Family Fun with the Ten Catholic Plagues

Ever notice how Jewish holidays seem to fall right before Christian ones? Like they were trying to outdo us or something. On his website, Dave Barry posted a link to a 'helpful' article about making Passover fun for kids. I had no idea being Jewish could be so entertaining! Here's the beginning of the article to give you the idea:

Since the idea of the Seder is to get children interested and involved, the Ten Plagues is a good opportunity to add an experiential, dramatic element to the evening. Plan ahead with some props and you'll see how much fun the Seder can be -- for children and adults alike.
Here are some suggestions for the Ten Plagues:
1) BLOOD -- Prepare a large, clear pitcher -- empty except for some red food coloring inconspicuously at the bottom. At the appropriate moment, pour in some water -- and watch the water magically turn to "blood!" (One technical point: Don't do the opposite and pour the food coloring into the water, as that would be a problem of "coloring" which is forbidden on Jewish holidays.) And if you're really brave, drink a little of the water, to re-enact the Midrash which says that even during the plague of blood, the Jews could still drink and have it taste like "water!"

Here's the link for the rest of it if you're interested:
http://www.aish.com/passfamily/passfamilydefault/Family_Fun_with_the_Ten_Plagues.asp

Not to be outdone by Passover, and in response to the above article which gave me severe pentecostal envy, I've compiled my own list entitled:

FAMILY FUN WITH THE TEN CATHOLIC PLAGUES
1) BEER -- Prepare a large, clear pitcher -- empty except for, ok, just empty. Now get a six-pack from the fridge. Happy Easter. Think of all the money you're saving on therapy because you didn't make your kids drink fake blood like the Rabinowitzs down the street. Burp. Rinse bladder. Repeat.

2) BUNNIES -- And you thought it was a pagan ritual? Catholics traditionally reproduce as fast as bunnies. At least the chocolate ones don't ovulate!

3) PLASTIC EGGS-- After drinking six-pack, fill eggs with coins, candy, guilt trips, etc. and toss around the yard. These will be keep the kids busy outside in the morning while you apply the hair of the dog to your hangover.

4) BABY ANIMALS -- Does little Timmy realize that the baby chicks he sees at the Easter display in the mall will be in his Happy Meal next month?

5) PLASTIC GRASS -- You pop a jelly bean into your mouth. Oh, nooo - a piece of plastic grass is now stuck between your teeth! Meanwhile more pieces of grass are forming an armored division under your couch, to reappear at your 4th of July party.

6) COLORING EGGS (AKA THE PLAGUE OF THE WHITE CARPET) -- What dummy woke up one day and said, "Hey, let's boil some eggs and let the kids put bright colors on them. And let's do this right before we have everyone over for Easter dinner."???

7) BLACK JELLY BEANS-- and hey, they're kosher! Who knew?!

8) CONFUSION-- 'Good' Friday - Jesus is freakin' dead. What's so 'good' about that? When is a fast not a fast? When you're Catholic! When is 40 days not 40 days? When it's Lent! Badda-bing!

9) GUILT -- "Finish your meal - don't you know there are children starving in Ireland!" (If their mums cooked like mine, no wonder they were starving.)

10) FIRST BORN -- "Do you have any idea what we paid for your education?" When we Catholics pass down the torch to the next generation, we usually whack them over the head with it.

11) CHOCOLATE -- Yes, we have one more plague than the Jews. Neener, neener. You could look it up - it's in the NEW testament. Nyuk,nyuk!

Might I also add - Manischewitz has nuthin' on Gallo. Both are hideous. Oy!

Crash

Poor guy never saw it coming. Never saw it leaving, either. Unstudied, unlucky, pitifully guessing, trying to pick the lock on a woman's life logic, he was left blinking in the dust by the side of a wayward road. She’s a blur, he’s blurry.

In life's travels, men take the expressway - not the prettiest drive but it gets you there, quick and dirty. Women, on the other hand, prefer the scenic route - lots of curves, time-consuming, plenty to see. It’s also very easy to get lost, and as we know, men don't ask for directions. So when they’re in an almighty hurry to get to their destination, the scenic route can drive them batty.

I know, analogies, schmalogies. Any road warrior can tell you that an analogy and a credit card will get you a full tank of gas for your guilt trip. But I’m your tour bus driver today, and I’m a woman, so I’m taking the long way home. Enjoy the view.

