Dinosaurs were actually rather talented

'poligies for size
Here is a slightly bigger version.
(Sun 4th Feb 2007, 19:05, More)

He's well 'ard

(Thu 21st Dec 2006, 20:26, More)

» School Trips

She appreciated the arts
Back when I was at high school in the US, our school orchestra wanted to go on a week-long school trip to Europe. As they were a bit short of cash, they decided to ask local businesses to sponsor them in return for advertisement on the back of the official trip T-shirt.

One day, a women in her forties calls in and says she'd like to sponsor the school orchestra. My violinist friend meets her and collects $200. "What's the name of your business?"

"Beulah's Raw Sex."

Yep, she's a hooker.

The music teacher forced them to print the name backwards, "Xes war s'halueb", but the official school trip shirts still advertised her services on their European tour.

And that's the story of how our orchestra's school trip was sponsored by a prostitute.
(Sat 9th Dec 2006, 2:05, More)

» Ripped Off

Flake
Picture this day from my childhood: it's a sweltering hot day and my brother and I are playing in the yard. Needless to say, it's a very welcome relief when an ice-cream truck drives up and promptly parks across the street from us. I'm six, my brother's four, it's fucking hot: we want ice cream. After some begging, my mum gets her wallet out, but the smallest note she can find is a $20. Oh well, surely the ice cream man can make change. She gives us the note and we run across the street to the van.

I don't like anything on the menu, but my brother wants an ice lolly. How much? "One dollar."

My brother hands the driver the twenty my mum had given him. "Thanks," says the man, and promptly drives away, ripping a four-year-old off for nineteen dollars.

Bastard.
(Thu 15th Feb 2007, 23:52, More)

» Other people's diaries

The foolishness of homicidal youth
When I was eight years old, my teacher required everyone in class to keep a journal. Being eight, I viciously hated not only the teacher, but also a lot of my classmates. The teacher promised she would never read the journals, so over the course of the year I filled two notebooks with:

-- Several page long rants along the lines of "I hate Emily/Ben/the teacher and I wish she would die by falling into a vat of acid ha ha ha"
-- Drawings of elaborate "death machines" involving lots of cogs and axes
-- Drawings of people I hated being killed in various ways, with captions like "Rachel faces the justice... OF DEATH"
-- A long, illustrated story in which people I hated were killed in various ways
-- The pièce de résistance, a story in which my teacher hunted down various high-ranking government officials, brutally killed them and ate their body parts, including crudely-spelled genitalia

If I'd written all this at home, it would probably be okay, but we would write at these journals every day in class. Furthermore, when we were finished writing, the teacher would collect all the journals and keep them in a cabinet right in the classroom. However, since she'd promised she'd never read them, it never occurred to me to be careful about what I wrote at all.

Several years later, I told someone about the journals, and they laughed and replied, "Oh, she probably read it anyway." Shit! I may have been a hateful child, but I was still a trusting one. I now live in fear that one day the teacher will find me again and reveal me as a sick fuck.

Then again, if she had read it I would probably still be in therapy.
(Thu 1st Feb 2007, 17:22, More)

» Strict Parents

Banned from lunch
When I was about 13, I was friends with a girl who was quite smart and taking several advanced classes, including a math class at the nearby high school. One day she was sitting at my lunch table, and I realised that she hadn't hadp any lunch for the past week, so I asked if she'd forgotten it.

"Oh, no," she said. "I got a B+ in English last quarter, so my parents are taking away lunch."

We lost touch when we went to different high schools, so I never found out what her parents would have done to her if she ever failed a class. However, it definitely makes me grateful that I have nice, normal parents, rather than psychotic overachieving ones who starve their kids if they don't get good grades.
(Sat 10th Mar 2007, 14:40, More)

» Best Graffiti Ever

War
There are a few stickers on lampposts around town saying, "If war is the answer, it must be a very stupid question."

I like to add "What band recorded the 1970s hits 'Low Rider' and 'Why Can't We Be Friends?'" to the end of them.
(Mon 7th May 2007, 16:12, More)