Note to self: law and order kills threads. Or possibly it was the frat-tastic a-holes.

Oh, phew, Toddson lives!

I should just make ambien slleepy cookie. yummy and restfull. ai only take an ambien rarely if the tough peepe habe my back. Cuz I[m reqlly not writr right now, and the people oN TV screen keep talking to me and I'm not quite sure where I am,.

sleep meds make me loopy can'ttype

Wow. Kristin is so stoned...

And very entertaining.

(I am quite loudly refraining from questioning the taste of Jesse's local coworkers.)

I know! At least for me it's the kind of place I don't go normally, so it is different, but not exactly a taste of the local.

Must keep showing her Toy Story and telling her not to be a Sid.

Hubby will not watch Toy Story 1, because he was so horrified that there were toys left in Sid's clutches. The escape of Woody and Buzz was not enough to keep him from thinking of the tortures that would be visited on the others. He did not believe that Sid changed his ways.

A while back I posted an article (in the NYT?) about researches studying children's attitudes to Barbie. They found Barbie-torture to be quite widespread. The researchers were a little bit shocked.

The researchers were a little bit shocked.

Conclusion: children are horrific little hellions. Only the researchers were surprised.

A lot of Barbie multilation isn't torture, I'd imagine -- it's just an attempt to find more things to do with the damn doll!

Conclusion: children are horrific little hellions. Only the researchers were surprised.

One of the weird things about the study is children seemed to have a love/hate relationship with their Barbies, much more so than with other dolls.

Ah, here's an article on the study: Researchers Find Barbie Is Often Mutilated

LONDON (AP) - Barbie, beware. The iconic plastic doll is often mutilated at the hands of young girls, according to research published Monday by British academics.

"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."

Researchers from the university's marketing and psychology departments questioned 100 children about their attitudes to a range of products as part of a study on branding. They found Barbie provoked the strongest reaction, with youngsters reporting "rejection, hatred and violence," Nairn said.

"The meaning of 'Barbie' went beyond an expressed antipathy; actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully, across age, school and gender," she said.

While boys often expressed nostalgia and affection toward Action Man—the British equivalent of GI Joe—renouncing Barbie appeared to be a rite of passage for many girls, Nairn said.

"The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown," she said.

Nairn said many girls saw Barbie as an inanimate object rather than a treasured toy.

"Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling," she said.