Greetings from Sarajevo

I'm sick and really not wanting to be sick. In Sarajevo. The person sitting next to me on the bus was a survivor of the war and told me in Serbian (of which I understood 50%, thankfully not more, it was gruesome) about what she went through. Pointed out where Srebrenica is, where other towns were destroyed (now being rebuilt). I saw some evidence of the destruction still around... bullet holes in house masonry for example. Other than the artillery marks left in the landscape the shape of plain old poverty and war is pretty much the same.

The bus trip took 9 hours instead of the usual 4 1/2 because we rearended a little car and took out its rear windshield just that side of the Serb/ B&H border. It was a long boring event, really.

The bombing mess left by NATO is still untouched/ unreconstructed in Belgrade. It is unnerving to see buildings looking almost as fucked-up as the WTC but fucked up by our bombs and our allies' bombs. One bomb landed near the house I stayed in last night. However, when it fell my friend wasn't awoken. But the Chinese embassy bombing further away woke him. Apparently the Chinese didn't move anything out of the old building into their new building, rumor has it because of the bad feng shui. Accidental bombing-- that's some bad feng shui! They REALLY shouldn't have gotten that extra carp tank.

I leave on a madcap funpacked road trip in a stick shift sedan with four other people down the Montenegrin coast and over to Macedonia via Kosova in two days. Send your SlackerStalker all the safe travel energy you have, stalksters!

Oh, and Slovenija is still a place I will stalk. I ran up to it and gave it a kiss on the cheek this time-- going night swimming at the Portoroz Adriatic seawater spa and sleeping in gorgeous little architectural jewel Piran for one night. The Slovenes are the well-adjusted Slavs. Just imagine it. They are happy people and they are Slavs. If Slav nations were dogs, Slovenes would all be Border Collies. The taxi driver (apparently straight, on his way home to his wife and kids) who took me from the airport in Ljubljana volunteered right after I said I love Slovenija and want to move there that "Slovenija isn't nationalistic or homophobic like other nations." That out-tha-blue comment alone was worth the $35 he charged me for the ride.

OK, off to try and steam this cold out of my head where it got firmly and painfully jammed by the steep mountain ascent I endured today.

The Anal Sandpaper That is a Dissolving Company

So I have been remiss in posting because I've been cramming for the GRE (710 verbal, 630 math, not bad), trying to get ready to be laid off (job fairs, applying for positions, etc.), preparing for this gonzo work-related two-week tour of the Balkans that I'm leaving for in a few hours (Prague, Portoroz/ Piran, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Athens), and watching my co-workers one by one get laid off unceremoniously.

I had a strong intuition slap me over the head that my horrible boss will lay off the rest of our office for Christmas, despite her pledge to keep us on until March, because she doesn't want to pay our (mandatory, by personnel policy) time-off between Christmas and New Year's, pay that doesn't come out of earned vacation or personal time. A former boss realized we tended not to take vacations as a staff, so she forced a short vacation every year at the winter holidays. This boss will lay us off rather than pay for three people to rest for four days. She just laid off a friend and co-worker earlier than she had said because she wanted to avoid him earning an extra vacation day in his last few weeks.

So, amidst this painful situation, I have to now go abroad to tout my organization's virtues. Which are mostly the people on staff who are mostly all gone now.

While I'm on the road to these seven different nations I will be checking my blog a little.

Here are some things I might need while I'm racing through the Balkan peninsula:

The Universal Currency Converter
Today the dollar is worth:

26.7 (CZK) koruny in the Czech Republic
198.75 (SIT) tolars in Slovenija
6.444 (HRK) kuna in Croatia
57.607 (YUM)new dinars in Serbia and Montenegro
1.64 (BAM) in convertible marka Bosnia and Hercegovina
51.20 (MKD) denar in Macedonia
and, speaking of anal sandpaper...
0.839 (EUR) Euros in Greece

The Weather Underground/ Wunderground EU Map

The Meeting Planner at Timeanddate.com
(Pacific Time is 9 hours behind Central European Time, although CET TV stations are only now playing Xena reruns that we saw two years ago on Oxygen)

The CNN regional country summary for Bosnia-Hercegovina (with drop-down menu to other local countries)
You remember that war they had there? You should read this summary and see if YOU can figure out how they make any decisions. Conservatives, some whose campaigns were funded by US Republicans, are making gains all over the former republics of Yugoslavija. Pfeah.

