Caramel Cob.

When I was at the drugstore this afternoon with my dad picking up my grandfather's medications, my dad was checking out and asked me if I wanted anything, and I didn't, but then I saw a tray of Caramel Cobs sitting on the counter -- they're these caramel corn packs packed into the shape of an ear of corn and put in a plastic sleeve that's half transparent and half corn-silk and -leaf graphic -- and threw it on the counter and had him buy it for me.

There was this slightly plump late 30s lady with dyed red hair and a lavender sweatshirt with flowers embroidered on it standing next to us at the counter, too, so I was like, "Man, did you see that Caramel Cob, isn't it the coolest thing ever?", and she was like, "Yeah, they remind me of that one movie with the children, and the you know...", and she seemed confused and her thought trailed off.

"Oh, 'Willy Wonka'?", I was like, finishing her thought.

"No, 'Children of the Corn'," she was like, and when she said that, this big blast of alcohol-smelling breath just whapped me in the face.

Black Market / Nymphos.

Back in WWII my great uncle didn't smoke and so sold up the cigarettes he saved to Russian soldiers in Berlin for $20 a pack and got enough to buy a house for him and his wife when he got back. Mickey Mouse watches were $500 a pop but he didn't have any to sell, he said. What he did have to do, though, is go around to the Polish DPs and tell them in his rudimentary Polish that the war was ending and that they would soon be returned to their homes, and he said all they did was swear and swear at him.

My godmother was saying that when she was down in Florida cleaning out her dead mother-in-law's house, she and her girlfriends who she went down there with to do it took one afternoon to check out an antiques store downtown in the town near the house, and the guy there told them to check out the shop across the street, and that the owner of that shop was nice and they should go talk with her but that she was a nympho. When he said that, my godmother was like, "How do you know?"

Schnoodles.

Me and my dad visited an old friend of his, and she and her sister, both widowed the past few years, recently adopted sister schnoodles (schnauzer-poodle mixes). One's browner and more schnauzer-ish and a little thing, and the other's pretty white and more poodle-ish, and my dad's old friend who had the browner one said that she eats and eats and eats but never gains any weight. "I got the anorexic one," she was like, and my dad was like, "Yeah, like that one woman, from the brother-and-sister singing duo," and then they all started talking about how sad it was, and how much they all used to enjoy Carpenters music.

Prosecution // World of Warcraft.

Yesterday night when me and my one friend and her brother were talking about horse insemination, her dad started talking about how years ago the county police had to follow up reports that this one farmer was fucking his horses and camcording it and running an interstate porn business out of his home. As it turns out, it was true, though the police had to show the judge a couple videos of the guy fucking the horse and fellating the horse or getting fellated by the horse (he'd rub liquid oats on his dick to get the horse to lick it; he never actually put his dick in the horse's mouth) in order to get the warrant to go in and do a legal search of the guy's house and barn. They could only prosecute the guy under state business law, though as part of the sentencing they confiscated the guy's horses and limited his contacts with him, though my friend's dad was saying that was stupid, since the next thing you know the guy was fucking and fellating and getting fellated by the cows and sheep he still had on his farm, which, of course, weren't part of the sentencing terms since the courts had only put horses into the terms and not all livestock in general. "What can I say," he said. "We were naive."

On another note, I heard that in "World of Warcraft", since you can personalize your characters, you almost never run into two gnome warlocks or human paladins or whatever that look the same, but pretty much everyone who plays as a dark elf ends up having their characters look exactly alike, really tall and stringy-looking with white eyes and long long ears, even though the same huge range of characterization is available for the dark elves as it is for the humans and gnomes and whatever the fuck else creatures you can play as (orcs or goblins at the very least, I presume?; you can customize eye color and body type with the dark elves, though no ear length customization is available for the dark elves, though - I wonder how the game designers overlooked that possibility).

As I understand it, then, for some reason, there's a beauty standard for dark elves within the virtual world of the game, or at float among the people who are driven enough to buy the expansion pack that lets you play as a dark elf (perhaps drawn from beauty standards or lookist expectations for dark elves from the fantasy genre as a whole?). It's odd, though, that that kind of thing only surfaces in "World of Warcraft" there, with the dark elves.

Two evangelical stories (part II of II): Birthday.

When I was over yesterday at my friend's family's house, her brother was saying that their neighbors who were over the previous day are evangelical, and they were saying how they were getting ready for Christmas, only they don't really do Christmas since it's too commercial, so instead they celebrate Jesus's birthday and they bake a cake for him and everyone brings presents and they sing 'Happy Birthday', only since Jesus is a real reason to celebrate, they sing it twice.

Two evangelical stories (part I of II): Lucre.

The gas stations in town are pretty much a monopoly run by this one oil company, and they charge ten cents higher for gas than anywhere in an hour radius, and everyone in town bitches about it, though the oil company people say they give the money back to the community, which is only half-true, since they only really give (and they give big) to the evangelical church their family belongs to.

Anyhow, my dad was telling me and my mom that last summer the one son from the oil company bought his wife a Hummer and a new pair of tits, and whenever she'd be driving around in her Hummer with her tits, guys in town would look at them as they passed by and be like, "I paid for those."

"But they're only 90% the size she wanted," my dad was like. "They tithe."

Sayings.

I have two new sayings:

1) A new oath, "My left nut!", so when people say something like, "Isn't everything fantastic?", I can be like, "My left nut it is!"

- and -

2) When a song is on Top 40 radio where it's a chick singing over acoustic guitar, I'm always like, "This song makes me feel like a lesbian."

My mom on music / Nun / My one friend on "Clumsy".

I've been having Top 40 radio on a lot this week hoping to catch that one Fergie song "Clumsy", and my mom's soundly hated all of it, except for Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls", which she finds kind of catchy. She didn't understand exactly what the bass line to "Stand by Me" was doing in the song, so I had to explain to her what 'sampling' is. She said me and my from high school are both listening to Top 40 radio since we both don't want to get old, though I say it's since the music is good and I like being in on the vibe, and my friend says it's since the music is good and she's never been in touch with the vibe before and likes it, since back in high school she was stoned most of the time, as well as derisive towards pop culture that wasn't the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

In fact, that same friend from high school was telling me that when she had study hall with the post-Vatican II nun who taught us religion, the nun would let her go outside and smoke during study hall, only she told her to do it off school property on the other side of the railroad tracks that ran by the school, not to let anyone see her do it and of course to shut up about it to everyone, and if she did get caught smoking, to say that she had asked to go to the bathroom and had taken off on her own.

Also, that same friend heard Fergie's "Clumsy" after I was telling her about it, and liked it for the same reasons I do, it turns out. She loves how the overproduced techno-ish beats and yelps of Fergie contrast with the underpolished sampling of Little Richard's "Girl Can't Help It", though she's not as exceptionally fond of the spoken word middle-part where Fergie talks about how when a guy dumps her her world just crumbles until the love bug crawls back up her dress and bites, at which point the song goes back into the Little Richard sample...

I really do love spoken word parts in songs; they take me back to the early 60s, and I think there should be more of them. I should make up a list of emotional first person spoken-word parts from popular songs, maybe after I do that list I'm thinking of of songs where they translate the chorus into French for a chorus or two, like Melanie's "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" and Blondie's "Sunday Girl".