It’s not completely hopeless. Ok, maybe it is. But we women can be figured out. Here’s the catch –any man who attempts to figure us out is immediately suspect by both sides. Female intuition instinctively keeps the man down by assuming that if you’re trying to figure a woman out, you’re trying to take advantage of her. Which, of course, is absolutely true, you horrid, manipulative beasts! See you in my rear-view mirror, buckos!

When a guy attempts to figure out why a relationship crashed, buddies try to spare him the pain they know is waiting for him. "Let her go, dude," they’ll shrug. "Walk away." But he can’t. Here we have the emotional equivalent of exploring a volcanic crater –nothing good will come of it, you know it can kill you, but you just have to check it out anyway.

While women strategize a game of 3-dimensional chess, men are playing Battleship, blindly calling out catch phrases in the hopes of sinking a dinghy or two.

Where was I going with this? Oh, that’s right, the scenic route past the battleship and the volcano, wherever those are. Isn’t life more about the journey than the destination? So why the big rush? Especially when you don’t know where and/or when it will….
…end.

Note to Self - Help!

If I took all the energy I piled into trying to figure out men and rolled it into a career in writing, two things would probably happen. The first would be that whatever guy-du-jour I would normally be putting through a mental blender at the time would suddenly be oh-so-interested in me, since I was no longer trying to dissect his brain. The second would be that I'd be so fabulously successful as a writer that I would have no time for him. Perhaps I would pity him enough to offer him a position as a cabana boy at my infinity pool.

I used to take apart every relationship I could, like CSI with a crime victim or President Bush with the English language. Apparently spending twenty bucks on a self-help book like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From the Kitchen doesn’t do anything – you actually have to follow the suggestions for them to work. Or just leave the book in a highly visible place and you'll never see him again. That also works, with the addled (yes, addled) bonus of giving you plenty of free time to figure out what went wrong.

So how do relationship book writers stay in relationships? Or do they? I can't imagine any guy wanting to be the lab rat owned by a date scientist-
"So, what do you do for a living?"
"I write self-help books about relationships."
"Check, please!"

Maybe they spin their many failed relationships as "experience." I'd be thinking tramp! or loser! myself. But then, if the author were married for say 40 years, come on - one stinking relationship does NOT an expert make. Besides, you spent 40 years writing books - how much time did that leave for your spouse? No wonder you got along - you never saw each other.

I got this book, Don't Play With Your Feud - How to Be Successful in a Man's World, and I have this lab rat, er, guy, and I want to apply chapter 17, Help Him Help You and He'll be Greatful, to his cerebral cortex. Ever suggest a new way of doing something to a guy? "If you put a little WD-40 on that cohesive tranny beltway, it'll go faster." You get a look like you just asked him to put pickles in his peanut butter. Then one day he discovers, "Hey, I put some WD-40 on that cohesive tranny beltway and it’s much faster!"

So one day, deep in her forties, our heroine was disgusted enough to start taking some advice. This was one princess that was kissin’ no more frogs. She tried chapter 23 - Reverse Psychology:
"Whatever you do, do NOT ask me why I'm this gorgeous and still single!"
"Ok. Pass the salt, please?"
Ugh. Guess that just works on guys under 30. After that they're more interested in flat-screens and a hemi. Back to the drawing board.

If self-help books actually worked, you wouldn't have to buy more than one of them, would you? Yet isn't the publisher's goal to sell more books? Right? Are you following me? If so, I have pepper spray, you perv!

Somewhere there's a book that's so helpful, it's all you'll ever need. Publishers are, of course, on the job making sure you'll never see it in print. Until we do, there's always chocolate.

Nice to Be Here (based on a true urban legend)

Once upon a time there was a town so nice that one day, someone said, "Hey, this is a really nice town. Let’s invite some more nice people to live here so it will be a nice town, only bigger." So it came to pass that a kind developer drew up a plan to expand the nice town nicely. He did this by carefully using lots of green and blue crayon in his map. Then he asked the nice people of the town if they liked it.

"It’s a very pretty map," someone said.

"It could use more green," suggested another.

"I don’t like maps," whispered another.

Some of the nice people decided that since the map was so nice, they should make it really big, almost life size, and add it to their nice town. Other people, just as nice, were politely afraid that if they did that, their nice town might not stay nice. So the nice people shared a dilemma – while they were all darned nice people, they couldn’t agree on what to do. They certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So they decided to flip a coin. No, actually, they asked Simon Cowell to decide. Oops, sorry, no -they dug up a wooly mammoth. Ok, they really did that, but it has nothing to do with this story.

