Monday, June 25, 2012

A Whole Lotta Evil


1. Demi Lovato's outfit. It's evil. From Hollywood Life




2. Stinging nettle. Evil. Extremely evil. Yesterday, as I was weeding my veggie and herb garden (without gloves on...I know...I'm an idiot), this bastard plant totally kicked my unsuspecting ass. And I have a botany degree---I should know better. But I was so worried about the jimson weed, which is highly poisonous and also causes contact dermatitis, that I wasn't paying attention to this malicious plant. It has hollow stinging hairs which act like a hypodermic needle and shoot histamine and other chemicals onto your skin. It hurts like a bitch and causes big welts, itching and pain. A lot of pain! And swelling. On to-do list....get gardening gloves.


3. Arachnoquake. Cheesy movie on Syfy about giant spiders that shoot fire. Evil spiders! This movie was actually total crap (not even close to as funny as Jersey Shore Shark Attack), but there was one scene that was brilliant! The shout-out to Deep Blue Sea, one of my favorite cheesy horror movies with Samuel Jackson, Thomas Jane and LL Cool J.

There is a motley crew of survivors on a trolley bus with a bunch of evil spiders approaching. The one lone nice black guy (of course) jumps on top of a fence and starts giving a rousing speech about how they have to stick together....and I knew what was coming. It was a brilliant shout-out to Samuel Jackson's speech in Deep Blue Sea, right before he gets chomped by the evil shark. The poor black guy in Arachnoquake gets attacked by a giant spider, and everyone gasps. Fabulous bit of writing there. Too bad the rest of the movie totally sucked. I DNFed it.

Nat (my 9 year old daughter) is now addicted to crappy Syfy movies and watched it to the bitter end. Her hilarious commentary is the best part. When Tracey Gold started the dissection and removed the slimy organs from the giant spider, both Natty and I screamed "EWWWWW!!!" at the same time. And then we laughed hysterically.

4. The DNF Brigade. This past week I DNFed books because of horrible head-hopping, jumping right into sex without knowing the characters, no chemistry between H/h, repeating same old dialogue and ideas from previous books, inane paragraphs of description about sandwiches, cheating, exploitative and idiotic BDSM descriptions, and introducing too many characters on the first page of the book. I don't really think any of these things are evil, but they sure as hell don't encourage further reading. I have never DNFed so many books in one week. Maybe I'm choosing poorly, or just getting pickier. Not sure.



5. Fruit flies. Squirmy, disgusting and evil. When my daughter adopted a praying mantis as a pet, I asked her what they eat. For some reason I thought she was going to say grass or leaves. But noooooooooo.......evidently praying mantises enjoy eating wingless fruit flies. So, Nat and I head over to Petco to get a jar of insects. Twenty five years ago I was a biology major and I did countless labs with fruit flies. Nevertheless, I screamed like a little baby when Natty brought over the jar of hundreds of squirming, foul, gross fruit flies. Screamed! "NO! I refuse to buy those things! No! No! No!" Nat and the check-out girl laughed at me. Finally, after about 10 minutes of me totally freaking out at the Petco cash register, I relented. Natty promised to NEVER EVER EVER EVER bring the jar into the house. EVER.

Fruit flies are evil.

6. I have come to a startling conclusion. Tumblr is evil. It's naughty, it's distracting, and it's the biggest time suck since re-runs of Star Trek: The Next Generation.


This is going to be a busy week for me. I'm packing for Hawaii, revising my Lumberjack story, and celebrating my birthday on Saturday. And even though some folks think birthdays are evil, I don't. I'm embracing my wrinkles, my white hairs and all of my quirky old-lady eccentricities.

Hoping to avoid evil spiders, outfits, plants, fruit flies, Tumblr posts, and books.

Ciao!
Penelope