen years ago)

Stevie, that's your GRAN? Amazing. How very cool.

the generational dividing line here is your parents taking drugs, being hippie, listening to rock&roll. absolutely unimaginable for me, not that my folks were swingers or rat pack fans either. far from it.

It's a cultural dividing line as well. My parents were born in 1943 and 1945, and were out and about and earning money in the mid to late 60s, but there wasn't a lot you could get up to in Ireland in those days, really. My Dad likes listening to Irish country music, which is the worst music on earth, and my Mam likes everything from Frank Sinatra to Nirvana.

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:53 (eighteen years ago)

Stevie, for a flickr image, you have to click above the photo where it says "show all sizes." Select the size that you want to post. Below the image are a couple of boxes with some code in them. One is the location of the actual image file, a web address which ends with a .jpg. That's what you copy and put between the img and /img tags. I think what you're doing is copying the URL of the whole webpage rather than just the image.

― Jenny, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:53 (eighteen years ago)

Some x-posts: My parents' relation to music was very interesting and still is -- it's idiosyncratic in the way that folks who are not truly obsessed with music are, and personally I couldn't've asked for better because that meant music was around but never foisted on me. Everything from Broadway musicals to early rock and roll to a slew of never-quite-superstar performers who were still known (Bonnie Raitt -- seventies version, mind you -- Jerry Jeff Walker, etc.) to a lot of country, my dad's continuing 'whatever is on the radio and is good' attitude to that being I think pretty darn healthy.

Though I suppose I wouldn't call that adorable per se.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:54 (eighteen years ago)

my dad was (and still is) OBSESSED with northern soul. all the rest is complete crap in his opinion. especially disco. indie snobness? eat yr heart out cause ns fans outdo'em. they smoked weed but now totally radically DENY this. hahah. i was THERE when it happened and oh boy i remember it very well: mum crawling on stairs saying "oh my god the lamps are opening and closing!"

― nathalie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:54 (eighteen years ago)

My Dad likes listening to Irish country music, which is the worst music on earth, and my Mam likes everything from Frank Sinatra to Nirvana.

Accentmonkey, have you stolen my parents? (except for their ages, my dad born in 1932, my mum in 1946)

― ailsa, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 14:59 (eighteen years ago)

I don't know, maybe. Does your mother love Elvis so much that when her son was born in 1977, she wanted to call him Elvis but bowed to family pressure not to?

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:01 (eighteen years ago)

my favorite dad moment: after my 5th grade basketball team's annual "father son" basketball game some of the dads decided to play a pickup game. my dad was one of the older parents there (this was '83 or so making him 42 or 43) but despite being an out of shape white guy he still went up and jammed on marc blanchet's father then stared him down when getting back on d.

it was classic at the time and now i see that it was actually fucking hilarious.

― chicago kevin, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:03 (eighteen years ago)

my parents don't like any music really. my mum likes the idea of music but only as barely audible dinner party background noise. my dad used to like simon and garfunkel and the beach boys, but that was about 20 years ago. now he doesn't really read anything but the papers, never watches films, and likes no music. he works too hard really! though maybe he just never really liked music/art.

― Ronan, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:03 (eighteen years ago)

No! Hurrah for my parents! (she doesn't love any music or musicians to any noticeable degree, just likes a lot of it).

Irish country, especially the insipid shite my Dad likes (Foster & Allan, Brendan Shine etc) = the work of Satan indeed though.

xpost to accentmonkey

― ailsa, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:06 (eighteen years ago)

Irish country, especially the insipid shite my Dad likes (Foster & Allan, Brendan Shine etc) = the work of Satan indeed though.

Yes! It's exactly that sort of shite. Never mind Planxty, he'd rather listen to Big Tom and the Mainliners. It's one of the reasons I hate going anywhere in the car with him.

― accentmonkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:08 (eighteen years ago)

my parents were born in 1952 and '54. Yep, teenage mother and twentysth dad.

― nathalie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:16 (eighteen years ago)

Ally's dad = Mitch Hedburg

― nabisco, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:21 (eighteen years ago)

my mom once made a mix tape that consisted of, both sides, i shit you not, nothing but the proclaimers 500 miles song over and over again. which she had not taped off the radio or a cd but rather by placing her recorder next to the television when the song was on mtv. 90 minutes of this.

she listened to it very regularly for about 4 months.

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:24 (eighteen years ago)

seriously ally, i asked this before, is your mom single? 'cause crazy chicks are so much better than squares.

― chicago kevin, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:27 (eighteen years ago)

we gotta get your mom up for a glasgow hogmanay some time, Ally! she'd be in hog heaven, that song is played probably 500 times at least.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:32 (eighteen years ago)

My mum has a thing about snow, she absolutely loves the stuff. This is mainly because she'd never actually seen any snow outside of photographs before she came over to the UK - she's Jamaican and moved to the UK when she was 19 (born in Montego Bay - I keep on asking her why she left...)

I remember very clearly from when I was a kid - I'm guessing she was probably in her late 20s or early 30s at the time - that whenever there was a significant amount of snow she would get me and my sisters up in the middle of the night to go out and have snowball fights.

― Stone Monkey, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:35 (eighteen years ago)

My mother, who is notoriously bad with lyrics, may have had too much to drink at a wedding we were at a few years back. During the quintessential party song, "Love Shack", she proceeded to scream out "LEEEEEEEEE-ROY" during the "tin... roof... rusted" section of the song.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at her.

I still don't know where she got "Leroy" from.

She also owns: The Dirty Dancing Soundtracks, v.1 and v.2 (yes, such a thing exists) AND The Dirty Dancing Live Concert. It's her cleaning music. She's great.

― molly mummenschanz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 15:42 (eighteen years ago)

[thanks jenny, mamy xposts!]

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:05 (eighteen years ago)

lol nathalie your parents are the same age as MINE!

― jessie monster, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:06 (eighteen years ago)

also ally your dad was pretty hot.

― jessie monster, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:09 (eighteen years ago)

my dad would like to think i have lots of adorable stories about him but right now all i can think of is that he was the "bad boy" that Jane Fonda briefly dated when she was in college

my mom once took me on an 'old boyfriends' tour in san francisco, every single neighborhood we visited is now hardcore cholo gang territory, best part is that it all used to be that way when she was dating those guys

once after the divorce my dad was visiting and being an ass, my mom got mad and flipped him off behind his back, i was the only one who saw and we both started cracking up

― Dimension 5ive, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:19 (eighteen years ago)

[i]I don't know whether it's a sign of my mindset or a sign of my family that I can't think of any adorable parent factoids about mine! I'm almost worried![/i[

Many of the "adorable" things my parents do actually annoy me to no end. It's nice that some of you have more patience than me, but after the 698th "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Re: You gotta see this!" e-mail or 86th box of crap dropped off on my front porch because someone "just loves to shop!", the adorability of it all is overwhelmed by other feelings.