They did what nice people do all over this nice country of ours –they put it up for a vote. Everyone was quietly excited – some people put up lovely green and white signs that said, "No thank you – we are happy just like this." Some other people, just as quietly excited, put up attractive blue and white signs that read, "Yes, please – come live in our nice town with us." This was very exciting for the nice little town, just exciting enough to be fun, in a good way.

Then a not-so-nice thing happened. Some of the blue and white "Yes" signs disappeared. "That’s strange," said the nice people. "They are very attractive signs. Maybe someone borrowed them. They’ll bring them back soon."

But they didn’t come back. And the nice blue and white "Yes" signs kept disappearing, to the point where the people that had owned them missed them very much, and started have sign-envy of the people with the green and white "No" signs.

"It’s not very nice," said the "Yes" people, "That you have signs and we don’t."

"No," said the "No" people, "It’s not nice, but we don’t know what to do about it."

This upset the nice people of the town so much that they couldn’t sleep in their nice comfy beds. One night, while they weren’t sleeping, one of the nice people heard a noise outside their nice house. She peeked out and saw a large, squatty troll eating her "Yes" sign.

"Excuse me, Mr. Troll," whispered the nice person, not wanting to wake her nice neighbors, "That lovely sign belongs to me. If you’d like, I could make you some nice soup instead."

"Burrrrp!," said the troll as it waddled away.

That wasn’t very nice, thought the nice, sleep-disrupted villager. But with little experience in not-so-nice things she didn’t know what to do. At least she had another lovely sign to put out, and now that the troll had eaten his full, she felt confident the new sign would not be eaten.

The next night, the troll came back. His raucous burping awakened the lightly sleeping townspeople. After eating a few more blue and white signs (apparently the green and white ones gave him terrible gas), he waddled away again. This time a nice but very sleepy villager followed him. It was easy to do since the troll was such a messy eater he left pieces of half-eaten signs everywhere. Sure enough, the sleepy villager discovered that the troll did not live in the nice town, but a good distance away, in a city known as Uglyville.

The next day, which was a meteorologically perfect day in the nice town, some of the nice townspeople went to Uglyville to talk to the troll. Being very careful where they stepped, they approached the troll, who was snoring on a huge pile of sign debris under a dead tree. They waited patiently until he woke up. This was difficult because the troll, due to his poor diet, had very bad breath.

"Excuse me," said one, "But we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t eat our signs."

"Snark!" said the troll sleepily.

"Look," said another in his most stern voice, "We like our signs. They’re nice. Please don’t eat them anymore."

"Snork!" said the troll, eyeing the lovely blue and white hat of one of the townspeople.

"I don’t like maps," said a third, obviously confused from lack of sleep.

"Shush!" shouted the troll, "I’m sick of all of youse and youse silly signs. I’ll eat what I want when I want. And youse ain’t gonna stop me!"

And with that the squatty troll got so upset that he suffered a massive coronary, no doubt brought on by excessive cholesterol content of the blue and white signs, complicated by his sub-par anger-management skills.

The townspeople, while saddened momentarily to see anyone kick the bucket, brightened at the thought of such a lovely Deus ex Machina. Eventually the blue and white "Yes" signs were able to come back, happily side-by-side with the green and white "No" signs, like so many strange Spring daffodils.

And the nice townspeople took all the trash from under the troll’s tree and used it as sub-base material to widen the freeway, which made everybody very happy. And that, too, was nice.

"O" is for "Odd"

Oh, my. I just watched the opening ceremonies of the NBC 2006 NBC Winter Olympics on NBC. Actually, I watched them last night but it took me until now to recover. Plus with the time difference, tape delay, and long, meaningful pauses by the announcers, it’s already next Tuesday.

I’m really trying to like them. But most sporting events are fast-paced, lots of noise, and the announcers (good or bad) are into it. So far, this show has all the pacing of an olympic bowel movement. Bob Costas puts me to sleep. Not literally, but he's a snore and a half. Meaningful pause? Noooo. More likely he’s trying to make it through 2 weeks of 24/7 broadcasting, so he’s dozing on his feet.

Before the opening ceremony began, they brought in a comedian to 'warm up' the crowd. When I say 'warm,' I mean something that would defrost the white wine slushies they were serving. When I say ‘crowd,’ I’m referring to the 33,000 people in the stadium, speaking about 834 different languages, with approximately 759 cultural comedic differences. Can you imagine? -
Announcer 1:"A horse walks into a bar..."
Announcer 2:"Un cheval camine dans le bistro..."
Announcer 3:"Ick ein cabal danke beergarten..."
Smedvig:"Vat horse? Vere? Shoot it, Gustaf! We eat again tonight!"

