Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Did you hear something?"
¤ Usage: *cats crash through the room engaged in noisy mortal combat*
Flux: "Did you hear something?"
Malaya: "Nope."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Notes: This one is a little game Malaya and I play where in one of the cats makes a loud or pathetic noise, and I ask if she heard it, and she says no.  Dusty used to be the cause of this, with his frequently yowling or noisy/clumsy TV-mounting attempts, but now that we have two cats who frequently chase each other around and make a lot of noise doing it, the saying is more all purpose.

Over the months it's become ritualized to the point that any time we hear any loud, interrupting noise, at home or elsewhere, I can say, "Did you..." and she'll immediately reply, "Nope." -- January 14, 2004

As for up here, I've got various vaguely sexually-themed news items, and a quick report on the Valentine's Day fun Malaya and I got up to on Saturday.

And as you might have guessed, you can ignore the preceeding two paragraphs, since my retelling of the Valentine's Day activities went long, and has been moved to the lower portion.  I'll do the other movie trailer discussion on Thursday.

Here's some random news of the naughty nature.

¤ A few day ago, I remembered that I'd been curious as to where Janet got the nipple decoration she so memorably sported during the Super Bowl halftime show. So I Googled around a bit, and wound at a site with the descriptive domain name of www.NippleHuggers.com.  There are a lot of topless females with hard nipples pictured on the site, so go there or not depending on your desire to see such things, and the safety you feel viewing them from your current location.

What Janet's got is a pierced nipple, with a barbell through it, and the star-shaped thing goes around the nipple, and is held on by the barbell. In theory it can rotate and such, if you give it a twist, and the tight gripping action of it is stimulating and will pretty much guarantee that at least one of your headlights is on at all times, if you know what I mean.

Check out Tribalectic.com for every imaginable sort of piercing accessory and decoration.  There are no sexy photos at all on this site, or at least none that I saw, so you can view it with mom and dad and Baby Jesus himself, if you so desire. I found things similar to Janet's on their accessories page, and if you go there, check out the spring coil things, made to insert your barbell into, and then twist, stretching the nipple out gradually.  Ouch... and yet... hmm.

¤ Check out these three amusing commercials from the UK that Malaya found the links to somewhere. They're funny and clever and inventive and not safe for work, but of course that's the whole point; comparing the sexually timid commercials we get in the US, to the more worldly ones in other, less repressive countries.  The first is funny, the second is realistic, and third made me wince.

None of them, however, would make me any more or less likely to purchase Trojan™ brand latex condoms.

• Wrestling.
• Pelvic lift.
• Pairs vault.

One thing I notice about these... the positions used.  In all three cases, the woman is on top (mostly).  Was that a requirement to show this sort of thing; that there not be any hint of male domination or male violence?  Or if it wasn't a "requirement" did they just choose the positions and action to be non-threatening and playful? I mean imagine the first commercial, with the wrestling or judo or tae kwon do or whatever it was supposed to be.  What if the guy won, and threw her down and took her doggy? That would seem like some sort of rape footage, eh?  Compared to the innocent fun the commercial is now.  If you see what I mean.

On Valentine's Day we didn't have any big plans. I'd thought to get her some flowers and maybe chocolate and a card, but a few days before V-day Malaya brought up the subject by saying, "We're not buying each other stuff for Valentine's Day, are we?" in the "Dear God no!" voice that I seldom hear except when she reads an email announcing yet another staff meeting at which her attendance is required. So out went my vague gift purchase plans, and in came the more sensible, easy, and enjoyable (for us anyway) prospect of just spending some time together.

First up was a trip to a place we'd seen a few days before while looking for another store.  Build-a-bear!

It's a painfully cute (and overly well-lit) store that sells stuffed animals. However they have a very clever gimmick to it.  They sell the animals without their bodies stuffed, just the heads.  So they're sort of like unwieldy hand puppets.  You pick one out, from the many types available, (mostly bears, but also cute pigs, frogs, cats, dogs, bunnies, etc) and proceed to a giant rectangular machine that's mostly a glass window, like a really large aquarium. Inside of the window is a spinning arm, sort of like a cotton gin, which tumbles around a huge amount of cotton stuffing.  Protruding from the front of the machine is a long metal pipe, and they stick this into the open hole in the back of the stuffed animals, and fill them up with stuffing while you wait, packing it to your specifications.

It's basically a reverse enema, if you want to get right down to it.

