Holiday Etiquette

Recently, the Today show had a really compelling news segment about etiquette at holiday gatherings.

It mainly focused on shoes and what you should do if your host requests you take them off when you enter her house:

Is this really a question? I could see an issue if the host asks you to insert a mini catheter into yourself so as not to defile her sparkling bathroom, but shoes in winter? Duh.

I guess it is a legitmate question because Lester Holt and an anchor I’m too lazy to look up stretched this out for nearly six minutes. They even consulted a comedian because….news.

I’ll admit, I likely don’t exhibit the best etiquette. At parties, I’m usually the person standing directly in front of the potato chip bowl, shoveling potato chips into my mouth and growling at others who approach me. And I will stay there until all the chips are gone. Then I will leave and cry in a gutter.

I also don’t know if I drink from the water glass to the right or to the left of the placemat so I usually drink out of both. 

But I do–at least I think I do–have a sense of how not to behave like a fucknut at gatherings that include other human beings. Since the Today show was surprisingly unhelpful, I thought I would take over the news for awhile and provide some etiquette tips of my own.

Speaker7’s Holiday Etiquette Tips

1. Don’t be a dick.

2. Don’t deliever political diatribes especially if you are just meeting someone new. For example, don’t say “Global warming is caused by all those sluts getting abortions. What are your plans for the holidays?” That kind of kills the holiday spirit. (see #1)

3. Don’t go near the potato chip bowl.

4. Don’t go spastic if someone says “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Birth Jesus Day.” There are multiple holidays in this month and multiple belief systems and see #1.

5. Don’t make a face if you don’t like your secret Santa present. Just be thankful someone gave you something and it wasn’t a venereal disease.

6. Wash your hands frequently.

Anyone else have some tips they’d like add?

Speaker7 politely thanks you for visiting her blog and reading her writing. She is a member of Nano Poblano Team during this month of writing daily pfffttttt…..Speaking of pffttttt, Speaker7 is looking for post ideas so if you got ’em, share ’em. 

The Cyrus-versy™

I am commenting on the Miley Cyrus controversy because I’m very concerned.

About my page views.

They’re low.

By now, you are aware that Miley Cyrus twerked and gene-simmonsed her way through a performance of her hit song “Mediocre Pop Song.”

If you’re not aware, it looked like this:

Like many, I was shocked. Shocked that the Video Music Awards was actually still a thing and that humans actually watched.

And then I saw that the performance became a news story and real-live journalists were talking about it. Even that Mika Brzezezzezzzzzzzzzzazzzzzzskii who famously tried to burn a story about Paris Hilton’s release from jail because she deemed it “trivial.”

Parent bloggers or Ploggers™ were up in arms over the performance and wondered if their children would view their Hannah Montana vibrating toothbrushes in a different way.  And zombies…well the zombies just said “BRAAIINNSSSS.”

Why has this performance gained so much traction? When you break it down, it really is the story of a young commodity trying to break out of her target market into a new synergized market share. A story as old as time.

And yet here I was doing this in Adobe Illustrator:

See, it looks like Miley is on the receiving end of a fart in the face.

What did it all mean?

Later in the performance, Alan Thicke’s semen creation came out to ruin Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Get It Up” whilst Miley poked at his privates with a giant foam finger. If I didn’t know better, I would have pegged the performance a brilliant parody of what passes for “sexXy” in American society. In case you didn’t know, this is sexXy:

I don’t know how this any less foolish than Madonna kissing a female Gremlin birthed out of Lady Gaga’s robotic birth canal or Katy Perry dressed as a skunk spraying whipped cream from her anal cavity.

As an aside, please make both happen for next year’s VMAs.

But I think we’ve lost sight of the real issue and that is, both songs really sucked. I mean, what the fuck, America. Get better musical taste and this would not happen. So I blame you.

All of you. Even Donald Trump.

A Poke from Facebook

 

Dearest Reader: Speaker7 is attempting to write a post every day in November so she doesn’t have to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Is it seriously still November? 

Reason #34 Why I Will Never Visit Florida

Some questions remain about why a naked man on a Miami causeway tried to rip flesh off another man’s face, according to today’s Miami Herald.