See you in December!

Transgender Youths Dress Up Like Prostitutes and Pretend to Be Undercover Vice Cops... Makes Me Almost Love the US Again

"You couldn't put this in a book -- nobody would
believe it."

--New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg Nov. 7 after
five transgender students from the Harvey Milk gay
high school were arrested for impersonating undercover
vice cops dressed as female prostitutes and demanding
money, credit cards, ATM cards and PIN codes to let
their victims go free.

(From Rex Wockner's "Quote / Unquote" column)

I'm recovering from my fear of a frozen death-by-mini-ice-age and/or the decline of literacy due to global warming. Now I'm back to just fearing the president.

The ambassador and the general were briefing me
on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live
in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people
and we will bring them to justice.

George W. Bush Oct. 27, 2003

You want to know where you can read this quote in its original context-- online? The goddamn US State Department website's transcript of the speech "Progress in Iraq." Read it now before the infamous Bush transcript doctors get to it.

I found it in the sig file of my friend Mamaliz and she's a reliable source. But the State Department had the balls to post the quote, as spoken, and that's extra special.

As Though We Needed Something Else to Worry About

It's been brought to my attention that, although inevitably the earth will be consumed by the sun, and in the meantime lots of crazy space debris is lined up to hit us and cause catastrophic climate change, we have something else to worry about: the sun losing its freckles and giving us an ice age.

Mini though it was, the mini-ice-age from 1645 to 1715 did occur (coinciding with a time when there were hardly any sunspots), and the English Channel did apparently freeze over.

Read more about the Little Ice Age (LIA) known also as (or - for the skeptics- merely coinciding with) the Maunder Minimum, the name given to that period with almost no sunspots. Volcanos also might have been awarded part of the blame, for the ice age, not the missing sun spots. I would prefer to worry about something we have no way of predicting, i.e. the disappearance of sunspots. It's just that much more goth.

I would love to know how the Little Ice Age influenced the emergence of popular English literature in the 18th century. And that, my friends, is why I'm studying for the GRE to go get a practical degree in policy analysis, a degree to keep me off the streets where I would be stalking rare books on the correlation between rare deadly environmental phenomena and social trends, menacing small children with my theories relating the decline of culture and global warming.

Bangkok Beauty

I love the Global Development Briefing, if only for its occasionally priceless quotes.

"We recognize that there are some difficult decisions that have to be made in hosting a conference of this type."

— An unidentified U.S. official, speaking to The Washington Post on measures taken by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to cleanup and secure Bangkok ahead of its hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which started Oct. 21. The government barred thousands of street vendors from the central city, shipped 10,000 homeless people to army camps and banned more than 500 human rights activists from entering the country. About 600 Cambodian beggars, mostly women and children, were rounded up and airlifted back home on C-130 Hercules military aircraft. About 3,000 stray dogs were caught and shipped to the countryside. And a banner four stories high and a quarter-mile long, displaying an image of the Grand Palace royal compound, was erected to conceal a slum.

(Bolds and italics mine.)

So You Think You're Articulate

Try saying "I was born on a pirate ship."

Now hold your tounge while saying it.

Ponder with me now how many sheets a sheet slitter could slit if a sheet slitter could slit sheets at the world's largest multilingual collection of tongue-twisters.

A Break in the Struggle to Understand California

...to marvel at the authors of the City of Oakland website.

"What do I do about rundown and abandoned property?" asks the official City of Oakland website, to which it answers itself with a more specific subcategory of problems:

Code Violations, Lack of Maintenance,
Weeds and Overgrown Vegetarian

...about which I am shocked there is not more concern. I had no idea vegetarians were getting out of control in Oakland. Isn't Berkeley big enough for these people?

Pitch to Barry

Now that the postseason has rolled on without my local teams, the A's and the Giants both, I thought it was strange that a friend left a "Pitch To Barry" t-shirt on my chair as a gift. I mean, sure, he'll be playing next spring, but until then, what does this shirt mean?

It means give a fair challenge to the overachiever. There is nothing more frustrating for an overachiever to be given a half-assed or mangled and mis-managed challenge.

I know whereof I speak.

And then you ask, why do these mis-managers get appointed/ hired/ elected to frustrate the overachievers who after all only want to do their very best for the team?