So they fill out the arms and legs and belly, and let you give it a squeeze to see if you want it plumper or not, and then you get a small plastic heart from a huge bucket of them, and go through a cute little ritual.  The girl filling the animal varies it depending on the age of her audience (mostly kids girls there, but boys as well and lots of adults getting animals too) but the routine is like, "Rub your tummy with the heart so he'll never be hungry!  Jump up and down so he'll have lots of energy! Tap your forehead with the heart so he'll be smart!" and so on.  It's cuter in person, trust me.

Once you've finished this voodoo-like imbuing ritual, they insert the heart into the animal's lifeless, cotton-stuffed corpse, and then lace the back shut with the loose thread that's left on it, overlapping in a sort of lattice.  Basically it's threaded through itself like shoe laces, and the expert tying skills of the girl working the machine pulls it tight and ties it off and snips the extra thread in just a few seconds, sealing the bear (or whatever) up tight and secure, but with your special heart inside of it.

Are you done then?  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

You then get to the real cash cow portion of the endeavor.  Dressing your new friend.

Most of the store remains ahead of you, and it's huge.  They have about half a baby store worth of costumes. Costumes of every sort.  Sports outfits, every sort of baby's first Halloween nurse, doctor, fireman, soldier, etc costumes, vests, shades, dozens of types of boots, pants of every color, tons of hats, rollerblades (which were popular additions to pony/unicorn models, oddly enough), and much, much more.

All of the clothing items are reasonable priced, but my god do they add up in a hurry.  I can see why babies cost so much, even though the individual items you're putting on them are just $5 or so. Our new stuffed animal, AKA Anthropologist Bunny, got a t-shirt, shorts, hiking boots, a vest, an explorer hat, and shades, and that plus the $20 base model rabbit ran us about $65. And that's nothing.  They had mini leather jackets for $50, and we didn't even go heavy on the costume, or get more than one animal.

The people ahead of us in line were a white couple, maybe 18 y/o each, and dressed very casually in baggy jeans and such.  They spent $209 on a whole basket full of clothing for a stuffed animal we didn't even see, and paid with two $100 bills and some change.

That place was raking in the coin, and it's a brilliant concept for a store, in a well-off area. You want to get the stuffed animal, and it's overpriced but not horribly. But then once you've got it you're just getting your toes wet, since you've got to customize/personalize it, and you can't just get a t-shirt or shoes or something, since it looks naked and silly and everyone else is carrying around fully-dressed stuffed pets, and all of the display models are decked out professionally. So you pick a hat, and a shirt, and some pants, and it just goes from there.  Hell, they had several styles of underwear for the animals, if you can believe it.  Worried about chafing?  We didn't drop an extra $4 for bunny-sized Under-roos, and I must admit to a second of guilt at the register when she was tallying up our bunny and verbally listing the items and we didn't have underwear on ours.  It was like we were neglectful parents. What if he gets into an accident, and the hospital staff see?

And yes, a year ago, before I was dating, I'd have read an account of this sort of thing and heaped so much scorn and derision and ridicule on the personalize stuffed animal concept (and pretty much everything else to do with love or dating that I now take for granted) that you'd have needed a snow shovel to read the update. I approve of it now, since Malaya wanted one and had fun making it on a special couples we're-in-love holiday, we got one that had special meaning to us based on our personal interests, we didn't go insane and buy five spare outfits, and we didn't get half a dozen of them at once.

Plus, I'm convinced that we're special and the most important people on earth and that the rules and standards of conduct that I hold everyone else to don't apply to us.  Which gives me exactly one personality trait in common with George Bush.

After the bunny store, we headed off to get dinner. Our first restaurant of choice seemed to have been torn down, or vanished into thin air, or else was practicing some sort of "find us if you can" decorating scheme, since we drove past it twice, checking street numbers, and never did see it.  So we said hell with it, and decided to just head to Claim Jumper, where we'd been planning on heading for dessert.  Neither of us had ever been there before, or ever had any interest in the restaurant, but recently on the Food Network we saw the end of a program that covered the top ten dessert cakes on earth, or top ten chocolate cakes, or something like that.  I wasn't paying much attention.  However one thing I did remember, and Malaya damn sure burned to her permanent disk storage, was that the Claim Jumper Motherlode chocolate cake was #1.

