Friends

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/business/media/05mickey.html?_r=2&scp=4&sq=disney&st=cse

remember- he wasnt always so G Rated and safe:

After Mickey’s Makeover, Less Mr. Nice Guy

post some of your favorite outrageous Disney Clips!

OK, I have tried to make this month varied, and so this will be the first (don't know about only) post about my kid.

She is now 10, and has a wicked, twisted sense of humor. She loves word play and sometimes listen to the Sunday morning NPR puzzle; she also digs palindromes. In terms of math, she  finds numerical palindromes and equations in stuff like the display in the digital clock. She blew away her math teacher when she mentioned familiarity with the Fibonacci sequence. I have no clue what it is, so please do not ask me--that's what Wiki is for.

Piano is on hiatus, but she is learning to play the flute. I remember how hard it was to learn how to play clarinet, and though she is going thru similiar struggles, she practices for a long time without my asking her to, which is way cool. When going to sleep she listens to classical or jazz, depending on her mood.

I miss her when she is not around, as she likes to talk about all kinds of stuff. Our favorite thing to do is to snuggle under the blanket right after getting up, in either my bed or hers, and chat about school, the future, music, boys and whatever she happens to think about. 

Then there is the stuff that does not make so happy, like the fact that she whacked off the right half of her bangs a few weeks ago. She said they were in her way, and the scissors were in her hand because she was opening a package *sigh* Sometimes kids really display that lack of frontal lobe development. She also has my temperament, where she does not get mad often, but when she does it can be quite intense. She is also capable of really dirty looks, which I give right back to her and let her know is disrespectful. What was that my parents said about laughing when I had my own offspring?

So that's her. The love of my life, she who grounds me.

Yeah, one of THOSE days.  A day where I stand up and walk through a room and think I'm walking straight but instead I'm tacking off to the left and then I crash into a wall or a sturdy piece of furniture.  So far I've slammed into two doorways, the dining room table, a bookcase and the playground fence. 

I stretched out on the couch after dinner, closed my eyes and felt everything beginning to rotate.  While I was struggling back to a sitting position, I heard EEEEEEeeeeeee in my right ear and then it went completely dead.  Most of my hearing is back, but the fullness remains.  This all adds up an impending attack of vertigo and the only thing for it is to take a hearty dose of meclizine and try to sleep it off.  No post tonight, and I had so much to post about, too!  Here's hoping I'm back to myself tomorrow. 

By the way, did you know another harbinger of vertigo (in my case at least) is lack of concentration?  I was clipping coupons from a circular earlier today and on one page was an ad for some incredibly unflattering mens' trousers.  The brand name, Casual Joe, was in a fancy cursive font and set off in a text box, and I swear to god I thought it read "Camel Toe."  And all I could think was, who in the world would buy Camel Toe pants?

Going to bed now.  *waves*

Hello and welcome to today's issue of snapenews. Thank you all for your continuing support and useful links! Feel free to comment (either below or at snapenews@gmail.com) and let us know how we're doing!

CHALLENGES/CONTESTS
• snupin100 posted Challenge 234: Dancing

TODAY IN FIC

Slash
•A Part of Me by phantomtf (Professor!Snape/Student!Snape, NC-17)

•Clean and Filthy by entrenous88 (Snape/Draco, NC-17)

GRAPHICS/ICONS
•magalud posted some Snape icons

DISCLAIMERS
The warnings listed here are those given by the artist/author/poet. Please pay attention to all ratings and warnings when following links.

We aim to bring you the latest Snape-centric items in the fandom but some might slip through the net! You can help to ensure this doesn't happen by sending us links via e-mail to snapenews@gmail.com). There are submission guidelines in the snapenews user profile, but for the 'Today in' sections we just require the basic title/creator/rating/warnings/link info.

....my journal turns slowly into an Alan-only-place, but that finding here is definitely worth a glimpse my dear friends:
As reported on Leaky and all the other "Potter" sides - earlier today, some footage from the Half-Blood-Prince dvd has appeared on YouTube and was deleted minutes later. But some smart person was quicker.