It didn't work. The temperature in the place after the comedian was hauled away was still a balmy 22 degrees metric. And what a supremely international way to bomb onstage. So quiet you could hear a Finn drop, a few coughs, and Bob Costas snoring.

I loved the simplicity of the 4th grader singing the Italian anthem by herself. Wow. In Italian even. Simple. Clear. Beautiful. Aaah, cut to commercial. Oh, well.

It’s difficult to please everyone. The Hindus were really miffed about the cow outfits. They insisted that they be designed to be flattering, that the spots follow a more vertical and slimming pattern. And the Tibetans were having a cow over the ‘mountain’ dresses. I have to agree – they looked like somebody lifted the design off a beer can. Rocky Mountain tasteless.

As I watched the parade of nations in horror, I was channeling Joan Rivers. "Awk – look at the Germans – tutti frutti, anyone? And what’s with the red and white color scheme – do they all work at Target or what?" At least she would have made it more interesting.

My neighbor must have had his disco station cranked, ‘cause all I heard during the parade was golden oldies. A rather peculiar contrast. What did they really play – Italian opera? Pagliacci, perhaps? Sorry I missed it.

I don't have hdtv, and I noticed a rainbow-type 'flare' on certain things on my screen. I'm assuming that's due to the hdtv signal. I've never seen it before. It was on an announcer's hair last night. I didn't hear a word he said. Oooh, shiny! It might have been an aura of some type. Turin is the home of the famous NBC Shroud of Turin. Never know when Jesus might make a special guest appearance. Is it sweeps week?

NBC, the Network of the Olympics, and proud owner of a slew of cable channels, is not broadcasting the Olympics here in primetime… much. Why not sack everything on MSNBC and just run a live feed from Turin? NOT TORINO. If they say TORINO, they should speak Italian ALL the time. Or start referring to Cleveland as "Tierra del Cleve."

Oops, gotta run. The women's freestyle is on and the boys are trying backflips off the couch.

Fear Fatter

Sometimes, I fear little girls. Yes, cute, bright-eyed little girls. It’s a seasonal thing, going on right now, which is why I’m in here writing on a beautiful day when I could be outside working on my winter tan like most normal Southern Californians. I close the blinds, put on my security-blanket sweatshirt, and huddle over the pc, shivering. Move along, please, nothing to see here. Maybe if I stay very still and quiet, they won’t notice me.

But they come anyway, wave upon wave of them. They know my ruse. They’ve seen it many times before. We all know it doesn’t work, that eventually I’ll give in like all the others. They relish the thrill of the chase, the gradual wearing down of the hunted.

Hide the cholesterol, it’s Girl Scout Cookie Season. Like uniformed, pigtailed lemmings to the sea they swarm, surging over each other to fatten both suburbia and the Grand Poobah Girl Scout’s wallet.

They ding-dong my doorbell, invade my grocery store, and blink bright-eyed outside my church. "Oh, you already bought some?" their little faces start to melt. "That’s ok," their voices fade as they choke back a tear or two while they quietly bestow a pixie curse on your head. So evil, so knowing, so successful. How can you not buy from them?

"Already have the peanut butter ones? Have you tried the Thin Mints? We also have low-fat!" Do I look like I need low-fat? Girls can be so cruel.

Other organizations have the presence of mind to offer kinder and gentler promotions. Boy Scouts hit me up to buy popcorn every year, but hey, it’s in the fall and I can regift it at Christmas. Our school wants us to buy wrapping paper (with which to wrap the regifted popcorn), and I must say the wrapping paper doesn’t pack on the pounds. But here come the Girl Scouts in January, as we mourn our fattened credit card statements, and give up the ghost on our New Year’s resolutions. Those little chunky delights are there to help us drown our sorrows in Shortbread.

They’re good, but they’re not perfect. Think how much more money they’d make if they sold their ‘sucker’ list to a company like Weight Watchers. First the Scouts hit up the unsuspecting victim for a few boxes, then, when she’s finished scarfing down the last of them, prone on the couch and wearing sweatpants, they sic Jennie Craig on her.

Some day, little girl, you, too, will be old. Your doorbell will ring, and you’ll try to hide, but some spunky package of perkyness will get you, my pretty…and your little dogma, too.