But being that I don't know any of your parents, this has been a fun thread to read. And I can't figure out if Ally's grandfather looked like Chuck Hagel or Norman Mailer.

― Pleasant Plains, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:23 (eighteen years ago)

PP, YES. I've thought about this a lot, actually. How does one gently get their mother (in my case) to stop sending them ludicrous FWDs?

Also, how does one tell their mother, when's she's sending emails, to use a normal font, not some wacky font called "Cyberkugel."

― molly mummenschanz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:27 (eighteen years ago)

I read that as "Cyberkegel."

― n/a, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:32 (eighteen years ago)

This is where I'm kinda glad that neither my mom nor my dad are really huge on Internet stuff. Or my sis. No endless wacky forwards!

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:33 (eighteen years ago)

My mom also learned how to text message. This was one of the worst possible things that could have ever happened to our family. When she was in New Orleans, I got a slew of drunken text messages chronicling her experience at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville with my father.

― molly mummenschanz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 16:44 (eighteen years ago)

omg stevie her shoes!

-- the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, April 10, 2007 3:49 PM (1 hour ago)

that's exactly what my girlfriend said when she saw that pic! she's the absolute greatest...

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:33 (eighteen years ago)

i went off to boarding school at 13 and then went off straight to college after graduating high school. So I guess my parents missed out on a big chunk of my life. As a result, my mom has this skewed view of what I'm actually like as a person. A part of her, I guess, is still stuck on the day I left home. So although she knows I'm an adult now and can take care of myself, she also sometimes thinks I'm still 12 years old. for example, she still fixates on bad habits I used to have, like not brushing my teeth before bed (I was a lazy kid).

Also, I used to take ballet lessons when I was little, so one day she bought these pink and orange "ballerina" bedsheets for me. I was already 22 years old.

They were cute. It broke my heart a little to tell her I was way too old for them.

― Roz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:45 (eighteen years ago)

my mum would take great pleasure when i was a child, of hiding behind doorways, etc, to jump out and scare my dad, which was even funnier as he would be using a walking stick. she has quite an evil sense of humour. once he fell over in the road, and they were both laughing so hard that a couple of old ladies had to help him up, as mum was laughing too hard. she also used to like pulling a scary bug-eyed face, like she was a zombie, after she said good night to me. this would seriously freak me out.

please don't hate me if this doesn't work, this really WILL be my last attempt:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/steviechickfoxyboxer/454228154/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/454228154_19b5090ebd_o.jpg" width="704" height="485" alt="nan" /></a>
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/454228154_19b5090ebd_o.jpg

― stevie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:47 (eighteen years ago)

your mother is awesomeness!

― Roz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:51 (eighteen years ago)

As a result, my mom has this skewed view of what I'm actually like as a person. A part of her, I guess, is still stuck on the day I left home. So although she knows I'm an adult now and can take care of myself, she also sometimes thinks I'm still 12 years old.

Along those lines, here are a few adorable things my father has said in the past few years:

* Asked me if I was going to wait for it to rain before I washed my car again.

* Reminded me that I didn't want to see Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was seven (this usually comes up when I say that I'll pass on seeing Braveheart VI or something.

* At my wedding, asked my best friend if I still go to Denny's to drink coffee (which I did on a regular basis in 1991.)

* Between 1997 and 2005, I didn't have cable. This didn't prevent him from calling me every time a Beatles show would come on VH-1.

* I also regularly receive e-mails that consist solely of "Call me when you get this, love dad." We live in the same town and he has both my home and cell numbers.

The man almost died a few years ago, and I am very much aware that someday I will miss all of this. But to call it "adorable" is reaching for it, in my book.

― Pleasant Plains, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 18:28 (eighteen years ago)

I was just looking for comical emails from my Dad because there are tons. Unfortunately, it seems I've deleted most of them. I did find one called "patrickshappy saint" and another he sent called "Pitcher" in which he was trying to learn how to send pictures. He cracks me up. To be fair, his English is great for someone who never had any English instruction and as a chef, he never needed to know how to spell for his job.
If my parents ever learn to text message, I'm getting a new unlisted number.

― ENBB, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 18:57 (eighteen years ago)

I am very confident that neither of my parents will ever learn to text message; I tried for an hour to teach them to use the "copy" and "paste" functions on their Mac before giving it up as a lost cause.

Also, my mother has not really mastered stuff like call waiting or getting the tv set up to watch a video or DVD.

― Sara R-C, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 19:00 (eighteen years ago)

In all honesty, I'm not so hot with the call waiting on my cell phone. I always hang up on someone.

A recent text from my mother: "Sabres r back! Sanjya could be the demise of am. idol! I luv hockeee!"

I think my sister taught her how to do this. Sadly, my sister feels the brunt of her texting as much as I do, so there's no need to get angry with her. She knows what she's done wrong.

― molly mummenschanz, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 19:05 (eighteen years ago)

My mother's voicemail says "You have reached H______'s phone. She is unable to talk to you right now."

Also, we have many conversations that go along the lines of

Mom: So we had to take Bobby to the shop today.
Me: Who is Bobby?
Mom: Oh, the hard-drive on the living-room Macintosh.

― Pleasant Plains, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 19:11 (eighteen years ago)

My mom just sent me an Easter package of goodies. Among the chocolate, jelly beans, and cosmetic samples, I also got a bundle of paper-wrapped straws, a container of colored toothpicks, and the piece de resistance, a 9 oz. jar of rainbow sprinkles.

Also, when Mom and Dad came to visit me, they asked me beforehand what kind of car my boyfriend drives. They brought presents for me--insurance forms, magazines, and two oil filters that were kicking around the garage--and had to make a special trip to the auto parts store to get an oil filter for my boyfriend's card.

― maryofdoom, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 23:41 (eighteen years ago)

she also used to like pulling a scary bug-eyed face, like she was a zombie, after she said good night to me. this would seriously freak me out.