About 45 sec in the vid you get an fantastic performance from Alan Rickman - as darkness descends upon the castle, you see him standing in the window - shadow and light merge on his face and his eyes say more than 1000 words...simply heartbreaking, oh I love that man and his talent! See I really have a fangirl-moment here...








3 bigger and clearer pictures from user oblivion (page 394) under the cut:
( biiiiig pictures....... )

Being a teen of the 80s, I watched a lot of tv, and remember a lot of commercials. This was one of my favorites, as it is so silly. So here is my tribute to a lost system. For the most part it was terrible, but at least people lived longer and drank less (according to Newsweek, anyway). Tell me if you remember:

Hello and welcome to today's issue of snapenews. Thank you all for your continuing support and useful links! Feel free to comment (either below or at snapenews@gmail.com) and let us know how we're doing!

NEWS/MISCELLANEOUS
• Words On The Wind is a new fanfiction awards site based on 'out-of-the-norm'/paranormal/supernatural fandoms.

COMMUNITIES
• wizard_love, the Valentine’s Day het fest, begins posting Feb 1
• harry_holidays has a sign-up for betas and posted a reminder about deadlines
• quiz_sshg posted answers to the latest challenge: Save Our Snape
• snapelyholidays reminds its participants that there is a weekly left to submit your entries

NEWSLETTER/ARCHIVE UPDATES
• hgss_digest’s Monday update
• The Petulant Poetess’ Snape/Hermione section, Potions Under Duress, has been updated with the following fics, all rated G – PG-13

CHALLENGES/CONTESTS
• less_for_you posted the Halloween challenge reveal

TODAY IN FIC

Gen
• A Brief Exercise in Self-Occulumency by iulia_linnea (Snape, PG-13)
• To The River by schmevil (Snape, Not Rated, warning: implied violence)

Slash
• A Wizard's Love is a Bitter One, by mailroomy, was updated (Snape/Sirius, past Snape/Lucius, R)

DISCLAIMERS
The warnings listed here are those given by the artist/author/poet. Please pay attention to all ratings and warnings when following links.

We aim to bring you the latest Snape-centric items in the fandom but some might slip through the net! You can help to ensure this doesn't happen by sending us links via e-mail to snapenews@gmail.com). There are submission guidelines in the snapenews user profile, but for the 'Today in' sections we just require the basic title/creator/rating/warnings/link info.

So, who's ready for Christmas?  Let's see a show of hands!!

What do you mean you're not in the spirit yet?  C'mon.  There are Christmas lights and displays all over town and Christmas advertising on television and Christmas catalogs arriving every day and even radio stations that are already playing Christmas carols!  Ho, ho, ho!  Yeah, it makes me sick, too.  Zack's been poring through the toy catalogs and it's bringing back Christmas memories.  Not necessarily good memories, but memories nonetheless. 

As a girl, I didn't like dresses or jewelry or frilly things.  I could usually be found outside, wearing jeans and flannel shirts, chasing frogs or digging in mud or climbing trees.  Every year my Christmas list was heavy on craft supplies and stuffed animals and lighter on baby dolls and Barbies, but that never stopped Santa from bringing me girly toys.  It also didn't stop me from destroying them most of the time.  I'll be honest.  I was very hard on my toys, even the ones I liked:

THE CASUALTY LIST

Barbie, Ken, Skipper and the Barbie Country Camper

I thought the Country Camper was awesome and just the thing for sending Barbie and friends on an African safari.  But I also reasoned that Barbie would have trouble maintaining her time-consuming beauty regimen in Tanzania.  Thanks to my mom's pinking shears and a package of barely-diluted grape Kool-Aid, I gave Barbie a punk purple hairstyle.  Except to dye her hair I had to turn her upside down, dunk her into a glass of Kool-Aid and leave her there for a while, so the upper half of her head turned out purple, too.  Ken was a douche and wimped out on the safari.  Skipper and Barbie came to a gruesome end when they made the tragic mistake of parking the Country Camper directly behind the back wheels of our family car.  My brother and I learned some creative new curse words and Ken, in his grief, joined my older brother's WWF: Extreme Mutilation Tour, wrestling the likes of the Six Million Dollar Man, the Lone Ranger, and G.I. Joe, ultimately losing one leg and both arms.

