The frosting is strong with this one...

Cupcakes. Pure little globs of awesomeness. But what, you might ask, could make a cupcake more awesome? How about this:

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/star-wars-cupcake-decorating-kit-rebel-alliance/

Williams Sonoma has some dope Star Wars stuff, but I get a little tired seeing the same iconic characters over and over again (okay, not really! Yoda! squeal!)



So behold the gallery of minor Star Wars characters cupcake toppers. To use, simply print on heavy card stock, attach to toothpick, and stick in cupcake of your choosing. Remember to remove said toothpick before injesting or you may choke and die.

Admiral Ackbar:



Lando Calrissian:




That stupid Ewok from Episode 6:




More to come! Maybe. Send pictures of your success.

Hand Puppets!

Hand puppets: Where would any teacher be without them? Especially as a secondary teacher, I find there is nothing my surly, jaded teenage students respond to better than a cheerful terry cloth muppet, dangling from my wrist!



But there are SO MANY hand puppets to choose from. How do I know I have selected a hand puppet academically and developmentally appropriate for my lesson plan? Here is a quick breakdown of hand puppets and their uses:







Bear: Essay Writing. let's face it, nothing terrifies students more than having to come up with a damn thesis. They'll feel better when snuggly wuggly Pookums the Bear shows them how to group those ideas into cozy-wozy paragraphs.


Dinosaur: Sex Ed and Health. These kids are trying to kill themselves, what with their beer pong, rampant sexuality and blow. Nothing frightens a student straight like a Tyrannosaurus dying dramatically of HIV.


Pig: Most math subjects. Watch that pudgy little piggy gobble up the remainder in that equation. Caution: not for students with eating disorders.


Cow: American history. Not a dry eye in the room when Bossie dramatically recites the Bill of Rights. Bonus points if you can do it with a colonial accent or while wearing a powdered wig and false teeth!


Octopus: String theory. Nanostructured biomaterials. Electromagnetic fields in statefied media. Also doubles as Medusa for a class on Greek Myths!

Centuries of Breeding Have Genetically Designed Me to Fuck Up Your Stuff

Dogs. We’re told they provide companionship, unconditional love and affection. Maybe this is true. Maybe there are some dogs out there adding richness and value to their humans’ lives. Mine, however, just seem to destroy things.

Lucy and Sookie. Sookie is the “blond.”1

I would like to give my butt-sniffers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are not just willful and destructive. Maybe they actually have an altruistic reason for destroying my personal possessions. Maybe there is a grand cosmic benefit to rolling in a dead seal carcass on the beach, and then trying to snuggle with a couple making out under a blanket.2

If we could read their little doggy minds….



So here is a positive way to look at a little incident I like to call “The Mulberry Tree”:




Of course, I am a pessimist, so here is another way to interpret this incident: Six year of no nookie and close quarters with another female dog have caused Lucy to fly into a rage.3





The most likely interpretation:





1Sookie is blond not because of her coloring—she’s black mostly—but because she is a total airhead. I know, not all blonds are airheads, but people use “blond” to denote a special type of stupidity, just in the same way they use “gay” and “retarded” in a negative and inappropriate way. We now know this is wrong. Don’t worry blonds, some day your revolution will come.
2Okay, this was not done by my dog, but by my sister-in-law’s dog. Yes, roll in a dead animal. Run up the beach. Climb under the blanket of two strangers trying to share an intimate moment. Rub seal carcass all over said strangers.
3I’m not forcing my dog to live as a lesbian. However, Sookie does like to climb on top of Lucy and hump her for extended periods of time. Lucy tolerates this because of her total apathy for almost anything Sookie does. Unless Sookie starts humping her face. Then it’s on.

Total Crap Recap: This Ain’t Oprah’s Book Club

Allow me to give you some background information: My husband loves me. And I love books. In an effort to show his love, my husband buys me books for major holidays. He selects these gems based on cover art interest alone, leading me to have read roughly 15 novels written by Sherrilyn Kenyon. This is not a good thing. No matter how terrible a book may be, put it in my hands and I gotta read it. And then read the sequels. My gift for this Mother’s Day: Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires (Book 1 and 2). Below is a brief synopsis:

Book 1: Claire is sixteen, perky as hell and a genius. She wants to go to MIT. However, her totally lame parents (boo!) are making her attend college in nearby Morganville as a “starter” school. But OMG, Morganville is totally overrun by vampires! Humans are their slaves! This is totally whack, but if Claire leaves college, she will lose valuable time at a facility of higher learning! Better stay and stick in out with her three plucky roommates. Because having to wait a year and a half to get into MIT is waaay worse than being murdered by vampires!
Book 2: More of the same, but with a lot of attempted rape. Oh, and lots of not-so-heavy petting.

Okay, here are my major beefs with this book. Oh yes, because with Total Crap Recap, it’s less about trying to glean deep understanding from these tomes and more about mocking the crap out of them. Also, spoiler alert! But if you have stumbled across this blog while reading Morganville Vampires, you have bigger problems than a ruined ending.

Beef #1 : Claire is a “genius.”