My mom used to do an incredibly accurate imitation of a gorrilla that scared the sh*t out of me (after tucking me in, in the dark with only the whites of her eyes illuminated).

― Andi Mags, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 00:49 (eighteen years ago)

My mum today:

"I have a new duck named Sir Francis. He lives with the chickens. He is let out each afternoon when the dogs are locked up and he takes himself back to bed when it starts to get dark. He has a big personality"

― Hard like armour, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 02:37 (eighteen years ago)

My mom has a busier life than I do (2 kids still at home, 2 jobs since her boss quit, and a horse she and my brother recently bought), so she's definitely not the type to send random text messages or e-mails, and she can be tough to get in touch with. However, she is really nice about sending things I've forgotten or forwarding things mailed to my house instead of school address, and in the most recent example of this, she put a $20 in with a note that I should have "a fun night out." Awwww.

― Maria, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 03:30 (eighteen years ago)

Jenny told me to post pics of my mom here, but I'm on dial-up, so that's not going to happen, but she will vouch for her being pretty adorable. She's 73, and speaks heavily accented English (she is originally from Mexico), and is kind of naive or something since she led a pretty sheltered life.

Anyway, here are a couple of her recent gems

-Anytime you mention the Amish she grimaces slightly a little and says (the Spanish equivalent of) "Those Amish...I don't care for them."

-She grew up half-assed Catholic and is now sort of Protestant, but still she says of conservative-seeming people, "Those people dress [or act] like Protestants."

-She thinks Spanish is a secret language, so she says things loudly that might be better whispered, the time we were in DC and she was scared of a crackhead who sat near us on the Metro, and above the roar of the train, she said, "Eso negro nos esta viendo feyo" (that black guy is looking at us funny).

― Jesse, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 04:08 (eighteen years ago)

That makes my mom sound kind of awful, but she's really sweet. It's just that she grew up kind of priveleged, and then married my dad and lived in various rural parts of the US over the last 40 years (and lost any semblance of privelege), so she has a....unique take on the world.

― Jesse, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 04:50 (eighteen years ago)

Turns out that PeoplePC's dial-up is actually pretty lightning fast compared with AOL and NetZero, which I have used previously when visiting home.

Anyway, here she is holding my bird.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/26/39901811_6b0462292a.jpg?v=0

― Jesse, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 04:54 (eighteen years ago)

"Those Amish...I don't care for them."

lol

― G00blar, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 07:59 (eighteen years ago)

[url][Removed Illegal Link]

some of this thread is in today's new zealand herald.

― estela, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 08:37 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/column/story.cfm?c_id=702&objectid=10433472

― estela, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 08:38 (eighteen years ago)

lol nathalie your parents are the same age as MINE!

Yeah, but I'm probably ten years younger than you are! :-)

The one funny incident I feel a bit guilty over: I was a couple of years old and we were jumping in the swimming pool. Up and down. She didn't notice that everyone was laughing, until I said, in reaction to her bikini top having fallen off:"Mommy you have beautiful long breasts." *sigh*

― nathalie, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 08:51 (eighteen years ago)

I mean, older of course. *sigh*

― nathalie, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 08:56 (eighteen years ago)

some of this thread is in today's new zealand herald.

-- estela, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:37 AM (54 minutes ago)
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/column/story.cfm?c_id=702&objectid=10433472

-- estela, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:38 AM (54 minutes ago)

WTF???
word for word as well.
surely this can't be allowed?

― stevie, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 09:38 (eighteen years ago)

why not, we're always stealing from other web sites

― Ste, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 09:41 (eighteen years ago)

That seems sort of wrong to me...

― G00blar, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 09:51 (eighteen years ago)

Aye, we don't get paid for stealing from other websites.

Well, grimly does, obviously, but you know what I mean.

― aldo, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 09:52 (eighteen years ago)

I don't whether it's good/bad that there's no real source reference.

So Estela is the journalist behind it?

― nathalie, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 09:54 (eighteen years ago)

no! i just found it.

― estela, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 10:02 (eighteen years ago)

looks like Ana Samways is a fictional staff composite author:

Sideswipe
Stories categorised by our Editorial staff

― sanskrit, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 12:21 (eighteen years ago)

uhh

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:19 (eighteen years ago)

the top of the story says these snippets are "contributions" to the column, which they are not; no one here "contributed" them (i think?)

somebody at the nz herald needs a talking to

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:21 (eighteen years ago)

the source is credited as "Scanner Blog"

― Ms Misery, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:25 (eighteen years ago)

The entire "Sideways" column seems to be lacking any citation whatsoever.

Hello, copyright.

― molly mummenschanz, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:28 (eighteen years ago)

Aye, that's not on.

Stable door, horse long gone, etc, but shouldn't the new FAQ have something about people having copyright over what they post here?

― ailsa, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:29 (eighteen years ago)

This seems a case for Woodward and Bernstein.

― Ronan, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:30 (eighteen years ago)

well, they did change 1 mile to 2km in nabisco's orange juice story

― mookieproof, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:31 (eighteen years ago)

Woah!!!

― ENBB, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:40 (eighteen years ago)

<i> but shouldn't the new FAQ have something about people having copyright over what they post here</i>

Ignore me, I R dumb and cannot follow a simple link. Also, Mod Request Board, yo. As you were.

― ailsa, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:43 (eighteen years ago)

(and I forgot about the html thing despite big red letters, kill me now, etc)

― ailsa, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:43 (eighteen years ago)

i've just sent emails to a number of department heads at the herald to the effect that we write this stuff for free; they get paid for writing, so the least they can do is work for it

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:44 (eighteen years ago)

ilx being a public forum, non-shockah.

also I would find out who 'scanner blog' is as that seems to be the real criminal. a google turned up nothing.

― Ms Misery, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:44 (eighteen years ago)

Said Scanner Blog post:

http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/scannerblog.aspx?id=96e10480#10480

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:45 (eighteen years ago)

Exactly, Tracer and Ms. Miz. They're getting paid to write. "The least they could do is cite their work properly," said the librarian.

― molly mummenschanz, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:47 (eighteen years ago)

Seems the NZ Herald attributed incorrectly, since the ScannerBlog didn't actually reprint anything from the thread, they just linked.

― n/a, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:48 (eighteen years ago)

haha, I went to school with/wrote for one of those two bloggers (not the one who actually linked us - EB - but the other.)