Because people love an optimistic bully, and moreover they want THAT guy to lead us, and at BEST they want the fatalistic nerd who believes in the sanctity of fair challenges to be a sidekick or some other humiliating post, like vice-president.

This is coming from the middle of the long (ok, not long, but long for slow readers, i.e. me) Al Gore chapter in Sarah Vowell's Partly Cloudy Patriot, where she muses on the both every day real and mythological/ archetypal nature of the Nerd Versus Jock Struggle.

This is the struggle of my life, and it certainly is not behind me. I think this is one of the reasons the recall election has depressed me so soundly. The biggest, most optimistic, and most Nazi-esque candidate for governor won, in part because of a vote from the person I'm dating, who believed this cartoon-character bully couldn't be worse than what we have already, who is a pessimistic dweeb. This person I'm dating is, like me, a still-recovering-from-high-school nerd. I'm really interested in her use of her vote in that horrible election.

Is there something in us nerds that sometimes longs to, for once, be on the winning team? To just walk away from the "right" and the "wrong" of the #2 pencil blue and white test form, and just go with the "flo"? Even when the "flo" is running us over a waterfall into a morass of poverty, denied rights to minority/ marginalized parts of the community, and infrastructure failure?

I am not speaking ill of our new Gubernator, who hasn't even taken office yet, I'm just trying to get inside the head of a very intelligent person who maybe is prone- as I believe I also am- to seduction by the prospective dark fun of dirty dealing, mangled command, the overachievers being thwarted and bullies running amok.

This is the side of us nerds that watches the Sopranos, the side that dresses up as pirates for Halloween, the side that wants to learn how to properly shoot a gun. It's a fantasy that we will somehow win if we side with the bullies who inevitably seem to prevail.

But will the mis-managers take notice of our loyalty when the time comes? Will we finally be spared our regular humiliations as brainiacs who just want a fair challenge, or will we once again get a painful lesson in democracy, which is that life is not fair and democracy is MUCH more unfair? Won't we, the overachieving nerds, even the nerds who helped elect an anti-nerd to office, despite our better knowledge, keep expecting people to play fair, stepping up the plate and praying for a nice, clean pitch?

After Some Contemplation..."Kicking Our Own Bicycles," An Anology for the Recall Fiasco

Sometimes everything breaks down, and we call it a fiasco. This recall election was a total breakdown of the democratic process, and it was so massive a breakdown that we could even call it an attack on democracy. It was like the electorate was taking out its frustrations on the electoral process.

I had a boyfriend once who was a nerd, and had always been one. Riding his bike home from school he would often be cornered and beaten up, and/ or his bike would be wrecked or stolen. One time, I think after three bikes had been stolen, he was cornered, and he just got off his bike and started beating the crap out of the damn bike. The bullies fled.

This is the electorate, feeling like politicos have stolen our government (whatever that means... it's just a general feeling of not having power or representation in government), and now an election rolls around that gives the electorate a little opening to express itself rather freely. It gets off its bicycle democracy, turns on it in the middle of a circling swarm of perceived politicos, and hauls off and elects a joke for a governor. It's more than self-deprecation, more than self-loathing-- it's a self-preservation urge gone twisted and desperate, lashing out at a PROCESS, a means to an end, as guiltless as a bicycle. It's so lacking in faith that you have any power in a situation that you just turn on an innocent object and tear it apart, alternately cynical and mindless and scared.

Speaking of tearing things apart, my tabby girlcat is raptly watching with me "The Lion Queen" on the National Geographic Channel. The lioness "Scarface" is our favorite character.

A not-very-bright dyke femme bully (diva?) has a one-woman costume drama in my face, the Giants and the A's play their way into a load of first class tickets to their own private World Series viewing from their COUCHES, my boss Captain Bligh gives me a couple of extra jobs and a six-month termination notice, and now a Nazi-reared brainfart of a man is holding the highest office in California, no doubt preparing to execute a series of gruesome 180's on a lot of great, if only recently passed laws, like the very seriously good domestic partner bill AB 205, so I will now ponder...

The Virtues of Parsley

I have recently changed from loving basil the best to loving parsley. It goes on everything I make that involves cheese or tomatoes. Which is a lot of what I make. Parsley has thiamine.

Googling, you will find parsley has a home in the titles of a number of blogs.