I’m not sure…could that headline be a little bit of an understatement? Maybe. One naked guy attacked another naked man on the MacArthur Causeway, and proceeded to chew his face. Passing motorists tried to get him to stop by honking and yelling things like “Stop!” and “What the fuck am I looking at right now? Did I just wander onto the Walking Dead set?”

A police officer arrived and ordered the man off. A passing bicyclist described the scene like this: “The guy just stood, his head up like that, with pieces of flesh in his mouth. And he growled.”

So yes, I think there might be a few questions that need to be answered.

Police theorized that the attacker suffered from cocaine psychosis, which causes the body to bake internally and would explain why he was naked.

Okay.

But what about the face-eating? I think, and I feel comfortable speaking for the entire world here, we are a little more concerned about the face-eating part. If I passed by a naked person biting into the face of another naked person, my first thought would not be “Oh my god! They’re naked! The horror! I feel shame for them.”

No. It would be more “Oh my god! That guy is eating that guy’s face!?!”

You see? I didn’t even mention the naked part.

The face-eating. Yes, that’s what we would like explained, and please, let it be an explanation that does not use the word “zombie”.

I may be in the minority here, but I am not a fan of zombies. I don’t like the guttural moaning, the dirty fingernails, the shuffling, the human-eating, the decaying flesh. I don’t like how they seem to find each other and then find your house, and they start to swarm around your front window and beat on the glass and you see a mouse scurry out of the mouth of one and you know they’re seconds away from getting inside and you only have a spatula to protect yourself.

See? This looks terrible. And he even has guns. I don’t have guns. I have a spatula, and it’s not even a high-end Williams-Sonoma spatula, it’s a plastic Dollar Store spatula. I’m totally screwed.

I don’t know if I want to wait the requisite six to eight weeks for the attacker’s autopsy report. I’d rather start preparing myself now.

And thus I present Speaker7’s Zombie Apocalypse-avoiding Checklist™*.

1. Purchase high-end pointy spatulas.

2. Never go to Florida.

3. Remain ignorant of everything at all times.

*This works in 98 percent of all emergency situations with the exception of tornadoes. For tornado preparedness change #2 to Never go to Kansas.

What’s Ur Look?

I bet you did not know this about me, but I am a girly girl thru & thru whether I’m heading 2 school or a party, I’m always sure 2 be perfectly turned out. I learned this from taking the geoGIRL Look Finder quiz.

Apparently what U choose to be in the future has a direct bearing on the type of feather mascara U should glob onto Ur eyelashes. These are the professions currently open to women: marine biologist; artist, or maybe fashion designer, or maybe rock star; president of the Younited States; and an elementary school teacher. I, of course, picked middle-aged marketer attempting desperately to sound like a tween girl by never using the word “you” and zombifying the nation’s youth.

What’s Ur look?

geoGIRL is a make-up line designed for girls ages 8 to 12, and contains anti-aging elements because let’s face it, by 8 a girl begins to look a little haggard :(. But it’s more than that–it’s also about joining 2-gether to save the planet one bronzer at a time. See the packaging is recyclable so it’s almost as good as the time when young girls did not purchase make up created exclusively for them ;).

Rather than wasting time reading, playing a sport or waiting for puberty, a third-grader can spend her time learning how to blend flavors of lip gloss together to create a taste sensation almost like a fruit parfait ¦0?!! It even has 2NTE lip treatment, a goodnight kiss for lips, so U don’t wake up the next morning with dried lips and scare the guy next to U….er….teddy bear next to U.

I think my favorite part might be the exclusive geoGIRL music video, showing young children with globs of blue eyeshadow.

For your enjoyment:

Miraculously Miraculous

Christmas is a time of miraculous miracles that miraculously mystify through their miraculousness.

The Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus who grew up and now lives forever at the North Pole under the moniker “Santa Claus.”

A hefty bag gave birth to many tiny hefty bags that were assembled together into a life size replica of Bo, the White House First Dog.

credit: Washington Post

And the Today show had a feature on how retailers are thrilled by the joy people spread through the firing of bullets, the stabbing of knives and the trampling of feet to obtain products that people can wear on their feet while they fire guns, stab and trample on others.

