Friday Fill-Ins ~ Giveaways, Gardening and Gorgeous Brothers :-)

 

And…here we go!

1. Apples are to oranges as a $1000 gift card to Amazon.com is to a $10 gift certificate to the bait and tackle shop.

2. Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki) is the hot brother,  and that’s all I have to say about that.

3. I think I hear that train a ‘comin’, it’s comin’ round that bend…  should I get off this track or lay down and just give in?

4. Grab the checkered flag. (It’s Indy 500 season!  Yay!!!) 

5. Do what you want to do, but make sure you want to do what I say.

6. The hair-cutting demon was chasing me with ginormous scissors, and behind him was a Radio Flyer wagon; in the wagon was a bucket filled with ooey-gooey ABC chewing gum… then I woke up… and found gum in my hair?  AHHHHH!!!! 

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to finishing up Hauntedby Chuck Palahniuk, tomorrow my plans include visiting the Presbyterian Church’s annual perennial plant sale, maybe do some garage-saling, grab some breakfast with Mags at the White House, go through all of everyone’s clothes and pack up stuff for Goodwill, and sometime, in all that, finish up Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford and Sunday, I want to go to church in the morning, enjoy a nice, as yet unplanned, Mother’s Day dinner, call my momma to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, and write the review for Hotel!

Don’t forget!  I’m giving away my copy of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford!  Click here for all the details and make sure to check out my review of Hotel, it’ll be posted on May 11th.

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VVW ~ Kids Say the Darnedest Things!

Hello and Happy Hump Day!  Woo-Hoo!  And who doesn’t like a good hump?  Today’s Viral Video Wednesday has a few new things about it.  First, we have a button!  WooT!  I’ve got a few other pics to turn into buttons, and if you’ve got one, lay it on me! 🙂  Second, if you look at the bottom of the picture header of this blog, you’ll see a Viral Video Wednesday tab.  I’ll be keeping the current week’s VVW there, and you can add your blog in the comments so I can check out your VVW posts, too 🙂  The third change to VVW is, at the end of my post and on the VVW page, I’ll let you know what the subject of next week’s VVW so you’ll have a week to hunt down some fabulous vid clips for your own VVW posts 😀

And now, on with the vids!

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The famous comedian W.C. Fields once said, “Never work with children or animals” and the reason for his sentiment is clear:  They will upstage you and steal all the laughs!  If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with the pastor at the carry-in, only to be interrupted by your four-year-old, “Mommy, Pastor Bill does TOO have a watch… See!  It’s right there on his arm!  Pastor Bill, did you buy that at the dollar store with the $3 Mommy put in the offering last week?” then you KNOW that kids can chime in was some really hilarious stuff every now and then.  So this week’s VVW is dedicated to all those darned funny things the little whipper-snappers say!

Poor little Colin suffers from two things endemic to childhood…  Like most children, he absolutely adores being the star of the home movies, and he struggles with the correct pronunciation of some words more than others.

I first saw the following video on “The Ellen Degeneres Show”  It’s always funny to watch a child when they realize where they’ve gone wrong in a conversation… that little “A-ha” moment when they take one step closer to understanding their world.  

The next video brought back memories of my oldest daughter’s trips to the dentist.  An utter dentophobic, she had to be given the red liquid sedative (Versed) AND the piggy-nose (nitrous oxide) to get her into the chair, then she had to have a TV headset playing Powerpuff Girls to keep her mind occupied while the dentist did anything inside her mouth.  Even routine teeth cleanings could disolve into a puddle of tears on the 5 foot overstuffed Pooh Bear in the waiting room.  So I completely understand David’s behavior.

What do you get when have an adorable little boy with big brown eyes telling Knock! Knock! jokes? Well… I have girls, so maybe that’s why I never got this…

And I think I’ll end here with the following video.  Before you slip that DVD of Jackass Unlimited into the DVD player, remember that little pitcher sitting next to you is taking it all in, and will recount the whole scene to Pastor Bill at the Mother’s Day after-service dinner a couple weeks from now.

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Do you have a favorite kid vid?  share it with me in the comments, or better yet, post your own Viral Video Wednesday “Kids Say the Darnedest Things!” at your blog and leave the link in the comments so I can visit!

Next week’s Viral Video Wednesday topic:  Stalkers

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

Title: Skeleton Crew

Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Signet
ISBN:0451168615

Publication Date: 1986

Skeleton Crew is a collection of 22 stories.  Most are short stories, with the exception of 2 poems and the novella, “The Mist.”  Like most collections, some of the book’s stories are better than others, two of which have been translated to film.

Aside from the Introduction, the book begins with “The Mist“.  This novella is the whole reason I picked up this book.  It has been recently made into a movie, also titled “The Mist.”  In my opinion, with the exception a few other entries, this is the only story that is worth reading in this book.  Since the movie’s release, “The Mist” is now in print as a stand alone novel. 

This story begins in the aftermath of a hundred-year storm that has left residents without power and a hefty chore of cleaning up.  Steff Drayton asks her husband, David, to run into town to get a few items on her grocery list.  David takes his son, Billy, with him along with his neighbor, Brent Norton, with whom he had had a recent court case that left both men with hard feelings toward one another.  As he gets ready to take off, Drayton takes one last look out on the lake where a bizarre mist has been rolling in from the direction of a nearby military base.

In town, the three enter the Federal Foods Supermarket.  But before they can get their shopping done, all Hell breaks loose… literally.  Stuck inside the store with several area residents and summer tourists, Drayton fights to keep his son and fellow shoppers calm and safe while huge tentacled beasts, ginormous flying bugs and spiders, and pteradactyl-type monsters loom on the other side of the Federal Food’s plate glass windows. 

While beasties troll outside, the breakdown of society occurs inside when Mrs. Carmody, area mystic and resident crackpot, begins spewing Apocalyptic references and claims only the human sacrifice of little, innocent Billy will keep them safe.  Drayton and a handful of others realize it’s no more safe inside than out, and decide to make a daring escape.  But is there any world left out there to go to?

The Monkey is another worthy-to-read story.  It is about a small boy finding a toy monkey that claps the cymbals permanently attatched to his simean paws when wound.  But when he winds it, he discovers it doesn’t work.  Later, when it spontaneously claps and chirps to life, young Hal is frightened.  But when he finds out that, at the exact moment it began to play, his babysitter died, he becomes terrified and throws it back in the closet.  But the monkey likes Hal.  He wants to stay with Hal.  The monkey refuses to stay gone, even after he’s given to the junk man and later thrown down a well, all the while clapping his symbols and taking lives, just to return, once more, to the boy he stalks.   I will never buy one of these monkies after reading this… never ever ever!

The second story that was turned into movie magic is The Raft; it was one of the segment stories  in the second Creepshow movie.  I still remember, to this day, this one scared the bejesus out of me.  I went to summer camp, which had the wooden deck floating in the middle of the pond, just like in the story.  I was so excited when I came across the written story in this book.  Basically, it’s the story of 2 couples, over-sexed college students, who decide to take a forbidden swim in the lakem which is closed for the season.  As their swimming out to the anchored deck, what appears to be an oil slick begins to float towards them.  It is no oil slick… it is some bizarre carnivorous floating monster, stalking the lovers like prey.

Other stories worth honorable mention are: Mrs. Todd’s Shorcut (her obsession with finding the fastest shortcut would stymie Einstein), The Jaunt (you can teleport to Mars, just don’t do it conscious).

Paranoid:  A Chant is actually a poem, but I thought it was pretty cool.  So I will end this review with a quote from it:

“Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles

of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening

For phone calls through the cheep wood with

chrome ears.I tell you, man, I hear.”