It also has a great and glorious place in antiquity (from Botanical.com):

The Greeks held Parsley in high esteem, crowning the victors with chaplets of Parsley at the Isthmian games, and making with it wreaths for adorning the tombs of their dead. The herb was never brought to table of old, being held sacred to oblivion and to the dead. It was reputed to have sprung from the blood of a Greek hero, Archemorus, the forerunner of death, and Homer relates that chariot horses were fed by warriors with the leaves.

I love antiquity, too. Now, having blogged, I will go translate some pages of the Aeneid and think about the ablative absolute. Calm, cold, comforting ablative absolutes. Far from the terrible, terrible reality I now live in.

Gaak, a Role Model for Those of Us Feeling a Little Set Up for Futility at Work

This is a very old news article from June 2002 that apparently some people didn't see at the time. I've been thinking about this robot's reaction to the "survival of the fittest" tests it was being put through at work every day.

Robot on the Run from Theage.com.au.

Apparently this learning and science center - for kids!- designed robots which could learn from their mistakes, programmed them as "predator" and "prey" and had them fight it out for a paying audience. Didn't anyone read their Isaac Asimov? Well, the Predator and Prey Robot Shows "have now reached the end of their show period." After Gaak ran away I wonder if they had other jailbreaks. I wonder if their nice English neighborhood has a wild "Predator" robot out there competing in the job market.

I'm not saying the nonprofit NGO work world is like a robot gladiator spectacle, really I'm not. I just have my Gaak moments at work these days.

Some Things I've Noticed Recently, Apropos of Very Little

I finally have a taste for baseball and get myself a favorite player (and a sugar daddy to get me his baseball card and brilliant behind-home-place seats for one of the season closer games) and he fucking BARELY EVER plays these days. He's a creaky old man.

Please don't retire before I get to see you play, J.T. Snow.

I've also noticed that the Equinox brought about the phenomenon of my cat actually regularly oversleeping. She has a nook in my closet which she has wombified with layers of tabby hair, and I get the "huzzawhazzawho?" look from her when I wake her up to tell her I'm going to work, without my morning lap-sit thank you very much. It has freed up my morning to allow more (any) time for breakfast, but our little lap dance ritual has been a comfort for me in my widowhood. Maybe I'll go to bed with her food bowl empty on purpose so she'll wake me up with the usual bladder-stomp and earnest stare.

Everything has to come in threes, so what else have I noticed... hmmm... Sarah Vowell's 2002 book The Partly Cloudy Patriot is rocking my world. She manages to make me misty-eyed about intellectualist loners and their struggle in a democratic society. I'm almost writing a stalker-esque passion-filled fan letter every day now.

(Yes. I know. It's a short book. I'm a slow reader.)

Oh look I've noticed something else. She's represented by the same agency as my beloved favorite living poet Jane Hirshfield. I wrote a stalker-esque passion-filled fan letter to Jane once via her agency and she wrote right back the same day. Someday I'm sure I will be at the agency winter holiday party rubbing elbows with Sarah and Jane and we'll all bond over having a great company to represent us all. And about my Pulitzer and so on. (Memo to self: remember to submit poetry somewhere... Or maybe I could pay Barclay to pretend I'm on their roster just long enough to have me at one of their winter holiday parties...)

This is For All You Jews Out There

...who are suffering a reduction in entertaining internet forwards from your newly-dumped-by-Jews-and-therefore-newly-anti-Semitic friends. I'm not Jewish but my name is Sara and my father's name is David (in Russian I'm Sara Davidovna, which is like saying "please put me in the concentration camp first," so it's never given to REAL Jews in Slavic nations, only to goyim in the safer/ more ethnically cleansed reaches of the rural USA), so I understand some of what it means to suffer as a Jew.

Now, I know most of you won't know what the hell you're reading in that paragraph up there, but your confusion is worth it for the sly evil chuckle it is sure to elicit from a certain Banjostani person trapped in Boise.

Here are links for my personal reference, pages from which I have become accustomed to receiving the daily highlights. I'll just have to spam myself now.

The Yahoo news photo slideshow.

Metafilter.

Smoking Gun. "Paving the Paper Trail."

And of course blogs...

Sweat Flavored Gummi.

and...

Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me -- the home of the daily news from the office of the Dictator for Life of Greater Banjostan, a place that is temporarily unfriendly to the Jews, or maybe really just one particular Jew, who is not me, being that I am not really a Jew.

Arrrrgh

I know Talk Like a Pirate Day is over, but I have to Arrrrgh. My boss Captain Bligh has just accepted her second resignation in a week, when her first mate and my close friend and coworker Mr. Millicent the Innocent jumped ship (ok, he gave a generous TEN weeks' notice). I'm now looking at the craigslist.org nonprofit job listings. Again thus I've opened and had to close the window on applying to a cool job because I have an ex who is in the management of the organization.

Why, oh why, did I have to have bad break ups (or bad after-break-up friendship-break-ups) with people in the management of:

ACORN - empowering communities to create the change the want to see, for and by themselves;

and

Pacific Environment - formerly PERC, Pacific Environment Resource Center, empowering environmental activists of all sorts all around the Pacific Rim, including the Far East and Eastern Siberia.

Thank the gods I'm dating someone who works for the goddamn government, for whom I NEVER intend to work.

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! Celebrate with mutinous abandon!

Well, my coworker Mr. Woody has taken Captain Bligh's cherry, being the first to resign on her. We will all, slowly, one by one, leave her on this ship to sink alone, burned out and ravaged by responsibilities she is heaping on herself by driving us all away.

Unless, of course, she quits and *I* become captain, a course suggested by my results from the Talk Like A Pirate Day website's Pirate Personality Test.

You are The Cap'n!

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any man that stands between them and the mantle of power. You never met a man you couldn't eviscerate. Not that mindless violence is the only avenue open to you - but why take an avenue when you have complete freeway access? You are the definitive Man of Action. You are James Bond in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. Your swash was buckled long ago and you have never been so sure of anything in your life as in your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off their head if they show any sign of taking you on or backing down. You cannot be saddled with tedious underlings, but if one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.

What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

Now that we're all Friendsters...

...I feel the need for other ways of making community.

Nemester

Do you have fantasies of stabbing someone regularly, but you suspect they may have the illusion that all is well between you? You can make sure your enemies know you hate them. I think it's good to have a list of enemies, and it would be even better to have a public place to show it. I would put Captain Bligh (my boss) and the President of Uzbekistan on that list. Among many others. Props to Mr. Woody who had the idea for Hatester, which I stole.

Annoyister

You know, brainless and overpaid celebrities with huge empty homes? Independently wealthy people who dress out of the Community Thrift reject pile for their street cred? Annoying. And the neighbors who have screaming fights in the morning, or *vacuum* every night at midnight? And then there are the journalists and politicians who grind their axes on the community's hardest-working (or broken) backs, demonizing immigrants and sick people and the homeless. Let people know that they are not hate-worthy, just extremely annoying.

Slutster

A grand way to let people know you wouldn't kick them out of your bed, should they happen to end up there. I think the Friendster community really needs this way to break through the pretension of being friends(ters) when you're really just all about connecting-the-dots with their freckles and your tongue.

Drinkster

Let people know you don't really want to be their friend, you don't really want to sleep with them, but you really, really enjoy getting drunk with them. Maybe you'd go to a ballgame with them, hell maybe you'd even sleep with them, but mainly you'd like them to know that you'd trust them to hold your hair/ jacket/ gun while you barf.

Spouster

Obviously, a great way to let someone know that you would marry them. I would Spouster Angelina Jolie first. If she wasn't ready to make that bold move at this point in her career, or turned out to be a femme bottom like me, then we could laugh it off and stay Friends(ters), and I would Spouster Jon Stewart (from the Daily Show). Then, since he is a straight man with a wife who is probably smart enough to ignore a marriage proposal from a lesbian, I would Spouster Lucy Lawless, who said on a late night talk show (to a question about whether she'd swing with the ladeez) that she's up for anything after drinking 12 white russians. I bet Spouster would have the best "testimonials" of them all.

Stalkster

The politest way to tell someone you are stalking them. Then again, I'm not sure Friendster isn't just a cover for some malicious hoarde of stalkers...

Exster

Now, as those dozen or so people who follow my blog know, I recently had a person I considered an ex call me at work to tell me s/he is not my ex and to please stop spreading around that information. So, I think it would be useful to have a service like Exster, where you can let people know that they are in fact an "ex" (exfuckbuddy, exgirlfriend, whatever), just so that there are no nasty surprises on either end, like someone thinking you never dated, for example. Or that you are still dating, heaven forbid.