We arrived at Claim Jumper a bit before 5, figuring we'd eat early since we'd gotten up around noon and hadn't had anything more than a small snack before leaving the house. Not early enough, apparently, since when we got there we winced at the huge crowd sitting around outside, and the entirely full parking lot. The mini mall we went to had a Benihana and a couple of other restaurants, and they were all solid packed full as well.  I suppose they'd all be full on a Saturday night, or a holiday that people eat out on (such as Valentine's Day) but when you put those two things together... 2 to 2.5 hour wait at Claim Jumper.

We weren't starving though, and there were other things in the mall we could go look at, so we put our names down and wandered off.  Personally, I figured it would be 1.5 hours or so tops; that 1/4 of the people on the list ahead of us would give up on the wait and go somewhere else.

So we wandered around and went into Cost Plus, and CompUSA, and a giant discount bookstore that had Malaya making small noises in her throat.  And by the time we walked back to check up at Claim Jumper, it was nearly 6:30 and they said... we had over an hour yet to wait, and that we should be seated around 7:45.

So we headed back to the bookstore and browsed some more, and I read the first chapter of half a dozen novels (most were dreck) and bought the last book in the Wheel of Time series since I had only gotten it from the library before, and they were selling a brand new hardcover with a sliced cover over the spine (obviously from a box cutter when they opened the carton up) for $2.50.  They had perfect condition ones for $7, and that was about the average price of a book there.  I didn't see any brand new bestsellers, but they had literally thousands of recent titles, most hardcover and brand new, and all for about $7. Dumping excess stock left over from Xmas from numerous area bookstores, I assumed.

We returned to Claim Jumper around 7:30, and finally at 7:50 they seated us.  We'd never eaten there before and had no idea what to expect, but it wasn't bad. I had the idea it was sort of a lower-class steakhouse, like a cheaper Black Angus.  Not quite. It was more like a high-class Chili's or TGIF, with a more sit down vibe. Priced slightly higher, but not bad, and lots of variety.  Steaks, burgers, chicken, fish, shrimp, vegetarian options, salad bar with a lot of fruit, etc.  I'd recommend it; just not on a holiday.

We got a spicy shrimp taquito sort of appetizer that ran us $10, Malaya got a strawberry daiquiri that I sipped generously from, her entree was chicken fried chicken with biscuits and a side bowl of clam chowder, and I got the BBQ Chicken sandwich with steak fries and a side salad.  The appetizers came quite quickly, shuttled out by someone other than our waitress, the soup and salad were close on their heels, and before we had finished those the entrees arrived.  I was impressed by the kitchen speed; it obviously wasn't their fault that the wait was so long.

The food was pretty good, and the portions were huge!  I'm talking gigantic.  We hadn't eaten in like 8 hours by the time we got our food there, the appetiser wasn't that big, and I didn't finish even half my sandwich, which is very rare for me.  We're both pretty good and not eating for hours in advance of dinner, and then stuffing it all down, followed by not eating again for hours after that.  I hadn't taken anything home in a doggy bag for weeks and weeks, and I took about 2/3 of my sandwich that day, plus a bunch of fries, and Malaya had some chicken left, all of her mashed potatoes, and one of her two biscuits.  And I must say, they were the biggest biscuits I've ever seen.  Like the size of a cereal bowl each.

I took some photos of the left over food when we got home, along with a bunch more shots of the super chicken taquito/shrimp/bean burritos I talked about last week, so there will be food photos in the immediate future.  I'm just not in the mood to pull the shots off of the camera and sort and crop and all of that just yet.

And of course we followed up the meal with the gigantic motherlode cake.  We didn't eat any there, since the waitress brought it to us in the box and it was all wrapped up in waxed paper and we didn't want to bother opening it up there, as full as we were.  However once we got home and had some more room in our bellies a couple of hours later, we dug in.  And it's damn good.  I'm very sensitive to cake that's too sweet, or too covered in bad, foam-like icing, and their cake was neither of those.  I'd still have liked less icing and more nuts, but I feel that way about basically every cake I've ever had in my life, so don't pin too much on my opinion.

The total bill for dinner was over $60, which is high for two people at a medium-end restaurant, but you have to factor in the appetizer, bonus salad and soup, one strawberry daiquiri, and then $8 for dessert.  With tip it ran us $70, but we split it so that's not too huge an expense. And actually, considering that Malaya prevented me from blowing $25 on chocolate and $20 on flowers, I probably came out ahead, at least in terms of lasting value, since Anthropologist Bunny will be here forever.  Or at least a lot longer than flowers and chocolates would have lasted.

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