― Ms Misery, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 15:56 (eighteen years ago)

My dad's been a guitarist since his teens (he's in his sixties now) and my mum's never really invested much interest in it. He also calls the whammy bar a "wanking handle".
When they were just married, my dad sent my mum to the guitar shop to get him a new wanking handle, and she did so. She asked the owner for a wanking handle, "you know, for wanking on a guitar". After picking himself up from the floor, the owner delicately explained to my mum the concept of masturbation, and why he was crying with laughter. She was in her twenties.

My dad still has the aforementioned handle, and never really needed it to begin with.

― melton mowbray, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 16:03 (eighteen years ago)

OK, the NZ Herald got here too early.

― ailsa, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 16:04 (eighteen years ago)

Christ xposts, this is mad!

― melton mowbray, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 16:11 (eighteen years ago)

* My father used to enjoy kidnapping New Zealanders and skinning them alive until they stopped switching their vowel sounds around.

― Pleasant Plains, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 17:15 (eighteen years ago)

we should send nabisco's dad to stake out the nz herald

― rps, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 18:07 (eighteen years ago)

NZ Herald OTM.

― The Yellow Kid, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 20:43 (eighteen years ago)

WTF DUDE I AM NEVER POSTING ANYTHING ABOUT MY FAMILY AGAIN

ALSO SUING NZ HERALD

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 22:42 (eighteen years ago)

holy shit

― Curt1s Stephens, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 22:54 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco, i should have given the link for the herald's front page, the words 'adorable parent factoids' and part of your first post from this thread were on there, wtf indeed, now you are being otm in aotearoa.

― estela, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 22:59 (eighteen years ago)

It's in the print edition, too? Apparently I don't have international calling on my cell plan, but I fully intend to email all hell out of these people, repeatedly.

If the "writer" of this column happens to return to this site, I would like to refer him/her to (a) the FAQ's copyright provisions and (b) the fact that posters here can be easily contacted by webmail to ask permission to reprint their work. I would also like to point out that said person is unconscionably lazy and unprofessional, a grade-A jackass, and probably merits firing. (The terrific cheat of calling these things "contributions" -- as if they'd been sent in by readers of the Herald -- actually makes me wonder if this person deceived his/her editors as to the source of this stuff.)

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:17 (eighteen years ago)

get this fuck fired, n!!!

― chaki, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:19 (eighteen years ago)

P.S. -- the Scanner blog is not to blame -- they added two of their own original bits and then wrote: "Add your Adorable Parent Factoid to this rapidly growing thread [linked to ILX] or leave it in the feedback section if you're too lazy to register."

In other words, the Herald thief couldn't have collected the material without linking over to ILX, making it all the more baffling that Scanner gets the "source" attribution. Even apart from being a stickler about the copyright stuff, it's just SO LAZY AND PATHETIC to make commercial newspaper columns out of people's stories you've stolen from the internet.

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:27 (eighteen years ago)

first, it's not a person, it looks like a made up composite author hoovering up all the staffs odds and ends. you might be able to unravel who the person who copied, altered, and pasted your words is, but i doubt NZ Herald will really care unless you get a lawyer involved..

i say order a print copy somehow or get a NZ ilxor to mail you one. could make a hilarious gag gift for your family.

― sanskrit, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:27 (eighteen years ago)

imagine if they found matos' stepfather thread

― rps, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:30 (eighteen years ago)

The hilariousness of showing my dad that his OJ joke was a hit in New Zealand would probably not be worth the "hey so why is it you go around telling personal stories about me on the internet but never actually pick up the phone and call" part.

― nabisco, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:30 (eighteen years ago)

cue touching "this was the only way i knew how to talk to you" response

― rps, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:31 (eighteen years ago)

i don't know about the print edition, i meant the front page of their online edition. here is today's cover with today's 'sideswipe' link, yesterday's was in the same place. the column is attributed to 'ana samways' and there is a photo.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

― estela, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:31 (eighteen years ago)

i stand corrected (she cute?)

ana samways = nick sylvester of nu-ILX era

― sanskrit, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:35 (eighteen years ago)

http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u288/rpspix/firebugheroes.jpg?t=1176334470

excitement reigns in nz?

― rps, Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:35 (eighteen years ago)

I feel so violated.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:01 (eighteen years ago)

http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/3638/sideswipenu7.jpg

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:03 (eighteen years ago)

i have to say that i am REALLY DISAPPOINTED that they didn't use any of my "adorable factoids" involving my mom and cocaine.

― max, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:03 (eighteen years ago)

i dont see a place to post comments!! where is it?!!?

― chaki, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:19 (eighteen years ago)

You shouldn't feel so bad, nabisco- I heard that for years some guy at one of the New Zealand papers was passing off Matos's Mother's Incredibly Stupid Ex-Husband stories as his own.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:22 (eighteen years ago)

joke's been done, kiddo:

imagine if they found matos' stepfather thread

-- rps, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:30 PM (1 hour ago)

― chaki, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:23 (eighteen years ago)

I see they've updated that page with a link to us

― stet, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:25 (eighteen years ago)

I really wish they had e-mailed everyone they used stuff from and asked for permission. I never would have expected myself to react like this, but honestly it is pretty unsettling to see a personal story pop up in a newspaper without any prior warning. :/

― jessie monster, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:34 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, exactly. Especially with the new webmail system here -- there is zero excuse for not being able to contact us.

Good GOD that actually just pisses me off even more -- it's an acknowledgement that they're aware of the issue, but don't take it any more seriously than a simple web edit. I guess we'll see what'd happen if they got an official request to pull it down.

Dear anyone from the paper who's checking in on this thread: it's not just a matter of attribution! You are SELLING other people's copyrighted material! This is, in addition to being illegal, really lazy and pathetic!

And it's especially annoying since it concerns people's personal stories about family members. I know, those stories have been shared here in an awfully public way, but one of the reasons I care about ILX copyright is that it should mean people will only see things here if they actively search for them, or link over here and read them in their original context. Printing them elsewhere, in something with a significant readership, without enough attribution to go straight to the source ... that's a really major shift in the level of public-ness, you know?

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:40 (eighteen years ago)

Exactly. I feel the same even though what they printed of mine, in and of itself, isn't that personal.

― ENBB, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:43 (eighteen years ago)

ana samways blog
http://www.spareroom.co.nz/2007/

― chaki, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:43 (eighteen years ago)

Eh, for me, I abide strictly by a "don't put anything on the internet you wouldn't want someone to see" policy, so it's not so much the publicity that bothers me as much as not being ASKED by a fucking NEWSPAPER that should KNOW THE RULES about this sort of thing. I mean if they had made a YTMND out of it, you know, tough shit for me, it's the internet. But a newspaper, staffed with people who would probably go berserk if they weren't properly credited for their work, is a whole different thing.