For a genius, Claire sure does some stupid shit.
1)Claire initially has to move out of the dorms because she has made “hottie” Monica look bad by insulting her intelligence and Monica is out for blood. The insult: Monica has referred to WWII as “that dumbass Chinese War thing.” Claire embarrasses her by mentioning how the Japanese were involved in WWII and then there was the Korean War. Now, I’m no history professor, but please correct me if I am wrong and China was NOT involved in WWII. You know, Japanese invasions, Bataan Death March, “comfort” women…I’m not saying Monica’s smart, but maybe she’s just a little less American-centric than you, Claire.
2)In Book 2, Claire sees her arch nemesis and the new big bad in town having COFFEE together. As the reader, it was the kind of “oh, I see” moment that feels like the author smacked you upside the head. Oh, they’re WORKING together. Claire, however, doesn’t put two and two together. EVER. Not until someone else tells her what’s going on. We might want to have her re-take that IQ test.
3)When she finds out Morganville is run by vampires, she STAYS IN TOWN.

Beef #2: Can’t we all get along? No, we CAN’T.

The aforementioned Monica really has it in for Claire. She pushes her down a flight of stairs, slaps her, punches her, threatens her with a knife, abducts her in a van, chokes her, has a crony pour acid down her back, sets fire to her house, sets her up to be drugged and almost gang raped by some frat boys (it’s apparently what they go to college for) and I may have missed some stuff in the barrage of death threats. Anyway, yadda yadda, some stuff happens and Claire saves Monica’s life by dragging her out of a burning building. Below, an excerpt of the lovely conversation Monica and Claire have after the fire:
“Claire…bitch!” Her voice sounded raw and hoarse. “You…think this…makes us…friends?” “God, no,” Claire said. “But I think you kinda owe me.”
Um, she kinda OWES you? She tried to have you raped and murdered. And she murdered your boyfriend’s sister. I may be a bit cynical, but if you try to murder me I am not going to send you flowers after. I probably am not going to rescue you from a burning building either. Sorry.


Beef # 3: Whooo, rape! Boogety boogety!

You know the book has a problem when it is filled with vampires and the scariest fucking sections are the ones where a bunch of bikers/frat boys try to rape some teenage girls. So far, the vampires and their curfews are not really frightening and are just really annoying. I’m sure they must be sucking blood and murdering people, but it must be happening in another section of town or something. Claire almost gets raped at a party, then something happens, and she has to hide in a closet with her would-be rapists. And she’s so scared; she ends up holding one of the rapist’s hands. Please see Beef #2.

Beef #4: Hiding in closets

Boy, there sure is a lot of action in Book 2. That is, I think there is a lot of action in Book 2. I can’t be sure, because Claire spends an inordinate amount of time hiding in a damn closet. I understand, she’s underage, not a fighter, blah blah. But it seems the height of laziness to have your characters hide in closets when something happens so you don’t have to describe the action.

Beef #5: Hot semi-sex scenes (that YOU should be ashamed of reading!)

Claire is in love with this guy named Shane. He’s “over 18.” Um, so would he be 19? 21? There’s a lot of ways to interpret “over 18.” Claire and Shane have several make out sessions. An example:
She wasn’t absolutely sure who was kissing whom this time. Maybe it was gravity tilting, stars exploding. It felt like it. His hands were free this time and they cupped her face, stroked her hair, her neck, down to her shoulders…
After each time the author describes Claire and Shane making out, both characters warn each other (and you the reader) that if they go all the way it would be illegal because she’s under 18. Um, I have to seriously doubt that the average teenager would take the time to remind her boyfriend after each time they kiss that they could at any moment be breaking the law. More likely they’d just already be going at it. And it seems somehow icky to create such an intimate moment and then scold the reader. At least Twilight had a legitimate reason for why the characters couldn’t go past first base (he’d kill her).

Beef # 6

Their hands clasped, finger laced and parts of her—parts she’d only ever warmed up alone—were going full blast.
Most vague description of masturbation---ever.

Why I Like Zombies

If you have a pulse, you've probably noticed the incredibly annoying infiltration of "sexy" vampires into every aspect of our culture. Bam! They're in novels! Bam! TV shows (where apparently they like to write in their diaries, which makes me question the whole "sexy" thing) and movies and comic books and I'm pretty sure I saw one hawking a Snuggie on late night TV.

Not to be outdone, the rise in "sexy" vampires has been followed by the rise in "sexy" werewolves (what! why? how?). The former grotesque, cursed and tortured creatures of the night have become the bad boy you just know you could reform, and if he has some sort of physical challenge to overcome (aversion to sunlight, bloodlust and murderous rampaging hairiness always make me say, "Awwww.") so much the better.

This is why I like zombies the most. You just can't sex them up. Zombies are disgusting shambling rotting corpses and they want to eat your brains. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Here's some things that people will never say about zombies:

-ooh...I love the way that zombie sparkles in the sun like glitter.
-I'm sitting next to this hot zombie in math class. He stares penetrately in my direction, dessicated eyeballs rolling in their attractive sockets. As the stench of his petrifying flesh wafts by my desk, I wonder: would he be going to the pep rally later?

-As he lay me back against the satin sheets, I panted feverishly. He leaned in to kiss me, his rotting lips flaking longingly. He murmured, "Blaaagh..."

I'm pretty sure I will never have to watch my beloved zombies pimped out to sell more romance novels. I love you, walking corpses! Now where did I put my shotgun?

It's On!

Oh, it's soo on. It's so on it doesn't even KNOW it's on. We're gonna bring it. It's gonna already been brung..brought..wait, what?