Baby Alive

I cannot believe they are still manufacturing and selling Baby Alive.  Even now I  have nightmares about that doll.  One Christmas morning when I was about six or seven, I remember excitedly unwrapping a huge box; excitedly, that is, until I saw what it was.  Baby Alive.  I carefully removed her from the packaging and stared at her in utter horror:  The awful pink gingham dress and droopy diaper, the deformed-looking legs and cherubic little mouth and her dead, dead eyes.  Included with the doll was a little pink dish and spoon and paper packets of baby food.  My mom patiently explained that I was supposed to mix the food and feed it to Baby Alive and then it would come out in her diaper and I could change her!  And she actually used an excited tone of voice like I was supposed to be thrilled about a crapping little baby doll.  So I gave it a chance.  I mixed up a packet of banana baby food (I can still remember the horrid smell) and stuck the pink spoon in her mouth and was rewarded with a horrifying mechanical grinding NANG NANG NANG NANG noise as her jaws worked away at the mouthful of slime.  I nearly dropped her and ran from the room but I was curious to see what shape the banana slime would be in when it found its way to the diaper.  I was expecting turds.  Boy, was I disappointed.  It was the same slime, only now it was all over her diaper and butt.  My mom then said I should feed the doll some water to wash out the rest of the baby food.  I asked if she wanted to take over, but she declined.  Cleaning up banana slime and banana slime mixed with water got old very fast, so I started experimenting with other foods.  Applesauce worked well, as did pudding.  The peanut butter was a mistake.  It went a little way down her esophagus and then became completely stuck.  All of my efforts to remove the peanut butter blockage were fruitless.  After that, when I tried to feed Baby Alive her standard baby food, it would back up and come pouring out her mouth.  I'm one of the only people who ever killed a Baby Alive.

Snoopy Sno-Cone Maker

Now this was a toy I loved!  It was a hand-cranked snow cone maker that looked like Snoopy's doghouse and, if I'm remembering correctly, the base held a little snowman that dispensed snow cone syrup.  I had so much fun playing with my snow cone maker, even when the ice would get stuck on the grater and I'd peel off parts of my fingertips and knuckles trying to dislodge the ice cube.  I used Dixie bathroom cups instead of paper cones and when we ran out of syrup, we substituted super-sweet Kool-Aid.  All was well for about six months.  I would take out trusty old Snoopy a few times a week, make two or three snow cones and put it back on my dresser.  Then I made a fateful visit to the fancy-schmancy house of one of my school friends.  Her family was so wealthy they had a guest bathroom.  Two bathrooms in ONE HOUSE.  Luxurious!   In this guest bathroom, her mother had a dish of rose-scented soap sheets.  Soap in a sheet!   I picked up one delicate leaf and there was a lovely rose fragrance and the sheet dissolved in a handful of bubbles.  I'd never used anything so decadent and glamorous in my life and I wanted to recreate the experience in my own house where the standard soap was a yellow bar of Dial.   So I had the ingenious idea to take a bar of Ivory soap, add a few squirts of some rose-scented hand lotion and grind the whole mixture in my Snoopy snow cone maker.  I was going to take the resulting fine shavings and fashion them into soap sheets.  No need to tell you that it didn't exactly work out that way.  Once I cleaned the gunk out of the ice shaver and rinsed it (and rinsed it and rinsed it), it still tasted like Ivory soap and roses and I never made snow cones again.  *quiet sob* 

Can you believe I'm not finished?  I could still tell you about my Barbie makeup head and the Toss Across and the Love's Baby Soft gift set, and the absolute worst Christmas gift I ever received (an air freshener), but I want to hear your stories now.

Third (and final) part of my Otaku Fest 2009 picspam!!! Also, click if you missed the first or second part.

Now, we start to the hilarious bathroom signs XD

Men's

Women's

( here be COSPLAYERS XD )

Man, I was kinda sad there was no Sasuke this year... But lo and behold.. a "Sasuko" in timeskip clothes! Wooohooo!!!