― jessie monster, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:45 (eighteen years ago)

they're still calling the nobbled grafs "contributions", which is a lie, i suppose, would be the right word for it.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:53 (eighteen years ago)

http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/3638/sideswipenu7.jpg

pls tell me where these comments are i cant find em

― chaki, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:55 (eighteen years ago)

oh its fake nm :/ im dumb

― chaki, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:56 (eighteen years ago)

We loved your manuscript, really. Great potential to resell rights (totally quirky in a Sundancey indiecom way). And the darker passages, shades of Augusten Burroughs, even. Just an engrossing, touching "growing up in America second-generation" type proven seller to the latte sipping NPR crowd.

Here's the thing, I had my assistant Google some of the choicest passages. We're going to pass, unfortunately it appears you've either been plagiarizing a newspaper in New Zealand or some guy obsessed with crackers.

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:56 (eighteen years ago)

THAT'S SOME GOOD ORANGE JUICE, RIGHT?: THE STORY OF NABISCO OTM

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 12 April 2007 01:59 (eighteen years ago)

Oh, how they've changed their tune:

Adorable Parent Factoids (contributions about the funny ways of parents from www.ilxor.com):

― molly mummenschanz, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:02 (eighteen years ago)

First generation! Though I am two years' runner-up for the title of "first extended-family member born in US."

Haha the world is so full of first-generation novels packed with descriptions of grandmothers lovingly preparing foreign foods -- I developed some weird issue with these across years of writing workshops, and actually swore myself some kind of personal oath never to write an actual story along those lines. (Besides, I think my parents were too successfully assimilated for it to really work, and we lived far, far away from any large groups of countrymen.)

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:04 (eighteen years ago)

No apology or explanation to us? Jeezum.

― Trayce, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:04 (eighteen years ago)

At least they havent printed peoples names. That could have been weird.

― Trayce, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:06 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco, i only guessed 2nd gen as your parents sound really well assimilated. not going after you there either, just felt from your perspective it's more than just theft of work, it's almost like they're reappropriating your most cherished memories.

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:09 (eighteen years ago)

i think there was once a twilight zone episode where people sold favorite memories for cash in a sort of grungy lab transients selling pints of blood type setting.

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:11 (eighteen years ago)

Oh, dude, don't worry, no problem. It's actually mostly scary to me because my parents are fairly private and concerned with propriety, and probably wouldn't be into internet story-telling -- that's the whole reason I was mostly sharing "adorable" Readers' Digest stories here, and not anything serious about their personalities.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:13 (eighteen years ago)

look on the bright side: you're famous and published in New Zealand.

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:14 (eighteen years ago)

it's a coincidental benefit that the Jagger clan's good name was not besmirched in this thread.

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:16 (eighteen years ago)

i got a response from an assistant editor who said only that ana samways didn't work for her and that she had passed my email on to the appropriate people

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:27 (eighteen years ago)

I like how we could end up destroying someone's professional life in New Zealand. (Not that we will but you never know.)

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:31 (eighteen years ago)

I miss good Ned.

― sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:41 (eighteen years ago)

i just like to think of it as payback for the fact that she is getting paid to repost stuff from ilx, while i am afraid to even type the letters 'ilx' into my browser while at work.
xpost

― tehresa, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:42 (eighteen years ago)

Not-good Ned was there from the start!

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:42 (eighteen years ago)

I'm sending out Gear's couch tale as a one-act play. It'll kill in UILs.

― milo z, Thursday, 12 April 2007 03:03 (eighteen years ago)

it's a coincidental benefit that the Jagger clan's good name was not besmirched in this thread.

-- sanskrit, Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:16 (6 hours ago)

lol

― estela, Thursday, 12 April 2007 08:30 (eighteen years ago)

i have received a reply from "ana" who says she apologies (sic) unreservedly

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 April 2007 13:33 (eighteen years ago)

just a bit of fun, be cool

― n/a, Thursday, 12 April 2007 15:57 (eighteen years ago)

DESTROY NEW ZEALAND

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 12 April 2007 16:27 (eighteen years ago)

Ah, don't do that. My brother's going there soon.

― accentmonkey, Thursday, 12 April 2007 17:38 (eighteen years ago)

I see they've updated that page with a link to us

-- stet, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:25 PM (Yesterday)


CONDITIONAL REDIRECT

― Catsupppppppppppppp dude ‫茄蕃‪, Thursday, 12 April 2007 18:55 (eighteen years ago)

hahahahah look what she's blogging about today:

http://www.spareroom.co.nz/2007/04/12/the-banana-is-an-athiests-nightmare%e2%80%a6/

― g®▲Ðұ, Thursday, 12 April 2007 19:27 (eighteen years ago)

i posted a comment to the ILX thread on the athiest's nightmare, suggesting she plagarize from there too.

― g®▲Ðұ, Thursday, 12 April 2007 19:28 (eighteen years ago)

I have received a reply from exactly nobody.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 19:35 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwBz-hxjSLU

― latebloomer, Thursday, 12 April 2007 19:56 (eighteen years ago)

wow wtf NZ Herald!!?

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 12 April 2007 20:06 (eighteen years ago)

man I guess print journalism really IS dead

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 12 April 2007 20:07 (eighteen years ago)

Seriously, though, why come Tracer gets a response? She took two of mine, not to mention the whole concept and title! Seriously, I want a check for whatever that salary works out to per column.

― nabisco, Thursday, 12 April 2007 20:10 (eighteen years ago)

http://web.bvu.edu/organizations/tack/1999/04/23/Photos/asshole.jpghttp://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y257/nitsuh/tree.jpg

― M.V., Thursday, 12 April 2007 20:25 (eighteen years ago)

she must have deleted your comment, grady.

― Lingbert, Thursday, 12 April 2007 20:46 (eighteen years ago)

it was "waiting for moderator approval."

i guess it didnt get approved.

― g®▲Ðұ, Thursday, 12 April 2007 21:15 (eighteen years ago)

how convenient!

― tehresa, Thursday, 12 April 2007 22:21 (eighteen years ago)

Deleted JUST LIKE THOSE WHITE HOUSE E-MAILS. Imus is the culprit.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 12 April 2007 22:28 (eighteen years ago)

Awww, Vonnegut's spirit is illuminating the tree. How adorable.