I guess some new sneakers came out, and they supposedly turn you into Michael Jordan when you wear them or maybe Lil Bow Wow, who starred in the movie Like Mike about a boy who finds a pair of old sneakers that make him play basketball like Michael Jordan. That–or they look cool so that’s why someone stabbed that guy seven times to get ahead of him in the line outside the mall.

Nike was none too happy (but kind of secretly happy) that people were literally trampling over toddlers to jam their feet into $180 shoes. They released this statement:

But there is a silver lining in all the attempted murdering–consumer confidence is up, people are spending and they are buying smart, says some smiling Today show guy in Florida. He smiles through his spiel about the tension people can feel when a gun suddenly goes off in a crowded sporting goods store before segueing into how people are using their trigger fingers to diddle their smart phones looking for the best deals and best ways to murder.

Christmas.

Around 25 percent of the population started buying their tangible displays of love this week, the Today show guy statisticizes, and 54 percent surveyed said that 80 percent of news stories that contain 63 percent of statistics make them sound 103 percent more scientific than stories that use less than 12 percent of surveys and 3 percent of reporting.

Shopping so close to the climax of the consumerism orgy fills Sheila Lopez with the Christmas spirit.

“I have to buy clothes,” she says in a spirited monotone befitting of one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

Sheila then goes and bites the face of the nearest person carrying a Nike bag containing Air Jordans.

Miraculous.

The Pulse of Hair

Today is a day of celebrating discoveries.

I’m not talking about Chris Columbus arriving in Boston on the Mayflower to dump tea on the top of Plymouth Rock and then going on to direct Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire (reference: Palin, S. Going Rogue: An American Life.).

I’m talking about the latest hair craze that is tying the world into knots of frenzied excitement.

What is it? BRAINSSSSSSSS.

Sorry, I’m became a bit of a zombie there for a second, but I am watching the Today show so that is understandable.

What is it? BRAIDSSSSSSSS.

It’s made it’s way from the silver screen to the small screen to everywhere in between like Wendy from Wendy’s, braided rugs, this:

Columbus discovers the braid keeps his hair from entangling in hot tea at the Boston Tea Party Massacre of 1213 in Philadelphia.

I never really thought the braid left, but apparently the braid had mixed itself up with hemp and been in rehab until recently.

But now “the word on the runway is that the braid is back” according to Ann Curry.

Some old man says he’s seen it on the streets, on the red carpet. It even formed a rubber band. “Wow this is really cute,” he says using very appropriate language for an elder gentlemen of means.

Apparently the new braid is “edgy.” It’s not like the subdued braids worn by Pippi Longstocking.

It’s now no longer a question of who’s doing braids, it’s who isn’t, some random interviewee states. Has this really been weighing on people’s minds? Has anyone here reading this blog ever asked anyone in their life “Are you doing braids?” and now suddenly you have to change that question to “Are you not doing braids?” Could this just be summed up by looking at the person’s hair? So many questions. I feel all tangled (do you see what I did there? Yeah I don’t either).

This same random interviewee says the new and improved braid is loose and undone and “very much on the pulse of what’s going on in hair.” Well now at least someone is making sense in this segment.

The old man is back saying he opened up a braid bar in his salon and business is “gang busters.” It may also be really cute.

Braids give women freedom some random person says. They are the Emancipation Proclamation of hairstyles.

Now an US Weekly correspondent will “teach” us something about hair. This will become the norm once the public school system is completely decimated.

We see it on the tennis courts, the runway, celebrities, she lectures. “This is really a twist on the classic braid.”

I’m still not sure I get it….is the new braid different from the old braid? Hmmm I’m not sure the point has been made the 700 times it’s been said in this 5 minute segment.

Unlike neon and skinny jeans, the teacher teaches, the old and fat can get in on this action too. (I’m paraphrasing, but that is essentially what she said and I’ve learned so much). All the women of the world will be woven and intermingled together by the strands of their hair much in the same way plastic and other debris form giant garbage patches in the oceans.

So thank you Chris Columbus for “discovering” the Bahamas that eventually led to Europeans taking over North America and finally to the founding of the Today show and BRAINSSSSSSSS.