The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

The TV soundtracks to How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Horton Hears a Who are in the iTunes store.

On December 10, I placed an order through Amazon that included three items from other vendors selling through Amazon. Two of these were gifts for Tom, one of them was a gift for my mom.

We know what happened with one of the items- I recieved an email from the seller a few days later apologizing for being out of stock in the item and offering me a refund, which hit my bank account shortly thereafter. Great.

I received a shipping notification from the seller of the gift for Mom. It supposedly shipped December 10. Right away! What Service! Except, not. The USPS says they got the billing information on December 13, and that’s the last info they have for that tracking number. So it looks like the package was never actually picked up.

As for the other gift for Tom? All I know is that my debit card was charged for it. I never received a shipping notification. I emailed the seller and got no response. I’ll call over there today, but I’m not hopeful.

The moral of the story? Third party retailers on Amazon SUCK.

If I don’t get the stuff I ordered by Christmas, I’ll post the names of the sellers.

By the way, have I mentioned how REALLY FREAKIN’ COLD it is here?

For those of you with WordPress blogs subjected to the ravages of comment spam, I highly recommend this plugin. It works with Wordpress 1.2 and I’m told it will also work with the current alphas of WP1.3.

The short version of how it works is that when you press the button to submit the comment, a javascript is loaded that calculates a secret code (md5 hash, for you geeks). When the hash gets passed through the form and it matches what the system thinks it should be, the comment goes through and you don’t notice anything different. If you’re submitting a comment through a web browser, like any normal non-spamming user would, this isn’t a problem as long as javascript is enabled.

But if you’re submitting directly to the wp-comments-post.php script, like spammers do, you never load the form, which means you never load the javascript, which means the system rejects the comment, and then loads Google News into your spamming client a few times before giving you a nasty message.

I’m sure spammers will find a way around this eventually (because they are slime and are out to destroy the Internet), but since installing this 2 days ago, I am getting ZERO comment spam. I used to download 40 or so spam comment notifications in a day. W00t!

Just wanted to plug a spiffy item that might be a good gift for women who are hard to shop for- I picked up a pair of Rosie Tosies for my grandma today. Since Grandma has had knee replacement surgeries in the last couple of years, I thought it might be nice to get her some stuff to pamper her feet and legs, so with the Rosie Tosies I’m also giving her some minty soothing foot and leg lotion which I got from The Fabulous Lynne.

(And aren’t you glad the vagina post is no longer at the top of the page?)

Go congratulate Monkey Boy on his engagement!

Yay, Monkey Boy!

I found a link over on Dave Barry’s blog to a woman who paints, but her medium is menstrual blood. My initial reaction was to be a little weirded out, but then I considered that some more, and the reactions of the commenters at Barry’s blog, and I came to a different conclusion.

It’s just blood, people. It’s not any different than the blood that comes out of your finger if you cut it. Hell, Guinness scratched my thumb today with his claws, which are on his feet, which had been out running around in the dirt for a couple of hours, and my first reaction was to stick my thumb in my mouth. The bleeding that happens when the uterus sloughs off a layer of tissue is no different. In fact, since the vagina is a self-cleaning part of the body as long as one showers regularly, menstrual blood is less gross than the blood you’d get from elsewhere. I mean, I wouldn’t go making art out of it personally, but that’s mostly because I don’t particularly relish the idea of blood to begin with, much less all the effort involved in storing it in a sanitary manner.

I’m not trying to be all militant or anything. I don’t walk around talking about the state of my cycle to everyone I meet- I don’t think my coworkers need to ponder the status of my vagina. I just don’t think that the female reproductive system is anything to be grossed out with, and I think it’s pretty sad that there are still people in 2004 who think the vagina is some dirty, gross thing that turns the stomach. And if it takes menstrual-blood paintings to point that out, well, then more power to Vanessa Tiegs.

UPDATE: I am amused to report that my comment at Dave Barry’s blog, which consisted more or less of the middle paragraph of this entry, was deleted by his webmaster. Apparently the suggestion that the vagina is not disgusting is offensive to Judi. *sigh*

I’ve got a new comment-spam blocking plugin working. You have to have javascript enabled in order to be able to comment now, and drop me an email at tiff-at-this domain right here if you notice anything weird happening, like multiple instances of Google News spawning on your computer.

My Christmas shopping is DONE!

DONE DONE DONE!!

Guinness, on the other hand, still needs to find a present for his Uncle Ben. I keep telling him he can’t get Uncle Ben a razor just because he wants to be the only furry one.

You guys did well in the song meme, and got all the ones I could reasonably have expected you to get. Here are the answers to the others:

14. In the wrong parade, the tickertape, the speeding motorcade, there’s no celebration: New Invisible Joy, “Figure Study (Lesson One)” (could be “in the long parade,” I didn’t look it up)
16. I’m gonna curse the sky, hit the ground, build it up and tear it back down…: The Clarks, “Born Too Late”
17. Always a horrid pest to her friends, ah look at her go: New Invisible Joy, “New Orleans”
19. I go to work, to earn my pay, all I want’s a woman that’ll do what I say: Johnny Longtorso, “Skeet Kootin BeBop RoSoCoFu”

New Invisible Joy is the Pittsburgh band I occasionally rave about. The Clarks are a Pittsburgh band that has achieved a moderate level of national attention due to the Pittsburgh Diaspora. Johnny Longtorso was a rockabilly band at my college that broke up when three of the members graduated, but not before putting out a CD.

I should write an entry about the ‘torso’s lead singer and his wife sometime… they’ve got an interesting story.