That tree is the spiritual kin of Le Petit Prince baobabs (visually, I am not suggesting your father's trees wreck asteroids).

― Abbott, Thursday, 12 April 2007 22:43 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco, i sent an email to almost everybody listed on their editorial contacts page that seemed even vaguely appropriate. Some people are likely on vacation, others probably just don't follow up on things, etc. - you have to shotgun this type of thing to get a reaction from anybody, is my experience.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 April 2007 23:34 (eighteen years ago)

Or more accurately, you have to shotgun this type of thing to get a reaction from the one person who is actually going to take some responsibility for it and get it to the right people, with the right oomph behind it.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 April 2007 23:38 (eighteen years ago)

FYI, the story was also in the print version of the paper, crediting the scanner blog.

my mum has a copy if u want it

― webber, Friday, 13 April 2007 04:41 (eighteen years ago)

Until I was eleven or so my mother did most of the cooking and my father did not have the slightest idea how to navigate a kitchen. One night my mother was out and my dad decided to try a vegetarian recipe for green beans in yogurt sauce. He used strawberry yogurt.

― Hurting 2, Friday, 13 April 2007 05:51 (eighteen years ago)

My father also used to ask me if I wanted to go to "Borders and Books" - he'd say it in his reformed Brooklynite accent (think a less erudite Leonard Lopate) and it would really irritate me for some reason, and I'd say "Dad, do they sell borders or books?!"

― Hurting 2, Friday, 13 April 2007 05:55 (eighteen years ago)

One night my mother was out and my dad decided to try a vegetarian recipe for green beans in yogurt sauce. He used strawberry yogurt.

haha!

― Curt1s Stephens, Friday, 13 April 2007 05:56 (eighteen years ago)

Ok, I can't resist sharing a couple of stories.

My mother had a love of horror novels (in fact, one of the first books I remember reading is "Jaws" and that was just before the movie. Probably not appropriate reading fodder for a five year old.) Later, when VHS rentals came out, she would rent horror/slasher movies. However, not wanting to completely scar the children, she would first fast forward to the end... then play the entire movie on rewind. And do the commentary herself. Friday the 13th became "Jason, the incredible healer." We would laugh so hard we would be exhausted and sore by the end of the movie(the beginning)and would need a nap. Which might have been the point ;) Especially if it was too cold outside to play.

Later in life, I embarked on a career of tech support. I built my mother a computer. She loved it... but couldn't quite figure out how to use it. I got a call from her one day.

"I can't get this new software from (really inexpensive ISP with no tech support)installed!"

"Ok, what does the computer tell you when you try to install it?"

"Disk cannot be found."

"The disk is in the drive, right?"

"Yes"

"Ok, hit the eject button on the drive."

"The computer just shut down."

*Sighs* Ok, there are a couple of buttons on the front, a little one just under where the cd goes in, and a big one in the front. Which one did you press?"

"The big one."

"Ok, hit that one again. Computer booting up? Good. Let's wait a minute until the hourglass goes away. Ok. Now look directly under where the cd drawer comes out, you should see a small button. Press it. The drawer came out? Good. Look at the disk and read me what you see."

"I can't read it, all the writing is on the bottom."

"Ma, the shiny side needs to go down."

It only took a half hour more to get things straightened out, which beat the two hour conversation I had with her that ended up with me driving 15 miles in a blizzard to walk in her house and click on "Forgot your password?"

― nikpaige, Friday, 13 April 2007 07:20 (eighteen years ago)


It only took a half hour more to get things straightened out, which beat the two hour conversation I had with her that ended up with me driving 15 miles in a blizzard to walk in her house and click on "Forgot your password?"
Ahh, that's a classic. My dad used to be the same a few years back when he got his laptop, he's a bit better now, but still uses the intercom on our phones to get me to go downstairs to help. Not sure how he can use the annoying piece of technology... but not the useful one =/

― james, Friday, 13 April 2007 13:17 (eighteen years ago)

My mum likes to make up smileys in her email - e.g. '<.^) - I generally have no idea what they're meant to represent.

― ledge, Friday, 13 April 2007 13:30 (eighteen years ago)

Clown with a pointy nose?

― kv_nol, Friday, 13 April 2007 13:53 (eighteen years ago)

Mouse facing left balancing upside raindrop on its nose.

― accentmonkey, Friday, 13 April 2007 14:07 (eighteen years ago)

Inner peace has been found...

― kv_nol, Friday, 13 April 2007 14:49 (eighteen years ago)

Ha, Tracer, I totally spread my complaint around -- Samways, online editor, print editor, webmaster, etc.!

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 15:06 (eighteen years ago)

My mum says "Strench" and "Lench" instead of "Strength" and "Length". Probably cos she is French, but it confused me for many years.

― the next grozart, Friday, 13 April 2007 15:47 (eighteen years ago)

My dad says "roseberry" and "catastroph", and is also furrin.

― Mark C, Friday, 13 April 2007 15:51 (eighteen years ago)

My dad used to actually say *By Jove!". That was the only adorable thing about him, mind.

― Matt #2, Friday, 13 April 2007 15:55 (eighteen years ago)

Follow-up notes:

1.) International dialing rates to New Zealand are lower than I'd have thought!

2.) What are the chances that the sign pictures next to the Herald column would contain -- dead center, bold face, and yellow-highlighted -- the first two thirds of my name?

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 20:41 (eighteen years ago)

clearly this whole thing was an elaborate scheme by your parents to get in touch with you, a la that one Simpsons episode where Homer's mom puts secret messages in newspaper stories about record-breaking foods

― bernard snowy, Friday, 13 April 2007 21:33 (eighteen years ago)

PS this thread makes me very, very sad... and I can only kinda-sorta figure out why

― bernard snowy, Friday, 13 April 2007 21:34 (eighteen years ago)

Okay, New Zealand must be pretty boring these days if newspaper staffs seriously all take Saturdays off.

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 21:39 (eighteen years ago)

This is turning into a soap opera. Of sorts.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 13 April 2007 21:49 (eighteen years ago)

I know it's actually Australian, but I totally want to ask one of these switchboard people to say "nobody listens to ABBA anymore, we listen to Baby Animals and Nirvana."

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 21:54 (eighteen years ago)

Most daily newspaper staffs take Saturdays off -- separate staffs do the Sunday papers.

