Phoebe and I designed and carved this jack-o-lantern together. I like it.

Welcome to the October Just Posts, the latest edition of our monthly round-up of blog posts on topics of social justice. Holly and I appreciate your continued support.

• Alejna, at Collecting Tokens, with: Celebrating 5+ Years of Marriage in Massachusetts
• Em, at Social Justice Soapbox, with: Venting
• Emily, at Wheels on the Bus, with: Glamorous
• Erika, at Be Gay About It, with: Stuffings or No Stuffings, We’re Getting Some Kids and President Obama Fierce Advocate of Rousing Speeches and the Status Quo
• Fatboyfat, at Make Lard History, with: Inverted Reality
• flutter, at by flutter, with: forgiveness
• GirlGriot, at If You Want Kin You Must Plant Kin, with: Tall and Tan, Young and Lovely and Attention White Folks
• Hedgie, at Princess Hedgehog Chronicles, guestposting at Talkin’ with the Teenie, with: The Unbearable Tenderness of Boys
• Holly, at Cold Spaghetti, with: October Awareness and Get It? Got It? Good.
• Kitty, at The Show Must Go On, with: Working the Cracks
• Kristina, at Everyday Public Relations, with: Does Sensationalism Help or Hurt Conservation?
• Magpie, at Magpie Musing, with: Meat
• Mary, at the Eleventh, with: Ma: Little Bigot On the Prairie
• Mary Beth, at Cats…Books…Life is Good, with: Are We Losing Our Humanity?
• Meagan, at Hades Arrow, with Frozen
• Megan, at Missing in Iraq, with: Uncensored II
• thordora, at Spin Me I Pulsate, with: In Health there is Freedom, Health is the First of all Liberities

This month’s nominators:

• Alejna
• Emily
• Holly
• Meagan

If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.

It’s the 5th of November. Which makes me remember some things about remembering.

I’m fascinated by memory, and clearly I’m not alone, judging from the large number of movies, stories, songs and such that feature themes of memory. Or loss of memory. Here’s a ThThTh list of some things I can remember:

Some memory-related things that come to mind

• The poem about Guy Fawkes day:
  

  Remember, remember the fifth of November,
  The gunpowder treason and plot,
  I know of no reason
  Why the gunpowder treason
  Should ever be forgot.

• remember the Alamo!
• mnemonic devices: phrases, poems or other sayings used to aid the memory for specific facts, such as:
  • Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet: the order of colors in the rainbow)
  • homes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior: i.e. the Great Lakes)

  (more mnemonic devices here)



• string tied around a finger: if you need to remember something, you can tie a string around your finger as a reminder that there was something you were supposed to remember. This relies on you being able to remember what it was that you hoped to remember.
• souvenir: a keepsake or memento, typically from a visit to a place to which one has travelled. From the French verb souvenir, “to remember”
• memento: an object kept to remember a time, place or event. From the latin remember:
  

  L. memento “remember,” imperative of meminisse “to remember,” a reduplicated form, related to mens “mind.” Meaning “reminder, warning” is from 1582; sense of “keepsake” is first recorded 1768. (from etymology online)

• Memento (2000): a movie about a man who loses his ability to form new memories.
• The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): a movie in which people can undergo a process of selective memory erasure.
• Chester Tate: A character on the 70s TV show Soap who spends several episodes with amnesia.
• “Tabula Rasa,” a Buffy episode: A spell gone awry causes the main characters to forget who they are. Hilarity ensues. (Seriously, it’s a really fun, funny episode.)
• “The Forget me Knot,” an episode of The Avengers in which Emma Peel forgets who she is. (This was Diana Rigg’s last episode on the series.)
• “Forget Me Not,” an amnesia episode of Gilligan’s Island (Okay, I didn’t actually remember this one, guessed that there was an amnesia episode.)
• For that matter, there are probably plenty of episodes from sci-fi shows like those in the Star Trek and Star Gate universes.
• The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996): Geena Davis plays an amnesiac ex-spy
• The Bourne Identity (2002): Matt Damon plays an amnesiac ex-spy
• Who am I?/Wo shi shei (1998): Jackie Chan plays an amnesiac spy.
• Total Recall (1990) Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a spy whose memories were re-written
• lots more movies and shows with a memory (or loss of memory) theme can be found here:
• “I Don’t Remember,” a song by Peter Gabriel
  

  I don’t remember, I don’t recall
  I got no memory of anything at all

• “I can’t forget,” a song by Leonard Cohen. I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.
• “Only a Memory,” a song by the Smithereens
• The Persistence of Memory: famous Salvador Dalí painting with melting watches
• memory: a card game also known by the name “concentration”
• memory: a computer component for storing data



• Remember when Chris Farley interviewed people? Remember how he interviewed Paul McCartney? That was awesome.
  

  Chris Farley: You remember when you were with the Beatles?
  Paul McCartney: Yes.
  Chris Farley: That was awesome.

Theo improves his web surfing skills.

You’ll be happy to know that I’ve solved the Mystery of the Feed Reader Mess. I hate to spoil the plot for those of you who haven’t read all about it, but it turns out that the problem was alien frog creatures.

(In case it isn’t clear to you, I am setting the bar very low with this NaBloPoMo business.)

Theo has yet to master the finer points of web surfing.

