I don't know why R. Kelly thought it would be good to do this "hip hop opera."

Are you sure you don't mean "hip HOPera"?

I knew about the guillotine thing. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (father of modern chemistry) was executed after the French Revolution, and planned to blink as long as he could after the fact. He stationed an assistant in the crowd, who counted 12 blinks.

I slept in this morning and dreamed I was sitting in a big gym watching middle-aged people take batting practice. I was in a recliner in right center field, and they were bouncing things off the left field Green Monster facsimile. Except they were not hitting baseballs, but glass stovepipes as long as my forearm. Somehow they didn't break coming off the bat, but they shattered off the Green Monster.

Somehow I could not convince the coaches that this was a Bad Thing. I was about to go find my sneakers so I could go out there in a huff and give them my mind (without cutting my feet), when the phone rang and woke me up.

MTV may have trademarked Hip Hopera for their Beyoncerrific retelling of Carmen.

So sad that Isaiah Washington's trailing Shane West in this poll. The rest isn't surprising, but Shane fucking West?

I slept which is good. I'm not too foggy, which is also good. Now to get ready to visit the chiro.

And brekkie. Yes, brekkie.

I think the discussion of the guillotine is particularly interesting because the inventer saw his invention as a more human way to kill people than previous methods. Good gracious.

Crap. I overslept, and now realize I need to rush around to shower and go to the post office, where they only have half of my shower present, and to the dollar store to buy a gift bag, and to the shower by one. Ooops. And yet I had to read here.

the inventer saw his invention as a more human way to kill people than previous methods. Good gracious.

It is faster and more certain than any method I can think of that they had available at the time.

I heard of a death row prisoner a while back requesting hanging as his method, and the nylon rope they used unexpectedly acting as a guilotine. Supposedly the family sued for cruel and unusual punishment, but he had to have died a lot quicker and cleaner than by broken neck alone.

Yeah, it was only particularly cruel to them, and that's not what you get to sue for.

Guys, my homework is hard. Like, I don't know if I can do this. Sniff.

Black Cherry Vanilla Coke

Blah. I don't see where this would please either the Vanilla Coke or the Cherry Coke fans.

The whole guillotine discussion is icky and I'm choosing to ignore it.

The good news: I have a nice guy from Dominion Power (Carolinas I think) up in the pole behind my house this very minute. He tells me I'll have power back today!!! Whee!

The bad news: I stopped at Burger King and bought everyone stuff including my vegan BIL. He'd never had a Burger King veggie burger before but thought it tasted kinda funny so he only ate half. Oops, I gave him the Angus burger by mistake. He gave the rest to the dog. I hope he doesn't get sick.

I just watched my tape of this week's Smallville and boy was THAT Duke Boy-alicious! I was yelling, "in the window! in the window! and Luke did what I said! Then Bo jumped the car. And I love them in the same naughty way I did at 13 -- and now I get all pitter-pat over the engine noise too. Sighhhhh

Our options for getting to Boston for Christmas are 1) $900 in plane tickets (Eve, being 2, doesn't fly free anymore) or 2) 12-hour drive up I-95. Other paths are even slower but less insane-making.

These feel like no options. We may not be traveling for Thanksgiving OR Christmas.

We're dealing with the same thing, flea. The cheap option involves a 30-hour, 4-airport trek with an 8-month old. I think that's illegal under the Geneva Convention.