― stet, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:01 (eighteen years ago)

Separate or same, I've never seen a paper that didn't have some staff in-office on Saturday. (And I've worked for small-town concerns!)

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:05 (eighteen years ago)

When we bought our first mac, maybe in 1992 or so, I naturally figured out things about it much more quickly than my dad did, and one of the first things I became fascinated by was the microphone and the ability to record one's own alert sounds. I decided to record one in a nasal, robot-like voice that said "ARNOLD [my father's name], TURN OFF THE COMPUTER NOW!"

Apparently my father listened and lost two hours worth of software installation work.

― Hurting 2, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:05 (eighteen years ago)

maybe you should complain to a different nz newspaper, the whole rest of the country hates auckland, the scandal would run for weeks, eventually the prime minister would get involved and say it had been 'a bit on the nose'.

― estela, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:10 (eighteen years ago)

Nabisco's dad sounds like the most awesomely corny guy ever.

― Hurting 2, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:14 (eighteen years ago)

estela is thinking here - seriously - forget the straight and narrow course, get others to do the dirty work, stir things up

― rrrobyn, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:41 (eighteen years ago)

NABISCO TOPPLES CRIMINAL NZ REGIME

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:43 (eighteen years ago)

hahaha let me look up Gawker.co.nz

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 22:44 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3492/features/8594/ana_samways.html

― estela, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:34 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco that's awesome that you called them! I imagine them hearing what happened, there's a pause on the phone, a clearing of the throat, and finally, in a melodic New Zealand accent, a resigned "OTM"

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:44 (eighteen years ago)

Yeh, but the Saturday staff is always going to be some confused chip-munching features writer, an alcoholic sports hack and the cleaner. Get em in the nuts: Monday, 10.30am.

Last month, Spare Room attracted nearly 60,000 browsers, putting it just ahead of TVNZ’s entertainment site.
Ha! We get twice that in a day. P'shaw.

― stet, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:47 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, Estela, note down at the bottom that the "Listener" is owned by the same parent company as the Herald (a fact not noted in their puff-piece interview). Do you know of any NZ media / bloggers / whatever that would have an interest in taking Samways down a peg?

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:49 (eighteen years ago)

I mean, not that this is news -- I think the very title "Sideswipe" refers to the whole point of the column being to swipe and collect items from other places. This woman's job would be really embarrassing if not for the fact that she actually gets paid for it.

― nabisco, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:51 (eighteen years ago)

any NZ media / bloggers / whatever that would have an interest in taking Samways down a peg?

this is a great idea

― sanskrit, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:53 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco, no i don't sorry, maybe nz ilxors do though, she is amazingly annoying.

― estela, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:54 (eighteen years ago)

a big filch in a small pond

― estela, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:56 (eighteen years ago)

ha

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 13 April 2007 23:57 (eighteen years ago)

Alright, I have a good contact, number, and time to speak with someone from the regular staff tomorrow. For the record, I am not actually out for vengeance here -- I am mostly just miffed that she hasn't responded to email, and my main goals are to (a) get her editors / superiors concerned about her "work" (which they should be), and (b) possily hear surprise in her voice if I can actually get her on the phone and say "hi, I wrote your column on Tuesday."

― nabisco, Saturday, 14 April 2007 00:03 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpghttp://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpg

― Pleasant Plains, Saturday, 14 April 2007 00:07 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/about

― estela, Saturday, 14 April 2007 00:10 (eighteen years ago)

please record call

― JW, Saturday, 14 April 2007 00:18 (eighteen years ago)

BTW the parts of Sideswipe that aren't stolen from ILX threads are usually stolen from Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald.

― webber, Saturday, 14 April 2007 01:34 (eighteen years ago)

she sounds awful.

― g®▲Ðұ, Saturday, 14 April 2007 02:03 (eighteen years ago)

Later, when VHS rentals came out, she would rent horror/slasher movies. However, not wanting to completely scar the children, she would first fast forward to the end... then play the entire movie on rewind. And do the commentary herself. Friday the 13th became "Jason, the incredible healer."

This is the most fucking awesome thing ever, and now I want to try it.

― Trayce, Saturday, 14 April 2007 02:17 (eighteen years ago)

plz someone intercut this frame:

http://www.listener.co.nz/assets/img/2007/i3492/featuresextra.jpg

into this animation:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v135/endlessxshadow/47dh6y1.gif

― sanskrit, Saturday, 14 April 2007 02:20 (eighteen years ago)

It really does appear that approximately four people work at the New Zealand Herald, all of whom saunter in and out of the office at random hours unknown to one another. No wonder they have to pinch content from the web.

― nabisco, Saturday, 14 April 2007 21:51 (eighteen years ago)

"hi, I wrote your column on Tuesday."

Uh no, you were the primary contributor along with a couple of dozen others. Quis custodiet ipse custodes?

― Mark C, Saturday, 14 April 2007 22:39 (eighteen years ago)

That would clearly not be as funny. Plus it's my title and topic! I'm happy to provide names and numbers for other folks to call and bother them too, though. Right now I'm kinda like those people who used to go on People's Court and sue for 25 cents "on principle."

― nabisco, Saturday, 14 April 2007 23:44 (eighteen years ago)

Also calling New Zealand is really fun!

― nabisco, Saturday, 14 April 2007 23:50 (eighteen years ago)

yo Mark C your purloined anecdote was not OTM

― sanskrit, Sunday, 15 April 2007 01:20 (eighteen years ago)

Following estela's original link, the "Adorable Parent Factoids" content seems to have disappeared from the website.

― C0L1N B..., Sunday, 15 April 2007 01:41 (eighteen years ago)

My mom uses the "Shitterooners" in public. "Shitty Shitty Bang Bang," too.

― Tape Store, Sunday, 15 April 2007 01:42 (eighteen years ago)

one year passes...

does fruit on the bottom yoghurt exist anymore?

― sunny successor, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 17:15 (seventeen years ago)

I want to know if Nabisco ever got a hold of the Kiwi blogger.

― jaymc, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 17:45 (seventeen years ago)

Yeah I see it got taken down or whatever, but, WHAT HAPPENED?

― RabiesAngentleman, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 18:09 (seventeen years ago)

SS, oh yes, most definitely. Actually just saw an ad on telly for said VILE concoction. Well, I find it vile cause it was a yoghurt with fruit and OBV aspartame (cause it was Vitalinea). Not that big of an aspertame hatah but I am when it comes to Vitalinea. :-)

― stevienixed, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:23 (seventeen years ago)

what is Vitalinea??