My Boss Is a Fiasco

I just listened to the Fiasco show from the "favorites" collection in the archives of This American Life, and I have finally reached the point of Zen acceptance that my boss is a fiasco.

I will call her Captain Bligh. Captain Bligh's incompetence is so extreme that it has become funny, all office protocol has been scratched, and we are all {} THIS CLOSE to starting a real office betting pool as to what date she's going to lay us all off.

Today's additions to the fiasco unfolding are her apparent accidental deletion of the record in our database of our organization's most important contact at the United Nations (we're a gay human rights agency, which needs all the friends in high places we can get). I can't prove that she deleted it, but who else, I tell you, when she's been working closely with the dude, and hasn't let anyone train her on ANY of our systems. Then she put a letter in the box of letters to be mailed... sans postage... and the letter looks like it's the contract for our newest and most important (next to Captian Bligh) employee. I saved it, but I have had to put a pointed sign on the mail out box that letters that are intended to be mailed should have postage on them.

In the mean time, another This American Life show from the archives, Music Lessons, features David Sedaris singing the Oscar Mayer Wiener song in the style (done with chilling accuracy) of none other than Billie Holiday. I ask you.

So I naturally was drawn to doing some research on the famous song... from which you will now all benefit.

Here's a page from Kissthisguy.com, with an instance of the wiener song's lyrics misheard.

Ya know, I think sometimes we all wish we were an octopuss' wiener.

Top Signs Your New Lezzie Romance May Be PoMo

I define PoMo here as post-modern/ post-industrial, showing characteristics of a micospecialized lifestyle or society, celebrating performativity and self-consciousness in the fragmented public narrative. I don't know what motivated me to make this list, I just haven't dated in a long time and it's like an anthropological experiment for me. Join me on this jungle ride... watch the strange new lezzie dating practices, but keep your fingers inside the car...

Your new lezzie romance may be PoMo if:

1. You met on Craigslist, or another anonymous mochepit of sex-starved people with 56k dial-up service.

2. You Google to confirm points of fact... while on dates.

3. You shop for your novelties and lingerie on eBay... while on dates.

4. You have a porn star encounter clause in your fidelity agreement. (There are so many of them now. Porn stars, I mean. But there are lots of different fidelity agreements out there too, aren't there?)

5. You have a list of urban straight hotspots where you intend to have sex using remote-controlled vibrators.

6. You share feedback about your preferred sexual practices on your blog.

7. Each date's preparation involves doing your nails, packing a toothbrush and change of underwear, selecting a costume and buying a soundtrack CD.

8. The date's degree of distance from internet connection is directly proportional to the numbers of cameras involved in documenting the date.

9. Friends e-mail you to see if you're having sex at that moment... and you e-mail back that you are.

10. You mark your one month anniversary with an appointment at a tattoo parlor.

Presenting People For the Unethical Treatment of Fireflies

The Pagan comic for Pagans and the people who love them, or used to love them.

PETA in this strip refers to "People for the Eternal Torment of Animals."

Where I grew up the only "out" Pagans were pretty scary folks, and they liked it that way-- their reputation kept the Xtians out of their hair. They had a sign on their porch "We shoot every third Christian who knocks on this door." I even heard that they used some rest stop on Route 177 (a major trucking road) to do a pig sacrifice. Now, that skeezed me out. But lately I've been getting into eating pork again and, in reflection, I'm betting they put on a nice barbeque for those truckers, and some State Trooper had to go blow the whistle... turning it into just another "animal sacrifice."

Ah, The Secret Spells Triad is Complete. Soon I Will Conquer the World.

Meet Secret Spells Kayla's best friend Secret Spells Barbie.

School girls by day, "by night they turn into magical enchantresses." No wonder it is out of stock. That dirty old man market is a surefire sell. Do they really send "edible poisons," do you think? Do you think they meant poissons? That they will send you some dried salmon jerky with every order?

And oh my god you can order their best friend Secret Spells Christie "in African American." This ad's blurb explains that they are sending sugar-based mixtures that you can drink, i.e. mystical Kool-Aid. Getting the little African American girls ready for Jonestown, are we? I know, I know, that was inappropriate. Shame on me.