Yeah! Nice ending for my Otaky Fest picspam :D

To be fair about my paralyzed reaction to this sort of contact, I had no idea how to deal with boys, despite being about 13 and having almost only male friends. Up until that year (when Gareth noticed I was female), I was...um... I had a singular style, and never had to think about boys beyond how much I enjoyed hanging out with them and playing Ren and Stimpy on Sega Genesis.

In order to draw this comic, I did a little research into bottle-base sidewalks. They were made to illuminate the basements below the city buildings, because NYC is so crammed that it's mostly built up and down. Turns out, there are a TON in downtown Manhattan, where I was a kid. They exist in other cities too, but they aren't that common, anymore. What's really sad is that a lot of them are wearing away-- the prisms busting out and breaking. But look: aren't they fascinatingly beautiful?

I'd love to write a nice long post about my day today, but my computer has other ideas.  I don't know what's wrong with it, but it's been having seizures when confronted with any embedded Flash object, including LJ animated icons.  If I suddenly trail off and disappear in the middle of a sentence, you'll know why.

The weather was gorgeous today but annoying.  It's November.  I'm slowing down for the year.  I want to stay in the house and bake bread and wear big unflattering sweaters and curl up in a chair and read and yawn and nap.  That's hard to do when it's sunny and 75 degrees and everyone is out walking and cycling and jogging and raking leaves and being disgustingly cheerful.  Bah.  

This afternoon we met Russ's family at the Shaw Nature Reserve for a picnic and a day of hiking.  (After almost 20 years, I know Russ's family is my family, too, but that's just an easy way to say it.  Otherwise I'd be saying we met my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and two brothers-in-law; very complicated.)  My mother-in-law, who raised six kids, is a picnic veteran.  When we talked the previous night, she said we'd have a "snack" together.  When we settled ourselves in the picnic area, she brought out three coolers, two shopping bags and a cardboard box from which she removed cold fried chicken, coleslaw, biscuits, ham salad, potato chips, homemade bread, apple crumb pie, chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, four different kinds of soda and a thermos of coffee.  I love her. 

After our light snack, I could barely waddle around but we did make it to the Bascom House and Whitmire Wildflower Garden.  We sent all the boys out for a nature hike while we found some comfortable Adirondack chairs and sat and admired the view and talked.  I took lots of pictures, laughed more than I've laughed in a while and had a wonderful, blessed day with people I love.  I can't ask for much more than that.  And before I end this post, I'll leave you with a small bit of wisdom I learned today:

If you're thinking about posing for a photo with a wooly worm clamped to your upper lip like a mustache, please reconsider.  The wooly worm will instinctively head for the nearest, darkest location which will be your left nostril.  No, I didn't get a picture of that and if by chance I did, I immediately deleted it.

Issue # 780: Saturday/Sunday, November 7-8, 2009

Hello and welcome to today's issue of snapenews. Thank you all for your continuing support and useful links! Feel free to comment (either below or at snapenews@gmail.com) and let us know how we're doing!

COMMUNITIES

severusbigbang has posted its Submission Rules

META/DISCUSSION/RANT

00sevvie has posted an essay: Love Thine Enemy: Severus' Request Part I, http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/251115.html#cutid1, Part III, and Part IV

sailorlum has posted Severus and the Dark Arts

fayzbub had posted Snape's career choices sans Voldemort

NEWSLETTER/ARCHIVE UPDATES

The SS/HP Prophet for November 1-7, 2009 has been posted here

potionssnitches has posted a Weekend Update for November 7

hgss_digest has been updated here

CHALLENGES/CONTESTS

snape100 has posted Challenge 307: The (Traditional) Five Senses: Touch

snapedom has posted its November Challenge: Severus and the Dark Arts

DISCLAIMERS: The warnings listed here are those given by the artist/author/poet. Please pay attention to all ratings and warnings when following links.

We aim to bring you the latest Snape-centric items in the fandom but some might slip through the net! You can help to ensure this doesn't happen by sending us links via email to snapenews@gmail.com. There are submission guidelines in the snapenews user profile, but for 'This week in' sections we just require the basic title/creator/rating/warnings/link info.