Yo, dudes! Can anyone tell me what happened to Google reader? At some point in the last few weeks, it stopped displaying blogs in folders, and I can’t make sense of the big jumble of unread posts that are accumulating. I keep popping over, realizing that it’s all a big mess, stabbing at a few unread posts, and then wandering off again. I think i may have to move along yet another feed reader, or revert to Safari. Is there some way to fix Google reader? What are other people using these days for a feed reader?

——-

In other news, Holly and I are putting together the October Just Posts, which we’ll put up in a few days. (Possibly Friday.) If you read and/or wrote any posts on topics of social justice in the month of October, we’d love to include them in our roundtable. We need your help to keep the Just Posts alive!

Want to learn more? Check our the JP info pages here or there.

For those of you new to the study of pants, it may be helpful to learn a few key terms commonly used by the field’s top panthropologists. As an exercise, please use one of the following words in a sentence.

pantipathy: a strong aversion to pants
pantiquity: bloomers of old
pantithesis: the opposite of pants
pantidote: a remedy for really ugly pants
pantidisestablishmentarianism: a fierce opposition to going shopping for pants
pantagonize: to cause annoyance by mocking someone’s ugly pants
pantepenultimate: the pants you wear when you are almost, but not quite, down to your last pair of clean pants.
pantecedent: the pants you wore yesterday
pantennae: trouser-shaped appendages atop the head (see also pantlers)
panterior: the front side of one’s pants
pantathema: really, really ugly pants
panthem: a song of pants celebration. PANTS!
panthology: a collection of short pants
panthrax: an infectious disease that makes one’s pants fit poorly
panthropormorphism: ascribing properties of pants to objects or creatures
pantlers: the horns atop the head of a pantelope
pantomime: the trousers of a mime

A pair of pantennae.

This load of pants was for a Monday Mission, hosted by Painted Maypants. This week’s assignment was to write a post in the form of a vocabulary list.

Hellfire and dalmatian.

As I mentioned, Phoebe wanted to be a firefighter for Halloween this year. Her costume turned out to be a cinch. She’d gotten a freebie fire hat at a recent daycare field trip to the firestation, and then our daycare provider had some other firefighter costume gear to lend us. A totally free costume.

Seeing as he doesn’t yet have a say in the matter, I figured I would dress Theo to go along with Phoebe’s firefighter. (As you may have noticed, I’m all about going with themes.) At first, I thought, “Theo can be a fire!” As I thought about the costume, however, I realized that there was a good chance that he would end up looking like a baby on fire. Um…perhaps a tad more disturbing than I had in mind.

So, the plan was to go with a dalmatian (the traditional firehouse dog).

For the pre-Halloween party on Tuesday, I hadn’t managed to get a dalmatian costume together. Theo went as a (very cute, and still black and white spotted) cow, instead. On Wednesday, I stopped by a used children’s store (where they sell used things for children, not actual used children). I had plans to get some white clothes, a white hoodie if possible, to which I would affix black spots, a tail, and some ears.

As it happened, the store had a rack of Halloween costumes. Which were additionally marked down. And there was a dalmatian costume. In Theo’s size. For $4.00. Suddenly, the whole home-made costume idea seemed like it would be a big ordeal.

Apparently, though, I still had a hankering for assembling a Halloween costume, because I decided to put together a costume for myself. I would be the fire to go along with the theme. I wore a red shirt layered over an orange shirt, along with an orange and red swirly-patterned shawl that I happened to have picked up for 1 euro at a Sevilla flea market. I fashioned a hat out of fleece left over from Theo’s carrot costume from last year, and attached flames of red and orange tissue paper to it with staples. (I was in a hurry. I made the hat this afternoon while Theo napped.)

I was quite pleased with the end result, especially considering that I bought nothing new to make my costume.

Of course, wearing this hat around our neighborhood reminded me of something: the fact that I have no dignity.

John, on the other hand, has some. He totally ignored my suggestion of a costume for him. Because you know what would have gone really well with both the firefighter and the dog costumes? A fire hydrant.

It’s that time of year again: The time when, even though I am overcommitted with work and family obligations and have been totally slacking off in the the blogging department, wow did this sentence get too long for me to even pick up where I left off before I started the parenthetical. I should really eat breakfast and get ready for work. Do you ever feel like you have trouble finishing things? It’s like that time when I started to put on my pants when the doorbell rang and I…

Oh, right.

So, it’s the time when I feel compelled to sign on to blog every day for a month. (Or at least, I have felt so-compelled twice before.)

I have yet to put my link in the NaBloPoMo blogroll, though I plan to today or tomorrow. But first, I wonder if I could have your help. You see, new this year, we can select categories for our blogs. Two categories, even. From among those on this list:

1. Crafts
2. Humor
3. Entertainment
4. Education
5. Shopping
6. Health
7. Parenting
8. Politics
9. Religion/Faith
10. Sex
11. Hobbies
12. Medical
13. Photography
14. Cooking/Food
15. Psychotic Ranting/Anonymous Foaming
16. General

So, if you had to pick two from that list to describe this place, I’m guessing you wouldn’t pick Sex and Religion/Faith. Which two would you pick to describe this place?

If you have a blog of your own, which two would you pick for yours?

Well, it wasn’t a bar. More of a community center. (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere, though. Maybe involving a cow tipping.)

Phoebe is one cool looking fire fighter.

And I defy you to find a cuter cow.

(Theo may get to be a dalmatian on Saturday, but I haven’t gotten his costume together. I had this here cow on hand.)