Joni’s Neighborhood

Nothing says Christmas like a Bundt cake candle.

This Bundt cake candle infuses your home with the sweetness and light we associate with this blessed season.

As its five wicks burn, they release into the air an aroma that returns fond memories of your grandmother gliding across the room on Christmas Day, silken lavender polyester robe trailing, drenched in cheap perfume from the 5-and-dime.

Amid a lifelike glaze mounds of cream-colored wax dot the monstrosity (possibly the creation of a Hollywood Wax Museum fellow who ingested three too many tabs of LSD in his youth) like samples emptied from the cosmetic surgeon's liposuction sac.

Garnishments of hard brown plastic balls replicating nuts nearly bring a tear to the eye, a nod to holiday sentimentality, detail and the prevailing presence of cheap Chinese goods in the American market.

Above all, you can rest assured that friends and family, upon viewing this one-of-a-kind candle cake, will shout: "Happy Holidays! And Good God! Where on earth did you find such a hideous contraption?!"

And you'll smile sweetly, if not demurely, and with a wink of an eye and finger alongside the nose like Santa Claus rise up the chimney (pretend if you don't have one) and answer: "At the Goodwill, for 99 cents."

Then like Blitzen you'll hasten toward the skies, three paces ahead of a spinning burning bad Bundt hurled your direction by your aunt (and quite the pitcher's arm she has) with a hollering command of "Get this damn gawd-awful thing outta my sight!"

(and to it a good night)

Ah, Christmas, when shineth the Spirit of Truth. Nothing bespeaks the holiday like the tackiest candle ever birthed on the face of the Earth, a Bundt Cake Gone Bad.

To all my loyal readers, bless you, and to the occasional drop-ins amused by the oddball and unconventional, all animals and to each and all every one a Most Merry Christmas.

May your holiday burn brightly. And badly with a Bundt.

Burn, Bundty, burn!

SO this morning I woke up at 6 am to an alarm clock, because i had to do something quickly for work... 10 minutes later i was back in bed and HERE IS THE GOOD PART...

We just saw Avatar

It's only three nights until Christmas (yes, here in Finland we celebrate it already on Christmas Eve), but if some of Santa's helpers doesn't have a clue on what to give me for Christmas, here is my wish list number two :)

Christmas Wish List 2

• A Bamix Wand mixer
• Tefal's Raclette "grill", model Ovation
• Candle "extinguisher" (don't know what the real English word for that is, i.e. the picture in the right upper corner)
• Tefal's Fondue pot, model Ovation
• Iittala glasses; Tapio and Verna (light blue)
• A flat screen TV with cable and antenna reception and preferably Full HD (size 26" or 32")
  

Some time ago I was told how rockets get into space. They are launched straight up, but because of the Earth's gravitational pull they can't continue straight up or they'd never get there. So they tilt and shoot out of reach in an arch, and it supposedly works because the Earth is curved. They slip out before they hit the ground. I'm not an engineer so I don't know if it's complete and utter bullshit or not, but I think it is, hands down, the best thing I've heard in a long time. Means Douglas Adams was right in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: all it takes to fly is fall down and miss the earth.

...but.... I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate my TWO NEW NEIGHBORS! who added ME, making me feel both Important and a little Self-Conscious (sorry about the mess... I've been.. away...)

Dear U.S. Senators,

When you have allowed months of torture and rape to utterly disfigure and destroy someone, the only sensible and humane thing to do is to take that person out somewhere secluded and shoot them in the back of the head.

Since you’ve essentially allowed this healthcare bill to endure the very atrocities I’ve described, it is my sincere hope you will have enough integrity left in you to consign it to the same fate. Executions are seldom easy, but considering the jaw-dropping debauchery to which you’ve relentlessly subjected this bill, such paradoxical mercy is the only way I see for you to even look in the general direction of redemption. Poor old “Healthcare” Bill was once our friend, but now he desperately wails in anguish, pleading for final respite from the blind, relentless assault of Lieberman’s tiny but deceptively powerful political penis.

Our friend wanted to give us a Public Option so that even the poorest Americans could get necessary medical attention. You laughed in his face.

Our friend believed a Single-Payer system was another way we could get healthcare to the less fortunate and was shouted down for that, as well.

Our friend wanted to fix Medicare Part D so that drugs were acquired at a reasonable price and beneficiaries didn’t fall into the infamous, medicine-revoking “Donut Hole”. In response to that one, you simply farted (although, to your credit, you did lift your leg beforehand so the gesture wasn’t lost on anyone).

In short, our friend’s overall goal was to HELP THE AMERICAN POOR. And you had a serious problem with that.

It’s a noble goal – aiding the poor – and one that is right in line with the teachings of every major religion, including the one this country so openly embraces (despite Constitutional insistence it doesn’t). But how did you react to such Christian kindness? You got all coy and then suddenly goal-kicked poor Bill in the nuts by adding a mandate that everyone purchase healthcare from private companies.

So kill it. Kill it until it’s good and dead and literally nothing of it remains. Better to have no healthcare reform at all (for now) than to have a panty-waste bill with ruptured testicles limping through American history as a permanent false testament to how the poor and weak simply don’t deserve access to medical care.

You know what you must do. If it helps, think about it this way: if all of you vote it out, then killing our friend Bill will be more like a firing squad execution than a cold-blooded murder. And isn’t that how you politicos sleep at night – by reframing the untenable things so they can be better blamed on someone else?

Oh, and Mr. President,  your recent rhetoric surrounding this bill worries me. You seem to be hedging. I have no doubt you recall making it unequivocally clear when you debated Hilary Clinton last January that you are deadset against an individual mandate, so I'm looking to you to keep your promise to veto this bill if it comes across your desk containing that clause.

Sincerely,

Kirk Starr
Your Employer

The 36th week starts today, so we're 5 weeks away (yup, the system they use to count this is confusing. 35 weeks 0 days - 35 weeks 6 days is the 36th week.) from my due date. I'm scared shitless.