Billytea:

While talking about weight, when I got back from Spain I weighed 206 pounds. This morning I tipped the scales at 192. So I've lost a stone! I'm feeling good about that.

TrudyBooth:

Wow, you Australian guys have some big testicles.

billytea. The Testicle Story.

Very well! I see that the time has now come. Gather ye round, boys and girls, for it is time that you heard the testicle story.

Follow me back to a happier, simpler time. The setup for the following events is this: when young, my older brother and I each had one undescended testicle. (I believe these days they are no longer called 'undescended', but rather 'scrotally challenged'. ...Meanwhile, my MS Word spellcheck wants me to change it to 'undecided testicle', possibly not inappropriate.) Now, this isn't a dangerous condition and doesn't have any apparent long-term effects (my older brother at least has already revealed himself – so to speak – to be a fertility god). But it does involve an operation to set things to rights. Thus it was, at the age of seven, that my father came to me and with pride in his voice, said (paraphrasing slightly) "Son, you are now old enough to have both your balls in the same place".

Well, the operation passed uneventfully. (The last time I had been in hospital it was for a tonsillectomy. I awoke from the anaesthetic to find my tonsils on the bedside table, floating in a jar of preserving fluid. I'm so very glad this experience was different.) But it did mean that my brother and I were off school for a week or two. Not, in and of itself, a bad thing; but as the day of our return approached it became apparent that some people might have noticed our absence, and demand an explanation. Thus my older brother asked our mother, "Do I have to tell anyone why I was away? Does anyone else have to know?" My mother, sensitive to the insecurities of primary school aged boys, assured him that he could just say he was off sick and no one need know the details.

It was perhaps unfortunate that they didn't talk to me too. Even at that age, I tended to play my personal feelings a bit closer to my chest (not so much because I'm that concerned about my own privacy, I just don't see why anyone else would be interested). So the first indication my mother had that word might have got out was when the headmistress called her to discuss the impromptu sex ed lesson I'd given my second-grade class during Show and Tell.

Apparently the point at which the teacher (who, BTW, was a nun, I don't know if that's relevant) felt control of the class slipping away from her was when I stated "If you're a boy, you should have two. But if you only have one, then that means you need the same operation I had." Whereupon an entire classroom collectively started rummaging around inside their pants, to determine what was what. Even this probably could've been safely glossed over (and was in any case better than my younger brother running up to a different nun to do a Fonzie impression, with the addition of dropped trousers); but my perfectly reasonable corollary – "But if you're a girl, don't bother looking because you don't have any" – was apparently sufficient to send at least two classmates home in tears. The phone calls to the school from their parents were duly relayed to mine, who assured the principal that the sordid event was unlikely to happen again.

There's this passage in the Bible about Jesus basically giving his parents a bit of backchat about nipping off, and then it reports "his mother treasured all these things in her heart." I occasionally wonder what my mother thinks when she reads that.

Here endeth the testicle story.

ita (in Bitches)

Scurvy is for pussies. Go team rickets!

Trudy, in Bitches, even without the context. Maybe especially without the context:

It's always time for a good testicle story!

In Press. When did Press get funny?

DX: Jon, I changed the names of the closed threads to make it clearer.

(and the changes were:)

Boxed Set, Vol. 1: Not This One...

Boxed Set, Vol. 1: Smallville, Due South, Farscape

Boxed Set, Vol. 1: Don't Pick Me, Either...

ita in Natter:

I was just planning triplets at lunch today. Didn't get very far.

meara's follow-up to the above:

suspects ita of planning to "have triplets" in a different sort of way. suspects lunch hour just wasn't enough time

Emily, in Boxed Set

Heck, it's how I got interested in all my most recent fandoms. I think I'd seen an episode of Smallville before I started reading the fanfic, but due South and Sentinel I hadn't, and Stargate I actively disliked (mostly because in my head it was like the snotty kid who moves in from a big city and thinks she's going to be all popular just because she shops at stores that have last names attached to them (as opposed to, say, "Hank's") so until she settles down she keeps trying to upstage the kid who actually is cool because she's just spiffy and funny and really smart and nice, but for a while you're afraid people are going to buy into City Girl's guff and start trying to act all snotty like her and meanwhile there'll be smaller and smaller attendance at the Grand Pirate Adventure Princess Veterinarian Superspy outing every weekend until it's just you and the girl who used to be cool and she can't help but be a little diminished in your eyes, but then twenty years later you come back and they're all living desperate-to-impress Big City Lives and she's got some wicked cool life in the outback either painting or rescuing wallabies and she sweeps you off your feet and you have a passionate affair after which you live happily ever after and just end up feeling sorry for all the other girls because they too could have grown up smart and cool and had a wild passionate affair and a happy ever after, so there's a sort of bittersweet tinge to your contentment) until the fanfic got me to take a second look.

And slightly later

(Also, the wallaby-rescuing wicked cool lesbian lover above was played by Farscape)

Madrigal in Movies:

Warren Zevon, Leni Riefenstahl - I suppose this now means an actor with an unusual name with a cult following is next to die

Trudy Booth ripostes:

Somebody hide Pia Zadora.

In Firefly:

Susan W: On the weirdness of any fandom, I recently read a Dean blog kerfluffle that could've been transplanted wholesale to Buffy fandom on LiveJournal if you'd just gone through and replaced "Dean" and "Kerry" with "Buffy" and "Spike."

Wolfram: Try doing that with the infamous balcony scene...there's a mind scrubber.