― sunny successor, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:29 (seventeen years ago)

A Danone product stuffed with artificial sweeteners so you don't get fat. Usually crap imho.

― stevienixed, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:30 (seventeen years ago)

http://www.vitalinea.be/v/view/nl/

i puke at their *image*

― stevienixed, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:31 (seventeen years ago)

omg that site is blocked by my work:

Your request for http://www.vitalinea.be/v/view/nl was denied because of its content categorization: "Games"

YOGHURT IS NOT A GAME

― sunny successor, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:35 (seventeen years ago)

http://www.vitalinea.be/v/download/nl/396478/image_detail/scaletomax-174-145/foto1.zip-hd-duo-abricot.jpg.jpg

This is some of their THERE IS FRUIT underneath the yoghurt.

― stevienixed, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:36 (seventeen years ago)

I had a dream once that I got rich marketing the fruit at the bottom of the yoghurt without the yoghurt. I was reminded of this recently when I saw an ad for muffin tops.

― Maria :D, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:37 (seventeen years ago)

I cant see that nath :(

hey this reminds me of that yoghurt that used to come in a tray where one triangle compartment was filled with vanilla yoghurt, one was filled with fruit (fake) and one with some kind of nut/granola/museli concoction. this tray was constructed such that you could bend it and the fruit compartment would land directly over the yoghurt compartment emptying the fruit into the yoghurt. thank you gravity! i used to eat those separately too though

― sunny successor, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:44 (seventeen years ago)

Hilarious thing about yogurt ads.

― Abbott, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 20:52 (seventeen years ago)

YOGHURT IS NOT A GAME

o for changeable screen names :-(

― CharlieNo4, Wednesday, 11 June 2008 23:21 (seventeen years ago)

sunny successor, that is a muller corner, and they still make them and some of them are quite nice (not the banana custardy one you tip coco-pops into though, that's just vile).

― ailsa, Thursday, 12 June 2008 08:40 (seventeen years ago)

Wow, just read all this thread.

You remember how ILX threads used to have a 'category' dropdown? (never used it myself)..

It'd be great if you could do that with threads and mark "Buried Treasure" on these sort of things...

― Mark G, Thursday, 12 June 2008 10:59 (seventeen years ago)

...so what HAPPENED?

― RabiesAngentleman, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:11 (seventeen years ago)

This is worse than waiting on Lost.

― RabiesAngentleman, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:12 (seventeen years ago)

that column is still going and whenever i see it i think of this thread and wonder what happened in the end.

― estela, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:26 (seventeen years ago)

11) My Mother proposed to Rex Harrison in an elevator at The Connaught Hotel in London sometime in the 60's

ENBB, you realize he had more spouses than Elizabeth Taylor and both Gabors combined, ja? Enough for any random cute girl of the time and place to think she might be in with a chance re: love in an elevator.

― suzy, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:30 (seventeen years ago)

Didn't he divorce one wife to marry another who was terminally ill with the intention of remarrying the original one when the second one had passed on?

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:46 (seventeen years ago)

That is an impressively terrible idea.

― RabiesAngentleman, Thursday, 12 June 2008 12:58 (seventeen years ago)

yeah, he nearly missed one!

― Mark G, Thursday, 12 June 2008 13:57 (seventeen years ago)

James: yes. Apparently Kay Kendall (the ill one) went to her grave unaware she was anything other than 'anaemic'* but RH did not go back to Lilli Palmer because she married her toyboy in the meantime.

*this was not unusual in the '50s when you did not say 'cancer' in polite company.

― suzy, Thursday, 12 June 2008 15:21 (seventeen years ago)

Thanks for the info, suzy. In further grim Rex Harrison news, I guess his co-star and his paramour during the shooting of Unfaithfully Yours- two different people- both came to bad ends.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 12 June 2008 15:29 (seventeen years ago)

Scousers, eh? Eh?

― suzy, Thursday, 12 June 2008 15:30 (seventeen years ago)

Huh?

I only know Kay Kendall from Genevieve, but that's all I need to know.

(I am getting paranoid writing on this thread, like nabisco's dad is watching me with his spyglass)

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 12 June 2008 15:35 (seventeen years ago)

Yoghurt is not a game, but "Yoghurt is not a game" IS a game.

― jaymc, Thursday, 12 June 2008 19:13 (seventeen years ago)

Yoghurt *could* be a game...

― Mark G, Thursday, 12 June 2008 21:25 (seventeen years ago)

two years pass...

I just met Nabisco's dad tonight, which gives me a new appreciation for some of these anecdotes.

― jaymc, Monday, 9 August 2010 02:51 (fourteen years ago)

YOGHURT IS NOT A GAME

― Gumbercules (Trayce), Monday, 9 August 2010 05:00 (fourteen years ago)

i was telling my dad how much i was enjoying Close to the Edge to which is scoffed that they had sold out after The Yes Album

my father, the hipster

― Dad Can Dance (LOLK), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:03 (fourteen years ago)

to which he**

― Dad Can Dance (LOLK), Monday, 9 August 2010 16:03 (fourteen years ago)

Ha, J, the real magic will happen if I can find pictures of him dancing for the "Let ZS animate your photos" thread

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Monday, 9 August 2010 20:48 (fourteen years ago)

Where mum worked, there was a manager who she felt was unfriendly to her - never returned her "good morning" with anything other than a scowl. Chatting with coworkers, his name came up, and she called him a "miserable old bugger." Somehow, he found out and confronted her, with the first words he'd ever spoken to her: "I understand that you think I'm a mean old bastard." She replied "No, that's not right, I called you a miserable old bugger!" He laughed out loud, then asked why she felt that way. He accepted her explanation and always greeted her with a smile and a "good morning" from that day on.

― Myonga Vön Bontee, Tuesday, 10 August 2010 09:55 (fourteen years ago)

Prompted by my dad having no clue what "surf music" is, I asked him why he never really appreciated rock music, of any era. (He was in his early 20s when Elvis broke big.)

"I guess I could see where Elvis was talented, but I thought Perry Como was a better singer."

― All 10 songs permeate the organs (Dan Peterson), Wednesday, 11 August 2010 21:49 (fourteen years ago)

two years pass...

my mom was once engaged to someone who eventually became one of the doctors on "teen mom"

― los blue jeans, Tuesday, 9 April 2013 06:10 (twelve years ago)


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